In this chapter, I make the case for a shift from the investigation of meaning (mak- ing) to the investigation of sense consistent with a transactional approach to psy- chology of education in which there is a primacy of events. The central point of the forgoing analyses is to show the role of the context in the constitution of text (word, sign, graph, phrase). Any bit of text writ large (including actions) exists in relation to context, and the two aspects together form the sensible contexture. Meaning (sig- nification) is only a small (and sometimes insignificant) part of a signifying event (word, graph) in the face of all the other aspects of sense, which, in fact, constitute the very context in which something like meaning (signification) can exist. The individual or the group does not just make such sense exclusively. Instead there also is a passive aspect, well rendered in expressions according to which something is found to make sense or feels right: sense is revealed as much as it is made.
Everywhere, common ground and common sense are presupposed and required for events to happen in the way they are seen to be happening. Something makes sense when it is part of a presupposed field, the whole world in its continuous unfolding.
As an interwoven, dynamically evolving phenomenon, a sensible field weaves together a fabric of sense including everything making the occasion.
The focus on the meaning of such things as graphs, language, or words makes sense in the context of an illusion that any such thing might be of interest in its own right, outside of some activity in the course of which it has some function. Thus, research is concerned with investigating the interpretations that experts (often sci- entists, mathematicians) or non-experts (often school students, sometimes workers) articulate with respect to graphs. But in the world outside psychological research, graphs do not stand on their own – they are always part of some occasion in and for the course of which they have particular functions. For example, the research scien- tists involved in this study produce graphs that are integral to their publications, which are integral to their career progress. But the graphs and the publications have a purpose that goes beyond academia in that they (potentially) inform fish hatcher- ies about when to release juvenile salmon; and hatching fish for release itself has a particular societal function. Their sensible field therefore always exists in society as a whole, not in themselves, in some abstract (ideal) meaning that is part of the self- sufficient existence of the graph. Their use is essentially shared, for we do not understand “tools” or “symbols” without knowing what it its use is doing for others.
Any understanding of the graph presupposes a massive amount of common ground, which inherently resists any complete articulation. If words and actions do not have meaning outside of a field, then focusing exclusively on the construction and nego- tiation of meaning may indeed make little sense. Any stretch of human communica- tion or action exceeds the lexical meaning of what is said or done. A reasonable alternative to the focus on meaning therefore is to investigate sense and the continu- ously evolving sensible fields in which it has its place.
The benefit of a move from meaning to sense is exemplified in Fragment 6.1.
Here, it is not the meaning of the graph that is at stake. It stands for whatever is anticipated to be the case once the number of measurement for specific A1 amounts are tallied. But the graph, which initially does not make sense, does make sense fol- lowing the exchange. It is the situation as a whole that serves as the context for the individual signifying event, itself a relation of things that has to be fulfilled for the event of signifying to exist; and the overall relation is determining the relation of the two events (signifying, signified). The two other graphs that make it onto the chalk- board over a 25-minute period (during which the “eyeball” also is drawn) make sense only in the context of the research of this team, which uses equipment that it has developed only 2 years earlier; the novel method was the object of a paper just published, the research for which was conducted during the preceding year. The existing technology was based on the extraction of the retinal tissue, making spec- trophotometric measurements on the whole extract. In a spectrophotometric analy- sis, the different wavelengths from the light spectrum are made to traverse the sample one at a time until the full spectrum was covered. The new technology mea- sured the absorption for the entire spectrum in one take; it allowed the measure-
ments on individual cells; and it even allowed measuring the rhodopsin/porphyropsin ratio anywhere along the cells, as the light beam had a diameter that was less than the width of the cell (Fig. 6.2c). The familiarity with the apparatus provides the sensible contexture for the two graphs labeled “Within Rod” and “Within Fish.” All of this is part of the laboratory members’ shared history that are immanent in them in the form of the common sense. The graphs are conceivable in the absence of the particular sensible field of this laboratory, but it would have made no sense talking about them as predictions for what they will be observing. It is only in the field of this team’s activities that it is plausible to anticipate observing a variation of rhodop- sin content measurements within a single fish, for the team was conducting absorp- tion measurements on 20–30 retinal cells from each fish. Similarly, because they have already talked about where along the longitudinal extension of a cell to take the measurements for the purpose of controlling variability, it make sense to expect that the rhodopsin/porphyropsin ratio may differ within the rod (as shown by line with negative slope, Fig. 6.1, right of center) or to be indeed more or less constant (as shown by the three bars, Fig. 6.1, right of center).
We also observe in Fragment 6.1 how the literal meaning of a statement is not the most important aspect that promotes the occasion ahead and thereby allows the sense of what is going on to pass into its successor sense. In the opening turns of the fragment, the postdoc makes a statement about not understanding. What we actu- ally observe as next action is the articulation of context. The articulation of the context provides what the preceding statement appears to ask for in a roundabout way, that is, without actually asking for something. The entire exchange makes sense in the way it unfolds, and it indeed constitutes an integral part of this meeting event in which further graphs are produced that depict anticipated results of the experiments. The present analyses provide evidence for the fact that the graph makes sense to the postdoc. Thus, in Fragment 6.1 work is done such that the scien- tists can continue to talk their research: they have maintained the conditions for talking research in this way and, thus, the intelligibility of the occasion as much as the intelligibility of the expressions. This phenomenon, the maintenance of condi- tions to continue acting in particular ways, is a hallmark of the reflexivity that makes for the social nature of actions in a strong sense – i.e. even if only one person is present. In the particular instance, the projected shape of the data has been rearticu- lated in the form of graphs, and to continue in the project of understanding the variation of the data, anything interfering with the assumption that everyone is on the same page has to be dealt with.
As the exchange is articulating context, common ground and common sense come to be reestablished. In other words, sensible common ground is a performative and an ongoing achievement; and in this achievement, the common ground shifts and evolves. Common ground is assumed, monitored, and produced for the purpose of framing the replies of the other, who answers in a way so that another reply may issue forth. Unsurprisingly perhaps, any particular utterance or action thus has to be considered as part of an ecology that includes context (ground!) rather than as a
thing that has meaning (or sense) on its own. The consequence of this position is that neither actions and texts nor contexts can be described independently of each other, for each is constitutive of the other. The context for any sequence of action or a stretch of talk is produced by the same behavior in which the action and talk are constitutive part.
In the foregoing analyses, pointing, drawing, and moving body are shown to accent what is potentially visible and attended to. One function of all forms of expressive events is to extend and change those parts of the field that are accented and thus visible, which may be actually visible or ideally present. The visibility is itself due to percipient events. The indexical nature of language is implicit in the statement of the function of discourse: In genuine discourse, talking presupposes knowledge of its content. If talking draws from the known, then it is presupposing this something; and the purpose of talking is to make manifest precisely this “what”
that it is about. Talking thereby is making accessible what it is about. To make it accessible, talking presupposes that there already exists access to its content; the question only is about its becoming visible. Normally, speaking brings something into the accented visible without being visible itself, though any word or phrase may actually become the topic of talking and thereby become itself visible – e.g. as being gendered, as not making sense, and so forth. The accented visible thus is the same as that which “language is about.” The signified event not only is always already presupposed but also constitutive of a particular material configuration as a signify- ing event of something else. The term sense thus marks that the intellectual and affective content associated with a word has been absorbed from the situation in which the word is used. That is, the field is equivalent to sense; it provides the degree of content that any form of signifying event contributes. Text thereby acquires its psychological functions from the context together with which it constitutes the field.
In conclusion we can that for a graph to be intelligible (i.e., to make sense) requires a massive amount of common ground in addition to understanding what the graph stands for. Each graph makes sense when its contribution to a signifying func- tion is established – i.e., the signifier–signified relation – against everything else that the team is doing and takes to be as common sense. Because it is common sense, it no longer has to be articulated. There is therefore a unity/identity of text and con- text: a sensible contexture or sensible field. The word acquires meaning in the con- text of speech, itself occurring in the context of a societal activity. When the context changes, so does sense, and, as a consequence, the sense with which the word is associated. This is why sense becomes primary for the later Vygotsky. Sense is a more important concept than meaning because already the infant lives and “makes”
sense long before it has words that could be used as tools for this poetic creation.
Indeed, the infant is participating in a world shot through with sense, and, in the course of participating, acquire, with its senses, a sense of how the world works.
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It is only man who has entered into a social relation with his environment, and then has abstracted and generalized it into a physical theory. (Mead 1938, 110)
A major weakness of all theories in educational psychology – including those of sociocultural and cultural-historical inclinations – is their intellectualist bent. Even Lev S. Vygotsky never explained how the scientific concepts that the children in his studies were learning came about in the first place, and how any abstract universal concept could have emerged in the course of human history – though he did intimate that all higher psychological functions were relations with others first before they were functions of the individual (Vygotsky 1989). Piaget’s main problem was the reduction of development to biological maturation underlying the different stages;
and he used biological concepts for describing the development of qualities that are recognized to be purely societal or cultural in the approaches developed by social psychologists such as L. S. Vygotsky, A. N. Leont’ev, A. R. Luria, and their students and followers. Mainstream psychological theories also have an intellectualist bent in that they conceive of what we know in terms of ideal things, such as concepts, which are abstracted from the physical world.1 In the cognitive sciences and psychology, these ideal things exist somehow exist independent of the world, which, as sug- gested in Chap. 1, leads to the symbol grounding problem, that is, of the connection between the material world and ideal concepts. The problem of the missing connec- tion has been made thematic in different names: the psychophysical or body–mind problem. The problem, however, is one of method and presupposition. As soon as we shift to a transactional approach, where everything is conceived in terms of events that together make the world-as-event, and where phenomena are the result of recurrences in percipient events and experiences, the existence of ideal things as an ensemble effect of material processes no longer is a mystery. This is so because in this approach, “all awareness, even awareness of concepts, requires at least the
1 In the transactional approach developed here, an abstraction is occurring when an event is referred to, after the fact and in another event, by means of some signifier. In chapter 5, the signifier for an event (e.g. graph) has a synecdochical relation to the event (i.e. scientific research process).