Author C. Konold

Excerpt: Clifford Geertz (1983) speaks of “genre blurring” to refer to, among other things, the cross-fertilization of the social sciences and the humanities. In the process, the social sciences are giving up their long-held objective of patterning themselves after the physical sciences. This volume might be looked at as a case study of such genre blurring. Some of the contributors come from academic backgrounds other than mathematics and mathematics education. They include academics trained in psychology, philosophy, and classical studies. This diversity is reflected to some extent in the lack of overlap in the works each chapter references. But there is a stronger rationale for characterizing these chapters as cross-disciplinary: one finds within single chapters, references culled from a variety of disciplines. Although the authors come from and draw on diverse disciplines, they share a core perspective. This shared perspective is a species of constructivism. There are many possible tacks to take in an introductory chapter such as this. What seems the most appropriate in this case is to orient the reader who is interested in mathematics education, for example, but who may be unaware of constructivist epistemology. Accordingly, we describe general philosophical and psychological issues that underlie the constructivism advocated by these authors. Having done this, we provide a brief overview of the volume in which we highlight the primary focus of each chapter.