[Xmca-l] Re: From Thinking to Speech

[Peter Feigenbaum [Staff]]

David,

Please accept my sincere condolences on the passing of your mother. And
thanks so much for sharing the enriching highlights of your mother's
scientific and literary history and contributions, as well as your own
attempt to get the Guardian to publish her obituary - and a more truthful
account of the Ada Lovelace story. What a fascinating patchwork of stories!
(Shame on the Guardian!)

I'm also pleased that you found a brilliant way to weave in the news story
from the BBC website that appeared today about the brain implants that can
'read' the articulatory signals that lead to speech production. I became
very excited when I saw that piece this morning. It didn't occur to me that
it served as a verification of LSV's proposal about the layers that
'thinking' passes through on its way to becoming 'speaking'.

Bravo!

It's always a treat to hear from you.

Best wishes,
Peter



On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 4:42 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.bbc.com_news_health-2D48037592&d=DwMFaQ&c=aqMfXOEvEJQh2iQMCb7Wy8l0sPnURkcqADc2guUW8IM&r=mXj3yhpYNklTxyN3KioIJ0ECmPHilpf4N2p9PBMATWs&m=mi0Dd6Y83ft2vUinCqIKA4fSXVfJ2TnOpAn6WUCq82A&s=X6QZB1LH_qIC7VSANCbNa74QiX-j15WUR11SUWAQG4k&e=>
>
> 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
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__doi.org_10.1080_09500782.2019.1582663&d=DwMFaQ&c=aqMfXOEvEJQh2iQMCb7Wy8l0sPnURkcqADc2guUW8IM&r=mXj3yhpYNklTxyN3KioIJ0ECmPHilpf4N2p9PBMATWs&m=mi0Dd6Y83ft2vUinCqIKA4fSXVfJ2TnOpAn6WUCq82A&s=VGO7AnHyIx0sE1T4DAcrbEwdbrG8kTtxIqgYkNfX7bM&e=>
>
> Some e-prints available at:
>
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> <https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.tandfonline.com_eprint_KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK_full-3Ftarget-3D10.1080_09500782.2019.1582663&d=DwMFaQ&c=aqMfXOEvEJQh2iQMCb7Wy8l0sPnURkcqADc2guUW8IM&r=mXj3yhpYNklTxyN3KioIJ0ECmPHilpf4N2p9PBMATWs&m=mi0Dd6Y83ft2vUinCqIKA4fSXVfJ2TnOpAn6WUCq82A&s=AVOd55hUm3avn8GZEKPCNpshyHPB9jGQriQT2-UkLvA&e=>
>
>

-- 
Peter Feigenbaum, Ph.D.
Director,
Office of Institutional Research
<https://www.fordham.edu/info/24303/institutional_research>
Fordham University
Thebaud Hall-202
Bronx, NY 10458

Phone: (718) 817-2243
Fax: (718) 817-3817
email: pfeigenbaum@fordham.edu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ucsd.edu/pipermail/xmca-l/attachments/20190424/7494fc8a/attachment.html