[Xmca-l] Re: useful psychology?

[David Kellogg]

Andy--

That really doesn't sound like Vygotsky to me.

Yes, he refers to art as the "social technique of emotion" (Psychology of
Art). Yes, he did experiments on reading "Gentle Breath" to see if Bunin's
short story had any affect on breathing rates. But as far as I know he had
nothing to do with Luria's work on lie detectors (in The Nature of Human
Conflict), and he was even rather skeptical of Luria's work on optical
illusions in "uneducated" peoples

. Remember, this is the guy who denied that a general psychology could ever
cut itself off from practice and vice versa (History of the Crisis in
Psychology), who rejected the idea that thinking is speech with the sound
turned off (Thinking and Speech). Besides, who ever heard of a technology
opposed to an epistemology? What would that mean? A hand without a brain?

Vygotsky sounds more like this: "Neither the hand nor the brain left to
itself can do much."  Francis Bacon, *Novum Organum* (1620), Book 1,
Aphorism 2.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

New Article: 'Commentary: On the originality of Vygotsky's "Thought and
Word" i
in *Mind Culture and Activity*

*https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775>*
Some free e-prints available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/SK2DR3TYBMJ42MFPYRFY/full?target=10.1080/10749039.2020.1711775



On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 11:49 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:

> There's somewhere where Vygotsky talks about psychology as a technology as
> opposed to (for example) an epistemology. Can anyone point me to where this
> observation is to be found. I can find it with my search engines. I think
> Vygotsky and Luria's invention of the lie-detector has been mentioned in
> this connection.
>
> Andy
> --
> ------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Hegel for Social Movements <https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
> Home Page <https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
>
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