[Xmca-l] Re: units of analysis? LSV versus ANL

Fri Oct 17 21:41:57 PDT 2014

Can you explain more about "action" versus "activity"?  These two terms get used a lot in nuanced ways and I get confused.  If there is a place where this is already delineated, could you please point me in that direction?

Also, I am not familiar with defect-compensation.

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> On Oct 17, 2014, at 9:35 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
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> Martin, I think the issue is that we have certain concepts which are intrinsically both subjective and objective (action, activity, meaning, experience for example) but we also have other concepts which are intrinsically either objective or subjective (behaviour, weight, thinking, consciousness, mood for example). Of course, because subject and object are mutually constituted, any of these domain-specific concepts also entails relations to the other domain. Otherwise we have nonsense. If I say "The Stock Market crashed in 1929" I am not talking about a state of mind, though obviously states of mind were entailed in this event. Likewise "I'm in a bad mood today" is not a statement about events in my life, even though these may be the cause.
> 
> What Vygotsky has done which allows him to develop a nondualistic psychology is that he took as his *most fundamental* concept "action". His other key concepts, his units of analysis for the various investigations, are also concepts which are intrinsically subjective/objective. E.g., word meaning, defect-compensation, perezhivanie. This is it: choose as your unit of analysis a concept which is a unity of objective and subjective.
> 
> ANL would agree with his, but in his critique he is trying to muddy the water by claiming that Vygosky takes as his fundamental concept, "consciousness".
> 
> Andy
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__home.pacific.net.au_-7Eandy_&d=AAICAw&c=Oo8bPJf7k7r_cPTz1JF7vEiFxvFRfQtp-j14fFwh71U&r=nc0IzcQ7AJuG1zNoaB3azX4jLwOThkgntuk4nvTAto4&m=gKMMa479BWWTMz0UJqBIkjS5I75PRZR54MHJbhn8NCY&s=lsnDPs27Ct58Y8MBNnCw3hdGxQkaKKMS-MEISlsP3JM&e= 
> 
> Martin John Packer wrote:
>> Who says that emotional experience is "subjective," Huw? LSV writes throughout The Problem of the Environment that perezhivanie is the child's relationship to social reality. In my book that makes it personal, not subjective. The word "subjective" doesn't occur once in the text. It is certainly a common assumption in today's dualistic psychology that experience is subjective, a mental state.That would indeed be idealist.  But since LSV is avoiding dualism...
>> 
>> Martin
> 