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[xmca] Language and thought, unity and the particular
David (and anyone else who might be reading),
Sorry for the long delay in responding, two weeks seems like
an eternity considering the pace of production of ideas on
this listserve. Hopefully your post isn’t too far in the
recesses of our collective memory…
I am greatly appreciative of your long and very thoughtful
response (and no worries about sounding pedantic or
patronizing - I'm flattered by your engagement with my
arguments). As you’ll note by the delay in my response, it
was a lot to chew on. I’ve read through your email a number
of times in order to do my best to get down to
the “concepts” that lie beneath the words (to put this in
terms of a dualism that makes me uncomfortable), and finally
have been able to put together a response. Yours was a
wonderfully dense email and I particularly enjoyed the
literary flourish at the end as you moved from Woolf to
Austen to Hemingway to Tolstoy to Proust.
Nonetheless, I am as yet unsure that I have quite “gotten”
the argument that you are putting forward with regard to
Vygtosky’s thinking since it seems to me to conflict with my
reading of Vygotsky. To this end, this email is an attempt
to clarify what it is that you are saying and to critically
engage with my understanding of the concepts that you (and
Vygotsky) were proposing.
Let me also apologize in advance for the fact that this
email surely does not do justice to your ideas and certainly
lacks a proper tone of deference (and probably demeanor as
well – but as Goffman notes, this reflects primarily upon
me). My apologies as well for the fact that this response is
far too long, but I'm not certain how else to do justice to
the conversation.
Let me start by stating my position and how it differs from
yours and then I’ll work through some of the ways I see this
question/difference manifesting in your email (and I may
well have misunderstood your email). I view language and
thought as processes that are intimately caught up with one
another such that it is difficult to speak of the two as
being logically distinct. As I read your emails, you seem to
be staking out a position that is somewhat more comfortable
in speaking of thinking and language as logically distinct
things.
To this point, in your email, you wrote: “The categories I
gave earlier(“relator”, “circumstance”, “process”, “entity”,
and “qualifier”) are semantic categories and not grammatical
ones. Not even an “entity” is necessarily a noun; it’s
perfectly possible to describe an apple with a clause, and
that is in fact what we do when we define it (“the apple is
a delicious fruit which appears in late summer on the boughs
of Malus pumila, the name of a species of Rosaceae”)”.
I’m still trying to understand what you mean by “semantic
categories”. This has the feeling of a language/thought
distinction but it is muddied by the fact that “semantic”
has a language-y component to it. Do you mean these in the
strict sense of “word meanings” vs. “grammatical rules”? I
would like to suggest that grammatical categories can
contain the kinds of things that you refer to as “semantic
categories”. What makes a category “semantic”?
I think that this is an important question with regard to
language and thought and the position that I am staking out
(namely, that language and thought are not logically
distinct and separate categories). I don’t think that it is
necessarily impossible to speak of language and thought as
separate things, it is obviously a useful way to carve up
the world. And, of course, there is a pre-linguistic moment
in which there was something called “thought” separate and
distinct from language, but we are now well beyond this
time. My concern is that we too easily forget that language
and thought are caught up with one other as soon as a child
is speaking. So, first question – does your semantic vs.
grammatical categories map onto the categories of thought
and language respectively? As I understand your position,
there is some parallel between these two distinctions).
To pursue this point a bit further, I think that I differ in
my interpretation of chapter 6 (but I’m not sure if I’ve
quite got your position down). In my reading of Vygotsky,
the relationship of thinking and speech is more of a
developmentally dialectical one. Across developmental time
(both phylogenetic and ontogenetic), thought is brought
together with speech and both are transformed in the process
and there are probably a few such inflections of one by the
other (and eventually these get caught up with other
dialectical processes like that between spontaneous concepts
and scientific concepts which, of course, can then transform
one’s understanding of language). Thus, the infant has
thoughts prior to speaking, but upon learning to speak,
those thoughts are transformed into something new. It isn’t
just that they give voice to something that they were
previously unable to voice but rather that in giving voice,
the actual experience of the thing is changed. In your
Strauss quote, I would want to push a bit further and say
that it isn’t simply the case that language puts pain into
words, but rather that pain actually takes on new meaning
with language.
Since it’s been a while since your post, I’ve copied three
paragraphs from your email that seemed to me to be making
the strong argument for a distinction between thought and
language - even if the two are “linked”, as you say. (I’ve
also left the original below in order to see the full
context).
“In some ways, then, speech is more differentiated, more
developed than thinking, even though, microgenetically, it
is more recent (in the same way cultural functions are more
developed and differentiated than natural functions, and
science concepts and more developed and more precisely
differentiated than everyday ones even though they are more
recently developed). This by itself is evidence that their
development is one process, and not two (because if it were
two distinct processes without any links then we would
expect that the older process would more differentiated and
developed).
“But another way to put it (that is, another way of
formulating the idea thinking and speaking are linked but
distinct) is more structural and less genetic. It is to say
that not everything we find in thinking is present in
speaking, and not everything to be found in speaking is
present in thinking. As soon as we put it this way, it
becomes clear that we need to distinguish between the
properties of language reified as a formal system for
producing actual utterances(what Vygotsky calls its “phasal”
properties, which is incorrectly translated
as “phonological”) on the one hand, and the properties of
the interface with thinking (what Vygotsky calls
its “semantic” properties, which includes the volitional-
affective substratum of speech).
“The semantic properties are not entirely present in
speaking, for some of them have evaporated (“volatilization”
is the term Vygotsky uses) in the process of speaking them.
The former, phasal, properties are not entirely present in
thinking, which often appears to come over us “all at once”
rather than in a linear, left to right, progression governed
by the rules of syntax. Thoughts occur to us, while
utterances must be articulated.”
Where I differ is in the sense in which these language and
thinking are distinct. I’m pushing for a much tighter
connection between the two such that it is very difficult to
describe conceptual thinking without considering language as
well.
There were two points that you made about the “phasal”
vs. “semantic” properties of language that did not square
with my read of Vygotsky’s Ch. 6 of thought and language.
First was the notion that the distinction between “phasal”
and “semantic” properties of language is central to
understanding the development of concepts in that the phasal
properties of language map onto syntax and the semantic
properties of language map onto thinking. Second was the
notion that “phasal” and “semantic” properties are learned
in fundamentally different ways. I think that both of these
draw a distinction between language and thought in ways that
doesn’t seem to me to jive with my understanding of
Vygotsky’s project.
To this first point, as I read this distinction
between “phasal” and “semantic” in Vygotsky, it seems that
this distinction (discussed on pp. 196-197 of Kozulin’s
translation, that is, assuming I have the right section) is
used simply as part of an analogy for understanding the move
from spontaneous to scientific concepts, and not as a
distinction relevant to the thinking vs. speech distinction.
Thus, I don’t read the “phasal” vs. “semantic” distinction
as having such a central role in the theme of the chapter
(which is about the acquisition of scientific concepts). The
phasal vs. semantic distinction appears to me to be a
distinction that he is making between the two sides of his
analogy of the learning of scientific concepts with learning
a second language (first language:second
language::spontaneous concepts:scientific concepts).
Vygotsky does note important differences between the two:
“However, while in the study of a foreign language attention
centers on the exterior, phonetic, and physical aspects of
verbal thought, in the development of scientific concepts it
centers on semantics. And since physical and semantic aspect
of speech develop along their own independent lines, our
analogy cannot be a complete one. The two developmental
processes follow separate, though similar, paths” (p. 196).
But as I read the above passage, Vygotsky is simply noting a
difference between the two latter parts of the analogy –
learning a second language is like learning a second
language EXCEPT for the fact that the former centers on
phasal aspects of verbal thought and the latter centers on
semantics. This doesn’t suggest to me that the phasal and
the sematic aspects are learned in different ways, just that
they develop “along different lines”. The point for me, is
that second language learning focuses on a different aspect
of verbal thought. Nothing is said about the nature of
acquisition of first language “phasal” properties as
compared to first language “semantic” properties – more on
this below.
But there is also another important difference. Vygotsky
writes:
“But there is also an important difference between these two
processes [of learning a second language and learning
scientific concepts]. In the case of language study, the
native language serves as an already established system of
meanings. In the acquisition of scientific concepts, the
*system* must be built simultaneously with their
development. The concept of system organization thus becomes
a crucial one” (p. 197).
It seems like the interesting and important point that he is
making is about the development of scientific concepts is
the importance of the relationship of the part to the whole.
Thus, I see the phasal vs. semantic distinction not as a
distinction between language and thought (or
phonetic/grammatical vs. semantic) but rather as a
distinction between part and whole. Vygotsky’s point about
the emphasis on the phasal properties of language seems to
me to be about how, for the second language learner, the
part is dis-connected from the whole. This differs from the
first language learner who learns language (even it’s phasal
aspects) in a purely structural way. In the case of the
second language learner, she does not learn the new word
with respect to the whole of the language. Instead, she
learns it as a part of and with respect to a different
whole, namely, her first language, and this leads to an
emphasis on the “phasal” aspects of language. E.g, for an
English speaker learning French, the French word “boeuf“ is
understood as the same thing as the English “beef” when
considered only in its part-ness and only is understood as
being different when it becomes a part of a system and the
speaker understands that French “boeuf” refers to “beef”
and “ox”. And one would want to add other distinctions such
as “sheep” vs. “mutton” as opposed to the single French
category “mouton.” And then a larger structure emerges here
in which the eating variety of the thing is a French
equivalent (boeuf>beef, mouton>mutton) whereas the word for
the living beasts have Germanic roots – and voila! we soon
discover the (cultural) concept – “French is good to eat”,
non? (and German is beastly?).
[Note: I draw on Saussure’s examples in order to again make
the point once again that Vygotsky and Saussure are both
drawing on the Hegelian-cum-Marxian (in the Grundrisse)
structuralist notion of locating the origins of meaning of
any part with respect to the whole. This doesn’t mean that
the two ideologies of language necessarily share identity,
simply that there is a great affinity in this regard.]
Now, returning the point that I would push with regard to
the distinction between the phasal/grammatical and the
semantic is that Vygotsky seems to me to be pointing to the
fact that both of these are similar in that they are
structural – in both cases the unity is necessary for
understanding the part (hence the analogy between language
learning and learning of scientific concepts). This suggests
that the phasal/grammatical properties of language have
an “all at once” quality as well as the semantic ones. One
last turn to Whorf is helpful to make this point. Whorf
nicely articulates the importance of grammatical wholes in
his notion of “grammatical categories” (for an example see
my earlier post about languages with classifiers vs.
articles and how this can encode for different processes
of “entification” – one of the “semantic categories” you
have proposed). Thus, grammar contains categories and
concepts just as semantics do (and you may have been in
agreement with me on this). And importantly, the category
(and the concept behind it) can only be seen with respect to
the larger system in which the grammatical category exists.
Thus, what I’m getting at is further evidence for how it is
that the “phasal” and the “semantic” share identity in the
sense that both require an understanding of the relationship
of the part to the whole in order to “get” it. The phasal
(grammatical) aspects of language may have a linearity in
usage, but this does not mean that it is learned linearly
(learning a second language can have this linearity, but
this is precisely what makes second language learning so
difficult, we try to incorporate the second language into
our first rather than allowing the parts to be defined
relative to the other parts).
Extending this to the argument about the learning of
scientific concepts – Vygotsky’s point seems to me to be
that the acquisition of the scientific concepts critically
changes the nature of the spontaneous concept (which can now
be seen “scientifically”). What I am suggesting is that this
is the argument that Vygotsky is making with respect to
thought and language. The acquisition of language transforms
thought and that these new possibilities for thinking (e.g.,
concepts, and later scientific concepts) transforms the
nature of language.
What I’m not understanding is how you are reading Vygotsky
as splitting apart the “phasal” and the “semantic”. It seems
that these share an identity in precisely the sense that you
are saying that they are different. That is, they are
similar in that they both contain the principle of part to
whole relationship. In order to really “get” a grammatical
or phonological aspect of language, you have to have the
whole just like in order to really “get” a “semantic” aspect
of language, you have to have the whole. It seems that both
semantic and phasal learning have an “all at once” quality
to them. This is in contrast to the argument that I took you
to be making that the phasal involves part-like learning and
the semantic involves more holistic learning.
Finally, as for the reading list that you suggested, I read
some Halliday back in the day and recall that his way of
breaking up the world was not productive for how I’ve been
thinking about things. But I’m willing to give him another
shot – did you have a piece that you might recommend?
I’d also be interested in a copy of your Lim and Kellogg
(2009) paper, I looked for it in all of the 2009 editions of
the journal Language and Education but couldn’t find it (and
for some reason my library doesn’t have access to these
articles anyways), so if you’re willing to share, I’d be
much obliged.
Again, I do sincerely appreciate your strong engagement with
my rather lengthy emails. I find this conversation to be
incredibly productive and helpful for me to better
understand how to make sense of the relationship of language
and thought, and how all of this relates to learning and
development.
Looking forward to continued conversation,
greg
>------------------------------------------------------------
----------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:42:42 -0700 (PDT)
>From: David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
>Subject: Re: [xmca] Vygotsky, Saussure, and Wolves with
different
> dreams
>To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>Message-ID: <72305.15901.qm@web110303.mail.gq1.yahoo.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
>Greg,
>Â
>Thanks for your letter, and let me first of all excuse
myself for the pedantic quality (bordering on the downright
patronizing) of this posting. The relentless didacticism is
not for a moment directed towards you personally, but rather
towards my pitiable (and as yet unknown) graduate students.
Classes start in about a week, and I am trying to make my
ideas as clear as possible in order to write them down in an
in-house textbook I am finishing up.
>Â
>As I said, Greg, Chapter Six of Thinking and Speech, is all
about non-noun concepts: “becauseâ€・ and “althoughâ€・.
Vygotsky, and Mandelstam before him, clearly says that a
word meaning is not a thing; it’s a process. I’m afraid
there isn’t any other way to interpret Paula and Carol’s
work. The concept is not in the blocks (that was Ach’s
mistake); it’s in the process of sorting them. This is
every bit as true of concepts as it is of heaps and
complexes.
>Â
>The categories I gave earlier (“relatorâ€・,
“circumstanceâ€・, “processâ€・, “entityâ€・, and
“qualifierâ€・) are semantic categories and not grammatical
ones. Not even an “entityâ€・ is necessarily a noun; it’s
perfectly possible to describe an apple with a clause, and
that is in fact what we do when we define it (“the apple
is a delicious fruit which appears in late summer on the
boughs of Malus pumila, the name of a species of
Rosaceaeâ€・).
>Â
>It’s just that in English the end state of most
logogenesis about apples is nominal. So the canonical,
default realization of an entity like an apple is a noun.
If English were a language spoken entirely by apple farmers
who for some reason exported their entire crop, we would
probably consider the root concept of “appleâ€・ a verb,
since we would spend our days talking of how to apple or
perhaps going appling or sitting around applizing.
>Â
>I have read and I heartily approve your reading list
(Klein, Karmiloff-Smith, etc.) Perhaps I might add to the
list Halliday, who gave me the categories of “relatorâ€・,
“circumstanceâ€・, “processâ€・, “entityâ€・, etc.) and
of course Wallace Chafe (“Discourse in Timeâ€・). There is
also my own work, especially Lim and Kellogg 2009, in
Language and Education.
>Â
>I don’t insist on the statement that articles inflect for
time; the notions of “inflectionâ€・ and “timeâ€・ imply
a formalist approach to language that is quite alien to the
way I really think. I was trying to make a point about your
taxonomy, which I find rather formalistic for my own use. In
the classroom, where I work, articles are important for
conveying (or, if you like, indexing) concepts. I don’t
think that they “createâ€・ concepts any more than I think
that tense creates time.
>Â
>I think that everything you have said about articles can be
used to demonstrate that verbs do not inflect for time
either (e.g. “It is high time you did your homework.â€・)
Here too I am agreeable; we can say that verbs changes are
called tense and not time and that tense is a purely formal
category with only a passing acquaintance (a notional
relationship) with the semantic category of time. Chinese
works very well without tense, and so, for that matter, does
English (e.g. when you have to tell a story backwards, from
effect to cause, you do not use tense to do this).
>Â
>As I said, I think most languages are superior to English
for the purpose of conveying concepts outside a very narrow
range of peculiarly English ones (e.g. “Misterâ€・). But in
general that is true of all languages; a language gets good
at the range of activities that its speakers indulge in, and
no language community indulges in the whole range of human
experience. The difference is that English has apparently
been “chosenâ€・ as our world language. As I said, I think
it has been so because of its anti-egalitarian and
ultimately anti-educational qualities; languages of prestige
and power are invariable impractical in obvious ways.
>Â
>Let me talk a moment about why I think it’s important to
distinguish between the formal properties of language, which
are expressed in linear ways, and the semantic ones, which I
think are not so (paradoxically, time is not expressed in
language through time; only tense is expressed through time).
>Â
>The Vygotskyan position is that thinking and speech are
linked, but distinct. One way to put this (Vygotsky’s way)
is to say that thinking is not expressed in speech but
realized in speech. As Richard Strauss wrote:
>Â
>Flamand: The infant’s cry of pain came before language!
>Olivier: But only words can explain what pain means.
>Â
>In some ways, then, speech is more differentiated, more
developed than thinking, even though, microgenetically, it
is more recent (in the same way cultural functions are more
developed and differentiated than natural functions, and
science concepts and more developed and more precisely
differentiated than everyday ones even though they are more
recently developed). This by itself is evidence that their
development is one process, and not two (because if it were
two distinct processes without any links then we would
expect that the older process would more differentiated and
developed).
>Â
>But another way to put it (that is, another way of
formulating the idea thinking and speaking are linked but
distinct) is more structural and less genetic. It is to say
that not everything we find in thinking is present in
speaking, and not everything to be found in speaking is
present in thinking. As soon as we put it this way, it
becomes clear that we need to distinguish between the
properties of language reified as a formal system for
producing actual utterances(what Vygotsky calls its
“phasalâ€・ properties, which is incorrectly translated as
“phonologicalâ€・) on the one hand, and the properties of
the interface with thinking (what Vygotsky calls its
“semanticâ€・ properties, which includes the volitional-
affective substratum of speech).
>Â
>The semantic properties are not entirely present in
speaking, for some of them have evaporated
(“volatilizationâ€・ is the term Vygotsky uses) in the
process of speaking them. The former, phasal, properties are
not entirely present in thinking, which often appears to
come over us “all at onceâ€・ rather than in a linear, left
to right, progression governed by the rules of syntax.
Thoughts occur to us, while utterances must be articulated.
>Â
>But as Goldwin-Meadow says, language is resilient stuff.
Almost everything in the human experience (and then some)
can make it into language as one way or another, and so it
is possible to semanticize its phasal properties just as it
is possible to render more phasal its semantic properties.
When we do this, however, we often find ourselves s This was
(I think) the great discovery of Jane Austen and other women
English novelists (e.g. George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell)
at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
>Â
>Virginia Woolf notes somewhere in “A Room of Her Ownâ€・
that the typical sentence at the end of the eighteenth
century was something like:
>Â
>"The grandeur of their works was an argument with them, not
to stop short, but to proceed. They could have no higher
excitement or satisfaction than in the exercise of their art
and endless generation of truth and beauty. Success prompts
to exertion; and habit facilitates success".
>Â
>You can see that the phasal structure of these sentences is
actually quite simple: “A was B (not to C but to D). They
had no E but F. G leads to H and H leads to more G.â€・
>You can also see that it is noun-filled (A through G) and
static, and that it literally winds up in a circle (from G
back to more G, which is really A, B, D, and F in disguise).
>Â
>Woolf compares this with what she calls Jane Austen’s
“shapely sentencesâ€・. She doesn’t actually tell us what
is shapely about an Austenian sentence, but most Austen fans
(and I am one) can tell you anyway: Austen’s sentences
unfold a character’s feelings as thoughts, and thoughts as
words, often in the form of a long, undulating relative
clause or series of relative clauses. Thinking is a form of
feeling in Austen, and both are realized in speech.
>Â
>>From this alone we can see that a single text has several
different semantic layers: mental, verbal, material. The
organization of these layers is linked but it is also
distinct, and when we penetrate the bottom layer the top
layer may disappear from view. For example, if we read the
Arabian Nights as a single utterance, we are left with a
story about a lady who for some mysterious reason is worried
about having her head cut off: Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba
appear only as delaying tactics or bad jokes told on the
scaffold. When we decompose it into its component tales (as
it must have been composed), it is Scheherazade who
virtually disappears.
>Â
>Mike is quite right to say that xmca threads are complexive
and sometimes even syncretic in their structure. But when we
decompose them into their components, we discover that the
things that are being grouped together complexively and
syncretically are not objects at all, but rather concepts
(“influenceâ€・, for example, which Vygotsky reminds us
means “in flowingâ€・).
>Â
>Hemingway, a writer whose psychology is almost entirely
behaviorist, liked to begin stories in the way you describe,
e.g.
>Â
>“He came back into the room. The body was still on the
floor.â€・
>Â
>The writer pretends to treat the reader as an insider,
privy to direct, unmediated, visual-graphic information.
>Â
>The reader, excruciatingly conscious of his outsider
status, has to read forward in order to catch up on what he
has been missing. But Hemingway is a small boy playing with
words; his technique is only a clumsy grammaticization of
the semantic trope of Homer known as “in res mediaâ€・. He
only succeeds in conveying the rather phoney and
characteristically macho idea that somehow unmediated
experience is truer, and if you gotta ask you ain’t never
gonna know.
>Â
>Why did Hemingway, who so admired Tolstoy, learn so little
from him? Hemingway apparently thought that he was
rejuvenating writing by bringing it back to the simplest
experiences, e.g. death. But of course death is NOT simple
to write about and of course it is one of the few
experiences about which we write that we CANNOT undergo
first hand. One of the few writers who tried to do this was
Marcel Proust, who apparently directed that his jottings
from his own deathbed struggles should be incorporated into
“A la recherche du temps perduâ€・. (Years later, another
French writer, whose name escapes me, tried to repeat the
experiment while he was dying of AIDS, and the only sentence
I can remember from it is “J’ai retrouve mes muscles
d’enfant.â€・)
>Â
>Unlike Hemingway, Proust really does rejuvenate writing by
bringing it back to the simplest experiences, but they are
the most readily experiential experiences, like trying to
fall asleep and eating a morsel of cake dipped in tea and
then trying to remember something that you have forgotten
but not forgotten about.
>Â
>And here, with the distinction between remembering and
remembering about, we really are quite close to the
distinction Vygotsky makes in Chapter Six between the
“phasalâ€・ (phonological but also grammatical) properties
of language and the semantic (volitional-affective, but also
pragmatic). Articles are clearly of the former, but concepts
partake of the latter.
>Â
>David Kellogg
>Seoul National University of Education
>
---------------------------------------
Greg Thompson
Ph.D. Candidate
The Department of Comparative Human Development
The University of Chicago
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