ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some broader implications, stemming from philosophical developments and related practical experience in knowledge representation. The study of ideology and social interactionism can help teacher educators think about social influences on teacher thought. Knowledge is coming to be understood as a representation of experience that is constructed by the learner using his or her prior schemes and adapting them to subsequent experience. Piaget and collaborators have argued that the former emphasis placed on logical transformations. A variety of viewpoints are possible, but studies by Ausubellians and other non-Piagetian cognitive researchers are helping to map the territory of elementary school science and mathematics. The Kuhnian revolution in philosophy of science was prompted by T. S. Kuhn’s attack on one of the classic arguments about thinking and the teaching of thinking, i.e., the supposed necessity for external, syntactical criteria of thought—logic.
