[Xmca-l] Re: On the difference between the social and the societal

[Alfredo Jornet Gil]

Thanks for sharing, Michael. Surely translation is, has been, and will probably continue being an issue in CHAT discussions. I guess that one thing is making absolute statements about the meaning of a word, and another more productive one is to explore what otherwise non-visible differentiations may emerge from following that translation. I was indeed happy to find that about half of the article is devoted to showing the implications that making the distinction may have across a number of issues/fields.
Alfredo  
________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Wolff-Michael Roth <wolffmichael.roth@gmail.com>
Sent: 11 January 2018 15:33
To: Andy Blunden; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: On the difference between the social and the societal

Hi Andy,
I appreciate your knowledge of Marx and Hegel, and I am not saying that you
do not understand Marx. I am showing that certain things are not thematic
in English translations because it does not make a conceptual distinction.
The one I am after allows tying the particular and the general-universal to
the distinction between the merely social and the societal.

In the extreme case that I am referring to: If, as Vygotsky and Leont'ev
state, personality is the ensemble of societal relations, then murders, of
which there are so many in the US, do not have somehow deviant
personalities, but instead reflect the relations of U.S. society. This is
for me an interesting way to think, which allows understanding why  all the
prisons in the US will fail, even if the prison industry will get bigger
and bigger.

Also, in the article I am saying, let's take the importance of the
distinction as a hypothesis, and then test it out in the different fields.
If it turns out that the patterns I show are chance occurrences even
despite their very low probability, then so be it. But it is more
scientific to test and reject hypotheses than to reject them beforehand.

Michael




Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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New book: *The Mathematics of Mathematics
<https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-mathematics-of-mathematics/>*

On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 6:22 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> Michael, I studied Marx from 1968 on, but I never learnt the
> word "societal" until the 2000s, on this list actually. I
> thought it was just an academic pretension, but someone
> explained to me the distinction intended. 40 years of
> studying Marx before hearing the word "societal" does *not*
> mean I never understood Marx. Really! German, like English,
> has plenty of words which are used with a number of
> different meanings, with varying degrees of difference.
> Should I claim that German-speakers do not understand the
> meaning of "Gestalt" because in German "Gestalt" has the
> same meaning as "form" in English? "Gestalt" has a clear
> meaning, not to be confused with "Form" in every language
> except German.
>
> Andy
>
> Andy Blunden
> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> On 12/01/2018 1:05 AM, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
> > Hi, some of you may be interested in this article where I show that
> English
> > translations of Marx are missing some important distinctions, without
> which
> > some aspects just do not make any sense.
> >
> > http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-19.1.2988
> >
> > This has repercussions on such things as the student learning of
> > *universal *concepts rather versus individual (local) "meanings". There
> are
> > certain nouns that in Marx, Vygotsky, Leont'ev etc. always are modified
> by
> > societal but never by social (including personality, consciousness).
> >
> > German and Russian versions of the same works (Marx, Vygotsky, Leont'ev)
> > will have a strict equivalence of gesellschaftlich = obshchestvenij (En:
> > societal) and sozial = social'nij (En: social), whereas English texts
> only
> > use the adjective social.
> >
> > Michael
> >
> >
> > Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> --------------------
> > Applied Cognitive Science
> > MacLaurin Building A567
> > University of Victoria
> > Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
> > http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>
> >
> > New book: *The Mathematics of Mathematics
> > <https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-
> directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-
> mathematics-of-mathematics/>*
> >
> >
>
>