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Re: [xmca] Dialogue on Concepts Part 1 Released!









Mike:
 
You are right to imply that I was using the Tolman article as a springboard for diving into my own concerns. But I had reasons. (For example, Tolman restricts his remarks to "adult" activity, to which child activity is merely foreplay. I beg to differ.)
 
Tolman summarizes the Activity Theory position extremely well and counterposes it excellently to the "contextualist" point of view point by point:
 
a) The rejection of "variables" in a mathematically functionalist sense. (But of course Leontiev does accept the use of variables in a psychologically functionalist sense, and "motive", "goal" etc. are nothing if not variables.)
 
b) The idea of appropriation as an internal link between the individual and society rather than an external clamp that joins the two (but of course "appropriation" without "interiorization", without semiosis, has the same problem).
 
c) The "societal" nature of of human ontogeny; that is, its link to a division of labor. (But of course there is a division of labor in animals, and in many important ways Leontiev's beaters are much closer to a pack of hyenas trying to corner a stray gazelle that a lion has overlooked than they are to, for example, a group of xmca-nauts seeking a way of applying CHAT to teacher training).   
 
I am quite ready to accept that the approaches are fundamentally different and that the difference lies in the very philosophical soil in which each approach takes root. (I am not really sure, though, that the rich black subsoil of Activity Theory is German, though!)
 
The problem is that just as the contextualist view seems to distinguish itself insufficiently from organicist and even mechanist views, the Activity Theory position seems to me to distinguish itself insufficiently from the contextualist one.
 
The Activity Theory position does, however, succeed in distinguishing itself from Vygotsky's own view, which I take to be that what is peculiarly human about human consciousness is not social organization or even societal organization but the way in both of these are realized in SEMIOTIC organization. 
 
Semiosis is really the form that societal relations take in psychological relations; the mind is, in that sense, a text (think of how memory works). In a completely non-metaphorical sense, the mind is a producer of text, which is another way of saying that it is a discourse. 
 
Teaching discourse strikes me as being a peculiarly human form of social relations; every bit as distant from Leontiev's hunt example as the hunt example is from the catfish going around a barrier to retrieve a piece of meat. 
 
The distinctive thing about the sign use is not that people are producing and exchanging information as they once did goods and services. Nothing new here, as Tolman says on p. 73. What is really new is that consciousnesses are sharing something; that consciousness is returning to its ontogenetic societal origin with microgenetic deliberateness and awareness and freedom. 
 
That's on the societal level. But psychologically, we see this return in every self-directed speech. (It is nontrivial and noncoincidental that Luria, but not Leontiev, embraced the importance of self-directed speech in his subsequent research.)
 
--- On Sun, 9/5/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

'Distance is an ineluctable part of the process of cultural mediation in so far as mediators and the people engaging them are imperfectly aligned; just this difference, this “degree of separation of the natural/phylogenetic and the cultural/historical” is dependent upon the power of the mediator."  In the case of conceptual mediators, the same should apply. This is what I see significant about David’s example below.'
 
Here's another (I hope significant) example. The following fond father and his third grade son are looking at a picture book which shows Baloo bending a tree so that Mowgli can reach a banana (it is a still from the Walt Disney animation directly preceding the wildly popular but highly opaque song "Bare Necessities"). 
 
Which of the following cultural mediators (I will continue to flummox you by calling them "initiates") is MORE perfectly aligned with the response?
 
Parent: Who likes bananas?
Child (understanding the word "bananas" and possibly also the word "like" and trying to decide how Mowgli's problem can be solved): Tall?
Parent: Tall? (trying something else) What does Mowgli like?
Child: Banana.
 
Obviously, the gap between "Who likes bananas?" and the child's understanding is not nearly as narrow as the gap between "What does Mowgli like?" and "Banana". Until we get this close, we cannot really say that there is any social communication going on at all; there is neither primary nor secondary intersubjectivity, there is ZERO intersubjectivity, as here.
 
Parent: Tell me about Mowgli. 
  
We can see that there is NO overlap between question and answer here. The gap between the mediator and the linguistic task is simply too big. The parent reduces it by switching to Korean. 
  
Parent: Mowgli daehaeseo mal hae bwa! (Tell me about Mowgli!) 
  
Child: I'm hungry. 
Parent (trying to turn the primary intersubjectivity into secondary intersubjectivity): He is hungry. and he is (trying to get back to the original question) .... He wants...? He likes.....? 
Child (also trying something new): The banana? 
 
A miracle! The child uses (incorrectly) an English article. But how did this miracle happen? I think somehow it must have something to do with one of three processes of objectification:
 
a) repetition
b) the successful completion of the exchange on "What does Mowgli like?"
c) the switch from "I'm hungry" to "He is hungry and he wants...likes..."
 
Now, ALL of these seem to me to create DISTANCE. But the distance that is being created is between the child and his past and future utterances. The distance created is between the child and his own speech. Wordsworth says poetry is emotion recollected in tranquility; had he recollected a little more he might have seen that this is true of all self-directed speech in one form or another.
 
And that's more or less what Mike says about Minkyeong's work!
 
"Here I would make another point. Each of the three 'levels' of response are characterized by conceptual mediation of more complex and more self-thoughtful content. I take it that David’s evidence indicates that  this complexity can be more or less scaled using Vygotskian categories of levels of concept formation. But he wrties that the “idea of direct demand correlates poorly with level of abstraction.”
 
Of course! Learning correlates very poorly to direct instruction, and for good reason. It seems to me that a) above has to do with being more self-thoughtful, and b) and c) are related to complexification. But none of these three are particularly characteristic of the well-beaten "beaters" example.
 
Tolman says on p. 73, that "although the situation is (made) immensely more complicated in our own society (compared to that of Leontiev's hunting beaters) by the dependence of essential actions on training and education, the underlying principle remains the same." 
 
Really? Kind of incredible, when you think about it. Maybe quite literally unbelievable. If not, such stagnation, such fossilization, such radical conservatism really needs to be explained. Why and how did man stop all qualitative self-transformation with the invention of the division of labor?
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
PS: I think that Leontiev actually elaborated his "beaters" example from a singularly unconvincing (and unprepossessing) account of the origins of language which holds that the original form of human language was not the indicative but rather the imperative.
 
 This is p. 188 of Janet, P. (1929) L’évolution psychologique de la personalité. Editions A. Chahine: Paris.
 

“Quand il pousse ce cri du début, analogue a` l’aboiement du chien qui se lance sur une proie, l’homme qui ordonne fait quelque chose de bizarre, il arrête l’action. Tandis que le chien continue a` courir après avoir donné le signal du début, le véritable chef done le signal, le cri du commencement, mais ne va pas plu loin. En un mot, le chef ne fait que le première partie de l’acte, et ce sont les sujets qui font la continuation et la sonsommation de l’action. Le chef n’a pas d’autre occupation que de surveiller l’exécution de l’acte, d’insister en répétant l’ordre du début, mais il ne doit pas lui-même fair l’action complète, la fair a` la place du sujet. Ce qui caractérise un ordre, c’est que l’acte est subdivisé entre plusieures individus sociaux, chacun de ces individus ne faisant qu’une partie de l’acte. Ce caractère se retrouve a` mon avis dans toutes les actions socials. Toutes les actions
 socials, quelles qu’elles soient, depuis les plus simples jusqu’aux plus compliquées, consistent dans une collaborations, dans une division des actes, de manie1re qu’un individu fasse une première partie de l’action et que l’autre individu fasse la seconde partie. Il y a collaboration dans toutes les actions sociales." 189. 
 
And so we have a whole theory of the genesis of language as activity--and a VERY monologic, and even dictatorial, theory it is, too!
 
dk 




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