Here's where I am with Chapter 4. Just to stay in the conversation...
There is the "objective" actual world.
Then there is also the individual's expected, imagined, anticipated world.
(At this point I looked back at Peter Smagorinsky's paper on reading --
what really happens when people read -- and felt that he and Leont'ev were
on the same track.)
This second world, the subjective world, is saturated with sensory
experience.
Yet even so, sensory experience depends on socialzation to produce meaning
(here we see the examples of the miners who are blind and have lost their
hands, and the deaf-dumb children, Kaspar Hauser). Sensory experience
alone does not add up to meaning.
Meanings are created by interaction with social relations -- activity in
social relations.
Meanings carry individual consciousness. Meanings cannot be the same for
all (this must have been hard to write in a classless society) becuase of
"concrete external conditions."
Finally, "The activity of man makes up the substance of consciousness."
In Chapter 4 he is NOT talking about consciousness and "the ideal;" He is
also not talking about collective consciousness. Maybe we will see these
come up soon. He has suggested that meanings can be learned -- see his
example of the deaf-dumb children. Will he talk about how a person can
learn the meanings of someone who lives under different concrete external
conditions?
On to chapter 5.
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