In a message dated 7/9/2002 3:06:05 PM Central Daylight Time,
mcole@weber.ucsd.edu writes:
> Why, eric, are the emergence of novely and the cultural mediation of
> > behavior
> > in conflict with each other. Might it be that you and I think of culture
> > differently in that the term "influences" is a very tricky one to use for
> > a medium.
> > mike
>
Let me try this again without humor {I find it tough to not rub agianst your
democratic leanings:)}
The emergence of novelty does appear to me to be in direct conflict with
cultural influences because as a unit of study sociocultural researchers have
either decided to study one or the other but not both. Rogoff appears to be
interested in how cultural entities emerge while Valsiner tends to emphasize
how specific individual behavior appears during the course of semiotic
mediation.
Perhaps it is a matter of what age group is being studied. Rogoff tends to
study adults and Valsiner has emphasiuzed preschool age.
I do not find it all coincidental that LSV pointed to adolescence as a key
time period in human devlopment as
'less a period of completion than one of crisis and transition. The
transitional character of adolescent thinking becomes especially evident when
we observe the actual funcitoning of the newly acquired concepts. Experiments
specially devised to study the adolescent's operations with concepts bring
out, in the first place, a striking discrepancy between his ability to form
concepts and his ability to define them. The adolescent will form and use a
concept quite correctly in a concrete situation, but will find it strangely
difficult to express that concept in words, and the verbal definition will,
in most case, be much narrower than might have been expected from the way he
used the concept. The same discrepancy occurs also in adult thinking, even at
very advanced levels. This confirms the assumption that concepts evolve in
ways differing from deliberate conscious elaborations of experience in
logical terms. Analysis of reality with the help of concepts precedes
analysis of the concepts themselves (pg. 141 of 1999 T&L).
What I gather from this is that for individual devleopment there is a
movement from very narrowly defined meanings of words to larger more robust
definitions that come from experiencing the world. Going back to the
difference between Rogoff and Valsiner; Rogoff is more interested in how the
larger robust word meaning is defined and Valsiner would be interested in
studying the individual understanding of the word. It is not that they are
in direct conflict with each other but yet it would be very difficult to
design a study that would get at both angles. Bill Barowy has been generous
enough to share a working paper he has that attempts to get at this perhaps
he would be generous to share it with any others intersted in studying this
topic further.
Graciously asking forgiveness for the Bill reference,
eric
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