Epistemology and conceptual resources for the development of learning technologies

inhabiting such a humanized environment ipso facto learns (everyday) meaning as an
aspect of the activities of living with other human beings.

Formal education plays a further and distinctive role, according to Vygotsky, by
inducting learners into domains of meaning not part of everyday practices. Social
practices are not restricted to everyday experience but many of the characteristics of
the knowledge domains (and the social practices underpinning them) that constitute
formal education take a very different form. Vygotsky characterised this difference by
distinguishing between scientific (abstract) and everyday concepts. The relevant point
here is that the relation between experience and the world is not direct and in the case
of domains of formal knowledge the relation may well be counterintuitive. The
philosophical issues involved are not straightforward but what is of interest here is the
extent to which epistemological presuppositions inform conceptions of how we come
to know. In very general terms one such presupposition is that of dualism.

Turning now to the criticism of dualism: the first point to note is that this
criticism has a long history. For example both Kant and Hegel devoted considerable
attention to this issue. Here however attention is drawn to the work of contemporary
philosophers who, working from within the analytic tradition, have called the
categorical separation of Mind and World into question. The starting point here is
Sellars’ attack on what he termed „the myth of the given’, that is the idea that we have
direct contact with the world. For Sellars the concept of knowledge belongs in a
normative context: that is to say it cannot be separated from making judgments and
giving reasons as Sellars puts it;

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