Re: [xmca] conservation

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Can I say also that I don't think I said anything about a competence, underlying or characterizing a specific age, or whatever. I was thinking only about the child's performance in the moment. Is the child 'merely' using words in a manner that is tailored to the face to face interaction that she finds herself engaged in? Or is it necessary to consider also the way the child, equally immediately in the moment, sees the objects as they are transformed in front of her, and how she is thinking about what is going on? I am suggesting that yes, we need to consider these other aspects too. To understand them I am sure we would need to dig deeper than the face-to-face interaction of the moment, and explore the child's changing involvement over longer time periods in enduring practices. But one step at a time! If it can all be explained parsimoniously (to borrow Jorge's term) by features of the interactants' discourse in the task then none of this will be necessary. But (there I go again) I am suggesting it cannot.

Martin

On Feb 27, 2010, at 1:50 PM, mike cole wrote:

> Sorry, I hit a wrong key and sent by mistake.
> Added comments below in blue so they are in context.
> 
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 10:43 AM, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> Martin: Here is what i understood David Ki to be saying (me in red):
>> 
>> "The very idea of looking for the "real" capability of the child at a given
>> stage of development is problematic, as different practices entail different
>> usages (thereby creating different intra/inter-mental functional systems).
>> Now people do develop as they grow older, but this has as much to do with
>> coordinating diverse practices as it does with any basic changes in the
>> "underlying" (i.e., organismic) capabilities. (which I would phrase as
>> "the heterochronic biological changes the child is undergoing become
>> intertwined in heterogeneous ways in a given event").
>> 
> 
> As it is developing, this line of discussion is carrying us back to issues
> that David K has been raising about processes of development envisioned in
> LSV chapter on problem of age. In particular, for me, it bring us back to
> our conception of the social situation of development. In this discussion
> it is the face to face interaction that corresponds to the social situation
> of development. I do not believe this is what LSV had in mind. I have great
> difficulty in discerning the referents to this term by different writers.
> 
> mike
> 
> PS-- Michael G: Gelman was writing as a confirmed developmental learning
> theorist at the time of that study. She has subsequently taken what I am
> sure she believes as a non-descartian point of view, rightly or wrongly.
> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 9:27 AM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
>> 
>>> But David, I am not by any means saying that language is not important,
>>> nor that it is not embedded in cultural practices. But LSV - in Thought &
>>> Language for example, but elsewhere too - was very critical of approaches
>>> that reduced ontogenesis to a single function, such as language. And looking
>>> at the work of Perret-Clemond, sent to me in an individual message, it seems
>>> to me that what we find there at least is an analysis of discourse that does
>>> well to include the adult, but then rather loses track of the child. There
>>> are certainly forms of psychology, such as discursive psychology in the UK
>>> and elsewhere, that are unwilling to consider more than language and propose
>>> that all psychological phenomena are in fact discursive phenomena. I find
>>> that an interesting approach, but it was not Vygotsky's, and I was asking in
>>> my original message for a Vygotskian explanation of failure to conserve.
>>> LSV seems very adamant that psychology, as he conceives it, is the study of
>>> consciousness. That does not mean introspection, because for LSV Cs is our
>>> relation to the world, and it is social first and individual only
>>> subsequently. But nonetheless the Cs of a child is not something we can
>>> observe directly, and (he says) we have to reconstruct it from its traces.
>>> Many of those traces are in discourse, for sure. But LSV tells us that Cs is
>>> always a dynamic system of psychological functions, of which language is
>>> only one.  I don't see the effort to reconstruct the child's perception and
>>> thinking in a conservation task as a fruitless search for a "real"
>>> capability if that means something independent of the child's embeddedness
>>> in relations with others: LSV insisted that the "social situation" was a
>>> crucial aspect.
>>> 
>>> Too many 'buts' in this message! But that's life
>>> 
>>> Martin
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Feb 26, 2010, at 11:18 PM, David H Kirshner wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Martin said:
>>>> 
>>>>> And then, most intriguing and puzzling of course, the fact that she
>>> relaxes contentedly when her cracker is divided in two. What kind of
>>> language game about 'fair' would one have to be playing to think it fair
>>> when the other person has two crackers and one has only two halves?
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> It's difficult to say what kind of language game is being played. But
>>> the burden of proof really is on the other side. Piaget posited stages as
>>> delimiting CAPABILITIES, not just practices. Now imagine that little girl
>>> from the videotape at the dinner table as her brother reaches over to divide
>>> her cracker in two to make it "fair." Are you sure she "relaxes contentedly"
>>> in this scenario? Or does she run to Mommy: "It's not fair...."
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> The claim that language matters in such tasks isn't tantamount to
>>>> 
>>>> "fall[ing] into the general tendency of many of those who adopt
>>> unquestioningly the representational model of mind (i.e., that people know
>>> the world through their mental representations), that the child has mental
>>> representations from the outset. That in these tasks the child *sees* the
>>> same things as the adult, and merely *talks* about them differently."
>>>> 
>>>> Rather it is positing that language use is embedded in social/cultural
>>> practices. The very idea of looking for the "real" capability of the child
>>> at a given stage of development is problematic, as different practices
>>> entail different usages. Now people do develop as they grow older, but this
>>> has as much to do with coordinating diverse practices as it does with any
>>> basic changes in the "underlying" (i.e., organismic) capabilities.
>>>> 
>>>> David
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> -----Original Message-----
>>>> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
>>> On Behalf Of Martin Packer
>>>> Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 3:05 PM
>>>> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
>>>> Subject: Re: [xmca] conservation
>>>> 
>>>> David writes:
>>>> 
>>>> "Fair" and "not fair," as with "more," "less," and "same," are bound
>>>> into a variety of broad cultural practices that could be seen as
>>>> absorbing children's responses in these experiments..."
>>>> 
>>>> Of course, these experiments would be impossible without language and
>>> the child's familiarity with a variety of cultural practices. The whole
>>> set-up of being questioned by a strange adult is familiar to some children,
>>> not to others. My main point  was that I can't bring myself to accept that
>>> what goes on in a conservation task is *solely* a consequence of the fact
>>> that child and adult interpret the words differently or, for that matter,
>>> that child and adult interpret the situation and its demands differently.
>>>> 
>>>> What is hard to convey, yet compelling, about the video I mentioned is
>>> the quality of the non-verbal component. The child's excitement when the
>>> crackers are brought out. Her expression of disappointment and puzzlement
>>> when the experimenter distributes them unfairly. And then, most intriguing
>>> and puzzling of course, the fact that she relaxes contentedly when her
>>> cracker is divided in two. What kind of language game about 'fair' would one
>>> have to be playing to think it fair when the other person has two crackers
>>> and one has only two halves?
>>>> 
>>>> Mike, thanks for the pointers to relevant literature. I suppose I am
>>> simply trying to resolve my own confusion, having taught one week LSV's
>>> critique of Piaget's early concept of ecogentrism, then the next week taught
>>> Piaget's explanation of failure to conserve. LSV rejected Piaget's proposal
>>> (or assumption) that the child is animistic and syncretic in their
>>> reasoning, and this because they are individualistic, verging on autistic,
>>> and need to be socialized. He certainly didn't accept Piaget's view that the
>>> world simply IS dualistic (thought versus matter, external versus internal,
>>> object versus sign)  and the child has to learn (be forced actually) to
>>> accept this, to accommodate to the demands of this reality and give up
>>> fanciful assimilation.
>>>> 
>>>> By the time of the conservation tasks Piaget's explanation of the limits
>>> of cognition in early childhood was different. As I understand it, it was
>>> that the forms of mental representation which the child is capable of at
>>> this age are limited. They are static and centered: the child is able to
>>> represent states of affairs but not their transformations, and will tend to
>>> focus on one dimension or aspect of a multi-dimensional situation. Since the
>>> child cannot form a mental representation of the pouring of liquid or the
>>> flattening of clay they cannot think about these transformations. Because
>>> they cannot think about the transformations their reasoning is dominated by
>>> their perception (of states), and perception in these experiments is
>>> misleading.
>>>> 
>>>> Egocentrism (as in the 3 mountain task, for example) is now just one
>>> manifestation of these characteristics of representation, not the central
>>> theoretical concept as it was in Piaget's earlier work. But in several ways
>>> the moral is the same. The child must come to recognize the distinction
>>> between appearance and reality. The child must come to appreciate that
>>> another person has a distinct point of view. And in all this language plays
>>> no constitutive role, it is simply the medium of expression of the child's
>>> thought.
>>>> 
>>>> LSV of course was very critical of this last point, and those
>>> contemporary researchers who have paid more attention to the linguistic
>>> demands of the task are clearly onto something important. But it seems to me
>>> that they fall into the general tendency of many of those who adopt
>>> unquestioningly the representational model of mind (i.e., that people know
>>> the world through their mental representations), that the child has mental
>>> representations from the outset. That in these tasks the child *sees* the
>>> same things as the adult, and merely *talks* about them differently. As Lara
>>> says, that is considering only language without considering the relationship
>>> between language and thought.
>>>> 
>>>> This is the age where LSV emphasizes that the child's perception has
>>> been completely transformed by language. The child, he says, now perceives a
>>> world of things with definite meanings, because language has broken the
>>> world in ordered objects. "At the end of [infancy]," he writes, "the child
>>> begins to experience, for the first time, a structurally- and
>>> objectively-formed world," as "speech changes the structure of perception,"
>>> to a kind of seeing, he suggests, that finds more in an object than what is
>>> immediately given in the perceptual act. Thinking too is transformed at the
>>> end of infancy, it is no longer completely perceptual but now also verbal;
>>> it is a ""visual-practical restructuring of the perceived field."
>>>> 
>>>> The child now "sees more" in each object. I can only think that LSV's
>>> explanation of failure to conserve would have started here. The child sees
>>> each half of her cracker as more than it is. I don't mean she sees more
>>> cracker, I mean that she sees, perhaps, a unit, a "one" and then a "two."
>>> Only later will she become able to see that one unit may both be equal to
>>> and different from another unit: that her "one cracker" is both equivalent
>>> to and yet not equal to the adult's "one cracker." LSV suggests that at this
>>> stage word and object are not yet differentiated: could it be that in
>>> counting the child transforms the objects in front of her own eyes? Her
>>> words have a direct impact on her perception. Later attention and memory
>>> will direct and correct this new way of seeing. For the moment the child's
>>> use of speech has brought a new order to her consciousness of the world. It
>>> is not yet the order that adults have, but neither is it an inadequate
>>> adaptation to a built-in dualism.
>>>> 
>>>> Martin
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Feb 26, 2010, at 10:32 AM, mike cole wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> Dear Columbian colleagues--- The literature on this topic goes way back
>>> both
>>>>> historically and ontogenetically.
>>>>> 
>>>>> At I noted earlier, some of the early work is summarized in LCHC (1983)
>>>>> which is in the lchc publications at lchc.ucsd.edu. There is a book by
>>>>> Micahel Siegal (1991) on this topic, and article by Rochel Gelman early
>>>>> on, 1972. This same line of discussion generated the "its all there at
>>>>> birth" literature by, among others, Baillargeon, Spelke, Wynn, et al.
>>> for
>>>>> conservation of number, causality, etc.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Other than Martin's initial question about LSV's view, in what context
>>> to
>>>>> what ends would you like to take this up?
>>>>> 
>>>>> Back on the weekend.
>>>>> mike
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <
>>>>> jlarream@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> 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
>>>>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>>>>> xmca mailing list
>>>>>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>>>>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
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