[Xmca-l] conditional response

[Peter Smagorinsky]

I wrote this in Smagorinsky, P. (2011). Vygotsky and literacy research: A methodological framework. Boston: Sense.<https://www.sensepublishers.com/product_info.php?products_id=1374&osCsid=388e4357ae448e518709d4a68ffd2e18> I think Knox might have been the translator (maybe Knox and Stephens?)


I use conditional response rather than the incorrectly translated conditioned response to account for Pavlov's finding that people and animals-most famously, dogs-respond to stimuli in relation to the conditions that have surrounded their prior responses to similar stimuli. According to the author of the uncredited forward to Volume 2 of Vygotsky's Collected Works,

In the interest of contributing to the formation of a coherent English terminology for Russian psychological texts, this series has joined in the use of the term conditional reflex for the older conditioned reflex, both in Volume 1 and in the present volume. By the time Watson adopted the Pavlovian formulation as a cornerstone for behaviorist psychology in the 1910s, Pavlov's uslovnyi had been mis-translated "conditioned" (as a Russian passive past participle), and the whole process was designated as "conditioning" (see Boring, 1950). At mid-century, however, Osgood (1953) suggested that "Pavlov meant that the occurrence of the reflex to a novel cue was literally conditional [sic] upon certain operations" and observed that "in contemporary American psychology ['conditioned' had] become practically synonymous with 'learned.'" (in the unattributed Foreword to Vygotsky, 1993, pp. vii-viii; emphasis in original; [sic] in original)