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Re: [xmca] last on concepts
David,
Thanks for your always intriguing comments, such as the ones from a
couple days ago, copied below.
I've been needing some help understanding the last statement in the
following paragraph from Vol 1, p 115, the Minick translation. It
relates directly to your comments (and also a question Jay asked a
couple weeks ago, if I remember), about practical activity and verbal
thinking.
The meaning of the final sentence puzzles me:
"Moving now from the issue of the genesis of inner speech to the issue
of how it functions in the adult, the first question we encounter is
one that we have addressed earlier in connection with issues of
phylogenesis and ontogenesis: Are thinking and speech necessarily
connected in the adult's behavior" That is, can the two processes be
identified with one another? All that we know that is relevant to
this issue forces us to answer this question in the negative. The
relationship of thinking and speech in this context can be
schematically represented by two intersecting circles. Only a limited
portion of the process of speech and thinking coincide in what is
commonly called verbal thinking. Verbal thinking does not exhaust all
the forms of thought nor does it exhaust all the forms of speech.
There is a large range of thinking that has no direct relationship to
verbal thinking. In this category, we could include the instrumental
and technical thinking that has been described by Buhler and what is
commonly called practical intellect."
According to the last sentence, Vygotsky appears to have included "the
instrumental and technical thinking that has been described by Buhler
and what is commonly called practical intellect" into the category of
non-verbal thinking.
Could you or someone help me understand this statement?
- Steve
On May 7, 2011, at 11:17 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
Steve:
I think that thinking and speech have what we would call, in Korea,
"jeong", or in China "yuanfen". "Jeong" and "yuanfen" are both
indicate a fateful encounter that neither party can ever forget, no
matter what their previous or subsequent history. Unsurprisingly,
both "jeong" and "yuanfen" have romantic connotations, and both are
symbolized by a red thread, which is something that Vygotsky likes
to use too.
So Chapter Four, which is in some ways our most "schematic"and
general chapter (because it mixes up the phylogenetic, the
sociogenetic, and even the ontogenetic), describes how thinking
becomes verbal and speech becomes rational, somewhere around age two.
This is, it seems to me, the genesis of verbal thinking. And once
past that fateful point, neither thinking nor speech will ever
forget each other, and neither can ever be quite the same again.
Vygotsky explicitly REJECTS Buhler's idea that
"Werkezeudenken" (practical activity) in adults is somehow non-
verbal. Once thinking has been verbalized, you can never really go
back to the pre-cultural, natural state of thinking; everything you
think will be at least potentially and often really verbal.
The units in which verbal thinking takes place are verbal: they are
word meanings, even if they sometimes do not actually leave the
"palace of shadows". You may not have time to completely verbalize
these word meanings, but they are nevertheless completely verbal in
their psychological nature. After all, when you READ something, you
are thinking in a completely verbal manner, even though you are
going MUCH faster than you would ever be able to speak, and it is
even possible to take in blocks of text in a non-linear manner.
Concepts are another example of how thinking and speech can never
really forget their fateful meeting at age two. As ought to be clear
(not least from the work of Jay Lemke) concepts come in a structure
which is paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic; they grow on tall
trees with deep roots, and do not proliferate temporally like
crabgrass. Yet precisely in their thematic relations (overconcepts,
examples, specific cases) they are clearly examples of verbal
thinking.
In Chapter Five (Sections Seven and Eight) Vygotsky reminds us that
generalization is really only ONE of the two intellectual "roots" of
the concept and it is in some ways antithetic to the other, namely
abstraction. I always think of this as "adding on" versus "taking
away": generalization involves expanding the pile of shared features
and abstraction involves cutting away the merely important to reveal
the absolutely essential (and yes, I think that Vygotsky's concept
of concepts is essentially essentialist).
English speakers tend to use GENERALIZATION: we say, for example, "I
like apples" rather than "I like the apple". Koreans, in contrast,
use ABSTRACTION: they say "I like the apple". A really rational
thinker, say, a Korean three year old, might find an expression like
"I like apples" rather puzzling, expecting a rider that excludes
rotten, unripe, and sour apples.
Except in a metaphorical sense, we cannot say that a good saxophone
solo has lexicogrammar. The sax plays notes, not vowels or
consonants, and a musical line is neither a noun phrase nor a verb
phrase. But if you imagine that, say, Lester Young or Coleman
Hawkins have no intonation, no stress, no phrasing, then you are
mired in what we can only call a "natural" state of musicality (see
the end of Chapter Four, Section Three), the state in which dogs
howl at phonograph records. Good saxophone is "talky" music in much
the same way that Mozart is, and it is no accident that jazz has
selected a main instrument that sounds or can be made to sound very
like a human voice.
Classical music too eventually settled on string instruments to
carry the main melodic line rather than brass or woodwinds or
percussion). Last night I went to see Poulenc's opera "The Dialogue
of the Carmelites", which is surely one of the most undialogic
operas ever written. It's wordy but not talky, the music is woody
rather than stringy, with two harps that can never quite agree to
disagree. In the libretto, everybody says exactly the same thing,
and one is hardly surprised when the Carmelites go on singing after
their heads are cut off.
But today I am sitting in my office, listening to Dvorak's Cello
Concerto in B minor. Dvorak wrote it after the death of his sister-
in-law, with whom he was hopelessly in love. It's a threnody and a
love letter with everything removed except thought and motive. Is
there sense? Well, there is certainly something sensuous, and it is
not animal; it is scarcely even human.
(Rostropovich! How is it possible to be unhappy on a planet shared
with such a sensiblity?)
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
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