Howard A. Smith
Abstract:
The objectives of this article are to describe abduction and to
highlight its role as a nonconscious psychosemiotic process.
Abduction is an inferential mode of reasoning which was explained by
Charles Peirce a century ago but which is still largely unknown to
psychologists and educators. A defining feature of abduction is its
dependence on nonconscious processes to create new hypotheses and
ideas. However, many current scholars in both psychology and
philosophy also include nonconscious elements in their inquiries.
Despite its perhaps unusual attributes, abduction may be the
thinking and reasoning process that is used most often in everyday
life.[ back
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Deborah L. Smith-Shank
Abstract: This article addresses the concepts of visual culture,
pedagogy, and cognition in contemporary times within the context of
art education. By its very nature, contemporary art, and much of the
art throughout all of history, is contextual practice. In recent art
education literature the notion of art has broadened to include
visual culture artifacts including advertising, costuming, and other
sign events that happen at the intersections of art, context, and
consciousness. The nature of these images and artifacts of culture,
the nature of our engagement with them, and the contexts through
which they engage us at both the affective and cognitive level, both
create and reflect culture. This nexus is the focus of visual
culture pedagogy and the content of postmodern art education.[ back
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Donald J. Cunningham,
Anne Arici, James Schreiber,
Kuk Lee
Abstract: In this article we describe some of the outcomes of
two studies in which subjects think aloud while navigating
information to be found on the WWW. In the first study, university
students were asked to find information relevant to questions they
selected from a list we provided, questions like “Does the death
penalty deter violent crime?” or “What is the best breed of dog for
you?” In the second study, mathematics educators (elementary and
secondary teachers) were asked to navigate the website of a
professional association to find information pertinent to their
classroom. We classified the navigational strategies and inferential
reasoning used by the subjects according to a model of reasoning
developed by Shank and Cunningham (1996). The data show that
abductive reasoning dominates in the web context to an extent not
well appreciated in educational circles. Implications for
instructional design are explored.[ back
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Noel Gough
Abstract: This essay appraises the work of fiction in
representing and generating semiotic consciousness in education by
examining three intertextual continuities between crime fiction and
stories of educational inquiry. First, many reports of educational
research resemble detective stories in their quests to determine the
(or a) “truth” about something that is problematic or puzzling and
this essay describes some of the ways in which the characteristic
investigatory methods of fictional detectives resemble forms of
educational inquiry. Second, the characteristic ways in which
detective stories generate interpretations are compared with the
textual strategies deployed in producing meanings and narratives in
educational inquiry. Third, recent transformations of both detective
fiction and educational inquiry are shown to be comparable — and
intertextually linked — manifestations of cultural and semiotic
shifts associated with postmodernity. I conclude by suggesting that
authors of “anti-detective” crime fiction might provide more
appropriate models of educational inquiry than do fictional
detectives.[ back
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Serge Testevuide
Abstract: This study analyzed
the “map reading” activity of an orienteer during a race through
Pierce’s semiotics — in the sense that the orienteer’s activity is
characterized as a semiotic activity, that is, the product of a
circular transaction between two triadic signs, “imagined
countryside” and “encountered countryside.” The task required the
orienteer to follow a predefined and highlighted itinerary in an
unknown environment with the sole aid of a map. The four volunteer
participants were sports students. A video recording of the race
made possible an analysis of the facts and a self-confrontation of
the actor during the interview. The phaneroscopic categories of
Peirce made it possible to pick out six semiotic registers used by
the orienteer to interpret space; the orienteer’s activity during
route mistakes was described as two parallels lines of triadic
signs.
[ back
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Inna Semetsky
Abstract: As part of educating semiotic consciousness, this
article focuses on the Peircean category of abductive inference,
connecting it with the concept of intuition. Intuition as a way of
knowing has been developed in the field of the philosophy of
education by Nel Noddings. This paper expands the boundaries of the
concept of intuition from the perspective of American pragmatic
philosophy (Charles S. Peirce and John Dewey) and also from the
perspective of the French poststructuralist Gilles Deleuze. The
paper asserts that if abduction (that may take a form of intuition,
or imagination, or insight at the psychological level) is afforded
its proper place in human consciousness in addition to deduction and
induction, then such a triadic semiotic approach may lead to
overcoming the classical learning paradox concerning the nature of
new knowledge. The paper concludes by addressing the practical
educational implications and suggesting that a teacher’s task in a
classroom becomes the one of providing the appropriate conditions,
as Firstness, under which something new would be produced. Students’
learning then is oriented to knowing both facts, as Secondness, and
values, as Thirdness, by means of assigning meaning to their own
educational experience.
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