[Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

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.