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Re: [xmca] conservation
Hi, all,
Martin's example is wonderful. But assuming that there's something
perceptual is a much less parsimonious hypothesis than exploring in
depth the issue or word meaning or a conversational feature, for
example. Was the question followed up by others? Often, in
conservation tasks the experimenter falls to the temptation to bring
about "spectacular effects" and fails to test whether there are
simpler ways to account for the child's answers. Sorry, but still
skeptical.
Jorge
Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
Profesor Asociado y Director
Departamento de Psicología
Universidad de los Andes
On Feb 26, 2010, at 9:52 AM, Martin Packer wrote:
David, Mike, Jorge...
I do know Margaret Donaldson's book questioning the child's
understanding of the researcher's language in conservation and other
Piagetian tasks. And just recently Rod mentioned Valerie
Walkerdine's work showing how 'more' and 'less' are understood in
terms of everyday family practices.
But I show a brief video when I teach this topic in my undergraduate
classes; I think it may even have come with Mike's textbook, as an
instructor's resource. I watched it again yesterday. In one segment,
the adult places one graham cracker in front of the child and two in
front of herself, then asks, do you think that we shared those
fairly? The child looks mildly offended and says no, because you
have two and I have this. The adult then breaks the child's cracker
into two pieces! She asks, now is it fair? The child replies, with a
big smile, yes, because we both have two!
I can't convince myself that this is entirely a linguistic
phenomenon, though differences in word meaning may certainly play a
role. There's something perceptual too. At this time in his work,
although Vygotsky had died before any conservation tasks were
performed, Piaget was still arguing that the child needs to come to
appreciate basic dualisms, such as that between appearance and
reality. Vygotsky, of course, argues forcefully against this in
Thought and Language. How would he have extended the arguments he
made about egocentric speech to lack of conversation? Would he have
suggested that changing word meaning transforms the child's
perception, so a cracker broken in half no longer is perceived as two?
Martin
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