Innovative uses of global and local networks of linked computers make new ways of collaborative working, learning, and acting possible. In Group Cognition Gerry Stahl explores the technological and social reconfigurations that are needed to achieve computer-supported collaborative knowledge building--group cognition that transcends the limits of individual cognition. Computers can provide active media for social group cognition where ideas grow through the interactions within groups of people; software functionality can manage group discourse that results in shared understandings, new meanings, and collaborative learning. Stahl offers software design prototypes, analyzes empirical instances of collaboration, and elaborates a theory of collaboration that takes the group, rather than the individual, as the unit of analysis.Stahl's design studies concentrate on mechanisms to support group formation, multiple interpretive perspectives, and the negotiation of group knowledge in applications as varied as collaborative curriculum development by teachers, writing summaries by students, and designing space voyages by NASA engineers. His empirical analysis shows how, in small-group collaborations, the group constructs intersubjective knowledge that emerges from and appears in the discourse itself. This discovery of group meaning becomes the springboard for Stahl's outline of a social theory of collaborative knowing. Stahl also discusses such related issues as the distinction between meaning making at the group level and interpretation at the individual level, appropriate research methodology, philosophical directions for group cognition theory, and suggestions for further empirical work.

Group Cognition: Computer Support for Building Collaborative Knowledge

Analytic work based on the intersubjective view of two participating subjectivities requires discipline rooted in an orientation to the structural conditions of thirdness. The author proposes a theory that includes an early form of thirdness involving union experiences and accommodation, called the one in the third, as well as later moral and symbolic forms of thirdness that introduce differentiation, the third in the one. Clinically, the concept of a co-created or shared intersubjective thirdness helps to elucidate the breakdown into the twoness of complementarity in impasses and enactments and suggests how recognition is restored through surrender.

Beyond doer and done to: an intersubjective view of thirdness.

@fmct:Contents @toc4:Translator's Note iii @toc2:1 Theromorphous 00 2 Acephalous 00 3 Snob 00 4 Mysterium disiunctionis 00 5 Physiology of the Blessed 00 6 Cognitio experimentalis 00 7 Taxonomies 00 8 Without Rank 00 9 Anthropological Machine 00 10 Umwelt 00 11 Tick 00 12 Poverty in World 00 13 The Open 00 14 Profound Boredom 00 15 World and Earth 00 16 Animalization 00 17 Anthropogenesis 00 18 Between 00 19 Desuvrement 000 20 Outside of Being 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Index 000 Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Philosophical anthropology, Human beings Animal nature

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The Open: Man and Animal

The act frequency approach to personality is advanced in this article. Dispositions are viewed as summaries of act frequencies that, in themselves, possess no explanatory status. As sociocultural emergents, dispositions function as natural cognitive categories with acts as members. Category boundaries are fuzzy, and acts within each category differ in their prototypicality of membership. A series of studies focusing on indices of act trends and on a comparative analysis of the internal structure of dispositions illustrates this basic formulation. The act frequency approach is then placed within a taxonomic framework of the relations among act categories (horizontal dimension) and hierarchic classification (vertical dimension). Theoretical implications of the act frequency approach are examined. Dispositional consistency is distinguished from behavioral consistency and several act frequency indices (e.g., dispositional versatility, situational scope) are defined. Situational analysis and personality coherence are then viewed from the act frequency perspective. Discussion focuses on the possible origins and development of dispositional categories and implications of alternative middle-level constructs for act categorization and personality theory.

The Act Frequency Approach to Personality

There is something of a controversy taking place over how best to theorize human learning. This article joins the debate over the relation between sociocultural and constructivist perspectives on learning. These 2 perspectives differ not just in their conceptions of knowledge (epistemological assumptions) but also in their assumptions about the known world and the knowing human (ontological assumptions). Articulated in this article are 6 themes of a nondualist ontology seen at work in the sociocultural perspective, and suggested is a reconciliation of the 2. This article proposes that learning involves becoming a member of a community, constructing knowledge at various levels of expertise as a participant, but also taking a stand on the culture of one's community in an effort to take up and overcome the estrangement and division that are consequences of participation. Learning entails transformation both of the person and of the social world. This article explores the implications of this view of learning...

Raymond Queneau

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