[Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion

[Andy Blunden]

Well David, I agree that we should not "fall into the trap 
of using the same term for the explanandum and the 
explanans" but I also like Goethe's words: "German 
frequently and fittingly makes use of the word
"Bildung" to describe the end product and what is in the 
process of production as well."

Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


David Kellogg wrote:
> Andy:
>
> Yes, I was hoping to talk about this in connection with YOUR
> presentation on collaborative projects, but time, as you remember,
> didn't really allow us to do this.
>
> I take heaps, complexes, and pseudoconcepts to be the precise forms
> that word meaning takes as it develops in the experimental subjects of
> Chapter Five. I take it that we can generalize these results to the
> actual word meanings that children use outside the laboratory too, but
> that they remain forms of word meaning and better understood as modes
> of semantic abstraction and generalization than as operations,
> actions, and activities. It seems to me that replacing the one with
> the other results eventually in abandoning what for me is the key
> insight of Vygotsky's later years, the insight that the structure of
> the mind is not behavioral or biological but rather semantic; the mind
> is structured like a text, or like a dialogue.
>
> Consider the long nominal group produced by Halliday's three year old child:
>
> "Look at those two splendid old electric trains with pantographs!" (p.
> 364 of Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar, M.A.K. Halliday
> and C.M.I.M. Matthiessen, London: Routledge, 2014).
>
> So in Chapter Five itself, Vygotsky calls them "functional equivalents
> of the concept". That is, they are the form of abstraction and
> generalization that the child uses when the adult would use a concept.
> That's why I take the heaps to be realized by Deictics like "this" and
> "that" and "these" and 'those" and "there" and "then" and even (to a
> very limited extent, because of the visiographic limitation of the
> heap) "thus". I take the complexes to be realized, at least when the
> child is the stage in which affective perception becomes internally
> differentiated (i.e. early childhood, roughly age one to three years
> old) by Epithets like "good", "bad", color words, size words, etc. Of
> course, referring is an act of speech, and an act of speech can
> realize an act of thinking in different ways, so complexes can ALSO be
> realized by Deictics, and even by words that adults take to be
> concepts (e.g. Classifiers, and Things), which is how the
> pseudoconcept arises. But I don't see that either the act of meaning
> or the act of speech is usefully described, in the context of Chapter
> Five, as activity; that was what Ach and Reumeuth were doing when they
> used the original "Suchmethode" (because "choosing" is an activity),
> and that was why they considered the main explanatory principle at
> work to be the "determining tendency" (very similar to Leontiev's
> "motive"!). So Vygotsky doesn't use the term activity to describe the
> functional equivalents of concepts created by the child (he does use
> the term "activity" elsewhere, but it is to describe behavior).
>
> In Chapter Six things change a little, and reconciling the two
> chapters is an unfinished project by our late colleague Paula Towsey.
> First of all, Vygotsky recognizes that basing concept formation too
> narrowly on the blocks results in preconcepts (the term he uses) that
> are too much like Things and not enough like processes. Secondly,
> Vygotsky recognizes that there are not five forms of complex but a
> potentially infinite number of "lines of latitude" along each line of
> semantic longitude, depending on the degree of abstraction or
> generalization. And thirdly, Vygotsky recognizes that generalization
> too is generalizable: children can and do create collections of
> associative complexes (imaginary characters are often structured like
> this), chains of collections (stories that involve teams of imaginary
> characters), and even diffuse complexes of chains of collections of
> associations (child drawings can often be analyzed in this way). Here
> Vygotsky uses the term "pre-concept", perhaps to emphasize the
> teleological aspect of the development of word meaning in dialogue
> with an already developed form. I am happy to agree to call the
> dialogue itself a form of activity (so long as we make it clear that
> it is verbal activity, and that it is therefore a form of subject to
> subject activity and not the activity of a subject wielding a tool
> against an object). But if we call this dialogue activity, how can we
> say that its outcome, that is, the preconcept, is also an activity
> without falling into the trap of using the same term for the
> explanandum and the explanans?
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
> On 5 October 2014 16:49, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>   
>> So David, when you read Chapter 5 of Thinking and Speech, what do you call
>> those combinations of sign-mediated actions which Vygotsky describes with
>> words such as "complex" or "pseudoconcept" or "heap"?
>> Andy
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>>
>>
>> David Kellogg wrote:
>>     
>>> This morning I had the great pleasure of waking up in my own bed and
>>> listening to Yo-yo Ma, Emanuel Ax and Itzhak Perlman playing this:
>>>
>>>  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRkWCOTImOQ
>>>
>>> It's the D Major Cello sonata number two by Mendelssohn, played, as
>>> Yo-yo Ma tells us, on the Davydov (no, that THAT Davydov) Stradivarius
>>> that was probably used to perform the sonata for the very first time
>>> in front of Mendelssohn himself. Now, throughout this concert, Ma has
>>> been something of a stickler for "the original", and Perelman has been
>>> pulling politely but pointedly towards a more personal interpretation.
>>>
>>> So at around 6:45 on the clip, Perelman tells Ma that if Mendelssohn
>>> himself had heard the sonata played on that very cello, then he,
>>> Perelman, was sitting in the very seat that Mendelssohn had occupied,
>>> and that therefore his freer interpretation was really closer to
>>> Mendelssohn than any attempt to recreate the sonata with period
>>> instruments. Mercifully, at this point, Ax interupts them and starts
>>> to play.
>>>
>>> Back in Sydney, Seth Chaiklin and I found ourselves in a somewhat
>>> similar argument, with Seth in Perelman's chair, and me clinging
>>> rather obstinately to a paleo-Vygotskyan interpretation which actually
>>> rejects "activity" as a unit of analysis for anything but behavior,
>>> and most certainly as a unit of psychological analysis. Seth's
>>> argument was pragmatist: for certain practical applications, we need
>>> new interpretations, including revisionist ones. Mine was an argument
>>> in favor of species diversity: when the revisionist account supplants
>>> the original to such a degree that Vygotsky's original argument is no
>>> longer accessible to people, we need to go back to original texts (and
>>> this is why it is so important to make the original texts at least
>>> recoverable--once they are gone, it is really a whole species of
>>> thinking that has become extinct).
>>>
>>> David Kellogg
>>> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>>>
>>> PS: Andy, what shocked me about Bonnie Nardi's plenum in Sydney was
>>> not her use of "society" or "object": actually, I think I would have
>>> liked it better if she had used those terms a little more imprecisely,
>>> in their folk meanings. In fact, a little more IMPRECISION might have
>>> made it even clearer to us the sheer horror of what she was
>>> contemplating.
>>>
>>> For those on the list who missed it, the plenary focused on a world
>>> without jobs--that is, a world where five-day forty-hour jobs are
>>> replaced by "micro-work". Nardi admitted that this was a rather
>>> dystopian state of affairs--but she also showed us what she called the
>>> "bright side": more leisure, less greenhouse gases, and also human
>>> identities less narrowly tied to work. As one person in the conference
>>> pointed out, and Nardi confirmed, it would also mean more time for the
>>> spiritual side of life.
>>>
>>> What was not pointed out was the effect of all this on the "object" of
>>> "society", using both terms in their folk senses. The working class is
>>> being ground down into the economic position of short term sex workers
>>> and atomized into the social position of housewives. Inequality is now
>>> at levels not seen since 1820. Even a cursory study of history tells
>>> us that the result of this is not going to be individual spirituality
>>> but rather more violence. The only "bright side" I can see is if that
>>> force is organized, social, and directed against social equality
>>> rather than against fellow members of the working class.
>>>
>>> dk
>>>
>>>       
>>     
>
>