[Xmca-l] Re: From Thinking to Speech

[Helena Worthen]

David — it was really stupid of the Guardian not to publish this. If anyone disagreed, let them respond!

That’s a beautiful picture of your mother. She must have been in her 50s at that point? Not much more.

And, does anyone have the manuscript of that science fiction novel? It was probably very good. And I’ll bet that the main concept got laid out right at the start.

Helena


> On Apr 24, 2019, at 1:37 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://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 <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 <https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663>

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