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Re: [xmca] Manfred Holodynsk's article on the emotions

Andy, I hate to be such a nay sayer, but here too I have difficulty grasping the way you think about 'activity.' Surely one of the central points of Manfred's approach to the development of emotions is that even an infant will be involved in 'activities' as a result of their parents' drawing them in, even though the infant aware of this. This is a key aspect of the prolepsis that Mike just mentioned. And Carol insists that 'activities' are collaborative.

If infants were truly excluded from 'activities' there would be no possibility for their development. We certainly don't want to say, do we, that their development is the consequence of "stimuli" and "feedback" (an odd mixture of behaviorist and information-processing terminology). Equally, define 'activity' in such a way as to exclude infants and children, and 'activity' loses the key characteristic of reproduction.

Then you state that school 'activities' are 'artificial." As opposed to what, 'natural activities'?

Still perplexed,

Martin

On Apr 2, 2013, at 10:32 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> An infant cannot do actions. Because the infant does not have an image of the object towards which their behaviour is oriented, their behaviour cannot be said to constitute actions. They begin with "operations," which by means of their success or failure in resolving the problematic stimuli and the feedback from carers, lead to their development of actions as such, and the possibility of fully developed and differentiated emotions, rather than just the innate precursor emotions.
> 
> The next phase of development, during which Vygotsky claims that the child does not develop true concepts, the child is correspondingly unable to orient to *activities*. Teachers and carers in fact make up "activities" for them, more or less artificial activities, such as games, sports and school projects, exams and so on. 


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