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successively and inexorably led the child to construct a mental representation
of the real world akin to that of the detached, dispassionate scientist. While
he did not quite drive the empiricist learning theorists from the field (they
have begun the take new life again through the formulation of “connection-
ist” computer-simulations of learning), his views surely dominated the three
decades following the Second World War.
Now there is mounting criticism of his views. The growth of knowledge of
“reality” or of the mental powers that enable this growth to occur, the critics
argue, is neither unilinear, strictly derivational in a logical sense, nor is it, as it
were, “across the board.” Mastery of one task does not assure mastery of other
tasks that, in a formal sense, are governed by the same principles. Knowledge
and skill, rather, are domain specific and, consequently, uneven in their accre-
tion. Principles and procedures learned in one domain do not automatically
transfer to other domains. Such findings were not simply a “failure to confirm”
Piaget or the rational premise generally (see Segal et al. (1985)). Rather, if the
acquisition of knowledge and of mental powers is indeed domain specific and
not automatically transferable, this surely implies that a domain, so called, is
a set of principles and procedures, rather like a prosthetic device, that permits
intelligence to be used in certain ways, but not in others. Each particular way of
using intelligence develops an integrity of its own - a kind of knowledge-plus-
skill-plus-tool integrity - that fits it to a particular range of applicability. It is
a little “reality” of its own that is constituted by the principles and procedures
that we use within it.
These domains, looked at in another way, constitute something like a cul-
ture's treasury of toolkits. Few people ever master the whole range of toolkits:
we grow clever in certain spheres, and remain incompetent in others in which,
as it were, we do not become “hitched” to the relevant toolkit. Indeed, one can
go even further and argue, as some have, that such cultural toolkits (if I may so
designate the principles and procedures involved in domain specific growth)
may in fact have exerted selection pressures on the evolution of human capac-
ities. It may be, for example, that the several forms of intelligence proposed
by Howard Gardner (which he attempts to validate by the joint evidence of
neuropathology, genius, and cultural specialization) may be outcomes of such
evolutionary selection (Gardner 1983). The attraction of this view is, of course,
that it links man and his knowledge-gaining and knowledge-using capabilities
to the culture of which he and his ancestors were active members. But it brings
deeply into question not only the universality of knowledge from one domain
to another, but the universal translatability of knowledge from one culture to
another. For in this dispensation, knowledge is never “point-of-viewless.”
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