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Reflections on the Pragmatics of a Paradigm Shift

Poplin's provocative essays elicited a response grounded in self-conscious personal knowing —by scientific and philosophical understandings metamorphosed by my own odyssey. I am openly personal (in contrast to the pretense of scholarly objectivity dictated by traditional styles of academic exchange), because my comments are inextricably linked to my intimate and sometimes painful involvement with the paradigm shift Poplin both heralds and advocates. Poplin's use of the structuralist/constructivist/holistic label reveals a more comprehensive (especially in regard to sociocultural issues), but no less fundamental, shift than my own preoccupation with what we have called Piagetian theory. This theory, however, shares a worldview, including an antireductionist stance, with the holistic paradigm (what other theories it will spawn still remains to be seen), even though Piaget himself resisted such a label (Piaget, 1971). A difficulty in responding to Poplin's work, however, is precisely this question of what constitutes a paradigm shift to holism and what is simply a new theoretical position within the mechanistic (or Newtonian science) model, an extension that results from the growth of knowledge and improvements in methodology derived explicitly from the scientific (or mechanistic) paradigm. To elucidate my concerns, I will address four topics: the nature of Piaget's theory, my concerns with bridging the leap of faith required to embrace holism, the role science plays in education, and the most obvious way holism might help us.