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

[Martin John Packer]

Google translates this as 'assimilation.' Accurate, Natalia?

Martin

On Oct 9, 2014, at 10:43 PM, Natalia Gajdamaschko <nataliag@sfu.ca> 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.
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>