Re: Mind As Action, Chapt 2

Eva Ekeblad (eva.ekeblad who-is-at ped.gu.se)
Fri, 25 Sep 1998 08:18:43 +0200

At 12.46 -0500 98-09-17, David Kirshner and Bill Blanton wrote:
>In the section on internalization, Wertsch points out that the
>exemplars used often are more significant in determining the
>scope of a theory than the abstract formulations of the theory
>itself.

This is a very useful idea, which leads DK and BB to the observation that
the exemplars used by Wertsch in this chapter are all of physically
manifest, minded actions. This is related to something that puzzled me in
this chapter: how the laying down of these two
entities-in-irreducible-tension, the agent and the mediational means AND
the grappling with the "conceptual baggage" of the term "internalization"
(as something visible going out of sight) makes the text slope
paradoxically towards that old mind-body dualism.

The description of who performed the multiplication of 342*822 as "I and
the cultural tool I employed did" is, I realize, doing a job of jolting the
reader out of the folk psychological pride-in-self of the I as sole
originator, and paying attention to the working role of cultural tools,
mediational means. Even so, the phrase keeps me and my tool neatly separate
participants in a professional collaboration. A dirtier way of phrasing the
relation would be to say that when I have internalized the paper-and-pencil
algorithm for multiplication it is, again *I* that perform the
multiplication, but it is an I(system) extended to what I do on the paper,
and to the culture of the algorithm... culture is in me and I am in culture.

This, of course, hijacks "internalization" away from the "visible going out
of sight" gloss. So there's no theoretical problem to internalize bicycles
and fiberglass poles this way either: the pole vaulter and the bicylist
don't have to swallow their mediational means, just fuse with them in the
action. Ideas like these have been discussed quite a lot on the xlists in
older days, in Batesonian and Gibsonian connections. (Perhaps the community
is fed up with it by now?)

I'm not quite sure if this expansion/fusion of agent and mediational means
into a functional system is what Wertsch does later by means of
connectionism. It just struck me how in aiming to explain in terms
intelligible to disciplinary psychologists the text produces this picture
of a clean, closed, predefined *I* in spite of itself.

Eva

PS. David, why don't you re-post just the questions part of your long
message on Ch2, since we were to occupied with units of analysis to respond
last week.