American Educational Research Journal

Winter 1995, Vol 32, No. 4, pp. 716-740

Deweyan Pragmatism and the Epistemology

of Contemporary Social Constructivism
Jim Garrison
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

In the quest for an epistemology that supports theories of situated cognition

and social constructivism, educational theorists and researchers have over-
looked one of the mostfamiliar figures in the modern history of educational
inquiry—John Dewey. Perhaps one reason for this oversight is that if we
adopted Deweyan social epistemology and constructivism we would have to
come to grips with his social behaviorism as well. Besides advocating Dew-
eyan epistemological behaviorism, the other purpose for writing this article
is to urge the field of education to seriously consider behaviorism as one
way of understanding social constructivism and situated cognition.

JIM GARRISON is a Professor at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University,

303 WMH, Blacksburg, VA 24061. His specialization is philosophy of education.

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism

B rown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) conclude their influential article by

declaring "the unheralded importance of activity and enculturation to
learning suggests that much common education practice is the victim of an
inadequate epistemology. A new epistemology might hold the key to a
dramatic improvement in learning and a completely new perspective on
education" (p. 41). The epistemology they reject "has concentrated primarily
on conceptual representation and made its relation to objects in the world
problematic by assuming that, cognitively, representation is prior to all else"
(p. 41). The epistemology that they would like to see developed would
include a prominent role for situated cognition. My purpose in writing this
article is to make a contribution toward developing such an epistemology.
More generally, I want to develop an epistemology for contemporary social
constructivism to which the idea of situated cognition has made an
important contribution.
Speaking properly, I will not develop an epistemology at all. Rather, I
will show that a suitable constructivist epistemology already exists deeply
embedded in the tradition of Deweyan pragmatism. Dewey, of course, has
immensely influenced educational thinking. I do not, however, believe that
educators have understood Dewey well. That is why they often fail to recog-
nize that Deweyan pragmatism is not captured by the notion of conceptual
representation and therefore could provide an epistemology for social
constructivism.
Some social constructivists interested in the topic of learning transfer
have remarked on the similarity between their research programs and that
of John Dewey's philosophical pragmatism (see, e. g., Bereiter & Scardamalia,
1992, p. 536; Brown, Collins, & Duguid, 1989b, p. 12; Deny, 1992, pp. 413,
417; Newman, Griffin, & Cole, 1989; Wertsh, 1991, pp. 2-3; Wineburg, 1989,
pp. 7, 9). Although this similarity has occasionally been mentioned, no one,
so far as I am aware, has attempted to specify in any detail the virtues of
Deweyan pragmatism as an epistemology for contemporary social con-
structivism. In this article, I will attempt not only to identify some common
themes between these two positions but even to suggest that the two positions
are substantially the same. If we can recognize some of these common
themes, it will be easy to see how the epistemology of Deweyan pragmatism
can serve social constructivism. I will identify and discuss four commonalties
between these two positions: (a) the pivotal role played by language, or
what Dewey called the "tool of tools" in meaning construction; (b) the
role of tools in constructing meaning with special emphases on Dewey's
"instrumentalism"—that is, his treatment of logic as a tool of purposeful
action; (c) social acts of meaning construction, or what Dewey often called
"labor;" (d) the emergent social construction of the mind and the self through
the interaction of a culture's language, tools, and patterns of labor.
Talking about language, tools, and labor allows us to herald the impor-
tance of activity and enculturation to learning in the most literal sense possi-
ble. As we will see when we come to discuss the work of Richard Rorty,
one of the contemporary neopragmatists most influenced by Dewey, if once

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Garrison
we have a substantial theory of activity and enculturation to learning, then
we have no need of an epistemology of conceptual representation. That is
precisely why Dewey himself turned away from traditional epistemology
toward a philosophy of education. Such a position is recommended at the
conclusion of this article.
I will refer extensively to the work of two neopragmatic philosophers
heavily influenced by Deweyan pragmatism to call attention to a feature of
Dewey's epistemology entirely ignored by those in the field of education.
What I have in mind is what Richard Rorty (1979) calls epistemological
behaviorism or what W. V. O. Quine (1969) prefers to speak of as the
"behavioral criteria for the truth" (p. 105). As we will see below, both associate
their behaviorist epistemologies with the work of John Dewey. Dewey him-
self (19l6a/1980a) characterized his instrumentalist theory of inquiry as "a
behaviorist theory of thinking and knowing" (p. 367). Dewey, Quine, and
Rorty all reject the notion of knowledge as conceptual representation. Along
with Quine, Rorty, and others, I will argue that Dewey's behaviorist epistemol-
ogy arises out of an even more general commitment to a behaviorist analysis
of learning. Because human learning was largely a socially constructed phe-
nomenon for Dewey, I have decided to call his position pragmatic social
behaviorism. I will explicate pragmatic social behaviorism and attempt to
demarcate it sharply from the reductionist and positivistic behaviorism advo-
cated by B. F. Skinner and his disciples.
For the sake of focus, I will concentrate my attention on only a few
authors: Jean Lave (1988), Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991), Denis
Newman, Peg Griffin and Michael Cole (1989), and James V. Wertsch (1991).
Although there are significant differences among these authors, nonetheless
all are influenced in one way or another by Vygotsky, and all represent the
social constructivist school of thought.

Deweyan Pragmatic Social Behaviorism

I will introduce Dewey's brand of behaviorism by reviewing its characteriza-
tion by two of the most influential neopragmatist philosophers of the second
half of the 20th century, W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty. W. V. O. Quine
(1969) begins his essay "Ontological Relativity," the first of the John Dewey
Lectures at Columbia University, by admitting, "Philosophically I am bound
to Dewey by the naturalism that dominated his last three decades. With
Dewey I hold that knowledge, mind, and meaning are part of the same
world" (p. 26). Quine continues:

When a naturalistic philosopher addresses himself to the philosophy

of mind, he is apt to talk of language. Meanings are, first and foremost,
meanings of language. Language is a social art which we all acquire
on the evidence solely of other people's overt behavior under publicly
recognizable circumstances. Meanings, therefore, those very models
of mental entities, end up as grist for the behaviorist's mill. Dewey

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism
was explicit on the point: "Meaning . . . is not a psychic existence; it
is primarily a property of behavior." (pp. 26-27)

Quine is correct to call Dewey a behaviorist about meaning. That he was a

behaviorist who rejected all mind/body dualisms we may see more clearly
by analyzing the implication of the full passage from Dewey cited by Quine.
The complete text alluded to by Quine as expressing Dewey's social
behaviorist theory of meaning reads:

The heart of language is not "expression" of something antecedent,

much less expression of antecedent thought. It is communication; the
establishment of cooperation in an activity in which there are partners,
and in which the activity of each is modified and regulated [coordi-
nated] by partnership [sic]. To fail to understand is to fail to come
into agreement in action; to misunderstand is to set up action at cross
purposes. . . . Meaning is not indeed a psychic existence; it is primarily
a property of behavior, and secondarily of objects. But the behavior
of which it is a quality is a distinctive behavior; cooperative in that
responses to another's act involves contemporaneous response to a
thing as entering into the other's behavior, and this on both sides
[sicl (Dewey, 1925/1981, p. 141, italics added)

Meaning for Dewey was a social construction; it was primarily a property

of social behavior and only secondarily of socially constructed and shared
objects that are dependent on the original coordinated behaviors for their
construction, meaning, and significance. Dewey's view of language as com-
munication in cooperative and coordinated partnership in the construction
of all meaning is at the core of his entire philosophy. Dewey (1925/1981)
stated, "Through speech a person dramatically identifies himself with poten-
tial acts and deeds; he plays many roles, not in successive stages of life but
in a contemporaneously enacted drama. Thus mind emerges" (p. 135). For
Deweyans, individual minds emerge without discontinuity when natural
organisms having that capacity learn to participate in social activities involving
labor, tools, and, above all, language.
Dewey's pragmatic social behaviorism has many implications for social
constructivism. We will extensively examine only one: Vygotsky's notion of
the zone of proximal development. To elucidate the similarity between Dew-
ey's and Vygotsky's thinking, however, we must first discuss some of the
epistemological work done by another contemporary neopragmatist influ-
enced by Dewey.
Richard Rorty (1979) rejects any epistemology, or theory of knowledge,
that identifies knowledge as correspondence between the mind's ideas (sche-
mata or scripts) and its objects—that is, "the relation between subject and
object, between nature and its mirror..." (p. 175). For Rorty, the epistemolog-
ical authority warranting a knowledge claim to be "true" lives within the
sociolinguistic practices of the community of those competent to judge. He
characterizes his position as epistemological behaviorism and identifies it

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Garrison
quite rightly with John Dewey. Rorty (1979) writes: "Explaining rationality
and epistemic authority by reference to what society lets us say, rather than
the latter by the former, is the essence of what I shall call 'epistemological
behaviorism,' an attitude common to Dewey and Wittgenstein" (p. 174).
Rorty (1979) carefully distinguishes his epistemological behaviorism from
psychological behaviorism. The two major differences are the following: (a)
Unlike most other behaviorists, Rorty and Dewey affirm a postpositivist
theory of science that rejects theory/fact and fact/value dualisms, and (b)
they avoid the reductionist definitions that forbid reference to inner states or
intervening variablestypical of what Rorty calls B. F. Skinner's methodological
behaviorism (see Rorty, 1979, chaps. IV, V; see also Lave, 1988, p. 87). It is
worth noting now that what Rorty calls epistemological behaviorism is only
part of Dewey's pragmatic social behaviorism. Epistemological behaviorism
concerns itself exclusively with cognitive meanings—that is, inquiry, knowl-
edge claims, and their warrant—while pragmatic social behaviorism is also
concerned with the construction of aesthetic and moral meanings.
Rorty (1979) sees traditional epistemology "as a notion based upon a
confusion between the justification of knowledge—claims and their causal
explanation—between, roughly, social practices and postulated psychologi-
cal practices" (p. 10). Rorty discards traditional epistemology in favor of
social practices of justification, while leaving psychology, including cognitive
psychology, to explain at least partially the processes that cause assertion
of and action on knowledge claims. Rorty not only abandons traditional
epistemology but eliminates psychological theories of knowledge. Rorty
(1979) maintains that "if assertions are justified by society rather than by the
character of the inner representations they express, then there is no point
in attempting to isolate privileged representations [of reality]" (p. 174). Social
constructivism takes us beyond the epistemology of "conceptual representa-
tion." I believe a more adequate epistemology for social constructivism
should adhere to Rorty's separation between knowledge-claims and their
causal explanation. Doing so, however, will render most forms of cognitive
psychology far less interesting to educators and learning theorists than they
currently appear to be.
Rorty's position does not reject cognitive psychology outright; for
instance, he is willing to accept Jerry Foder's notion of psychological, and
even innate, states of inner representation as unobjectionable. Foder's notion
is considered unobjectionable because it "has nothing to do with the image
of the Mirror of Nature [i. e., conceptual representation]. . . . There is no way
to raise the skeptical question 'How well do the subject's internal representa-
tions represent reality?' about Fodor's language of thought'" (Rorty, 1979,
pp. 246-247). Commenting on this passage, Howard Gardner, who character-
izes Foder as "the complete cognitivist," remarks,

Rorty and Foder concur on the importance of separating out two

questions: how the organism interacts with the world-a legitimate
psychological question; and whether the organism's views about the

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism
world are in fact true-the traditional (and to Rorty's mind, the untena-
ble) question. (Gardner, 1985, p. 85)

That the inner representations we employ to process information may help

us successfully coordinate our actions effectively does not imply that they
are epistemologically privileged internal representations corresponding to
external reality.
The consensus between Foder and Rorty amounts to less than it may
seem, for, while Rorty finds Foder's position unobjectionable, he also finds
it fairly uninteresting. From a personal communication with Rorty, Gardner
(1985) concluded that in Rorty's opinion "psychology has thus far not accom-
plished much, and believes that eventually only neurological and humanistic
[sociocultural-historical] approaches to mental phenomena will be left"
(p. 86). This controversial observation accords well with several of Dewey's
remarks in an address to the American Psychological Association (of which
he is a past president) titled "The Need for Social Psychology." Dewey
(19l6b/1980b) wrote, "all psychological phenomena can be divided into the
physiological and the social, and . . . when we have relegated elementary
sensation and appetite to the former head, all that is left of our mental life,
our beliefs, ideas and desires, falls within the scope of social psychology"
(p. 54). Dewey (19l6b/1980b) concluded his article by proclaiming, "From
the point of view of the psychology of behavior all psychology is either
biological or social psychology" (p. 63). If Dewey and Rorty are right, then
not only cognitive psychologists but social constructivists—indeed learning
theorists of all kinds—should stop doing traditional epistemology. Knowing
how to cope effectively with a problematic situation in an unstable world
does not require privileged representations of external reality. All we require
is a command of the social practices proven to work well. There will be
much more on Dewey's pragmatic social behaviorism in the pages that
follow. The foregoing should, however, provide enough evidence to lead
the reader to seriously consider Dewey from such a perspective. Eventually,
I will want to recommend pragmatic social behaviorism as providing social
constructivism with a general theory of meaning making taken literally in
terms of a culture's language, tools, and forms of labor. From this perspective,
Rorty's epistemological behaviorism is only a small part of pragmatic social
behaviorism; it is, though, that part that provides the epistemology sought
by Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989).

Language: "The Tool of Tools"

Dewey (1925/1981) wrote, "As to be a tool, or to be used as means for
consequences, is to have and to endow with meaning, language, being the
tool of tools, is the cherishing mother of all significance" (p. 146). To appreci-
ate the full significance of this statement, we must strive to understand exactly
what Dewey meant by it.
Quine (1969) felt that, if we see language in behavioral terms, then

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there cannot be, in any useful sense, a private language. This point
was stressed by Dewey in the twenties .. . "Language is specifically
a mode of interaction of at least two beings, a speaker and a hearer;
it presupposes an organized group to which these creatures belong,
and from whom they have acquired their habits of speech. It is there-
fore a relationship". . . . When Dewey was writing in this naturalistic
vein, Wittgenstein still held his copy [i.e., representational] theory of
language." (p. 77)

Quine is correct. The core of Dewey's behavioral theory of meaning, and

perhaps the core of his entire philosophy, is his argument for the natural
origin of language in shared behavior.
Meanings originate for Dewey by coordinating naturally occurring
behavior—for example, gestures like pointing—between two or more per-
sons and some common object. Dewey (1925/1981) wrote:

A requests B to bring him something, to which A points, say a flower

[sic]. There is an original mechanism by which B may react to A's
movement in pointing. But natively such a reaction is to the move-
ment, not to the pointing, not to the object pointed out. But B learns
that the movement is pointing; he responds to it and not in itself, but
as an index of something else. His response is transferred from A's
direct movement to the object to which A points. Thus he does not
merely execute the natural acts of looking or grasping:... he responds
in a way which is a function of A's relationship, actual and potential,
to the thing. The characteristic thing about B's understanding of A's
movement and sounds is that he responds to the thing from the
standpoint of A. . . . Such is the essence and import of communication,
signs and meanings. Something is literally made common in at least
two different centres of behavior, (pp. 140-141)

The two abstract characters here, A and B, could well refer to teacher and
student. For Deweyans, the mind that manipulates meaning emerges socially
through participation in the social processes of meaning construction.
Pointing, looking and grasping, as meaningful activities and not merely
random behaviors, are themselves socially constructed by mutual assistance
and understanding (coordination) within a shared context that establishes
intersubjective, and in that sense objective, reference. The behavioral power
of language or speech acts is easy to illustrate.1 For Dewey, all meanings
aesthetic, moral, or cognitive (whether private or public) emerge out of
linguistic participation. Dewey (1925/1981) declared, "Meanings do not come
into being without language, and language implies two selves [e.g., teacher
and student] involved in a conjoint or shared understanding" (p. 226). There
are no exclusively private languages. Even hermits take their sociocultural
heritage with them.
It is well-known that George H. Mead was a pioneering social psycholo-
gist. It is less well-known that Dewey hired Mead when he was head of the
Department of Philosophy at Michigan or that Dewey requested a position

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism

be made available for Mead when he assumed the chair of the Philosophy
Department at the University of Chicago.2 Together, Dewey and Mead estab-
lished the Chicago school of pragmatism and the functionalist school of
American psychology. Each had great influence on the other (see Joas,
1985). Together they worked out the idea that the mind emerged through
participation in the sociolinguistic practices of a community and that the self
emerged by taking the role of the other. As the prominent Deweyan scholar
Thomas Alexander (1993) has noted regarding the emergent theory of mind
and sell, "This is most completely worked out in Mead's Mind, Self, and
Society, though a synopsis of the theory is outlined in the fifth chapter
of Dewey's Experience and Nature" (1925/1981, p. 399). With only two
exceptions, all the passages cited from Dewey thus far are from the fifth
chapter of Experience and Nature. The full title of Mead's most famous work
is Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. To
clarify the meaning of the designation social behaviorist in the subtitle of
his most famous work, Mead painstakingly distinguished his (and Dewey's)
behaviorism from that of John B. Watson, just as we should be careful to
distinguish it from that of B. F. Skinner. In Mind, Self and Society, Mead
(1934) insisted that,

We want to approach language not from the standpoint of inner

meanings to be expressed, but in its larger context of co-operation
in the group taking place by means of signals and gestures [e.g.,
pointing]. Meaning appears within that process. Our behaviorism is
a social behaviorism, (p. 6)

Compare this statement to the full text of the passage from Dewey cited by
Quine, above. Dewey could have easily written it. Because Dewey and Mead
worked out this pragmatist social psychology together, I have designated
their position, along with that of neopragmatists like Quine and Rorty, prag-
matic social behaviorism.
A thoroughgoing social constructivism must acknowledge that all mean-
ings, as well as the minds that manipulate them, emerge from making some-
thing common between at least two centers of action. Therefore, cognitive
meanings (or truth claims) must also involve two or more persons co-
intending some object. Objectivity, then, is intersubjectivity. The resultant
epistemology would be something like Rorty's epistemological behavior-
ism—that is, the idea that the epistemological authority warranting a knowl-
edge claim to be "true" resides within the sociolinguistic practices of the
community of those competent to judge.
For Dewey (1925/1981), "Mind denotes the whole system of meanings
as they are embodied in the workings of organic life. . . . Mind is contex-
tual. . . ." (p. 230). One consequence of mind as a contextualized system of
meanings is that it is not simply located. For example, "The nervous system
is in no sense the 'seat' of the idea. It is the mechanism of the connection
or integration [coordination] of acts" (Dewey, 1925/1981, p. 222). Dewey

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Garrison
uses the hyphenated phrase "body-mind" to express "what actually takes
place when a living body is implicated in situations of discourse, communica-
tion and participation" (p. 217). Mind for Dewey was a distributed event.
For Dewey, it was all important that the mind be at home in the world
that it sought to understand and act within. In the preface to his most
renowned work Experience and Nature, Dewey (1925/1981) wrote:

That character of everyday experience which has been most systemati-

cally ignored by philosophy is the extent to which it is saturated with
the results of social intercourse and communication. Because this
factor has been denied, meanings have either been denied all objective
validity, or have been treated as miraculous extra-natural intrusions.
If, however, language, for example, is recognized as the instrument of
social cooperation and mutual participation, continuity is established
between natural events (animal sound, cries, etc.) and the origin and
development of meanings. Mind is seen to be a function of social
interactions and to be a genuine character of natural events. . . . (p. 6)

This passage affirms many of the themes that we have been discussing. It
comprehends the mind and meanings as arising naturalistically out of animal
behavior (sounds, body movements, etc.) and social behavior without any
breach of continuity; therefore, it is not necessary to consider mind as some
mysterious psychic or mental "stuff or to categorize it as merely physical
(e.g., neurophysiological) "stuff." Mind is contextual; the linguistic meanings
that make it up are distributed in both natural and cultural histories of persons,
places, and events.

Tools and the Zone of Proximal Development

These Deweyan images of the mind are shared by all of the social constructiv-
ists embraced within this discussion. Vygotsky's most famous definition of
the zone of proximal development states:

It is the distance between the actual developmental level as deter-

mined by independent problem solving and the level of potential
development as determined through problem solving under adult
guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. (Vygotsky,
1978, p. 86)

Vygotsky (1978) makes the social construction of meaning the sine qua non
of human learning. For instance, he asserts that "animals are incapable of
learning in the human sense of the term; human learning presupposes a
specific social nature and a process by which children grow into the intellec-
tual life of those around them" (p. 88). This statement seems to correspond
well to Dewey's (1925/1981) claim that, "Ability to respond to meanings and
to employ them, instead of reacting merely to physical contacts, makes the
difference between man and other animals" (p. 7).

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism

Dewey and Vygotsky also seem to share similar views about language.
Vygotsky (1978) believed that, "Language arises initially as a means of com-
munication between the child and the people in his environment. Only
subsequently, upon conversion to internal speech, does it come to organize
the child's thought, that is, become an internal mental function" (p. 89).
Compare this statement by Vygotsky to the following by Dewey: "that the
fruit of communication should be participation, sharing, is a wonder by the
side of which transubstantiation pales. . . . When communication occurs, all
natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted
to meet the requirement of conversation, whether it be public discourse or
the preliminary discourse termed thinking" (Dewey, 1925/1981, p. 132).
Dewey's phrase "preliminary discourse termed thinking" and Vygotsky's
"internal speech" match up nicely. As an antidualist, Dewey thought that it
would require something like transubstantiation for mentalistic entities to
conduct transactions with physicalistic entities. If anything was internalized
for Dewey, it was neurophysiological (e.g., habits); all the rest would be
social psychology. Dewey and Vygotsky seem to share this antidualism.
Besides rejecting the positivist theory/fact and fact/value dualisms, the episte-
mology of social constructivism would be well served by also rejecting any
form of mind/body dualism.
Jean Lave (1988) begins her book by proclaiming:

The project is a "social anthropology of cognition" rather than a

"psychology" because there is reason to suspect that what we call
cognition is in fact a complex social phenomenon. The point is not
so much that arrangements of knowledge in the head correspond in
a complicated way to the social world outside the head, but that they
are socially organized in such a fashion as to be indivisible. "Cognition"
observed in everyday practice is distributed—stretched over, not
divided among—mind, body, activity and culturally organized settings
which include other actors, (p. 1)

Significantly, near the end of his career, Dewey wanted to retitle his book
Experience and Nature, from whence we have drawn many salient passages,
to Culture and Nature (see pp. 361-364). Similarly, Wertsch (1991) states,
"I use the term socioculturalbecause I want to understand how mental action
is situated in cultural, historical, and institutional settings" (p. 15). Lave and
Wenger (1991) explicitly connect learning with many of the ideas developed
by Dewey when they state that,

a theory of social practice emphasizes the relational interdependence

of agent and world, activity, meaning, cognition, learning, and know-
ing. It emphasizes the inherently socially negotiated character of
meaning and the interested, concerned character of the thought and
action of persons-in-activity. (pp. 50-51)

A theory of social practice must concern itself with the artifacts of meaning-
making activity. One artifact is particularly interesting to social constructivists.

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Garrison
In their introduction, Newman, Griffin, and Cole (1989) announce,

We agree with [Herbert] Simon's characterization of the mind as an

artifact rather than as a "natural" system. This position is consistent
with the sociohistorical theory . . . that we draw upon in our analysis
of cognitive change. Where we differ from many of our colleagues
in cognitive science is in our primary interest in man-made systems
of social activity. A game of poker, work in a factory, a classroom
lesson and a psychological experiment are all artificial systems in
Simon's sense. But they are systems organized among as well as
within human beings. The physical symbol systems that constitute
cognition are materially present in the organization of people—in
their interactions—as well as in their brains, (p. 3)

At first it might seem that a construction of mind as an artifact rather than a

natural system breaks the continuity between mind and organic-physical
nature. To restore continuity requires only that we appreciate the role of
artifacts—that is, tools—in the emergence of mind. Dewey (1925/1981)
wrote,

But at every point appliances and application, utensils and uses, are
bound up with directions, suggestions and records made possible by
speech; what has been said about the role of tools is subject to a
condition supplied by language, the tool of tools, (p. 134)

We ourselves are the product, the artifact, the construction of cultural labor
aided by tools—especially, the tool of tools. The labor of language "the
cherishing mother of all significance" gives birth to our minds and our selves.
It should come as no surprise that Dewey (1925/1981), influenced by Mead,
saw "the self as the tool of tools, the means in all use of means" (p. 189).
Vygotsky saw the zone of proximal development (ZPD) as a tool. Vygot-
sky (1978) wrote, "The zone of proximal development furnishes psycholo-
gists and educators with a tool through which the internal course of
development can be understood" (p. 87). The ZPD is a social tool for the
construction of meaning between A and B, between "two selves involved in
a conjoint or shared understanding" and the establishment of communicative
cooperation in coordinated partnership. How we comprehend communica-
tion within what Newman, Griffin, and Cole (1989) call the construction
zone is crucial to issues of cultural and, inseparably, personal reproduction,
progress, freedom, and creativity.
For many constructivists, these issues focus on the question of direction.
They ask whether an activity is unidirectional, such that students are simply
led to a mastery of pre-existing cultural tools, or whether it is a bi-directional
creative space, in which both participants learn and cultural tools can be
reconstructed. Wertsch (1991) calls attention to the bias toward unidirection-
ality—that is, following Reddy (1979), "the univocal" found in the subtle
but pervasive "conduit metaphor" for communication. Reddy outlines the
structure and function of the metaphor as follows:

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism
(1) language functions like a conduit, transferring [psychic] thoughts
bodily from one person to another; (2) in writing and speaking people
insert their thoughts or feeling in the words; (3) words accomplish
the transfer by containing the thoughts or feelings and conveying
them to others; and (4) in listening or reading, people extract the
thoughts and feelings once again from the words, (p. 290)

Wertsch (1991) points out that the overall idea of the conduit metaphor is
that "human communication can be conceptualized in terms of transmission
of information" (p. 71). Wertsch (p. 72) schematizes the conduit metaphor
this way:

Signal Signal
transmitted received
Sender > Channel > Receiver

In the conduit metaphor, as it is often understood, psychic entities (e.g.,

ideas, schemata, and scripts) are conducted from one talking head to another
by means of physical symbols and sounds. Historical and social context is
entirely irrelevant. It is the conduit metaphor of communication, along with
its hidden dualisms, that is assumed by most forms of cognitive psychological
constructivism, especially those dependent on information processing mod-
els (see Broadbent, 1958, 1975). It is also the dominant public image of
education.
Wertsch makes a number of criticisms of this schema as a model of
communication that bears a marked resemblance to Dewey's criticism of the
model of organic functioning discussed earlier. Wertsch (1991) begins, "One
of the most common critiques of the transmission model . . . concerns the
unidirectionality of the arrows involved. Because they are unidirectional, the
receiver is viewed as passive (note the term receiver)" (p. 72). Reddy (1979)
himself writes, "to the extent that the conduit metaphor does see communica-
tion as requiring some slight expenditure of energy, it localizes this expendi-
ture almost totally in the speaker or writer. The function of the reader or
listener is trivialized" (p. 308). Referring to M. M. Bakhtin (1981) and his
concept of dialogicality, Wertsch (1991) concludes, "from a Bakhtinian per-
spective the schematization of the transmission model is problematic above
all due to the inherently monologic assumptions that underlie it. These
assumptions [are] reflected, among other places, in the schema's unidirec-
tional arrows" (p. 73).
Referring to Bakhtin's fascinating notions of dialogicality and ventrilo-
quation, I would like to call attention to an aspect of Dewey's philosophy
that is too often ignored. Dialogicality and multiple authorship are implied
in Dewey's cooperative social behaviorist theory of meaning. He saw lan-
guage as a social construction, one in which codesignation and co-reference
are crucial. The following passage shows just how dialogical Dewey's own
thinking was:

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The final actuality is accomplished in face-to-face relationships by
means of direct give and take. Logic in its fulfillment recurs to the
primitive sense of the word: dialogue. Ideas which are not communi-
cated, shared, and reborn in expression are but [monological] solilo-
quy, and soliloquy is but broken and imperfect thought. (Dewey,
1927/1984, p. 371)

As we will see in the next section, logical objects are merely tools for the
Deweyan. Their ultimate realization is in linguistic dialogue or cooperative
discourse involving "the tool of tools." For Dewey, rational persons and
societies were dialogical. The transmission model of communication maps
a monological soliloquy and breaks what is really a dialogical and interpretive
hermeneutic circle. This observation has important consequences for our
understanding of the ZPD.
Lave and Wenger (1991) discuss three interpretations of the ZPD. We
will consider only the first and last (pp. 48-49). The first is the widely
influential scaffolding interpretation (see Greenfield, 1984; Wood, Bruner, &
Ross, 1976). Lave and Wenger call attention to the criticisms of this position
formulated by Engestrom (1987) and Griffin and Cole (1984). Let us consider
the latter criticisms.
All of Griffin and Cole's criticisms of the scaffolding model center around
what Wenger called the monological character of the conduit model. First,
Griffin and Cole (1984) observe that scaffolding is a "largely spatial metaphor,
in which the temporal aspect of the construction of the whole remains as a
residual, unanalyzed aspect of the living process" (p. 48). Second, the scaf-
folding metaphor is restricted to achieving a predetermined end. Griffin and
Cole (1984) observe,

The scaffold metaphor leaves open questions of the child's creativity.

If the adult support bears an inverse relation to the child's competence,
then there is a strong sense of teleology—children's development is
circumscribed by the adults' achieved wisdom. Any next-step version
of the Zo-ped [ZPD] can be of similar concern. . . . (p. 47)

Griffin and Cole (1984) do not think there must necessarily be an externally
imposed linear order to learning in the "Zo-ped" (ZPD). As a result, the
scaffolding interpretation of the ZPD tends to share the passive unidirectional
transmission of information characteristic of the conduit metaphor of commu-
nication. It tends also to be monological and, therefore, illogical as a model
of the social construction of knowledge.
Griffin and Cole warn,

Adult wisdom does not provide a teleology for child development.

Social organization and leading activities provide a gap within which
the child can develop novel creative analysis. . . . A Zo-ped is a dia-
logue between the child and his future; it is not a dialogue between
the child and an adult's past. (p. 62, italics added)

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism

This statement comes close to picking up the kind of dialogicality most

appropriate to the Zo-ped, if it were truly a social constructivist site in the
sense characterized by Dewey. Still, it fails to realize all of the dialogical
possibilities between teacher and student.
Lave and Wenger (1991) call their last interpretation of the ZPD a collec-
tivist or societal perspective. They draw their inspiration for this perspective
from Yrjo Engestrom (1987), who redefined the ZPD as the "distance between
the everyday actions of individuals and the historically new form of the
societal activity that can be collectively generated as a solution to the double
bind potentially embedded in . . . everyday actions" (p. 174). The "double
bind" regards the tension between the need of the students to appropriate
historically entrenched tools that empower them as social actors and the
simultaneous need of the culture to retool and recreate itself. Sometimes, as
those that have studied gender, race, and ethnicity have noted, the historically
entrenched tools of a culture may actually be instruments of power, control,
and domination. That is why debates over curriculum can be so bitter.
Lave and Wenger (199D try to cope with the double bind by placing
"more emphasis on connecting issues of sociocultural transformation with
the changing relations between newcomers and old-timers in the context of
a changing shared practice" (p. 49). For Lave and Wenger, the double bind
leads to an inescapable paradox that they describe as follows:
The different ways in which old-timers and newcomers establish and
maintain identities conflict and generate competing viewpoints on
the practice and its development. Newcomers are caught in a dilemma.
On the one hand, they need to engage in the existing practice, which
has developed over time: to understand it, to participate in it, and to
become full members of the community in which it exists. On the
other hand, they have a stake in its development as they begin to
establish their own identity in its future, (p. 115)

To exemplify these generalizations, think about what happens between stu-

dents and professors in schools or between first-year teachers and their
mentors.
The double bind is less of a problem for some societies than for others.
Dewey brings this point home in a way that has some surprising conse-
quences. Dewey (19l6c/1980c) begins the chapter in Democracy and Educa-
tion titled "The Democratic Conception in Education" by indicating that, "To
say that education is a social function securing direction and development
in the immature through their participation in the life of the group to which
they belong is to say in effect that education will vary with the quality of
life which prevails in a group" (p. 87). If we take the ZPD as a zone of
sociolinguistically constructed meaning, then the quality of participation in
the communal life of the zone should be of pre-eminent interest to educa-
tional researchers and practitioners. Dewey (19l6c/1980c) goes on to say,
Particularly is it true that a society, which not only changes but which
has the ideal of such change as will improve it, will have different

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standards and methods of education from one which aims simply at
the perpetuation of its own customs, (p. 87)

Any society that wants both to preserve itself reproductively and to improve
itself productively should be perpetually caught in the double bind of creative
tensions between its old-timers and its double-bound newcomers.
Dewey attempted to derive his ideal of community life (and we should
think of the ZPD as a manifestation of community) from real communities
as he found them. From his observations, Dewey (19l6c/1980c) concluded:

In any social group whatever, even in a gang of thieves, we find some

interest held in common, and we find a certain amount of interaction
and cooperative intercourse with other groups. From these two traits
we derive our standard. How numerous and varied are the interests
which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with
other forms of association? (p. 89)

Lave and Wenger (1991) claim that,

Insofar as the conflicts in which the continuity-displacement contra-

diction is manifested involve power—as they do to a large extent—the
way the contradiction is played out changes as peer relations change.
Conflicts between masters and apprentices (or, less individualistically,
between generations) take place in the course of everyday participa-
tion. . . . Each threatens the fulfillment of the other's destiny, just as
it is essential to it. (p. 116)

In such a paradoxical situation, the answers to the two questions posed by

Dewey, above, become particularly important. Dewey (19l6c/1980c) pro-
poses democratic process as the key to resolving both:

The two elements in our criterion both point to democracy. The first
signifies not only more numerous and more varied points of shared
common interest, but greater reliance upon the recognition of mutual
interests as a factor in social control. The second means not only freer
interaction between social groups . . . but change in social habit—its
continuous readjustment through meeting the new situations pro-
duced by varied intercourse, (p. 92)

I believe that if we apply Dewey's two standards of ideal community life to

the zone of proximal development with its paradoxes and double bind, we
will soon see that, if it is to serve as a fit cultural tool for education in a society
that not only seeks to preserve but to improve itself, then the construction of
that zone must be democratic.
Dewey (19l6c/1980c) defined democracy in terms of dialogue and com-
munication when he affirmed, "A democracy is more than a form of govern-
ment; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated
experience" (p. 93). Given our earlier discussion of his dialogical understand-

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism

ing of logic, it should be evident that Dewey considered democracy the

most logical tool for governing social relations, whatever their binding and
paradoxical tensions. If we bring these definitions of logic and democracy
together with Dewey's social behaviorist theory of meaning, we can appreci-
ate the depth of what might be called Dewey's solution to the paradox of
the zone of proximal development. Dewey (19l6c/1980c) declared:

Not only is social life identical with communication, but all communi-
cation . . . is educative. To be a recipient of a communication is to have
an enlarged and changed experience. One shares in what another has
thought and felt.. . has his own attitude modified. Nor is the one who
communicates left unaffected. Try the experiment of communicating,
with fullness and accuracy, some experience to another,. .. and you
will find your own attitude toward your experience changing.. . . The
experience has to be formulated in order to be communicated. To
formulate requires getting outside of it, seeing it as another would
see it, considering what points of contact it has with the life of another
so that it may be got into such form that he can appreciate its meaning.
(pp. 8-9)

Recall the earlier passage where Dewey observed that "when communication
occurs, all natural events are subject to reconsideration and revision" (Dewey,
19l6c/1980c). Remember too "that the fruit of communication should be
participation" (Dewey, 19l6c/1980c). In Democracy and Education, Dewey
(19l6c/1980c) pronounces that

it is appropriate that language should play a large part compared with

other appliances. . . . The emphasis in school upon this particular tool
has, however, its dangers.. . . Education is not an affair of "telling"
and being told, but an active and constructive process, (p. 43)

Actions do speak louder than words, and, for the Deweyan, the transactions
go both ways. It is a kind of transaction that provides a democratic solution
to the double bind. Education as a creative and constructive activity is progres-
sive and productive rather than merely reproductive of the pre-existing
social order.
A simple and accurate statement of what Dewey meant by progressivism
is that progressive societies grow while other kinds merely reproduce them-
selves. If we think of the ZPD as a community, then a democratic community
is best because it frees intelligence to reconstruct the social order. The aim
of education for Dewey was simply more education, "We have laid it down
that the educative process is a continuous process of growth, having as its
aim at every stage an added capacity of growth" (p. 59). Dewey explicitly
denounces the "false idea of growth or development, that it is a movement
toward a fixed goal;" an illusory sense of "growth is regarded as having an
end, instead of being an end" (Dewey, 19l6c/1980c, p. 55). The solutions
to the problems of directionality and the paradox of the double bind that

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we have been discussing in this section all point toward democratic and
pluralistic social relations. Dogmatism is the monism that says people may
only grow and develop in the direction others choose. This dictum constitutes
the very core of oppression.

Tools and "Logical Objects"

Let us consider the paradox of the double bind as an investigation of how
newcomers appropriate cultural tools. Newman, Griffin, and Cole (1989)
borrow the principle of appropriation from A. N. Leont'ev (1981). Their
explication of appropriation provides not only a good solution to the paradox
of the zone of proximal development but a good introduction to the role of
tools in the ZPD, or what they prefer to call the construction zone. Newman,
Griffin, and Cole (1989) observe:

For Leont'ev, the objects in the child's world have a social history
and functions that are not discovered through the child's unaided
explorations. The usual function of a hammer, for example, is not
understood by exploring the hammer itself. . . . The child's appropria-
tion of culturally devised "tools" comes about through involvement
in culturally organized activities in which the tool plays a role. Some
tools are quite different from the hammer, like the mother tongue.
(pp. 62-63)

What the child appropriates are the tools and social practices of the culture,
including hammers and language. The solution of the paradox lies, for New-
man, Griffin, and Cole (1989), in the realization that, "The appropriation
process is always a two-way one. The tool may also be transformed, as it is
used by a new member of the culture . . . " (p. 63). Dewey, as we will see,
was willing to take the transformation of tools as far as it was logically
possible to go.
Wertsch (199D boldly declares, "The most central claim I wish to pursue
is that human action typically employs 'mediational means' such as tools
and language, and that these mediational means shape the action in essential
ways" (p. 12). Wertsch explores Wittgenstein's idea of "language games" and
is particularly impressed with Wittgenstein's conceptualization of language
as "being organized in a tool kit" (Wertsch, 1991, p. 105). Wertsch (1991,
p. 105) cites the following passage from Wittgenstein,

Think of the tools in a tool-box: there is a hammer, pliers, a saw, a

screwdriver, a rule. . . . The function of words are as diverse as the
functions of these objects. . . . Of course, what confuses us is the
uniform appearance of words when we hear them spoken or meet
them in script and print. For their application is not presented to us
so clearly.

To forestall misguided criticism of Wertsch and Wittgenstein, I would like to

point out that the words function here in their everyday intersubjective sense;

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism
they are not things in the head as some cognitive psychologist would consider
them. Words and wrenches for Wittgenstein, and Dewey, gear into the world;
their meanings are in their application. As Dewey (1925/1981) put it,

Man's bias towards himself easily leads him to think of a tool solely
in relation to himself, to his hand and eyes, but its primary relationship
is toward other external things, as the hammer to the nail, and the
plow to the soil. (p. 101)

Tools are in the box, or in the mind, because they work in the world and
are worth saving until needed again.
Lave and Wenger (1991) also affirm the importance of tools,

The artifacts employed in ongoing practice, the technology of practice,

provide a good arena in which to discuss the problem of access to
understanding. . . . Participation involving technology is especially
significant because the artifacts used within a cultural practice carry
a substantial portion of that practice's heritage, (p. 101)

Larry Hickman (1990), head of the Dewey Center in Carbondale, argues that
Dewey understood "knowing as a technological artifact" (p. 16). Hickman
argues that Dewey's entire philosophy can be understood as a philosophy of
technology. Tools are enduring and intelligent answers to persistent cultural
questions. But if cultures are to progress productively as well as persist
reproductively, they must continuously be retooling—that is, reconstructing
entrenched social structures and functions. Progressive societies must permit
newcomers to introduce new purposes to which cultural tools may be put.
Lave and Wenger (1991) indicate why: "Obviously, the transparency of any
technology always exists with respect to some purpose and is intricately tied
to the cultural practice and social organization within which the technology
is meant to function" (p. 102, italics added). Tools for Dewey were instrumen-
tal; they were preeminently means for achieving human ends, human pur-
poses. Dewey (1925/1981) affirmed: "Fortunate for us is it that tools and
their using can be directly enjoyed; otherwise all work would be drudgery.
But this additive fact does not alter the definition of a tool; it remains a thing
used as an agency for some concluding event" (p. 105). This simple statement,
so compatible with the definition offered by Lave and Wenger, has remarkable
properties. We will return to this definition and examine it more thoroughly
after we have considered some of Lave's criticisms of the tool kit analogy.
Lave is primarily concerned with the learning transfer involved in mathe-
matical and logical problem solving. Lave (1988) found that,

In functionalist psychological theory, mind and its contents have been

treated rather like a well-filled toolbox. Knowledge is conceived as
a set of tools stored in memory, carried around by individuals who
take the tools (e.g., "foolproof' arithmetic algorithms) out and use
them . . . after which they are stowed away again without change at
any time during the process, (p. 24)

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The functionalism being criticized here is that of the kind of cognitive psychol-
ogy committed to decontextualized information-processing models, the con-
duit model of transmission, and dualistic images of the internalization of
mentalistic cognitive structures. For the functionalist mentalistic, structures
like schemata and scripts are made out of a different kind of "stuff than the
physical world to which they are applied; therefore, cognitive tools may be
pulled out, applied in any context, and returned to the tool kit unchanged.
This is a static picture of abstract and decontextualized learning and knowing.
It is undemocratic and unfit for persons and cultures that seek not only to
persist but to progress.
In a subsection titled, "The Cultural Specificity of 'Rational Problem
Solving,'" Lave (1988) calls into question the very existence of "cognitive
universals" (p. 173)- Lave cites from several authors, with stunning effect—
including Warren's (1984) statement, "Logic, as Marx has it, is the money of
the mind . . . it always expresses a reified and alienated mediation of man
and reality" (p. 50). Placing cognitive functioning in a supposedly socially
neutral and entirely decontextualized transcendental realm, apart from
human purpose and accessible only by supposedly value neutral psychologi-
cal research, depoliticizes logic and mathematics teaching, learning, and
application. But if logic is truly a tool fashioned for human purposes, just
as hammers, pliers, and saws are, then its meaning may change with the
purposes for which it is applied. Indeed, in a culture with entirely new
intentions, the tool itself may be discarded or retooled beyond recognition.
Dewey saw tools as instruments for achieving certain purposes by securing
determinate and fixed consequences. For instance, logic is a tool for produc-
ing knowledge, or what Dewey (1938/1986) preferred to call "warranted
assertability" in order to express the tentativeness of all knowledge claims
(p. 11). As Dewey (1938/1986) put it, "rationality is an affair of the relation
of means to consequences, not of fixed first principles as ultimate premises"
(p. 17). The following statement leaves no doubt about where Dewey (1938/
1986) stood:

Logic is a social discipline. . .. Man is naturally a being that lives

in association with others in communities possessing language, and
therefore enjoying a transmitted culture. Inquiry is a mode of activity
that is socially conditioned and that has cultural consequences.
(pp. 26-27)

Should the desired consequences change, so too might the logic. Recall yet
again Dewey's statement, "When communication occurs, all natural events
are subject to reconsideration and revision; they are re-adapted to meet the
requirements of conversation" (Dewey, 1925/1981, p. 132). One suspects
that as more voices enter the conversation (e.g., women and minorities),
language, "the tool of tools," will be correspondingly reconstructed, and,
therefore, so will many other lesser tools like logic.
For Dewey, logic is as subject to retooling as any other tool. He gave
a little known talk titled "Logical Objects" in the same year that saw the

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism

publication of Democracy and Education. In that address, Dewey (19l6d/

1980d) asserted that logical inference "is not anything which can profitably
be termed psychical, it belongs in the category where plowing, assembling
the parts of a machine, digging and smelting ore belong—namely, behavior,
which lays hold of and handles and rearranges physical things" (p. 91).
Again, he defines inference instrumentally, "It is of inference as defined in
and by such a change of behavior that I say that inference generates all those
objects called logical which have provoked so much controversy" (p. 91).
Dewey was every bit as serious about his behaviorism with respect to tools
like logic as he was about the tool of tools. In his Essays in Experimental
Logic, Dewey (19l6a/1980a) declared:

In the logical version of pragmatism termed instrumentalism, action

or practice does indeed play a fundamental role. . . . To use a term
which is now more fashionable (and surely to some extent in conse-
quence of pragmatism) than it was earlier, instrumentalism means a
behaviorist theory of thinking and knowing. It means that knowing
is literally something which we do; that analysis is ultimately physical
and active; that meanings in their logical quality are standpoints,
attitudes, and methods of behaving toward facts, and that active exper-
imentation is essential to verification. .. . Thinking does not mean
any transcendent states or acts suddenly introduced into a previously
natural scene, but that the operations of knowing are . . . natural
responses of the organism, (p. 367)

The operations of knowing—for example, inferences—differ when new pur-

poses emerge. Because of our different inferences, we may behave and act
differently. If our behavioral changes engage us in different conversations,
then our purposes and appropriation of logical tools and patterns of inference
change. The image is that of a circle, and the circle is interpretive and opens
to reconstruction.

Labor: "Education Through Occupations"

Dewey (1938/1986) wrote in his Logic: The Theory of Inquiry (the subtitle
is significant),

A tool or machine, for example, is not simply a simple or complex

physical object having its own physical properties and effects, but it
is also a mode of language. For it says something, to those who
understand it, about operations of use and their consequences, (p. 52)

I would like to conclude with some comments about the laborers to whom
language and other tools speak.
A theory of everyday action and practice is of supreme importance to
all of the social constructivists that we have been discussing. Wertsch finds
that, "A fundamental assumption of a socio-cultural approach to mind is that
what is to be described and explained is human action" (p. 8). Newman,

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Garrison
Griffin, and Cole (1989) concentrate on "the case that cognitive change is a
process of interactive construction" (p. 2). Lave (1988) introduces her book
as an inquiry into the possibility of "outdoor psychology" and near the end
concludes that, "Theperson-acting (in setting), as an integral unit of analysis,
is quite different from a 'person.'" (p. 180). Lave and Wenger (199D look
closely at apprenticeship (see, pp. 61-87). Initially, they had intended writing
a book "to restore the idea of apprenticeship" (p. 29). They found that the
ideas of apprenticeship and learning by doing were largely metaphorical
and that the results of empirical research were not what they had expected
(p. 3D. As a result, Lave and Wenger decided that "the notion of situated
learning now appears to be a transitory concept, a bridge, between a view
according to which cognitive processes (and thus learning) are primary
and a view according to which social practice is the primary, generative
phenomenon and learning is one of its characteristics" (p. 34). So Lave and
Wenger conclude, "In apprenticeship opportunities for learning are, more
often than not, given structure by work practices instead of by strongly
asymmetrical master-apprentice relations" (p. 93). This conclusion comes
remarkably close to those drawn by Dewey.
Dewey (19l6c, 1980c) began his discussion of "The Meaning of Vocation"
in Democracy and Education by boldly stating:

At the present time the conflict of philosophic theories focuses in

discussion of the proper place and function of vocational factors in
education. The bald statement that significant differences in funda-
mental philosophical conceptions find their chief issue in connection
with this point may arouse incredulity: there seems to be too great a
gap between the remote and general terms in which philosophic ideas
are formulated and the practical and concrete details of vocational
education, (p. 316)

It is my hope that the discussion so far in this article makes this statement
more credible to the reader than it might appear in another context (see
Garrison, in press). Dewey (19l6c/1980c) gives several reasons for the forego-
ing statement that sound like something Lave, Wenger, Wertsch, Newman,
Griffin, and Cole might have said. Consider the following:

(a) The advances which have been made in the psychology of learning
in general. .. fall into line with the increased importance of industry
in life. . . . It reveals that learning is not the work of something ready-
made called mind, but that mind itself is an organization of original
capacities into activities having significance, (p. 325)
(b) An occupation is a continuous activity having a purpose. Education
through occupations consequently combines within itself more of the
factors conducive to learning than any other method, (p. 319)

Dewey (19l6b/1980b) makes much of education through the occupations,

"The only adequate training/or occupations is training through occupations"

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 Deweyan Pragmatism and Social Constructivism

(p. 320). Dewey uses this distinction in many of the ways discussed by Lave
and Wenger (1991, p. 116), including references to power. While writing
Democracy and Education, Dewey was publicly denouncing David Snedden
and Charles Prosser's advocacy of what we would now call tracking (see
Garrison, 1990). Involvement in this debate led Dewey (19l6c/1980c) to
write:

In the past.. . the education of the masses . . . was called apprentice-

ship rather than education. . .. The schools devoted themselves to
the three R's in the degree in which ability to go through the forms
of reading, writing, and figuring were common elements in all kinds
of labor. Taking part in some special line of work, under the direction
of others, was the out-of-school phase of this education. The two
supplemented each other; the school work in its narrow and formal
character was as much a part of apprenticeship to a calling as that
explicitly so termed, (p. 321)

Dewey lost his debate with Snedden and Prosser when the Smith-Hughes
act was signed into law in 1918. Vocational apprenticeship for an occupation
became part of public education and soon led to tracking and the kind of
social class separations that Dewey had predicted. Confining the direction
of socially constructed meaning to a predetermined track, perhaps even a
specific job, to which students must conform is evidence that schooling is
plagued by unidirectionality, monologicality, and undemocratic social rela-
tions. There is no room left to negotiate alternative purposes. Social con-
structivism is threatening to many because of the following bit of "logic:" If
the mind and self are indeed made through participating in social practices
and, as is rather obvious, social practices, tools, and language are themselves
social constructions and, equally obviously, there can be no denying that
power fashions practices and tools into the shape it desires for them, then
there can be no doubt that political power can shape minds and selves into
the form those who wield it desire.

Conclusion
I have attempted to provide an epistemology for contemporary social con-
structivism by recovering Dewey's pragmatic social behaviorism from the
field of education's progressivist past. It is a powerful theory of learning that
stresses the roles of labor, tools, and language as activities of enculturation.
I have suggested connections between this theory and Vygotsky's zone of
proximal development and the paradoxes it entails. Following Dewey's rea-
soning, we saw that the paradoxes of the ZPD are resolvable if we structure
participation in the Zo-ped dialogically and democratically.
The conclusion of these investigations leads to an embarrassment of
riches. We set out with Brown, Collins, and Duguid (1989) searching for an
epistemology adequate to discover a new perspective on education and
capable of effecting a dramatic improvement in learning. What we found was

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Garrison

a theory of learning that provided the possibility of dramatically improving

epistemology. We could call the result pragmatic social behaviorism. More
broadly conceived, pragmatic social behaviorism provides a complete theory
of meaning acquisition and emergent mental development, embracing not
only cognitive but also moral and aesthetic meanings. Pragmatic social behav-
iorism, social constructivism, or whatever w e may choose to call it, answers
important questions traditionally classified as epistemological, like "What is
knowledge?" and "How d o w e know?" It is here that w e can catch a glimpse
of w h y Deweyans so often see philosophical questions as subordinate to,
and subsumed under, educational questions.

Notes
The author would like to thank Elizabeth H. Roth and the anonymous reviewers of
this journal for their many helpful comments. The errors that remain are my own. One
reviewer astutely observed, "I am troubled by the extent to which this article is a romp
through a thicket of very messy ideas and very disorderly alternatives. . . . Lines between
competing positions are drawn more sharply than I think is the case in the world." I agree.
The article, however, is already long for a journal article, so there is not enough space to
deal with many nuances. Please enjoy the romp, do not get too raucous, and remember:
The article is only trying to start a conversation, not finish one.
1
Stand up now! Even if you did not obey this dramatic and rather rude imperative,
you may well have felt your body tense as you considered your course of behavior. Many
of the things we do socially, we do with words.
2
Dewey (1931/1985) begins his remembrance of Mead with the statement, "It was
some forty years ago in Ann Arbor that Alice Dewey and myself made the acquaintance
of Helen and George Mead, an acquaintance which ripened rapidly in a friendship which
is one of the most precious possessions of my life. . . . We lived in neighboring houses;
we came to Chicago at the same time; we lived many years in the same building; there
was hardly a day we did not exchange visits . . ." (p. 22).

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Manuscript received June 14, 1994

Revision received December 12, 1994
Accepted February 22, 1995

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