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

[Andy Blunden]

Well the Russian words are whatever is usually translated as "sense" and 
"meaning".
I think one was смысль and the other was значение.

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


Natalia Gajdamaschko wrote:
> усваивает? (Mind you, I don't have a Russian text in hand but this is what comes to mind while reading this para). 
> NG
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "mike cole" <mcole@ucsd.edu>
> To: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net>, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Thursday, October 9, 2014 8:42:11 PM
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion
>
> Assimilate is a very unfortunate word choice. I wonder what the Russian was.
> mike
>
> On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 6:08 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
>   
>> Dmitry Leontyev's main speech to ISCAR (at the pre-conference on Monday)
>> was all about the dualism between sense and meaning, including the Russian
>> terms (was it mysl and znachnie or something?) and the German Sinn and
>> Bedeutung, and he preferred in ENglish to use "personal meaning" and
>> "public meaning" to clarify the difference, because "sense" is so
>> polysemic. A wonderful dualistic world, simply divided between internal,
>> psychological sense and non-psychological, material/external meaning. The
>> clearest explication of the fallacy of AN Leontyev's approach I have ever
>> witnessed.
>>
>> Anyway, as I understand it, "meaning" is objectively fixed in words by the
>> objective relations between words and words, words and things, and between
>> things. "Sense" is the internal psychological reflection of this external
>> world. So in the "Evolution of the Psyche" I read:
>>
>>    "Meaning is the reflection of reality irrespective of man’s
>>    individual, personal relation to it. Man finds an already prepared,
>>    historically formed system of meanings and assimilates it just as he
>>    masters a tool, the material prototype of meaning. The psychological
>>    fact proper, the fact of my life, is this, (a) that I do or do not
>>    assimilate a given meaning, do or do not master it, and (b) what it
>>    becomes for me and for my personality in so far as I assimilate it;
>>    and that depends on what subjective, personal sense it has for me."
>>
>> So I guess "primitive consciousness" is sort of like these people who vote
>> for George Bush because "he's my kind of guy," and don't reflect on it. :)
>>
>> Andy
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>> *Andy Blunden*
>> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>>
>>
>> mike cole wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> I, to, have returned to Leontiev's develoment book following David's
>>> suggestion. Still reading,
>>> but passages such as the following really dicombobulate me.
>>>
>>> "The coincidences of sense and meanings is the main feature of primitive
>>> consciousness."
>>>
>>> mike
>>>
>>> On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:
>>> ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>>>
>>>     This discussion has sent me back to looking at A N Leontyev's
>>>     "Development of Mind." For all his faults, ANL expended a lot of
>>>     energy in tracing the phylogenetic evolution of activity (which
>>>     for ANL is a broad category, inclusive of unconscious activity).
>>>     He traces the evolution of behaviour (as in animals without a
>>>     central nervous system operating on a reflex basis) through
>>>     conditioned reflexes and habits to operations (scripts which can
>>>     be moved from one situation to another and adapted to conditions
>>>     without conscious awareness) to actions (consciously determined by
>>>     their immediate goal) to activities (where the goal is remote from
>>>     the immediate actions, and a whole series of actions are required
>>>     to meet the goal). Then he is able to trace the movement back and
>>>     forth between behaviour, operational activity, actions and
>>>     activities in both ontogenesis and microgenesis. I have always
>>>     been a bit impatient with this kind of move (reifying a theory of
>>>     human activity into Nature and then importing it back), but I have
>>>     to say it was a useful exercise. And clarifying.
>>>     Here is a link to an excerpt from part of this work:
>>>     http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1981/evolution.htm
>>>     Andy
>>>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>>> ------------
>>>     *Andy Blunden*
>>>     http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>>>     <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>>>
>>>
>>>     David Kellogg wrote:
>>>
>>>         All of which has to be sung with screams of pain (Strauss has, you
>>>         see, stacked the deck in Rousseau's favor). But maybe both
>>>         singing and
>>>         speech are exaptations of something that is functionally
>>>         neither and
>>>         not specific to humans at all, which for want of a better name
>>>         we can
>>>         call activity WITHOUT thinking.
>>>
>>>         David Kellogg
>>>         Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
>>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>       
>
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