Re: Vygotsky and disability

Naoki Ueno (nueno who-is-at nier.go.jp)
Mon, 25 May 1998 15:39:57 +0900

konopak,

By the way, have you ever read Ray and Herne' s paper
'Culture as Disable' ?

In this paper, deaf people in Matha' s Vineyard are not
regarded as just the same case of the blind people in
H.G. Wells' s story.

Actually, deaf as "disable" here is decribed as the combination
of "disable" visible situation and invisible situation exactly as
in Mike, Ray and others' research on LD child in various
contexts.

Anyway, story is not the simple contrast between the claim
like that "disable" is disable and the claim like that "diable"
is not dsiable.
Rahter, their question is "when does a disable count, under
what condition, and in what ways, and for what reason?"

Your "langauge game" looks, rather, in the very simle contrast
between ""disable" as disable and "disable" not as disable.
And, maybe, you want to claim that "disable" is disable.
That is cognitivist's dualism.

Of course, we can see "physical disable". However, the main
point is that this "physical disable" is always embedded in
specific langauge games along with artifacts even when
one tries to see "pure" physical disable.
I am interested in the concrete analysis of this kind
of specific langauge games.

Through refocussing on "disable" or "dropout" children,
we can see the specific situation or the specific cultural
practice which makes us see "disable" as disable or
"individual" as individual.

H.G. Wells' s story as thought experiment is addressing
to this refocussed analysis of situation.

So far, our langauge games looks like quite different
and you appear to want to make the stage of cognitivist' s
dualism.
I doubt this dualism.

I strongly recommend you to read a series of papers of
Mike, Ray and Herve about Adam and culture as disable.
If you have no intention to read them, let us stop
the exchange of mail. Please stop to send me
the strange message with unnecessary expressions.
I have no time to play with cognitivist's dualism so far.

You are fighting with yourself on the stage of dualism,
not with me.

Naoki Ueno
NIER, Tokyo