Re: Brain-related and culture-related hemisheres of the psychology

From: Bill Barowy (wbarowy@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Oct 10 2001 - 05:06:11 PDT


Thank you Laszlo, for your response, and for stimulating my interest. I've
found your paper and will read it today.

Bill

--- Garai László <garai@mtapi.hu> wrote:
> Bill,
>
> My e-mail being a couple of days broken down, I may only now thank you for
> your answer to my question:
>
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Bill Barowy <wbarowy@yahoo.com>
> > To: xmca <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 3:11 AM
> > Subject: Re: Ready to discuss Vygotsky's "Crisis in Psychology"
> >
> >
> > > I had a chance to do a quick read of the crises paper. Unless i
> > > miss my guess at this second, but brief, reading, I see in it
> another
> > > possibility how a "design science" approach to experimentation is
> > problematic.
>
> > Bill, this critical point of yours sounds interesting, but could you
> give
> > its somehow more detailed version?
> >
> > Laszlo
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: Bill Barowy <wbarowy@yahoo.com>
> To: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Sent: Wednesday, October 03, 2001 9:23 PM
> Subject: Re: Ready to discuss Vygotsky's "Crisis in Psychology"
>
>
> Hi László ,
>
> I think you are being an excellent coordinator for the discussion of your
> own
> paper. I have a short time to respond -- and little time over the next few
> days. But I'll do what I can. There is a paper online that provides a
> fairly
> good overview of 'design science'. One of the features of this approach is
> to
> identify critical factors, and independent and dependent variables in order
> to
> create design principles and theory for educational innovations. A
> statement
> that stands out for me is:
>
> "Similarly, a design science of education must determine how different
> designs
> of learning environments contribute to learning, cooperation, and
> motivation. "
>
> -- Collins
>
> While this seems similar in some ways to the goals of a few chat
> investigators,
> the CH is left out, and an ecological understanding, i.e. a framework that
> addresses interdependence, reciprocality, the development of and around the
> investigator(s), and so on, is missing.
>
> Now, while fully agreeing with you as to this critical point of yours ("the
> CH is left out") we have to point out that within the other hemisphere of the
> psychology (i.e., within the one that deals not with the historical but the
> natural aspect; the one whos concern is not the culture but the brain) we
> find the same ecological approach by no means at the conservative but at the
> most progressive extremity of the research. Take, e.g., Gibson's ecological
> theory of perception.
>
> It is a pitty, however, that the psychology, being in its actual crisis that
> consists in its incapability of synthetizing its brain-related and its
> culture-related hemispheres, it is eager instead to simply transfer its
> findings from one of those hemispheres to the other one. Thus, the logic of
> the ecological approach that is rather productive in that former part of our
> science gets transfered in this latter one where, however, it proves
> fruitless.
>
> By the way, when I worked on the topic of the inter-relation between a
> brain-related and a culture-related psychology I found that that ecological
> logic while being unproductive in the psychology's culture-related hemisphere
> in itself, however, turns out to be rather usefull for linking these two
> parts to each other: I found such a performance, in particular, in ethology's
> idea about territorial behaviour of populations and in... Vygotsky school's
> theory of functional organs. (For more details see my keynote paper
> "Vygotskian implications: On the meaning and its brain" to the International
> Vygotsky conference celebrating LSV's centennary [e-version:
> www.jate.u-szeged.hu/~garai/Vymplic.htm]).
>
> Laszlo
>
>
>

=====
"One of life's quiet excitements is to stand somewhat apart from yourself and watch yourself softly become the author of something beautiful."
[Norman Maclean in "A river runs through it."]

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Make a great connection at Yahoo! Personals.
http://personals.yahoo.com



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Nov 01 2001 - 01:01:38 PST