ABSTRACT
The work of Donald Schön has been shown to be influential in teacher education, yet it has been the contention of this book that there are fundamental difficulties with Schön’s work which call into question the often uncritical use made of that work. Argument has been made for the view that any epistemology presupposes a theory of meaning and an account of language; Schöns claim to have identified a new epistemology has been tested against this view and has been shown to be inadequate as a description purporting to account for convergence of meaning. An alternative description of convergence of meaning has then been offered, based on the later work of Wittgenstein, and it has been argued that, in spite of Schön’s claim to be extending the work of Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s later work anticipated that of Schön and showed that the account of meaning which Schön was later to propose was incoherent. Schön’s notion of reflection-in-action has been rejected as redundant in accounting for convergence of meaning; the significance of context and of actions as well as words in convergence of meaning has been highlighted and developed. The case studies with which Schön and, in places, his co-authors attempted to support their thesis have then been reinterpreted and shown to be capable of being placed within the Wittgensteinian description of meaning and language which has been advanced.
