[Xmca-l] Re: sense, meaning and inner aspect of word

[Larry Purss]

Martin and others curious to explore "inner form",


I wanted to return to the notion of "inner" form as the inner aspect of the
unity of "word meaning"
I do not have the background but do have the curiosity to invite further
reflections

An edited book [cultivating minds: identity as meaning making practice] has
a chapter on Georg Simmel but mentions Vygotsky and Shpet's influence.
on page 44 there is this paragraph:

     Overall, with his brilliant idea of synthesizing objectification and
appropriation, Lazarus, for the first time, outlined a cultural historical
theory which was then elaborated sixty years later by Lev Vygotsky and his
socio-historical school.  in fact, the possible influence of the
Humboldtian  scholar Gustav Shpet (1879-1937), on Vygotsky's thinking also
remains largely unanalyzed (See Zinchenko 2000).  As a student, Vygotsky
followed a course given by Shpet and we may assume that he kept following
Sept's theorizing with some interest. (Van der Veer 1996). what is
interesting with regard to Shpet is his discussion of Lazarus
and Steinthal's Volkerpsychologie in his 1927 "Introduction to Ethnic
Psychology".  In a similar vein, Simmel designated culture as that which
the mind has deposited in language, institutions, art and, last but not
least, technology.  Frisky (1992) argues therefore, that Simmer is one of
the first cultural psychologists to examine the inner (psychic) consequence
for individual experiences of the domination of the cultural things in
everyday experience as the culture of human beings."

I share this paragraph in the hope of exploring further the notion of
"inner form" as it played out in these various scholars. Zinchenko's
hypothesis that in reflecting on "inner form" is the way of
creating/realizing "inner form". I do not have the background to do more
than gesture towards this "theme" but am attempting to keep the topic alive.

larry


On Tue, Jan 27, 2015 at 2:04 PM, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co
> wrote:

>
> On Jan 27, 2015, at 12:16 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> > I did a search on "Thinking and Speech" for all the uses of the word
> "inner". 283 of the 329 of them are "inner speech" and all the others are
> referring to mental or psychological, and then there's "inner aspect of a
> word."
>
> Without wanting to get blokey, it seems to me that these paragraphs in
> Chapter One of T&L are very clear:
>
> "However, what is such a unit, which cannot be further resolved and in
> which are inherently contained the properties in verbal thinking as whole?
> To us it seems that this unit can be found in the internal [inner,
> interior] aspect [side] of the word [внутренней стороне слова], in its
> meaning [значении].
>
> "This inner side [внутренняя сторона] of the word, until now, has hardly
> undergone any special studies. Word meaning [Значение слова] was dissolved
> in the sea of all the other conceptions (представлений, predstavleniĭ) of
> our consciousness or all other acts (актов, acts) of our thinking, just as
> sound, torn from meaning [значения], was dissolved in the sea of all of
> those remaining sounds existing in nature. Therefore in exactly the same
> way that, with respect to the sound of human speech, contemporary
> psychology cannot say anything which would be specific to the sound of
> human speech as such, so too psychology in the field of the study of verbal
> meaning [словесного значения] cannot say anything besides the facts that
> characterize in identical measure verbal meaning [словесное значение] and
> all the other ideas and thoughts [представления и мысли] of our
> consciousness.
>
> "Thus the matter proceeded in associative psychology, and so, in general,
> it proceeds in contemporary structural psychology. In the word we always
> recognize only one side, that which is turned towards us. The other, the
> inside, has ever remained and remains today unstudied and unknown as the
> other side of the moon. Meanwhile it is precisely in this, the other side,
> that the possibility lies of resolving the problems that interest us
> concerning the relation of thinking and speech, for it is precisely here,
> in word meaning [значении слова], that we find tied together the knot of
> that unity [завязан узел того единства] that we call verbal thinking
> [речевым мышлением]."
>
>
>
> Martin
>
>
>