be it children’s conceptions of kinds or categories (Carey, 1999), or learning
of mathematics (Schoenfeld, 1992).
The Centrality of Meaning-Making in Intellectual Functioning. Due to
unique self-awareness and conscious experiences of personal import, mean-
ing takes on subjectivity. Rather than seeing meaning as a list of features
about a category or propositional statements people use in an impersonal
way to represent the surrounding world, Eldelman (1989, 1995) sees meaning
as based on the functional value for the person and growing with the history
of remembered body sensations and mental images. Similarly, Glenberg
(1997) suggested that meaning is fundamentally embodied:
An embodied account of meaning suggests that meaning is not independent of
human functioning and that a sentence cannot have a universal meaning sepa-
rate from the people doing the comprehending. Instead, embodied meaning is
intrinsically embedded in human functioning. Rather than abstract meaning-
less elements, basic elements of embodied meaning reflect human capabilities,
goals, emotions, and perception. (p. 509)Consider text comprehension as an act of meaning (Bruner, 1990). It in-
volves construction of a coherent mental model out of discrete elements of a
textbase (Kintsch, 1998). Such a process cannot be objective, but rather is
filled with mentally simulated actions. Thus Wineburg’s (1991) historians
would go to great lengths to set up an ad hoc mock reader in order to under-
stand social persuasion embedded in the discourse represented in a historical
document. Dai (2002a) also showed how such an act of meaning can break
down when personal beliefs (e.g., “knowledge is simple and certain”) are in-
commensurable with the complexity of discourse in the text.
Engagement of the Whole Person. Integration through consciousness
goes a step further from molar approaches, by blurring the distinction be-
tween cognitive, emotional, and motivational constructs. Bruner (1994) ar-
gued that separation of emotion and cognition is likely a theoretical assump-
tion rather than existing in the immediate phenomenology of human
experiences. Merleau-Ponty (1962) also argued that cognitive life cannot be
separate from the life of desire or perceptual life, subtended by an intentional
arc, which unifies our experience.Interestis one of those phenomena where
the boundaries between motivation, affect, and cognition are blurred. To be
interested in something is to have a subjective feeling for it (affect), to be
drawn to it (conation), and to have some degree of knowledge about the ob-
ject or activity in question (cognition). Because interest is an emergent prop-
erty of a rather dynamic relationship or union between a person and an ob-
ject or activity that frames the significance and meaning of the object or
- BEYOND COGNITIVISM 13