[Xmca-l] Re: From Thinking to Speech

Fri Apr 26 14:37:52 PDT 2019

Helen--

In 2015, my brother and I sold my mother's flat in London and moved her
into Lord Wandsworth's Home for Distressed Jewry in Clapham (which was
originally set up as penance for Lord Wandworth abandoning the faith of his
fathers, but which n caters to Jews who are mostly quite undistressed,
including my mum). I made a very thorough search of her papers and could
find no trace of the onion-skin on which she'd typed the science fiction
novel, or for that matter of the studies on Robin Dunbar, Alison Wray, and
the origins of language. There was also nothing of her long studies of the
effect of textiles as an industrialization strategy for poor countries that
she was doing when she visited me in China. Dorothy was a perfectionist,
and she had that Victorian habit of burning papers every decade or so.

But I can tell you this much--she never laid stuff out from the get-go. For
example, when she sat down to write "Ada", she knew perfectly well what her
endpoint would be and how unpopular it would make her. The first line is
this:

"Nothing in Lady Byron's life became her like the leaving of her marriage."

When we were sitting shiva for Dorothy, I read that passage, and one of her
neighbors remarked that although it had nothing to do with computer
science, it had a certain Austenian savour to it (and in fact I remember
she crafted it along the lines of the opening of "Northanger Abbey").

Avram--

A mitzvah is a blessed ACTION, and it lies on the "environment" end of the
pole that connects the subject to the social environment. I had in mind a
blessed THOUGHT, which lies on the "subject" end of the same pole "מצפה" .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizpah_(emotional_bond)

The Hebrew word originally meant "watchtower", but it's a proper noun and a
verb too, and it means a convenant or a concern or "to watch over", as when
Laban and Jacob come to an agreement (yes, Laban breaks it, but only
because he is overconcerned for his family).

城闕輔三秦，

風煙望五津。

與君離別意，

同是宦游人。

海內存知己，

天涯若比鄰。

無為在歧路，

兒女共沾巾

Which means (James will tell me if I got this right...):

"These watchtowers are those of the three lands of Qin" (i.e. Shaanxi, then
the imperial heartland--DK)

"I make out the land of five crossings" (i.e. Sichuan, then a remote area
to which dissident intellectuals were sent--DK)

"With you I part and with my own feelings" (i.e. to leave you is to leave
part of myself, but it is also to "over-live" the grief of parting--DK)

"We are both officials who must live far from home" (i.e. we are both
dissident intellectuals going into exile but not together--DK)

"Yet when there are those who understand us

"Though faraway as the four corners of the earth they are neighbors

"Why should we, when we reach the fork in the road

Soak our handkerchiefs like children and women?"
(The story is that Wang Bo, after writing these lines, went to attend his
father's funeral in Vietnam, and his ship overturned, drowning him. But
school children still recite this poem in China, and the line about "the
four corners of the earth" is a kind of byword for far-flung covenants like
xmca...)

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

On Sat, Apr 27, 2019 at 5:29 AM Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>
> 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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