L. Radford, G. Schubring, and F. Seeger (eds.), Semiotics in Mathematics Education: Epistemology, History, Classroom, and Culture, 215–234. © 2008 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. LUIS RADFORD THE ETHICS OF BEING AND KNOWING: TOWARDS A CULTURAL THEORY OF LEARNING 1 This chapter sketches a theory of teaching and learning that takes its inspiration from some anthropological and historico-cultural schools of knowledge—the theory of knowledge objectification. Within this theory, the problem of learning is formulated in such a way that rationalist or individualists views of cognition and social interaction are avoided. The theory of knowledge objectification posits, indeed, the problem of learning as a social process through which students become progressively conversant with cultural forms of reflection. Arising in the course of sensuous mediated cultural praxes embedded in historically formed epistemes and ontologies, learning, it is argued, is not just about knowing something but also about becoming someone. The formulation of learning as a process where knowing and being are mutually constitutive leads to a non-utilitarian conception of the classroom: entrenched in unerasable ethical concerns, the classroom appears as a space for the growth of intersubjectivity and the nurturing of what is called here the communal self. The chapter is divided into six sections. In the first section, I discuss some problematic assumptions often adopted by many contemporary theories of teaching and learning, in particular assumptions related to the learner, the content to be learned and process of learning. In Section 2, I introduce a non-mentalist, culturally embedded, concept of thinking that neither reduces the thinking subject to the mere product of discursive structures, nor posits it as a culturally-detached res cogitans. Section 3 is devoted to a discussion of the epistemological and ontological bases of the cultural theory here advocated. The concepts of learning and the mathematical classroom portrayed in this theory are presented in Sections 4 and 5, respectively. The main ideas of the previous sections are brought together in Section 6, where the educational questions surrounding the ethics of being and knowing are discussed. 1. THEORIES OF TEACHING AND LEARNING Theories of teaching and learning differ from each other mainly in their conceptions about: (a) the content to be learned; (b) the learner; and (c) how learning actually occurs. Concerning the third point, most contemporary theories have adopted the view according to which the student constructs his or her own knowledge (Lesh, Doerr, Carmona, & Hjalmarson, 2003). Although, in their account of learning, these theories do not necessarily exclude the role of the social, the social dimension of