[Xmca-l] Re: In Defense of Fuzzy Things
Andy Blunden
ablunden@mira.net
Thu Jul 17 17:59:24 PDT 2014
OK David, I *think* I get your line of argument here. Can I try to pick
out what are for me the key elements?
(1) When you referred to the child internalising thinking you were
referring to the actions (i.e., unity of behaviour and consciousness) in
which others are involving them - the "law" about categories appearing
first on the social plane and later on the psychical plane. "Later" of
course. That is, if "thinking" is a meaningful word, they are not yet
thinking. They are engaged in a process which all going well will become
thinking.
(2) You quite correctly note that one of the lines by which Vygotsky was
labelled idealist is on the basis of the orthodox Marxist idea of labour
as the paradigmatic form of activity, rather than speech. That is true,
and you and I and many here would agree that Vygotsky had a point.
Labour is the paradigmatic form of activity for a certain kind of
historical analysis, but I think that while there is some truth in that
approach to history, there are also severe problems. But labour is
certainly inadequate as a foundation for psychology.
(3) Semantic actions create "intellectual" structures in the mind. I.e.,
the interest in semantics and speech activity is the basis for the
charge of intellectualism.
On all these points I think we are close to agreement. The disagreement
is this: I see "Thinking and Speech" as a specialised investigation
which was to be an exemplar for how to conduct *any* psychological
investigation, but *not* to create a model for all psychological
processes. By studying thinking and speech, the target is what we like
to reify as the intellect. The intellect is not the whole of
consciousness - it is one aspect abstracted from the whole of
consciousness. Vygotsky showed us how to study the semantic structure of
consciousness - awful phrase - the intellectual aspect of mental activity.
So for example, I think your use of perezhivanie below is open to
criticism. I accept that there is no English word for perezhivanie other
than perezhivanie, and mostly the way Vygotsky uses it in "Problem of
the Environment" is open to an interpretation as "experiencing" - i.e.,
the fundamental concept of empiricism. But when people are studying
perezhivanie they are not talking about the intellect, though
undoubtedly the intellect is involved, if we are to accept the word of
those Russians who exclude the possibility of perezhivanija for
children. Perezhivanie is a unit for the development of the personality,
admittedly not a well-defined term, but in my mind quite distinct from
the intellect.
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
David Kellogg wrote:
>
>
> First of all, in defence of Andy, I should point out that he is not
> really as pompous as he sounds when he is solemnly informing me of my
> gross misunderstanding and my utter confusion, or when he is stating
> that only certain works read in a particular order (which miraculously
> coincides with the selection of works he has effected and the precise
> order which he himself has read them in) can produce genuine clear
> thinking. Andy and I are old friends, and in addition we both come
> from societies where a certain amount of raillery is a mark of
> affection and an antidote to affectation (something that Andy and I
> are both prone to, alas).
>
> Secondly, in deference to Beth, and Francis and all lurkers who would
> join in the discussion if they could only make head or tail of it, let
> me defend some of this esoterica and try to link it to the parallel,
> more exoteric thread. What appears to be under discussion, for
> example, is whether a Russian word which means something like "social
> contact" should be translated as "society" or as "contact" (as Mike
> very perceptively points out, I do BOTH, translating the same word in
> two different ways). Or perhaps what is under discussion is whether
> "meaning" refers to consciousness quite generally and therefore
> includes the way a child who knows nothing about alcoholism might
> perceive a drunken mother or only consciousness as it has been
> transformed by verbal thinking. In other words, what appears to be
> under discussion is precisely what was under discussion in the other
> thread: other words, and the extent to which they really do represent
> other thoughts.
>
> A lot of the misunderstandings (to use Andy's term) between Helen and
> the other Mike (the Mike in Helen's data, not the Grand Old Man of
> xmca) are of precisely this nature. But not all of them. Sometimes we
> use the same word, e.g. "community of learners" or "meaning" and we
> actually mean totally different things, just as the child who hears
> "Some dinosaurs learned to swim and other dinosaurs learned to fly"
> may understand that dinosaurs are purely imaginary creatures that went
> to school in order to do these things. And THAT is what I meant when I
> said that the mere fact that a child has not fully internalized a
> socially, culturally worked out act of thinking does not make it any
> the less an act of thinking.
>
> Now, let me make the context of my two quotations a little clearer.
> They are both from Chapter One of Thinking and Speech, but the first
> quotation has nothing whatsoever to do with Sapir, and in fact my
> translation is rather inept. It should really be this:
> "
> It has been assumed that the means of contact is the sign:--that is,
> the word, the sound."
>
> Vygotsky's attacking Saussure, who holds that the "signifier" and the
> "signified" inhabit two different realms, like soul and body: one is
> made of meaning and the other is made of meat.
>
> Vygotsky's point is that "wording" actually includes both, but in an
> idealized form. Wording (speech) does not directly interface with the
> environment: the semantics interfaces with the environment because it
> is a representation of human experience and the phonology interfaces
> with the environment because it is phonetically realized by going
> through physical human organs like the lungs, larynx, and the lips,
> but lexicogrammar--words and wordings--must interface with the
> environment through the semantics and the phonology.
>
> True, later on in the Chapter he refers to phonemes, which to us,
> today, just means sounds. But I have since established that the word
> meant "morpheme" to Vygotsky, not phoneme. (His example, in the
> "Lectures on Pedology" is actually Russian CASE grammar, which has
> nothing to do with pronunciation. So Vygotsky is saying exactly what
> the good Moorish doctor Ibn Hakim says in the opera Iolanta (right
> before the line Vygotsky quotes about consciousness reflected like
> sunlight in the drop of water):
>
> "Два мира — плотский и духовный
> — Во всех явленьях бытия.
> Нами разлучены условно,
> Они едины, знаю я."
>
> (Two worlds, thinking and extension
> Found in all things that can be
> In ourselves, in intension
> Their one-ness is known to me.)
>
> Here's a Soviet version from 1963--Ibn Hakim's lesson in monism begins
> at 2:34.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SXF6610O0I
>
> Experience (perezhivanie) and sounding are thus united in wording.
> BUT...first of all, we have to recognize that they are united in an
> idealized form: an abstraction. Secondly, we have to recognize that
> they are united in a generalized form--a historico-culturally evolved
> meaning. And finally, I think we have to accept that this act of
> abstraction and generalization is, ontogenetically, initially social
> and only in the long run individual and personal: word meanings
> develop as children grow up.
>
> So this bit of esoterica turns out to be pretty exoteric after all. I
> was actually, going to mention this earlier, when Huw said that his
> translation interests pointed more in the direction of Leontiev than
> in trying to recover Vygotsky's original ideas. Leontiev is, as Andy
> points out, a recovering Vygotskyan--he is working in a climate where
> Vygotskyan ideas must be carefully disguised as vulgar, behaviorist
> ones. Meaning making, therefore, has to be disguised as "activity", of
> which the paradigmatic form is not speech at all, but rather labor. It
> is actually much easier to live lies like this twenty-four seven if
> you actually try to believe them, and I think that by the end of his
> career Leontiev actually believed that his formulation was more
> Marxist than the "idealist", "intellectualist" alternative--the idea
> that says that the mind is actually semantic in structure rather than
> structured by physical or even social activities.
>
> Nevertheless, when we read Chapter One of Thinking and Speech, we see
> that semantic structure, not activity structure, is precisely
> what Vygotsky has in mind: there is indeed a clear link between
> feeling and thinking (else children would never learn to think
> verbally), but there is also a dialectical leap (else children would
> already know how). Children accomplish this dialectical leap through
> dialogue. That is, they are confronted with the finished form of word
> meaning, and they find there way to it through all kinds of
> misunderstandings (just as we do on this list).
>
> This word "day" that they thought they knew so well actually doesn't
> just mean the stretch of time between waking and sleeping, and that
> when you call your grandmother in Los Angeles on Tuesday, its still
> Monday over there, but that doesn't somehow make your grandmother one
> day younger than you are. That's what I meant when I said that the
> mere fact that the child is not thinking verbally does not make the
> generalization that we find in the word any less an act of thinking.
> It's just an act of cultural, social, inter-mental thinking, and not
> yet a act of individual, personal, intra-mental thought. Grandma and
> grandchild are not quite on the same page, but they are getting there.
>
> It's interesting that the precise example that Vygotsky uses in
> Chapter One is...the FEELING being cold, which must be generalized
> into the THOUGHT of coldness. He points out that you can communicate
> this feeling perfectly well by shivering and letting your teeth
> chatter, and even by simulating shivering and making your teeth
> chatter, but what you are communicating is a feeling...and not the
> idea of being cold. The idea of being cold is a generalization, and an
> act of thinking.
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
> PS: Huw--the whole of Ganzheitpsychologie--from Wurzburg to
> Leipzig--was a "genetic" psychology, and in fact they are the ones who
> founded the concept of "microgenesis". The problem was that half of
> them became Nazis and the other half became their victims. The
> victims, like Otto Selz, never had a chance to complete their
> work--and their classmates and killer (Narziss Ach, Felix Krueger,
> Eduard Spranger) we only read about today because Vygotsky cites them.
>
> dk
>
>
>
> On 17 July 2014 11:24, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>
> Could you elaborate on this one, David:
> "The fact that the child has not yet fully internalized that act
> of thinking does not make it any less an act of thinking" and how
> it relates to generalization?
>
> Andy
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>
>
> David Kellogg wrote:
>
> Andy:
>
> Here's what Vygotsky says in Chapter One of "Thinking and Speech".
>
> Общение, основанное на разумном понимании и на намеренной
> передаче мысли и переживаний, непременно требует известной
> системы средств, прототипом которой была, есть и всегда
> останется человеческая речь, возникшая из потребности в
> общении в процессе труда. Но до самого последнего времени дело
> представлено сообразно с господствовавшим в психологии
> взглядом в чрезвычайно упрощенном виде. Полагали, что
> средством общения является знак, слово, звук. Между тем это
> заблуждение проистекало только из неправильно применяемого к
> решению всей проблемы речи анализа, разлагающего на элементы.
>
> That is:
>
> "Society, based on rational understanding and intentional
> transfer of thinking and perizhivanie, requires without fail
> some system of means, the prototype of which is, was, and will
> always remain that of human speech, which arose of necessity
> through social conotact in the process of labor. But until now
> the matter has been presented in conformity with the
> dominating view in psychology, in an extremely simplified way.
> It has been assumed that the means of contact is the sign, the
> word, the sound. This error stems solely from the incorrect
> use in the solution of the problem of speech an analysis which
> decomposes speech into elements."
>
> Vygotsky then points out that this analysis is incorrect
> because it does not take into account that each word is a
> generalization--an act of thinking. He quotes a passage of
> Edward Sapir which has been cut from the Soviet version int
> the Collected Works (but which Kozulin has included in his
> update of the Hanfmann-Vakar translation).
>
> В сфере инстинктивного сознания, в котором господствует
> восприятие и аффект, возможно только заражение, но не
> понимание и не общение в собственном смысле этого слова.
> Эдвард Сэпир прекрасно выяснил это в своих работах по
> психологии речи. ≪Элементарный язык, . говорит он, . должен
> быть связан с целой группой, с определенным классом нашего
> опыта. Мир опыта должен быть чрезвычайно упрощен и обобщен,
> чтобы возможно было символизировать его. Только так становится
> возможной коммуникация, ибо единичный опыт живет в единичном
> сознании и, строго говоря, не сообщаем. Для того чтобы стать
> сообщаемым, он должен быть отнесен к известному классу,
> который, по молчаливому соглашению, рассматривается обществом
> как единство≫.
>
> "In the sphere of instinctive consciousness, in which rules
> perception and passion, only infection and contagion is
> possible, not understanding and social contact in the true
> sense of the word. Edward Sapir has wonderfully explained this
> in his work on the psychology of speech. Elements of
> language,” he says must be connected to an entire group, to a
> defined class of our experience. “The world of our experiences
> must be enormously simplified and generalized before it is
> possible to make a symbolic inventory of all our experiences
> of things and relations; and this inventory is imperative
> before we can convey ideas. The elements of language, the
> symbols that ticket off experience, must therefore be
> associated with whole groups, delimited classes, of experience
> rather than with the single experiences themselves. Only so is
> communication possible, for the single experience lodges in an
> individual consciousness and is, strictly speaking,
> incommunicable. To be communicated it needs to be referred to
> a class which is tacitly accepted by the community as an
> identity.”
>
> Vygotsky concludes that a word meaning is a generalization,
> and that a generalization is an act of thinking. Ergo, the
> rational and intentional transfer of thinking and of
> perizhivanie requires an act of thinking. The fact that the
> child has not yet fully internalized that act of thinking does
> not make it any less an act of thinking.
>
>
> Nor does the fact that this view was criticized by Stalinists
> make it any less true for me. Stalinists criticized Darwinism,
> you know!
>
>
> David Kellogg
>
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On 16 July 2014 14:34, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>> wrote:
>
> David, it may seem picky, but I can't agree with this
> formulation
> below, in particular the use of "thinking". To interpret
> Vyotsky's
> observation in terms of "thinking" is to *intellectualise*
> Vygotsky, or to put it another way, to impute to Vygotsky an
> intellectualisation of human life. This move was a
> principal line
> of attack of Vygotsky during the Stalinist years after his
> death,
> so it is important not to repeat it now. You correctly
> analysed
> the difference for a child of having a drunk for a mother,
> rather
> than for a father or a neighbour. But this was not a
> question of
> what the child *thought* about these relations, but the real
> significance of each relation for the child having its
> vital needs
> met, within the horizon of consciousness of the child. And
> I use
> "consciousness" here as a Marxist, to indicate the entirety of
> subjective processes of the child which mediate between their
> physiology and their behaviour, not as a synonym for the
> intellect. The child will perceive their situation (and
> threats to
> it) in the only way they can, that is, in an
> age-appropriate way.
> And they will change their own activity in response to the
> perceived threat also in an age- and
> circumstances-appropriate way
> too. All of this - significance, perception, needs - are
> not to be
> interpreted as categories of thinking, but categories of the
> life-activity of living beings, that's all, not necessarily
> thinking. But of course, the capacity for thinking - the
> use of
> symbolic actions - and the capacity for extended
> reflection on an
> experience, are additional resources and points of
> vulnerability,
> over and above vital relations which do not imply intellectual
> relations.
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>
>
> David Kellogg wrote: ...
>
> It's not that nothing is real until thinking makes it
> so; it
> is only that
> meaning is made by thinking and not simply by
> experiencing. ...
>
>
>
>
>
>
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