Tímarit um menntarannsóknir - 01.06.2012, Page 29

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Rauntengsl eða merkingartengsl?
degger, who focused on the perceptual
(Husserl) and interpretative (Heidegger)
commonalities of the human experience.
As an antidote to both those approach-
es, the authors offer a rehearsal of the lin-
guistic philosophy of the late Wittgenstein
and its practical application in the philo-
sophical sociology of Peter Winch. Both
these theorists assume that human exist-
ence is essentially played out in a “space
of reasons” and that the most salient rela-
tions characterising our existence are not
empirical but conceptual ones – or, more
precisely, semantic relationships of mean-
ing. Those relationships are, in principle,
social and objective as a “private lan-
guage” of meaning (whose rules another
agent could not, in principle, grasp) is,
according to Wittgenstein’s well-known
argument, incomprehensible. The funda-
mental role of social scientific (including
educational) research then becomes that of
revealing the “grammar” of the “language
games” played by social actors: decipher-
ing their “worlds of meaning”. A “world
of meaning” is subsequently defined as
reality with respect to the meaning con-
ferred on it by the “actors” in the relevant
“language game”.
In the latter sections of the article, this
Wittgensteinian/Winchian methodol-
ogy is, in the spirit and style of Wittgen-
stein’s own writings, “shown” rather than
“said” through an analysis of the concepts
of (a) student motivation and (b) student
self-discipline (and its sister concepts self-
regulation and self-control). The basic idea
is to expose the inadequacies of the main-
stream psychological approach (typically
also adopted by education researchers) of
understanding these concepts as pure em-
pirical variables. For example, in order for
the claim that agent A is “motivated to do
x” to be intelligible it needs to stand in cer-
tain logical connections to other cognitions
and behaviours ascribable to A; it cannot
be isolated and explored as an independ-
ent empirical factor. Furthermore, the very
idea of the self exerting discipline upon
itself reveals logical paradoxes that may
only be resolvable if we consider “self-
discipline” to be a metaphorical rendering
of certain reasonable evasive tactics (as in
the famous Marshmallow test). However,
such an understanding seems to rule out
self-discipline as an independent and op-
erationalisable empirical factor.
The lessons drawn from those examples
are that educational researchers cannot
shirk the Winchian task of searching for
the meaning of concepts such as motiva-
tion and self-discipline as they figure in
the purposeful self-understandings of stu-
dents – self-understandings which, in turn,
form part of the common and objective so-
cial reality that they inhabit. For purposes
of the first author’s doctoral project, this
assumption gives rise to questions such
as whether the concepts of “study” and
“the school” still constitute for students in
today’s fragmented social world a unify-
ing source of experience – or whether stu-
dents, by contrast, confer radically differ-
ent meanings upon them within radically
different language games.