Re: [xmca] Valsiner on Semiotics and Psychology

From: Nate (vygotsky@nateweb.info)
Date: Tue Jan 03 2006 - 13:55:37 PST


Mike,

Am I misreading or are you reading to quickly? The "Psychology adamently
sets itself apart from literature"was a view he was critiquing, right? I
don't think he was arguing for such a stance just pointing out the
reasons for its historical separation. Here are the first two paragraphs.

    Some things in life just do not make sense. Coming out of the
    creative environment of Tartu University in Estonia of the 1970s
    --where semiotics was one of the main frameworks for our
    intellectual growth-- the separation of semiotics and psychology has
    always seemed awkward to me. Yet it is the case all over the
    world-as I encountered that divide in all my subsequent years in
    Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Somehow the discourses about
    signs do not link with psychology's favorite stories about behavior,
    cognition, or affect.

    In some ways that divide is parallel to another: psychology
    adamantly separates itself from art and literature, as if Gabriel
    Garcia Marquez, Anais Nin, or Remedios Varo have less to say about
    human psyche than the accepted sources of psychological evidence--
    lever-pressing rats in mazes, or college undergraduates putting
    pencil marks into boxes of multiple choice tests. Yet the glorious
    invention of behaviorist objectivity-the laboratory rat-is itself a
    semiotic construction. The rats themselves may of course remain
    little animals as they are-but any interpretation of aspects of
    their behavior as if those represent basic human psychological
    functions is an act of semiogenesis conducted by the researchers.
    Similarly, the "objectivity" of the experimental evidence is a
    flavour generated by semiosis-Einstein's look at what experiments do
    (and can't do) is an example of relativity of acceptance of semiotic
    construction of crucial evidence for theory (Hentschel, 1992).

>>
>>
>> http://www.semioticon.com/semiotix/semiotix5/newsletterindex5.htm#psycho
>> logy
>>
>>

-- 

Nateweb http://nateweb.info

“There is no hope of finding the sources of free action in the lofty realms of the mind or in the depths of the brain. The idealist approach of the phenomenologists is as hopeless as the positive approach of the naturalists. To discover the sources of free action it is necessary to go outside the limits of the organism, not into the intimate sphere of the mind, but into the objective forms of social life; it is necessary to seek the sources of human consciousness and freedom in the social history of humanity. To find the soul it is necessary to lose it". A.R Luria

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