Why SAGE?

To those unfamiliar with SAGE, the Society for the Advancement of Genetic Epistemology, it seems an obscure idea at best—epistemology?—and misleading at worst—genetics? However, since it refers to the research that explains how knowledge arises in human thought, it is an essential science to educators.

Let's unpack the meanings carried by the term genetic epistemology. First of all it refers to the science of epistemology, not philosophizing about knowledge. For example much speculation and assertion, "philosophy" in th bad sense, has surrounded the idea of number. Mostly this speculation is generated by the question, "What is number?", not a very useful approach. If the question is changed to "How does the idea of number arise in human thought?", then the question asks for an explanation for the development of the concept of number, a much more useful approach that lends itself to scientific research. The question is one of epistemology since there are many possible sources for the development of number. It could be an innate idea transmitted by heredity that forms the basis for math learning by children. It could be of a social origin that is transmitted by the adults to the young of society through language and discussion, perhaps at first by teaching children to count or perhaps it's source could lie in language or the metaphors we use which children learn and then apply to their own problems of numbering objects. Or it could have its origins in physical experiences inteacting with objects. Children by playing with objects and observing their world, see number all around them in collections of objects. Or number could be the gradual organization and equilibration of activity that is at first exhibits sensory-motor coordinations in children's behavior whose coordinations later become abstracted and represented in mental activity. Scientific epistemology then concerns the determination of the role of each these various factors—social, biological, physical, experiential, and equilibration factors—by experimentaion to determine what in the development of the mental activity of students is due to each.

The study of how number arises in human thought necessarily means to study its development or genesis from earlier forms of human activity. The problem is to explain how human activity constantly transcends itself, that is, how it manages to develop. That problem can only be studied by tracing the understanding of number backwards in development to describe its various earlier forms so that then the factor driving this development can be investigated and understood. Once we have the series of the various developin forms of mathematical activity, we can then seek a causal explanation for why and how a stronger form arises out of a weaker, earlier form. At once stage, children can learn to count but this figural notion of number cannot understand number as a concept as it does at a later stage. How does mental activity manage to reconstruct itself out of its incomplete and illogical comprehension of number? Genetic epistemology then concerns uncovering the developmental sequence of a specific form of knowledge such as number so that the causal mechanism that constructs the later form out of an earlier form can be understood.

Since genetic epistemology always involves an explanation of how some act of knowledge such as number arises in the human species it necessarily coordinates two disciplines, a discipline such as mathematics which produced the concept and psychology which accounts for its actual development through a series of constructions in children's thinking (and adults too since the construction of knowledge doesn't necessarily stop).

Since it is a science, it delimits its problem to the development of each specific concept it attempts to explain, number, speed, time, topological space, Euclidean measurement, weight, volume, and so on. It does not study achievement since that notion mixes huge numbers of concepts and relations together in an undefinable mass as well as putting numbers of very different students into large group to study the effects of various vaguely defined factors on learning.

SAGE makes its purpose the advancement of genetic epistemology since to understand how students' mental activity develops into a conceptual understanding of number and other concepts provides extremely useful information for organizing and conducting instructional activities. All science helps humans organize and carry out activity. To understand what essential processes students' mental activities must be carrying out other than learning to count by rote would be very useful to the primary teacher just as understanding how automobiles operate forms an essential knowledge for mechanics who must diagnose and repair some problem with an automobile.

Finally, SAGE is a society of like-minded people regarding student growth since it is difficult to sustain our work in isolation, mutual support and contributions are necessary to our own development of understandings of student growth.