ABSTRACT
This chapter contributes to the critique of the grand tradition of modernism that Descartes helped to launch some 350 years ago. The mantle of modernism is carried in our day by the tradition of mainstream cognitive science, which understands the mind according to the model of the serial digital computer. Piaget’s contributions to educational thought and practice are as complex and multifaceted as they are pervasive. Research by Piaget and others based on systematic observations of infants during the sensorimotor period of the first 2 years of life provides a set of explanatory principles and a timetable to anticipate the successful resolution of the pacifier dilemma. The ethics of participant observer research in which there is potential harm to subjects have been debated for decades. Cognition evolves in situated practices, from which it is inseparable. Linkages across practices are manifestations of semiosic chaining not of logic.
