Excerpt: Education has failed to show steady progress because it has shifted back and forth among simplistic positions such as the associationist and rationalist philosophies. Modern cognitive psychology provides a basis for genuine progress by careful scientific analysis that identifies those aspects of theoretical positions that contribute to student learning and those that do not. Radical constructivism serves as the current exemplar of simplistic extremism, and certain of its devotees exhibit an antiscience bias that, should it prevail, would destroy any hope for progress in education.

Blickt man in die Zeitschriften der Handelslehrerschaft, besonders in die ihrer Standesorganisationen, so stellt man fest, daß Handelslehrerinnen und -lehrer in wichtigen Fragen der Gestaltung wirtschaftsberuflichen Unterrichts derzeit verunsichert sind. 1Diese Verunsicherung hat unterschiedliche Gründe. Sie ist Folge des umfassenden Wandels wirtschaftsberuufllicher Arbeit heute (vgl. Backes-Haase 1997a) wie der damit zusammenhängenden aktuellen berufsbildungspolitischen Diskussion im Umfeld der Standortdebatte (vgl. z. B. zuletzt Stihl 1997). Verschärft wird die Unsicherheit nach Einschätzung vieler Handelslehrer (vgl. z. B. Rückwart 1996, bes. S. 3) derzeit noch durch die mangelnde Orientierung, welche sie angesichts dieser Herausforderungen von seiten der hochschulischen Wirtschaftsdidaktik in grundlegenden Fragen der Unterrichtsgestaltungerfahren. Diesem Problem möchte ich im Rahmen meiner Themenstellung in einem m. E. zentralen Punkt näher nachgehen.

Excerpt: The main thesis of this chapter is that the culture of teacher education must share the core characteristics of the desired mathematics classroom culture. In particular, this relationship must hold if teacher education is to exercise a reforming influence on in-service teachers and create a break in the circle of reproduction by which the weaknesses of the existing school system are perpetuated. It follows that more attention should be devoted to the relation between alternative classroom experiences and theoretical instruction, to the fundamental role of everyday language for the understanding of mathematics, the balance of self-directed work and the negotiation of meanings in seminars and tutorials, and to the development of reflection and self-monitoring.

Recent accounts of the relation between law and other social spheres have emphasized law’s “relative autonomy. ” The intui- tion behind the “relative autonomy” formula is that law is neither wholly independent of, nor entirely reducible to, political, eco- nomic and other social processes. Sensible as this intuition is, however, the idea of “relativeautonomy” by itself remainspurely negative. It excludes two unpalatableextremes-pure formalism and pure instrumentalism-butit does not by itself characterize, in positive theoreticalterms, the relation between law and other social discourses or practices. This Article examines an attempt in recent German social thought to specify theoretically the relation between law and other social spheres. The theory examined-Niklas Luhmann’s theory of “autopoiesis”-is,though familiar to Continentalread- ers, not yet well-known to American legal academics. This Arti- cle presents autopoietic theory to the American legal audience, with particularattention to the way in which Luhmann reformu- lates the “relative autonomy” problematic. Throughout, the Ar- ticle focuses on the connections between autopoietic theory and issues in American law and contemporaryAmerican legal theory. The Article’s strategy is to criticize those aspects of autopoietic theory that deserve criticism, but at the same time, to show how he theory might operate as a productive stimulus for American legal theorists.

Excerpt: Since World War II, mathematics and science education have been high on the educational reform agenda in many countries, including the United States. […] In this chapter, I wish to suggest some ways to reframe this conception of reform in science education. These ways are at one time theoretical and empirical – that is, rooted in the constructivist perspective and in The Professional Practice Community (PPC), a grassroots model for collaboration that may be a constructivist medium to foster educational reform even in the present era of national standards. This model may offer effective structures not only for “valuing questions and ideas” in relation to the usual beliefs on cognition, learning, and teaching, but also for providing a network to support risk taking and change. But before that, some comments on the current U. S. reform project.

Excerpt: My purpose in this paper is to show that the two major options on which the current debate on the interpretation of quantum mechanics relies, namely realism and empiricism (or instrumentalism), are far from being exhaustive. There is at least one more position available; a position which has been widely known in the history of philosophy during the past two centuries but which, in spite of some momentous exceptions, has only attracted little interest until recently in relation to the foundational problems of quantum mechanics. According to this third position, one may provide a theory with much stronger justifications than mere a posteriori empirical adequacy, without invoking the slightest degree of isomorphism between this theory and the elusive things out there. Such an intermediate attitude, which is metaphysically as agnostic as empiricism, but which shares with realism a commitment to considering the structure of theories as highly significant, has been named transcendentalism after Kant. Of course, I have no intention in this paper to rehearse the procedures and concepts developed by Kant himself; for these particular procedures and concepts were mostly adapted to the state of physics in his time, namely to Newtonian mechanics. I rather wish to formulate a generalized version of his method and show how this can yield a reasoning that one is entitled to call a transcendental deduction of quantum mechanics. This will be done in three steps. To begin with, I shall define carefully the word “transcendental,” and the procedure of “transcendental deduction,” in terms which will make clear how they can have a much broader field of application than Kant ever dared to imagine. Then, I shall show briefly that the main structural features of quantum mechanics can indeed be transcendentally deduced in this modern sense. Finally, I shall discuss the significance, and also the limits, of these results.

This article proposes to replace current semiotic folk theories by a more complex conception of the role signs play in human societies. It distinguishes between the world and the reality of human beings, describing the perception of the world as a production of images that are projected outward and thereby create reality. While perception takes the world as its object, behavior takes it as a project. A considerable part of the behavior of organisms consists in the production of signs which represent perceptions (as in a photograph), behaviors (as in film), or signs (as in writing, which imitates spoken language). On one hand, signs have the function of making perceptions, behaviors, and signs in themselves communicable; on the other, they serve to anticipate perceptions, behaviors, and signs which are not yet real. This second type of signs (schemata) takes reality as a project in exactly the same way in which ordinary behavior takes the world as its project. The article ends with a discussion of the various types of schematic signs used by human beings to control their perceptual, behavioral, and sign spaces, and suggests a systematic improvement of our semiotic folk theories in order to facilitate orientation in the reality created by ourselves.

This article deals with the notion of reality. During the last twenty years, public discourse in western societies has identified the opposition between the real and the virtual as one of the cultural key questions. Taking concrete examples as a point of departure, the paper investigates the semantics of the polysemic terms virtual and real. A semiotic model of the relation between (human) organisms, concepts and signs is used in order to demonstrate that the virtual cannot be adequately described as something opposed to reality, but must be seen as an indispensable part of it. The way in which organisms constitute reality is discussed in the light of the basic cognitive operations of categorization and the formation of conceptual relations, and also of their linguistic counterparts. The apparent conflict between the real and the virtual, which has led many critics to develop apocalyptic visions of the end of civilization, is, in fact, a phantom, product of an outdated theory of semantics.

Key words: coherence, communication, culture, semantics, semiotics, virtual reality