Realizing Vygotsky's program concerning language and thought: tracking knowing (ideas, conceptions, beliefs) in real time

Educators generally are concerned with testing what learners know by means of written tests, as if knowledge was some intrapsychological thing or state that could be translated and externalized into some interpsychologically available inscription that is a more-or-less accurate approximation of what the person knows. In such endeavors, language is used as a fixed representational means to achieve the interpsychological representation. Carefully conducted design experiments show, however, that knowing and learning are distributed - and therefore contingent processes - across different temporal, spatial, and social scales, which raises questions about the nature of the knowledge exhibited in various situations and forms. In this paper, I problematize the question of what spoken language specifically - and communicative acts more generally - tell us about knowing, learning, and development. I propose a different way of theorizing and analyzing what people think in action, and the ideas and concepts they mobilize. I articulate a set of propositions about knowing, which I exemplify in a careful look at a randomly chosen lecture episode from a university physics course.