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[Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion
- To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
- Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion
- From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
- Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2014 12:08:29 +1100
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Dmitry Leontyev's main speech to ISCAR (at the pre-conference on Monday)
was all about the dualism between sense and meaning, including the
Russian terms (was it mysl and znachnie or something?) and the German
Sinn and Bedeutung, and he preferred in ENglish to use "personal
meaning" and "public meaning" to clarify the difference, because "sense"
is so polysemic. A wonderful dualistic world, simply divided between
internal, psychological sense and non-psychological, material/external
meaning. The clearest explication of the fallacy of AN Leontyev's
approach I have ever witnessed.
Anyway, as I understand it, "meaning" is objectively fixed in words by
the objective relations between words and words, words and things, and
between things. "Sense" is the internal psychological reflection of this
external world. So in the "Evolution of the Psyche" I read:
"Meaning is the reflection of reality irrespective of man’s
individual, personal relation to it. Man finds an already prepared,
historically formed system of meanings and assimilates it just as he
masters a tool, the material prototype of meaning. The psychological
fact proper, the fact of my life, is this, (a) that I do or do not
assimilate a given meaning, do or do not master it, and (b) what it
becomes for me and for my personality in so far as I assimilate it;
and that depends on what subjective, personal sense it has for me."
So I guess "primitive consciousness" is sort of like these people who
vote for George Bush because "he's my kind of guy," and don't reflect on
it. :)
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
mike cole wrote:
I, to, have returned to Leontiev's develoment book following David's
suggestion. Still reading,
but passages such as the following really dicombobulate me.
"The coincidences of sense and meanings is the main feature of
primitive consciousness."
mike
On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
This discussion has sent me back to looking at A N Leontyev's
"Development of Mind." For all his faults, ANL expended a lot of
energy in tracing the phylogenetic evolution of activity (which
for ANL is a broad category, inclusive of unconscious activity).
He traces the evolution of behaviour (as in animals without a
central nervous system operating on a reflex basis) through
conditioned reflexes and habits to operations (scripts which can
be moved from one situation to another and adapted to conditions
without conscious awareness) to actions (consciously determined by
their immediate goal) to activities (where the goal is remote from
the immediate actions, and a whole series of actions are required
to meet the goal). Then he is able to trace the movement back and
forth between behaviour, operational activity, actions and
activities in both ontogenesis and microgenesis. I have always
been a bit impatient with this kind of move (reifying a theory of
human activity into Nature and then importing it back), but I have
to say it was a useful exercise. And clarifying.
Here is a link to an excerpt from part of this work:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1981/evolution.htm
Andy
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
<http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
David Kellogg wrote:
All of which has to be sung with screams of pain (Strauss has, you
see, stacked the deck in Rousseau's favor). But maybe both
singing and
speech are exaptations of something that is functionally
neither and
not specific to humans at all, which for want of a better name
we can
call activity WITHOUT thinking.
David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
--
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.