[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery







Sure, Jenna. 
 
But the way my head works, I think in EXAMPLES. And the first example that springs to mind is almost always a WORD. It drives my poor students crazy.
 
                WORD VALUE
sense-value           signification-value
("I", "it", "and")        ("elephant", "kick", "time")
 
You can see that words like "I" and "it" and "he" and "she" and "but" and even "because" depend almost entirely on circumstances for their interpretation. That's not true of words like "elephant" and "kick" which can be put in dictionaries. 
 
We tend to think of languages as being made up of signification-values, partly because these are more official. But historically, and also in every day life, sense-values are much more frequent and are historically the source of signification-values.
 
Of course, it's true that we make our individual sense-values with the help of signification-values. For example, we ask "What time is it?" more or less the same way every time we ask, and we can answer in the same way exactly twice a day even though the true answer is, by definition, never the same. Sociogenetically, sense-value produces signification-value, just as microgenetically signification-value produces sense value.
 
We see (more or less) this relationship with use value and exchange value, and that is where the distinction between utensil-artefacts and tool-artefacts really comes into play.
 
          ARTEFACTS
utensil-artefacts   tool-artefacts
(chopsticks)        (screwdrivers)
 
The former is an implement for personal consumption; it's a "sense-artefact". The latter is a tool for production; it's a "meaning-artefact". So the former is really concerned with use, and the latter with production and exchange.
 
The distinction between signals and symbols is not really mine; it's something Vygotsky uses in his struggle with behaviorism (which involved, if we read "Psychology of Art", both internal strife and external). 
 
When the leaves turn red, that is a signal of winter, and it was before humans ever existed. A footprint in the sand is the sign that somebody has been walking on the beach, whether you are a speaker of English or Korean. Signals are older, and much more common, than signs.
 
When you say the word "red" or when you spell the word "foot", that too is a sign. But it is  means absolutely nothing unless you are speaking to somebody who knows English. So we say it is a symbol. Symbols seem much more "typical" of signs, but they are in reality merely more official, more formalized, more systematic and less context bound.
 
And that brings me to reality and ideality. But here I am really going to catch it from Andy, because "real" means something quite different to him (in Hegel it includes the idea of rationality, of what it is that gets "realized" when we realize something). 
 
But I do feel the need for a superordinate category, and since I am a materialist, that superordinate category is in the final analysis material. That means I need something to counterpose to the ideal, the potential, the past and the future. I could call it the "hic" and "nunc" but I prefer "real" because...well, because it rhymes with "ideal".
 
David Kellogg (correcting midterms at)
Seoul National University of Education
 
PS: Larry--I just read your post, and I have to get back to these midterms. But like you, like Martin, I am working on the problems between Piaget and Vygotsky right now (I'm retranslating and commenting on Piaget's riposte to Chapter Two and Chapter Six of T&S). 
 
I think you are ABSOLUTELY right--part of the real difference, the real distinction, the break that cannot be denied between Piaget on the one hand and Vygotsky on the other is that Piaget believes that the sociocultural is really only important in the history of science. 
 
For him, everything else is interpersonal, or as you put it, relational. That's the weird, wordless, undialectical way he thinks. But the interpersonal is not the sociocultural, any more than the words that we get still warm from each other's lungs and lips are reducible to the ones we find printed in dictionaries, or the words we still read in Vygotsky's books have faded away with the "crumbly, yellow voice" that Vygotsky supposedly had (according to one of his patients).
 
dk


--- On Mon, 10/18/10, Jenna McWilliams <jennamcjenna@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Jenna McWilliams <jennamcjenna@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, October 18, 2010, 7:30 PM


David, for those of us trying desperately to cling to this thread, can you add some explanation to help with interpreting those categories?




On Oct 18, 2010, at 10:20 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

> Nothing, Andy. That's why I want to oppose the ideal to the real, and not to the material.
> 
>              ARTEFACT:
> Tool-artefact       Utensil-artefact
> (mass production)  (personal consumption)
> 
>                 SIGN
> Signal-sign         Symbol-sign
> (thing-thing)        (meaning-meaning)]
> 
>         MATERIALITY
> Reality               Ideality
> (percepts)          (concepts)
> 
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
> 
> --- On Mon, 10/18/10, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Tom Toolery
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Monday, October 18, 2010, 7:02 PM
> 
> 
> What would be an example of something which is ideal but not also material, David?
> andy
> David Kellogg wrote: ...
>> It seems to me that if we follow Steve and Ilyenkov, and we see problem after problem as a matter of establishing the interaction of "ideal" and "material", we will need some kind of super-category for the indivisible whole which both ideal and material make up. Otherwise we really do fall into the worst kind of Cartesian dualism. ...
>> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> 
> 
> 
> 
> __________________________________________
> _____
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca

__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca




__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca