in the first place and Cartesian dualism has been tacitly accepted in these fields of
study. The proximity of learning to knowledge, that is the proximity of acquiring
knowledge to what counts as knowledge in the first place, throws this acceptance into
question and opens the way for the criticism of it within philosophy.
Mind and World
As a preface to considering philosophy that is pertinent to the question of what sort of
conceptual resources we need for thinking about technologies and the enhancement of
learning, it is helpful first to note some of what Vygotsky said about the development
of mind. Vygotsky dealt with the question of how a child learns language by
introducing a social aspect to the development of mind. The problem of how it is
possible to learn meaning without a cumulative building up of more and more
complex words, is dealt with by understanding meaning to be a located in social
practices which a child inhabits by default. The actions and utterances of a newborn
are made meaningful, not by an original intention of the child, but by the meaning
given to the utterances by other human beings. In this sense a newborn becomes
human by his/her induction into the meanings and practices of the social group. The
distinctive character of human beings is that contact with the world is not a matter of
responsiveness to causes but to reasons. Meaning cannot be understood apart from the
social practices that govern our responses to our environment. The human
environment is not one of „first nature’ but of „second nature’ i.e. it is an environment
made meaningful through the significance given to it by human activities. A child
14