Reflecting Gergen

The ontological positioning of scholars

 Sociocultural perspective
Symbolic Interactionism
Vygotsky Gergen
Situated cognition

Bakhtin
Pragmatism

German Idealism

Scottish Moralists

Individualism Privileging of the social

Socrates Descartes

Plato

Aristotle

Dualist Ontology
Let’s ponder over these questions
 Are you comfortable with the visual representation?
 Which quadrant will you put these scholars?
 Dewey
 Geertz,Bourdieu and Holland
 Hayakawa
 Wertsch and Linell
 Postman, Lemke and Ellsworth
 What questions would be of interest to you
as consequences from this exercise of
positioning scholars?
 These are my questions:
 Is this right to position scholars in this way?
 Is Gergen creating enough wave to spark off the Second
Enlightenment?
 Is Gergen looking towards the East now?
 Are his ideas really new?
 Must the concept of binary be taken out from our
dictionary?
Tyvm!