[Xmca-l] Re: Intrinsic motivation?
Andy Blunden
ablunden@mira.net
Tue Aug 5 22:34:09 PDT 2014
"Dualism" is a very longstanding philosophical problem and
from the time
of Spinoza forward it has been recognised as a problem. In
my view, this
problem was not resolved until Hegel, though Kant made
important steps
in its solution.It is more that I am opposed to the cry of
"dualism" as
a slogan, and the unthinking condemnation of Descartes, for
committing a
kind of original sin. "Dualism" is where you say (more or
less) the
world is made up of two kinds of substances, ..." but the
solution to
the discovery that there are indeed in some given situation
two opposite
kinds of entity, is to work out how the two are mediated,
i.e., by
introducing a third, or by working out how the two mutually
constitute
one another or how one changes into the other and vice
versa. How it is
never solved is by (1) declaring it to be a false dichotomy,
(2)
inventing a neolog to mean both one and the other, (3)
denying any
distinction, or (4) subsuming one under the other. In the
specific
instance of the distinction between thought and matter the
question is
more difficult, because this question is the most
fundamental of all and
cannot be resolved in the ways other dichotomies are
resolved. Although
the way the problem is posed - "thought vs matter" - is
problematic,
i.e., the very posing of the question seems to imply that
thought is a
substance, it is an inescapable dichotomy because we live it
every
moment of the day. Aristotle did not know of this dichotomy,
because he
took it for granted that the world was just how it was
reflected in
thought and language and there was no reason to suppose that
if we
looked inside any person's head we would find anything
different from
inside anyone else's head. It just never occurred to the
ancients to
make "consciousness" an object of science. Anyway, I am
happy to defer
to what Vygotsky says in that chapter. I read it and re-read
it annually.
As to the language question, there is no doubt at all that
we need
specialised languages in specialised projects such as
Psychology. But
that definitively does not mean that researchers should
start by making
up words when they come across a difficulty. When the
concept first
appears, the word is usually already present. Problems like
the relation
between thinking and acting, between individual person's and
their
social environment have been around for millennia. They are
not new
problems. You would have to have very very good reasons to
resolve these
conceptual problems by making up new words. If you can't
explain it in
ordinary English, then you probably don't understand it.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
Greg Thompson wrote:
> So Andy, I take it that you approve of Cristina's opposition of dualism.
>
> And as to the need to not rely on our natural language, I wonder if
> Vygtosky is with Cristina (and me) on that one. In the Two
> Psychologies essay that you shared
> (http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/psycri13.htm),
> Vygotsky writes:
>
> "Høffding compares it with the same content expressed in two languages
> which we do not manage to reduce to a common protolanguage. But we
> want to know the content and not the /*language*/ in which it is
> expressed. In physics we have freed ourselves from language in order
> to study the content. We must do the same in psychology."
>
> I'll confess to occasionally reading Vygotsky upside down (he often
> introduces opposing positions without any indication that they are
> opposed to his own), so maybe I've got it backwards. I certainly had
> some difficulty discerning the proper context for this paragraph, but
> it seems like it is straight through. Please correct me if I'm wrong here.
> -greg
>
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 12:00 PM, Greg Thompson
> <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com <mailto:greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Andy,
> I'm a bit baffled by your response to Cristina. It seems fair
> enough to try to recover Descartes as not necessarily a bad guy.
> But I didn't take that to be Cristina's point.
> It seems to me that she was arguing against Cartesian dualism - a
> particular way in which we Westerners (and we aren't the only ones
> who do this) divide up the world into various kinds binaries -
> subject/object, mind/body, nature/culture, emotion/reason, and so on.
> Are you advocating that these should be the governing categories
> of the human sciences?
> If so, then "real human language" will work just fine.
> If not, then the "real human language" called English will pose
> some significant problems for imagining things other than they are.
> Confused.
> -greg
>
>
> On Tue, Aug 5, 2014 at 9:07 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>
> Cristina,
> There is far too much in your message to deal with on an email
> list. What I usually do in such cases is simply pick a bit I
> think I can respond to and ignore the rest. OK?
>
> I think *real human languages* - as opposed to made up
> languages like Esperanto or the kind of mixture of neologs,
> hyphenated words and other gobbydegook fashionable in some
> academic circles - can be underestimated. Sure, one must use
> specialised jargon sometimes, to communicate to a specialised
> collaborator in a shared discipline, but generally that is
> because the jargon has itself a long track record. Don't try
> and make up words and concepts, at least, take a year or two
> about it if you have to.
>
> Secondly, Descartes was no fool. He was the person that first
> treated consciousness as an object of science, and the many of
> those belonging to the dualist tradition he was part of wound
> up being burnt at the stake for suggesting that the world was
> not necessarily identical to how it seemed. So I'd say, better
> to suffer association with Descartes than make up words and
> expressions. The Fascist campaign launched against him in the
> 1930s was not meant to help us. He deserves respect.
>
> For example, my development is not the same the development
> some project makes. And no amount of playing with words can
> eliminate that without degenerating into nonsense. I must
> correct something I said which was wrong in my earlier post
> though. I said that the relation between projects was the
> crucial thing in personality development. Not completely true.
> As Jean Lave has shown so well, the relation between a person
> and a project they are committed to is equally important,
> their role, so to speak. Take these two together.
>
> Motives instead of motivation is good. More definite. But I
> don't agree at all that Leontyev resolves this problem. For a
> start his dichotomy between 'objective' motives, i.e., those
> endorsed by the hegemonic power in the given social formation,
> and 'subjective', usually unacknowledged, motives, is in my
> view a product of the times he lived in, and not useful for
> us. The question is: how does the person form a *concept* of
> the object? It is the object-concept which is the crucial
> thing in talking abut motives. Over and above the relation
> between the worker's project of providing for his family (or
> whatever) and the employer's project of expanding the
> proportion of the social labour subsumed under his/her
> capital. The relation between these two projects doubtless
> seems to the boss to be the difference between the worker's
> subjective, secret, self-interest, and his own "objective"
> motive. But his point of view is not necessarily ours.
>
> Have a read of Alasdair MacIntyre on extrinsic and intrinsic
> motives, too.
>
> That's more than enough.
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>
>
> Maria Cristina Migliore wrote:
>
> Greg and Andy,
>
> Thank you for your comments.
>
>
> Greg, I absolutely agree with you about the difficulties
> of overcoming our
> western language and thoughts, so influenced by the
> Cartesian dualism.
> Andy, I hope to be able to show a bit how I connect
> activities in what
> follow.
>
>
> About my attempts to overcome a dualistic language: I tend
> to prefer to
> talk about a) single development (as suggest by Cole and
> Wertsh) instead of
> individual and activity (or context or project)
> development; b) dimensions
> of a phenomenon instead of levels of a phenomenon
> (micro-meso-macro); c)
> motives instead of motivation.
>
>
> However it happens that I need to swing between ‘my’ new
> language and the
> ‘standard’ one, because I am living in a still Cartesian
> world and I need
> to be understood by people (and even myself!) who are (am)
> made of this
> Cartesian world.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 882 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
>
>
>
>
> --
> Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
> Assistant Professor
> Department of Anthropology
> 882 Spencer W. Kimball Tower
> Brigham Young University
> Provo, UT 84602
> http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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