ABSTRACT
Including the Spiritual in Post-formal Thinking Kincheloe and Steinberg's theory of post-formal thinking (1993) provides a context for re-visioning human cognition which furthers the recognition and appreciation of diverse ways of knowing. They utilize a critical interdisciplinary perspective that allows us to step outside of the assumptions of positivistic developmental psychology's views of intelligence. Cognitive growth is seen as a dynamic hermeneutic with pattern making as one of its hallmarks. All intellectual work, all theories, illustrate the mind's predilection to search for meaning by constructing patterns out of perceptual phenomena. We build models to "capture" some aspect of reality and then get caught in our own conceptual traps. The tendency to reify theories is characteristic not only of psychology but of every discipline. Unlike formal operations, post-formal operations require that we see any theory, including itself, as historically situated and only relatively true, as "one perspective from the particular point in the web of reality" (p. 317).
