Re: [xmca] moral life of babies

[Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu>]

Yes, very juicy matters indeed!

A few comments until I've had time to try to work out a more general proposal -- and that might take me a while longer than it will Martin, as the baby case is not one I have been focusing on. But the issue of the relationship of semiosis, representation, and action is, including in evolution and development.

I think the most important point to make is this: semiosis is a form of action and an aspect of pretty much all human activity, including for infants, and I'll even go all the way out on the limb and say even pre-birth, though that's still a guess at this point. The second point is that semiosis does not need to have anything to do with representation. In fact, I agree with Mark Bickhard and others who have done semiotic and actional analyses of even the best philosophical views of representation and find them "incoherent", which more or less means they just can't be made to make sense if you push hard enough. Meaning, in short, is not representational at all. Representations are at most tools in the process of making meaning, signs or perhaps just sign-vehicles (signifiers, Peircean representamina). 

Insofar as "schemas" are thought of in purely cognitive terms as mental representations they are incoherent on two counts: because mental does not usually imply bodily-actional or body-environment inter-actional, and because nothing represents anything else apart from taking part in an actional process of meaning-making (i.e. semiosis, or maybe better semiotic action/activity). So in that sense they would hardly be candidates for proto-concepts.

Part of the problem is, as Martin notes in the case of Mandler, that if you assume that concepts are mental representations, then schemas look more promising as precursors and you just look for the "right" kind.

Alternatively, reconceptualize "concepts" as some sort of analyst's abstractions from patterns of meaningful and meaning-making behavior/action/interaction/activity (easier maybe to call it inter-activity), and then one looks for what kinds of activity form the precursors. Which seems to be Etienne's move in suggesting "reciprocity" not as a concept, or as having a proto-concept precursor in giving-and-receiving. Marcel Mauss, by the way, is a major source for Bourdieu, and his famous book is The Gift. I think he is also a major influence on Levi-Strauss and his analysis of kinship exchange systems, and L-S explicitly notes the similarity to language structures. Piaget in turn is influenced in part by L-S, and maybe by Mauss directly, in his version of structuralism: that systems of relations of relations (in formal terms) are fundamental to meaningful human systems of behavior, whether (for L-S) cultural activity (like who marries whom) or language semantics or village architecture (or systems of related myths), or for Piaget of operations and transformations first on objects and later on concepts. As Etienne notes, Piaget's view of the sensorimotor to conceptual developmental transition is a bit hazy, but that is because in part he was  not trying to show actual developmental progressions, he was trying to figure out the historical and logical roots of core (i.e. Kantian) meaning categories by looking for developmental precursors, using the formal-logical analogies of structuralism. 

The direction I am trying to go with this is to redefine "concepts" or conceptual thinking as a form of action, with its roots in interaction/inter-activity as a meaningful motor complex, and more or less cut the "mental" out altogether, along with notions of representation. Mark Bickhard, who has perhaps the most powerful critique of representatlonalism around (he calls his alternative, which is more or less in the same direction as mine, interactionism) was a student of Gene Gendlin (U of Chicago), who did some very interesting phenomenology of social interactivity, though he is better known for his work on body-centric psychotherapy and a colleague of Don Campbell, one of the key philosophers of emergentism. This whole intellectual tradition  was somewhat overshadowed, esp in the US, in the 70s-80s by the then dominant cognitivist school, and offers, I think, a much better alternative that fits with more distributed, situated, activity-based approaches to understanding the development of meaningfulness. It certainly seems to me to fit better with LSV than do mental representation approaches.

I think it is very likely that giving-and-receiving is one of the fundamental building-blocks of an inter-activity model of the development of a number of key aspects of language (cf. Ron Scollon's work on "handing over") and very likely of "sharing" as an ingredient in cultural models of moral behavior. The problem with lab setups to "test" infants' moral appreciation is that they don't allow us to see what ELSE normally gets integrated along the developmental pathways for various adult functionings -- what other actional and inter-activity processes get networked together in new ways through participation in the ordinary activities of the culture around infants?

JAY.



Jay Lemke
Professor (Adjunct, 2009-2010)
Educational Studies
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
www.umich.edu/~jaylemke 

Visiting Scholar
Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
University of California -- San Diego
La Jolla, CA
USA 92093







On May 7, 2010, at 8:37 PM, Larry Purss wrote:

> Martin
> I just wanted to respond very positively to the way you have analyzed an immense amount of research and created linkages to the underlying BASIC ASSUMPTIONS of various theories of the formation of mind.
> 
> You mentioned that sensorimotor functions are NOT REPRESENTATIONS and NOT SEMIOTIC.  In fact they are interactional patterns of living in the world.  Piaget sees them as physical and NOT social.  
> Then you add  "that is a topic for another day."
> That topic for another day is what fascinates me and I'm holding my breath waiting for the next installment.  I hope you keep avoiding thinking about the implications of what your students have learned and add another installment in this ongoing saga of the origins of meaning and concepts [as originating in socially situated practices]
> 
> Larry
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
> Date: Friday, May 7, 2010 2:48 pm
> Subject: Re: [xmca] moral life of babies
> To: lchcmike@gmail.com, "eXtended Mind, Culture,  Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> 
>> On May 7, 2010, at 9:26 AM, mike cole wrote:
>> 
>>> If we are going to get keep into this, the work of Jean 
>> Mandler seems to
>>> require some kind of consideration. She quite explicitly 
>> critiques the
>>> "sensori-motor first"
>>> idea in Piaget's version of it which seems a least similar to Jay's
>>> formuation.
>> 
>> I had a couple of hours to spare today, and to avoid thinking 
>> about the implications of the indications in my last classes of 
>> the semester that none of my students have learned anything at 
>> all, I immersed myself in a few of Jean Mandler's texts. My 
>> conclusions, for what they are worth, follow...
>> 
>> Mandler is interested in the kind of knowledge that infants must 
>> have to be able to learn language, in particular. She argues 
>> that Piagetian sensorimotor (SM) schemas are not a sufficient 
>> basis for the acquisition of language; she asserts that Piaget 
>> too saw this. The "gap" in his theory is that he did not specify 
>> in any detail the new kinds of representations which he proposed 
>> become possible at the end of the SM period. Also, since speech 
>> begins well before the end of the SM stage, psychologists have 
>> needed to try to explain early speech in purely SM terms, with 
>> little success. 
>> 
>> Mandler is a typical information-processing psychologist. She 
>> takes for granted that *all* knowledge has the character of a 
>> representation. So it is not a question for her whether SM 
>> schemas are representations; she simply assumes that they are. 
>> The question for Mandler is whether they are *the right kind* of 
>> representation, and the problem she claims to find in Piaget's 
>> analysis is that SM schemas are "the wrong kind" for the 
>> acquisition of language and for the development of the other 
>> higher cognitive functions. This 'representationalist' 
>> assumption becomes very clear in the opening sentence of the 
>> abstract of one of her articles: "It is agreed that infants 
>> require pre-existing conceptual meanings to learn language…." 
>> (Mandler, 1994, p. 63). Agreed by whom, one wonders. Not be LSV, 
>> for one. Mandler's theory follows closely the general lines of 
>> Fodor's representational theory of mind, a central claim of 
>> which is that there is an innate, representational language of 
>> thought. 
>> 
>> Why are SM schemas inadequate, "not the right sort of 
>> representation for learning language"? (p. 367 of Mandler's 
>> chapter in Language and Space By Paul Bloom, Mary A. Peterson, 
>> Merrill F. Garrett, 1999, MIT Press). The problem is that they 
>> are "procedural," and so cannot serve a semiotic function, as 
>> Piaget himself explained. They are at best indexical, enabling 
>> the infant to recognize familiar objects and for one component 
>> of an event to signal what is to come next. Mandler argues that 
>> "a sensorimotor schema does not allow independent access to its 
>> parts for purposes of denotation or to enable the baby to think 
>> independently of the activation of the schema itself" (367). 
>> Such claims are a little hard to parse. What would thinking be 
>> 'independently' of a scheme's activation? Surely for Piaget this 
>> *is* what thinking is for an infant? The point seems to be that 
>> Mandler wants to describes the difference between SM schemes and 
>> later knowledge in terms of a distinction between procedural 
>> knowledge and declarative knowledge. The former, she asserts, is 
>> inaccessible to consciousness, while the latter is explicit 
>> knowledge that is accessible to consciousness. Conceptual 
>> thinking, she proposes, requires conscious awareness. 
>> 
>> Furthermore, since SM schemas "structure perception and control 
>> action" this implies, for Mandler, that they have "continuously 
>> varying" and "rapidly shifting" parameters, which in turn 
>> implies that they cannot "be mapped into a discrete 
>> propositional system." Putting a spoon in a bowl, for example, 
>> calls for "an intricate sequence of movements." This kind of 
>> knowledge is quite distinct from conceptual knowledge, she 
>> argues, because "the conceptual system greatly simplifies it, 
>> forming a summary of the event that constitutes its meaning." 
>> 
>> Mandler's point seems to be that once language is acquired, it 
>> will traffic in representations such as "one object containing 
>> another," rather than the procedural knowledge of how to *put* 
>> one object inside another. Clearly here she is privileging the 
>> propositional (declarative) aspect of speech, and downplaying 
>> its  practical, pragmatic character. This is, to put it 
>> lightly, a weakness in her approach.
>> 
>> Mandler seems to be a member of the camp that attributes 
>> everything to the child once they start to speak. LSV's argument 
>> against Stern applies equally to Mandler. Stern, LSV wrote, was 
>> proposing an "intellectualist" theory that was fundamentally 
>> anti-genetic: ""This is the fundamental error of any 
>> intellectualist theory. In its attempt to explain, it begins 
>> with what needs explanation" (T&L, p. 94). In the same way, 
>> Mandler proposes that "the underlying concepts needed  to 
>> learn grammatical categories are ntions such as 'actionality,' ' 
>> objecthood,' 'agent,' 'location,' and 'possession,' as though 
>> these are abstract concepts that a child will have available the 
>> instant they are able to talk grammatically, rather than being 
>> notions implicit in the language system that the child only 
>> gradually figures out.
>> 
>> In addition to her critique of Piaget, Mandler examines and 
>> discards the associationist account of concept formation, in 
>> which perceptional similarity of exemplars provides the basis 
>> for  generalization which will form superordinate concepts. 
>> Eimas and others believe that 6 month old infants' ability to 
>> make perceptual discriminations (between horses and zebras, for 
>> example) is the basis for the first concepts. Mandler's 
>> objection is that this approach can't explain the formation of 
>> important properties such as 'animate.' Nor can it explain the 
>> transition from perceptual categories to "more abstract or 
>> theory-laden" concepts. Mandler claims that her research shows 
>> that 7 month olds have already formed concepts such as animal 
>> vehicle, and plant. She interprets this as evidence that infants 
>> actually form 'global' categories first, and only later 
>> differentiate among various exemplars. 
>> 
>> Mandler's own proposal is that there exists in infancy a 
>> "preverbal propositional representational system" (373). The 
>> representations in this system have the form of "image-schemas," 
>> a type of spatial representation "of a special kind" which has 
>> an analog (continuous) character but at the same time provides 
>> "some of the desirable characteristics of propositional 
>> representations." They "form discrete meaning packages," and 
>> they can be "combined both sequentially and recursively" with 
>> one another. They provide "an excellent medium to bridge the 
>> transition from prelinguistic to linguistic representation" (373).
>> 
>> How is an image-schema different from a perceptual 
>> representation?  Each image-scheme "represents a meaning" 
>> (1994, p. 63). Although they are based upon perceptual 
>> information, this information is "redescribed" into "simplified 
>> spatial representations." The advantage of these, for Mandler, 
>> is that they provide the child with "an analogue-digital 
>> interface": perception is analog (continuous), while language, 
>> she asserts, is made up of 'discrete propositional forms." 
>> 
>> For example, an infant watching an object move will form an 
>> image-schema of its path, without regard to the kind of object. 
>> The analysis of paths that the image-schema makes possible then 
>> provides the basis for concepts such as animal (because animals 
>> move in a particular way). Such "kinetic" representations are 
>> abstract and non-perceptual, the earliest kinds of conceptual 
>> meanings. They are an intermediary between perception and 
>> language. 
>> 
>> But is it in fact the case that for Piaget, SM schemas are 
>> representations, a matter of "perceptual categories and motor 
>> routines," as Mandler puts it? In fact Piaget claims that it is 
>> only at the end of infancy that "the semiotic function" makes 
>> its appearance. SM schemas are not representations, they are 
>> patterns of interaction with the world the child lives in 
>> (primarily the physical rather than the social world, to be 
>> sure, but that is an argument for another day). Schemas enable 
>> an infant to achieve a practical classification of objects as, 
>> for example, 'suckables.' These practical classifications become 
>> progressively differentiated and coordinated during infancy. In 
>> Piaget's account, this process eventually enables the transition 
>> to representational knowledge. Having read several times the 
>> book "Play, Dreams, and Imitation," where Piaget tries to 
>> explain this transition I have to say I find it unconvincing. 
>> But the important here is that Piaget did not consider SM 
>> schemas to be representations. They are forms imposed on the 
>> infant's actions, actions which are intentional and consciously 
>> directed. 
>> 
>> A paper by Müller and Overton (1994) makes many of the same 
>> points I have  made here. They argue that "Mandler’s and 
>> allied proposals have tended to throw out the baby with the bath 
>> water. In this respect, our thesis will be that an action-based 
>> logic is a necessary prerequisite for the competence of mental 
>> representation and that this remains an indispensable feature of 
>> any coherent theory of infant cognition." They list 6 problems 
>> that image-schema theory is unable to overcome, most seriously 
>> that it too (like Piaget) fails to explain how the capacity for 
>> representation becomes possible. Since image-schemas are, by 
>> definition, inaccessible to consciousness, they cannot be used 
>> by an intentional agent to refer to some object or event. 
>> 
>> Finally, I think Etienne is absolutely correct to insist that we 
>> consider the social situation that is defined by the 
>> experimental settings of infant research. Much of Mandler's own 
>> work involve 'preference tasks' in which infants are seated, 
>> observing visual displays. In such situations, perception is 
>> divorced from action and the child is separated from important 
>> adults. Dubious metatheoretical assumptions are built into this 
>> situation.  
>> 
>> Martin
>> 
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