[Xmca-l] Re: Intrinsic motivation?

Wed Aug 6 03:34:15 PDT 2014

I read After Virtue in grad school, assigned by Philip Jackson (and it was Lortie, not Jackson, who made the apprenticeship of observation a common term among teacher educators--someone posted earlier on this question. In case anyone's interested, I've got a forthcoming study of apprenticeship of observation that complicates Lortie's conclusions based on interviews from a different era, and would be happy to send the pdf to anyone who's interested).

Anyhow, on MacIntyre: I remember discussing at the time that the book seemed like a rough draft that really would have benefitted from a thorough revision to cut out the meandering and make a more pointed argument. 

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2014 8:55 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Intrinsic motivation?

Relevant references to MacIntyre's "After Virtue" are on pp. 7-8 of "Collaborative Projects. An Interdisciplinary Study," which I know you have a copy of, Greg. He uses the expressions "internal reward" and "external reward."
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/

Greg Thompson wrote:
> And one more thing Andy (I realize given the hour down-under, you are 
> probably slumbering - hopefully not dogmatically...), could you sell 
> us on why we should look at MacIntyre on extrinsic and intrinsic 
> motivation.
> Your suggestion that Cristina read MacIntyre on extrinsic and 
> intrinsic motivation was less than convincing to me if only b.c. I 
> know nothing about it!
> -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