In her analysis of Belle Van Zuylen and the Enlightenment, Courtney (1975) argues that after being fascinated with the powers of rationality during her early years, Belle came to recognize the limits of abstract reason imposed by the concrete experience of life. According to Courtney, Belle discovered that "Cartesian reason yields only a few general abstract principles which are difficult to apply in real life" and that any notions of "pre-established harmony between the rational and empirical, or the head and the heart, are belied by experience" (p. 175).

In Courtney's view this evolution in Belle's thinking did not result in her becoming a disillusioned romantic or a pessimist. Instead, Belle remained devoted to the rational principles of the Enlightenment, but she recognized and explored the "tension between her pursuit of intellectual certainty and her awareness of the ambiguity of the values implied in concrete lived experience" (p. 172).

The kind of tension Courtney identifies in Belle Van Zuylen's thinking is a tension between ways of representing events, objects, dilemmas, and so forth in speech and thinking, or between what I shall term "voices." Specifically, it is concerned with the difference between representing phenomena in terms of abstract, rule-governed systems of categories (what I shall call the "voice of decontextualized rationality") and representing reality in personalized, context-bound terms.

The kind of conflict in voices recognized by Belle Van Zuylen is not unrelated to some recent observations of Gilligan (1982) in her analysis of the different voices males and females tend to use to represent and reason about the issues in certain moral dilemmas. For example, in comparing the answers two eleven-year-olds provided to questions about relationships and moral dilemmas, she found that the boy, Jake, considered the moral dilemma to be (in his words) "'sort of like a math problem with humans'" (p. 26), whereas the girl, Amy, approached it in terms of concrete relationships that exist between real people. In response to questions about conflicting responsibilities, Amy responded "contextually rather than categorically, saying 'it depends' and indicating how choice would be affected by variations in character and circumstance" (p. 38). In contrast, Jake sees "a world...through systems of rules" (p. 29).

Both Belle Van Zuylen and Carol Gilligan are srtiving to understand how it is possible to represent reality in alternative ways and why people choose certain ways over others. Gender differences have provided one of the major forums where this issue is currently being discussed, but the general problem of what alternative ways of representing the world exist and why some come to be chosen over others extends into a variety of areas of modern life. In what follows, I shall outline a theoretical approach that can hopefully help us make some sense of this issue and interrelate various concrete cases of voices as they represent reality and as they come into contact.

I shall approach these issues from the perspective of the developmental, sociocultural approach in psychology. By "developmental" I mean that it is an approach grounded in the assumption that one can fully understand mental functioning only by understanding its origins and the genetic (i.e. developmental) transitions it has undergone. By "sociocultural" I mean an approach that focuses on the institutional, cultural, and historical specificity of mental functioning rather than on universals. I want to pursue a sociocultural approach not because I believe there are no universals; rather, I do so because I believe that universalism has come to dominate psychological theory today to such a degree that there has been little attention given to the historical, cultural, and social situatedness of mind. One of the results of this is that psychology has often produced ethnocentric or "gender-centric" (as Gilligan might say) conclusions, thereby avoiding some of the most complex and interesting issues that we should be addressing.

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