Abstract Meditations on the Concrete and Concrete Implications for Mathematics Education

Seymour Papert has recently called for a "revaluation of the concrete": a revolution in education and cognitive science that will overthrow logic from "on top and put it on tap." Turkle and Papert (1991) situate the concrete thinking paradigm in a new "epistemological pluralism" an acceptance and valuation of multiple thinking styles, as opposed to their stratification into heirarchically valued stages. As evidence of an emerging trend towards the concrete, they cite feminist critics such as Gilligan's (1982) work on the contextual or relational mode of moral reasoning favored by most women, and Fox Keller's (1983) analysis of the Nobel-prize-winning biologist Barbar McClintock's proximal relationship with her maize plants, her "feeling for the organism." They cite hermeneutic critics such as Lave (1988), whose studies of situated cognition suggest that all learning is highly specific and should be studied in real world contexts.