Re: [xmca] The Ubiquity of Unicorns: conversation

I am sure it is, Mike, probably the main way.

Can we say that speech "evokes" something?? and what
something depends on the level of development of the
mind/behavior of the individual. For a child at the stage of
speech just beginning to turn inwards we can't talk of
speech evoking concepts, but it could evoke sensuous images.
But more importantly it seems that Kathy Nelson-type
scripts, or Merlin Donald-type episodes might be the
relevant elementary units of consciousness and behavior at
work here.

Andy

mike cole wrote:
> Andy-- Is private speech another way of controlling ourselves from the
> outside?
> mike
>
> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>
> Peter, it is very interesting to me to discuss something I know
> nothing about. How else can we subject our fundamentals to test?
>
> Firstly, Peter, I think it is incoherent for you to talk of
> "conversation" as an "irreducible functional unit." "Conversation"
> is the whole animal not the cell. And in any case, it's not actually
> a conversation, though you might conceive of it as a limit case of a
> conversation if you wanted to. But you could also conceptualise what
> is going on as a performance, and a performance requires a script,
> scenes and stage directions; it *can* have an audience but doesn't
> have to have an audience (addressee).
>
> Also, I don't think being a long monologue is any bar to being an
> utterance. Luther's 95 theses was an utterance in my reading, as was
> the Gettysburg Address. They can be broken down, but if they are,
> they cease to be an utterance and cannot be understood in that way
> as "a move".
>
> Question: is private speech always associated with practical
> actions? If so, aren't these actions part of your unit of analysis?
>
> Andy
>
>
> Peter Feigenbaum wrote:
>
> So we must approach the problem from both a practical and a
> conceptual
> perspective, and find a way to make them coincide. For Bakhtin,
> utterance
> unit boundaries can be concretely identified by turn-taking. For
> Vygotsky,
> word meaning is the irreducible unit of analysis, beneath which the
> functional integration of word and meaning ceases to exist. If
> conversation is, indeed,
> that irreducible functional unit, then what is the smallest
> concrete form
> conversation can take? It cannot be defined as a turn at talk,
> for some
> turns can be quite extensive, such as a monologue consisting of
> multiple
> sentences.
> But if an individual utterance is defined in terms of a single
> word (at
> minimum)
> or a single sentence (at maximum), and these linguistic
> structures are
> shown to have the functional properties of conversation (i.e.,
> they participate
> in an initiation-response structure with other utterance units
> or practical
> activity),
> then this unit would meet both the practical and conceptual
> criteria we
> have been discussing.
>
> Of course, this does not address all of the problems associated
> with the
> analysis of private speech utterances, for there is still the knotty
> problem of
> *who is conversing with whom*! But that moves the problem down a
> different
> path, which is a whole other topic.
>
>
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>

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Andy Blunden http://www.erythrospress.com/
Classics in Activity Theory: Hegel, Leontyev, Meshcheryakov, 
Ilyenkov $20 ea
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