Thinkers whose frameworks illuminate this section.
Vygotsky's zone of proximal development is the theoretical twin of Bruner's scaffolding — ch5 is entirely structured around their complementarity, and his concept of what a learner can do with support but not alone defines the book's core tension.
Bruner's constructivism grew in productive argument with Piaget — where Piaget saw development as internally driven stage-by-stage, Bruner insisted on the role of external social scaffolding, making their debate the generative tension behind ch0's constructivist principle.
Illich's tools for conviviality draws the same line Bruner draws between scaffolding and prosthesis: tools that expand human capacity versus tools that create dependency. Ch4's prosthetic-trajectory diagnosis echoes Illich's critique of counterproductive institutions.
Simon's bounded rationality and satisficing behavior underlie ch2's analysis of what pre-AI cognitive constraints inadvertently produced — the limits that forced the debugging, documentation-reading, and deep engagement that built genuine understanding.
Dewey's learning-by-doing principle is the American precursor to Bruner's constructivism — the conviction that understanding is constructed through active engagement rather than passive reception, which ch8's acts-of-meaning vs. acts-of-production distinction amplifies.
Freire's critique of the banking concept of education — treating students as passive receptacles rather than active constructors — resonates directly with ch8's concern that AI-accelerated production decouples output from meaning-making.
Polanyi's tacit knowledge — the embodied understanding that cannot be fully articulated — is precisely the kind of capability that ch2's Trivandrum analysis fears may not transfer through AI-scaffolded performance. We know more than we can tell, and we build it through friction.
Bandura's self-efficacy — the belief that one can execute required actions — maps directly onto Bruner's independence ratio. Ch9's question of whether AI-scaffolded builders develop greater independent judgment is a self-efficacy question by another name.
Gardner's multiple intelligences framework extends Bruner's narrative vs. paradigmatic distinction across a broader range of cognitive modes, reinforcing ch6's argument that AI's paradigmatic facility does not exhaust the dimensions of human understanding.
Clark's extended-mind thesis treats AI tools as cognitive scaffolding genuinely integrated into the extended cognitive system — a framework the book needs to distinguish genuine scaffold from prosthetic attachment, the question ch4 leaves urgently open.
Turkle's longitudinal studies of human-computer relationships document the subjective experience of technology dependency from the inside — the closest empirical parallel to Bruner's prosthetic-trajectory diagnosis applied to digital tools.
Kahneman's System 1 / System 2 distinction maps loosely onto Bruner's narrative vs. paradigmatic modes, and his work on cognitive ease resonates with ch3's concern that AI responsiveness eliminates the productive friction that triggers deeper processing.
