Standing on the Shoulders of Giants A Balancing Act of Dialectically Theorizing Conceptual Understanding on the Grounds of Vygotsky’s Project

Abstract

Defining knowledge and theorizing concepts is a difficult task if only because the target notions/phenomena are centrally (albeit often tacitly) implicated, right from the start and throughout the whole process, in the very ways and procedures employed in this endeavor. How can one define the ways through which we know the world, including concepts, conceptual understanding and thinking, while these very concepts and methods of knowing need to be applied to the task at hand? There seems to be an inherent complexity involved in resolving epistemological issues that are akin to what is infamously known as an attempt to pull oneself by one’s own hair. This complexity, though rather obvious, is paradoxically not often reflected upon by researchers involved with epistemological issues—judging by the largely overlooked situation when the stated epistemic conceptualizations are often at odds with the methods employed to arrive at them. For example, claims about collective and distributed nature of knowing and concept development as never belonging to the individual realm seem to contradict methodology behind these claims employed by individual researchers that often represents a single-handedly construed process of solitary analysis apparently disconnected from collaborative pursuits. It would appear that researchers, who state the radical position on mind as being distributed and not attributable to anything at the individual level, have to struggle to reconcile their position with their own claims to individual authorship and authenticity of theoretical arguments, concepts, and views.

In view of these complexities inherent in the paradox of knowing about knowing, the twofold goal of this paper is (a) to draw attention to the need of a critical self-reflection about reciprocal relations and important synergies between the methods applied and the conceptions developed within epistemic inquiries as a potential remedy against undesirable gaps between the two, and (b) to explore how some warrants to guard against incommensurability in accounting for these two aspects of epistemic inquiries can be developed. To highlight the potential value of such self-reflection and suggest some warrants of this nature, I discuss epistemic methods and concepts of knowing and conceptual understanding as these can be developed on the foundation of Vygotsky’s project with its grounding in the mutually complementary dialectical method of inquiry and the worldview-level dialectical outlook on reality, both predicated on the idea about infinite movement and interpenetration of any and all aspects of reality including activities of knowing and theorizing. Although it is likely not possible to completely avoid circular effects in the process of knowing about knowing—in that the applied method has to depend on some ad hoc (intuitive) understandings of phenomena before theorizing them (as well as vice versa), this critical reflective focusing on commensurability between methods and products of epistemic inquiry can serve as a step in the direction of advancing our understanding of epistemic issues.