Mike Mascolo points out that the notion of meaning construction advocated by
Kelly and Piaget differs substantially from that of Vygotsky. As he puts it,
the former pair see learning as directed `from the inside out' rather than as
primarily formed through social conditioning or symbolically mediated
cultural forms. I should add that this is also the view of Joe Rychlak,who
has spent his entire professional life trying to convince the cognitive
scientific community of the limitations of their `mediational' approaches.
Let's not forget Edmund Husserl and Eugene Gendlin. It may also be Larry
Leitner's and Franz Epting's position, although I have a harder time
identifying their precise stance concerning the locus and nature of
construing. Mike makes it clear that he is not comfortable with a
`predicational' notion of the horizon of meaning formation. What I would like
to know is, who in the personal construct community recognizes the
revolutionary import of a wholistically self-directing model of knwledge
development? Who understands and sides with Rychlak's thesis? It has always
puzzled me why researchers and clinicians wopuld bother to wed themselves to
methodologies derived from a theoretical model whose most fundamental
implications
they reject, knowingly or not . There are plenty of theoretical-clinical
models out there which offer more coherent articulations of mediational
cognitivist metatheory.
Josh Soffer
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%