Thinking as Communicating: Human Development, the Growth of Discourses, and Mathematizing (Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: February 29, 2008
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 360
ISBN-13: 9780521867375
Subjects: Cognition & cognitive psychology; Philosophy of mathematics; Psychology & Psychiatry / General; Education & Training; Psychology; Language; Mathematics; Thought and thinking
Description: "This book is an attempt to change our thinking about thinking. Anna Sfard undertakes this task convinced that many long-standing, seemingly irresolvable quandaries regarding human development originate in ambiguities of the existing discourses on thinking. Standing on the shoulders of Vygotsky and Wittgenstein, the author defines thinking as a form of communication. The disappearance of the time-honored thinking-communicating dichotomy is epitomized by Sfard's term, commognition, which combines communication with cognition. The commognitive tenet implies that verbal communication with its distinctive property of recursive self-reference may be the primary source of humans' unique ability to accumulate the complexity of their action from one generation to another."--Jacket.