So.........
Luria goes off to Central Asia and studies various kinds of cognitive
functioning among local people. In the American journal, Science, he
invites others to join him in order to
"study the system of thinking of primitive societies, the development of
the psychological functions in their thinking, and the pointing out of those
changes which this thinking undergoes in social and cultural transformation
connected with socialist growth.
Is that a contextualist view according Ana or Susan and Artin?
Three major conclusions Luria makes:
As a result of involvement in collectivized agriculture (with some schooling
tossed in):
1. direct-graphical functional thinking is replaced by at least the rudiments
of 'theoretical thinking.'
2. The basic forms of cognitive activity go beyond fixation and reproduction
of individual practical activity and cease to be purely concrete and
situational [context-bound? MC], becoming a part of more general, abstractly
coded systems of knowledge.
3. These changes give rise not only to new forms of reasoning, restricted
to logical premises free of immediate experience, but new forms of self
analysis and imagination as well.
Isn't contextualism implied by the idea that animals live in the here and
now and humans, as a result to the acquisition of culture and language,
are freed of context-dependence? It may be upside down from the way American
contextualists have used the idea.
Hmmmmm. But when textbook writers talk about Vygotsky and contextualism,
this is not what they write about.
Hmmmmmm
mike
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