[Xmca-l] Re: conditional response

[mike cole]

 David and Peter --

Impossible to hold the beginning of the conversation stable with such
interesting, related topics piling up. As a feeble attempt to claw my way
back to the beginning.....

About conditional response & translation:

I took my first psychology course with Celeste McCollough at Oberlin
college in
1955. She is famous in psychology for the "McCollough effect" (a perceptual
color aftereffect that is contingent on pattern orientation). But the class
she taught us was Skinnerian behaviorism mingled with Pavlov. The term was
referred to as a condition*ed* reflex, as it often is still today. I had a
very difficult time learning to distinguish conditioned from unconditioned
learning. CS- US - UCS in some sort of combination. Confusing to me anyway.

The Russian term, uslovni ( условные) as in "uslovni refleks" is, as Peter
points out most sensibly translated as conditional. If you do not
understand it in this way, you
do not understand what Pavlov was claiming. Nor do you understand the
difference between Pavlov and Skinner. So translation makes a difference.

we started this part of the discussion with the example of *tongue* in the
text. It is sort of doubly misleading. Firstly, before I saw the Russian
text that David provided, I assumed that it was a mistranslation language.
Nope. It was a mistranslation of rech (speech).

At this point, we also lose track of the relationship between Dewey and
Vygotsky. There was a time when LSV referred to what he was engaged in as a
form of instrumental psychology. As much discussed, the ideas of the two
men were similar in many ways.

I published a discussion about the causes and consequences of
mistranslating obuchenie as learning, not instruction. It messes with your
understanding of a zone of proximal development.

There is at least one other example in *Mind and Society *I am sure there
are many more.

Its a general problem. The perezhivanie discussion revealed, if nothing
else, that the term is promiscuously translated and used in a variety of
poorly marked ways, a major outcome of which, it seems, is a cottage
industry in clarifications, extensions, and all sorts of discussions about
the right way to define the term. And apply it.

This problem is endemic in the translation by Horsely Gantt of Luria's *Nature
of Human Conflicts*.( Gantt is the same the guy who translated Pavlov --
yep the same guy who brought us conditioned reflex.). Particularly irksome
is the variable way he translates oposredvovanie ( oposredsvovanie) so that
the reader is left confused about a key concept of, as they say,
cultural-historical psychology.

To me its great to have real experts like Rene and Jaan Valsiner and many
others providing more adequate translations and providing a far deeper
understanding of the texts and their intellectual, social contexts than we
had in the 1970's.

But the problem of translation will never go away. So academics will have
something to do, we can be sure.

:-)
mike






On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 3:58 PM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> 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)
>
>