[Xmca-l] From Thinking to Speech

[David Kellogg]

In the early 1970s, my late mother, who had been one of the very first
programmers of a computer that has a compiling language (the ORDVAC at the
Naval Research Laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland), begain to hear of Ada
Lovelace, sole legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, and supposedly the first
programmer of Charles Babbage's "analytical engine" back in the 1840s.
There had already been one biography of Ada and the defense department was
interested in naming its programming language after her, but my mother
thought this would be a good chance to do right by an early female pioneer
in a notoriously male field. So she got a contract to write a scientific
biography of Ada for MIT Press ("Ada, a Life and a Legacy", 1986).

But research can baffle your book proposal. My mother soon discovered that
Ada struggled with some of the most basic concepts in algebra, and that
Babbage, who was obviously ghost-writing her papers, was using the Byron
name to make claims he would never be able to sustain (e.g. that the
"analytical engine" could do algebra the way computers do today). She tood
a deep breath, published anyway, and died almost completely ignored three
and a half decades later: Ada Lovelace is still lauded as the world's first
computer programmers, and when I sent an obituary of my mother to the
Guardian (attached), they rewrote it to downplay my mother's own
contribution and play up the contribution of Ada. When I objected they
agreed to publish nothing instead, so I am circulating this obituary on
xmca partly because I have no other way to publicly commemorate her
scientific work.

One of the many, but more minor, reasons I have for admiring the work of
Alex Kozulin is that he has always drawn our attention to the many, minor
and not so minor, ways in which Vygotsky's work really WAS confirmed by
subsequent research even though it formed no part of it because of the
geopolitical isolation of the USSR. For example, in "Vygotsky's Psychology:
A Biography of Ideas", Kozulin shows how Vygotsky not only foresaw the
outcome of the ape language debate but predicted how it would be resolved.
He also shows how the dispute with Piaget over egocentric speech was
resolved decisively in Vygotsky's favor.

Here's another, minor, example. In Chapter Seven of Thinking and Speech LSV
made the apparently unverifiable claims that feeling (the
affective-volitional impulse to speak), thinking, and inner speech are
separable "planes" of verbal thought. He made these claims partly on the
basis of introspection and partly on the basis of ontogenetic data, but
also on the basis of verbal art (Uspensky, Stanislavsky, and of course that
wonderful passage of Anna Karenina where Constantin and Kitty seem to share
inner speech through the children's game of "Secretary"). The far flung
nature of his argument made it easy to ignore. But if Vygotsky is correct,
then there is no ready-made "thought" which can be picked up by brain scans
and synthesized into speech: the only way we could synthesize fully
developed speech in speech impaired individuals would be to intercept the
actual signals sent to the articulators.

Take a look at this.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48037592

Sometimes the research DOES support the proposal. But sometimes it does
take a while.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article:
Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in
understanding narratives by
Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663

Some e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
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