[Xmca-l] Re: sense and emotion

[David Kellogg]

Alfredo:

In your note below you say that you reinserted an email response from Rene
van der Veer, but I couldn't find any such attached. Anyway, here's a pdf
of the two comments I wrote on the chapter, as requested.

I recently did a study on "involuntary creativity" in children. The data
was pretty straightforward (children trying to remember Hamlet,
actually--quite similar to Peter Smagorinsky's data in the paper he
circulated recently). But the theoretical background was, as usual, clear
as mud to me.

We know how "conditioned responses" arise: Pavlov demonstrated this in the
laboratory, and Vygotsky theorized it using cultural history: the
"response" as such is given by the hereditary endowment but the environment
is manipulated in some way, as when humans go from hunting to herding, or
from gathering to farming.

We know much less precisely how the NEXT form of higher
behavior, creativity and intelligent solutions to unprecedent problems, can
arise, and it seems to me that one possiblity is that it arise
precisely when children try to plagiarize and fail because of the semantic
rather than lexicogrammatical or phonological nature of their linguistic
memory.

For example, last week I was teaching "How languages are learned" by Patsy
Lightbown and Nina Spada. The first chapter tells a funny little story
about a five year old's birthday party. The children are drinking grape
juice from long-stemmed glasses, and the parent, adultomorphizing a bit,
raises his glass and says "I'd like to propose a toast", to which all the
other adults, and the children somewhat belatedly, respond by raising their
long-stemmed glasses.  A few minutes later, the birthday boy raises his
glass and says "I'd like to propose a piece of bread."

I probably got the anecdote wrong, and I am quite sure that Lantolf got it
wrong when he used it in an article about ten years ago, but perhaps that's
Hegel's point. Even if you could get a toast, or an anecdote, or a quote
verbatim; even if you could translate perfectly from one language (e.g.
English) into a highly cognate language (e.g. Dutch), the translation
wouldn't and couldn't avoid involuntary creativity, because the
interpersonal meaning has changed.

Interpersonal meaning (or, if you like, sense) is made at all levels:
sounding (phonology/graphology/punctuation), wording (lexicogrammar) and
meaning (semantics). It's not just in tone and voice quality, or
punctuation and style, although interpersonal meaning certainly is
expressed at that level (commas are becoming largely a matter of style, and
in the nineteenth century, the use of quotation marks was
too).Interpersonal meaning is also expressed in the proportion of
exclamatives, interrogatives, and declaratives you use (Vygotsky the
teacher turns out to use a lot more exclamatives and more of what we would
call "known answer questions" today than Vygotsky the writer). Our memory
for the grammatical form of what people say to us is remarkably poor, and
in some cases the grammatical mood is not even clear the first time it was
said (Should. "I wonder what he meant by that" have a question mark or a
full stop?) And of course, at the level of "pure" semantics (assuming that
there is such a level) interpersonal meaning is encoded in your choice of
audience: the one or the many, your students or posterity.

What's interesting in Vygotsky is not simply that he quotes verbatim; it's
also that he gets the quotes spectatucularly wrong in places (Thorndike,
for example, becomes a progressive, holistic math educator, and G. Stanley
Hall a humanist psychologist!). He translates, but hardly ever word for
word, and always with his own volitionally creative goals in mind. The
technique is really not that different from involuntary
creativity--transposing utterances from one context to another--but the
motives and aims and audience and hence sense certainly are.

I sometimes think that in the era of machine translation--one that Halliday
predicted in the 1950s--now lies in annotation, footnotes and reference
lists, and it's really here that v der V and Z have done us a priceless
service.






David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full


On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 5:02 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
wrote:

> Thanks Peter for following up on the Van der Veer / Zavershneva article
> that you so kindly shared here. And sorry, David, that I have not yet been
> able to find the time to address your thorough and developing reviews of
> the article, which are, as usual, very insightful as well as felicitiously
> debate-able.
>
> I did read the article, and, as Mike already notes, the first thing I
> would say is that this should be a very welcome piece in that it adds a
> really rich item to a growing number of works that help us situated
> Vygotsky's legacy in its cultural and historical context. Specially welcome
> are the clarifications concerning the multiple citations and paraphrasing,
> some of which W-M Roth and others had flagged before.
>
> I am however not even close to literate enough on these topics so as to
> add much, beyond re-stating that perhaps most important than finding out
> about the "intentions" of the author may be testing out which research
> avenues can be pursued by following the lines (not new, but still lines
> that grow) drawn in chapter seven.
>
> But I wanted to reply to-reinsert Rene's e-mail, which had not been copied
> in the last response. Please, unless René would rather like to be dropped,
> remember to "reply all" and not just hit the reply button when answering to
> this thread.
> I also wondered whether David would like to add (attached as pdf perhaps?)
> his previous posts, which I thought raised good and well-informed questions.
>
> Alfredo Jornet
> ________________________________
> New article in *Design Studies* "Imagining Design: Transitive and
> intransitive dimensions"
> Free print available: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1WhHg_,KmyN6Dr
>
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> Sent: 08 April 2018 01:58
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: sense and emotion
>
> Well, David's comments consisted of two parts. The first part was pretty
> incoherent--I just objected that they hadn't read the chapter the way I
> did, with an emphasis on what Halliday calls "logogenesis" as opposed to
> phylogenesis and ontogenesis. After some reflection, I wrote something a
> little better, in which I argued that the distinction between "phasal" and
> "semantic" was key to the chapter. When I think back at what I wrote,
> though, the first part is really reproaching them for not reading Halliday
> and the second part for not reading Saussure. Obviously, the second part is
> a little fairer than the first...but in a hundred years I daresay things
> will be the other way around: Saussure will only be of historical interest,
> but Halliday himself will be part of our own living history.
>
> I always wondered about that, Mike. In the preface to Mind in Society, it
> says the first four chapters are from Tool and Sign, but the fourth chapter
> is clearly from the end of Chapter Two of HDHMF. Vygotsky says:
>
> Так, Д. Дьюи, один из крайних представителей прагматизма, развивший идеи
> инструментальной логики и теории познания, определяет язык как орудие
> орудий, перенося определение руки, данное Аристотелем, на речь.
>
> So it's not about the "tongue" at all--it's about "language" and then about
> "speech". And what's the difference?
>
> Here I think Peter's got a point. The difference between "znachenie" and
> "smysl" is semantic. But semantics, according to Halliday, has a way of
> "rising to the concrete"--that is, all the patterns, from lexicogrammar to
> phonology to phonetics, can be semantically motivated one way or another.
> So for example at the level of lexicogrammar, there are some words that are
> closer to "smysl", because they are so embedded in the context of situation
> (these are the ones favored in infant speech and early childhood, the
> "this" and the "that" and the "there" and "here" and "it" and "the" and so
> on, whose reference is immediate and constantly changing as a result). But
> so many of these words, iin Englsh, begin with voiced interdental "th".
> Why?
>
> Well, it's not just Tibetans and native Americans who point with their
> lips, Henry! There is a fair amount of pointing with the tongue going on
> here. But less trivially, I think you'll find that sense is linked to
> VOWELS (as well as to intonation and stress) whle signification is carried
> disproportionately in consonants. Because there is meaning being made at
> every level, we can see, at every level, Vygotsky's distinction between
> sense and signification (which is really identical to Voloshinov's between
> "theme" and "meaning").
>
>
>
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
>
> Recent Article in *Early Years*
>
> The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
> child’s first interrogatives
> <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>
>
> Free e-print available at:
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full
>
>
> On Sun, Apr 8, 2018 at 8:32 AM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
>
> > Hi again, Peter--
> >
> > Inspired by your note, I read Rene and Ekaterina's article. It was great
> to
> > see the
> > identification of sources of all of those LSV references. Tracking them
> > down has eluded editors of LSV's writings over the years --Russian and
> > non-Russian alike. All the work they have been doing, like the earlier
> work
> > with Jaan Valsiner, has enormously helped to provide a corrective to the
> > shortcomings of *Mind in Society.*
> >
> > I tried to recover David's earlier comments on the logic of the chapter
> > under discussion, but the xmca archive is down at the moment. When it is
> > recoverable,
> > it seems worth putting together with your comments for discussion
> (assuming
> > that folks are moving on from the discussion of the use of facebook for
> > organizing
> > and the perils/virtues of activism).
> >
> > mike
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 3:49 PM, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > Peter-
> > >
> > > I have put of reading Rene's article, but will try to get it to the top
> > of
> > > the always-growing stack of "must read nows."
> > >
> > > Just a quick comment to say that the use of the term, tongue, with
> > respect
> > > to Dewey
> > > is almost certainly a mistranslation of the term, язык which in this
> > > context should be translated as language. Another casualty of
> collective
> > > editing of the translator's work.
> > >
> > > mike
> > > editing.
> > >
> > >
> > >
> > > On Sat, Apr 7, 2018 at 12:41 PM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu>
> > wrote:
> > >
> > >> I had an opportunity to read the article by Rene van der Veer and
> > >> colleague on the last few chapters of Thinking and Speech, and found
> it
> > >> interesting for a number of reasons. First, he does some historical
> > work to
> > >> argue that it was more a compilation of earlier work and ideas
> borrowed
> > >> heavily from other sources than an original culminating statement on
> > human
> > >> development, an issue obscured by editors who removed quotation marks
> > from
> > >> appropriated material. The ways in which Vygotsky as we now know him
> was
> > >> shaped by those who produced the volume is interesting in and of
> itself.
> > >>
> > >> I can't say exactly how I came to what follows, but it was something
> > that
> > >> occurred to me throughout the article's discussion of meaning and
> sense.
> > >> Below, I'll paste in something I wrote nearly 20 years ago on this
> > >> smysl/znachenie distinction, and I think I still believe what I wrote
> > then.
> > >> What struck me this time around is how smysl:sense has a deeply
> > emotional
> > >> foundation, consistent with LSV's insistence that cognition and affect
> > >> can't be separated. This was the first time I ever saw how that
> process
> > >> might work. Emotion, as I'm thinking about it right now, produces the
> > >> material through which ideas/thoughts take shape on their way to
> > >> articulation via speech (or other mediational tool).
> > >>
> > >> [as an aside, I recently reviewed Mind in Society prior to using it
> in a
> > >> class I taught in Mexico, and was struck by the quote about how "the
> > tongue
> > >> is the tool of tools"....I'd forgotten the "tongue" part because I
> > >> typically see this phrasing accorded to speech, not the more
> > alliterative
> > >> tongue. Very nice.]
> > >>
> > >> In any case, I posted Rene's article, so feel some obligation to
> follow
> > >> up with the group, and so am offering this notion, which I find
> > >> interesting. Am I on the right trail?
> > >>
> > >> http://www.petersmagorinsky.net/About/PDF/RER/RER2001.pdf
> > >> The Russian term smysl has been translated as sense (i.e.,
> unarticulated
> > >> inner speech), while the term znachenie has been translated as meaning
> > >> (i.e., the articulation of thought through a sign system such as
> words).
> > >> Vygotsky, however, viewed both smysl and znachenie as constituents of
> > the
> > >> meaningful whole. I next explain each of these two zones of meaning in
> > >> greater detail.
> > >>             Smysl is the set of images and associations one makes
> with a
> > >> sign such as a word in the area of consciousness Vygotsky (1987)
> called
> > >> inner speech, that is, the abbreviated syntax and
> > stream-of-consciousness
> > >> properties of unarticulated, inchoate thought. Smysl corresponds to
> what
> > >> Rosenblatt (1978) refers to as the initial zone of meaning in a
> reader's
> > >> evocation, or what Gallas (2001) refers to as imagination. Rosenblatt
> > >> describes this experience as
> > >>
> > >> a penumbra of "memories" of what has preceded, ready to be activated
> by
> > >> what follows, and providing the context from which further meaning
> will
> > be
> > >> derived. Awareness-more or less explicit-of repetitions, echoes,
> > >> resonances, repercussions, linkages, cumulative effects, contrasts, or
> > >> surprises is the mnemonic matrix for the structuring of emotion, idea,
> > >> situation, character, plot-in short, for the evocation of a work of
> art.
> > >> (pp. 57-58)
> > >>
> > >>             Smysl is as yet unarticulated, being instead the storm
> cloud
> > >> of thought that produces the shower of words, to use Vygotsky's (1987)
> > >> metaphor. One great limitation of the concept of smysl is that it
> > cannot be
> > >> empirically demonstrated, only inferred. Vygotsky's formulation of
> inner
> > >> speech came from his observations of egocentric speech in young
> > children,
> > >> which he theorized became internalized as inner speech. Once speech
> (or
> > >> another tool) is articulated and thus observable, it appears in the
> > zone of
> > >> meaning that is the shower of words (or other signs) that Vygotsky
> calls
> > >> znachenie. Znachenie, then, is the zone of meaning available in
> > represented
> > >> form, corresponding to the notion of a sign, regardless of modality.
> > >>             Because these two zones compose a meaningful whole,
> > referring
> > >> to znachenie as "meaning" can be misleading. I retain the translation
> of
> > >> sense for smysl: "the aggregate of all the psychological facts that
> > arise
> > >> in our consciousness as the result of the word. Sense is a dynamic,
> > fluid,
> > >> and complex formation which has several zones that vary in their
> > stability"
> > >> (Vygotsky, 1987, p. 275). For znachenie, I use articulation:
> > >>
> > >> It is the most stable, unified, and precise of these zones. In
> different
> > >> contexts, a word's sense changes. In contrast, [articulation] is a
> > >> comparatively fixed and stable point, one that remains constant with
> all
> > >> the exchanges of the word's sense that are associated with its use in
> > >> various contexts. (p. 275)
> > >>
> > >>
> > >
> >
>
>
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