RE: [xmca] New Valsiner SEmiots paper on MCA website at lchc

From: Michael Glassman (MGlassman@ehe.ohio-state.edu)
Date: Tue Nov 21 2006 - 07:18:59 PST


Eric,

Just a couple of things,

"I also believe that he would agree with Pierce's pragmatics
and if this makes him a realist, so be it."

I don't think Pierce was ever a realist - maybe some of his earlier
theory could be construed that way, but definitely not late when he was
developing his Pragmatics orientation along with James (and I would make
the argument that an early Dewey was in the mix as well). Pierce was an
experimentalist. I'm wondering if being an experimentalist and being a
realist has become so conflated in our dialogue that we have forgotten
that one is process and the other is a specific philosophical position
(not that process is not a philosophical position).

"About there being no distinction between inter- and intra- is that
dualism as an idea is rejected and that communication is a large body of
water, sometimes we swim in the water and sometimes we sit on the shore
and merely observe."

The best arguments I have read against dualism (and people always seem
to be angry at dualism but there is never a discussion why. It took me
a really long time to understand why dualism is such a difficult and
perhaps dangerous position) suggest that you really shouldn't even pay
attention to intra or even inter - you concentrate on the activity
people are engaged in and its relationship to the movement of nature
(the naturalistic difficulty with dualism being that it separates human
from nature - related to the reasons why we should worry about dualism).
My question is, once you bring up "intra" is there any possibility at
all of escaping dualism.

I have another question that maybe you or somebody else on the list
might be able to answer. Plemora as a phrase has a long history in the
study of human behavior. It is based on a Greek word as Valsiner
suggests, but it was first used in anger I think by the Gnostics,
suggesting a divine ether that moves above the earth that we are trying
to reach (the issue of divinity is important I think). It was taken by
Jung because it fits this idea of an undifferentiated whole that runs
through his theory. It was also an important phrase for Bateson and
maybe the whole idea of cybernetics (somebody who knows Bateson better
than me might be able to expand on this) - the idea that plemora
represented the non-living (physical?) universe, and was a world less
differentiated by subjectivity of the individual perspective. I think
this fits in to the cybernetic framework - the idea that fewer feedback
loops are necessary for Plemora than for more subjectively oriented
parts of our universe - that it is easier (maybe not the right word) to
come to some mutual understanding or agreement on its use in activity
(which actually fits in I think with a number of other theorists,
including Vygotsky and his idea of scientific concepts). Is this what
Valsiner was trying to get at? It is difficult to tell from reading his
article. Was using this particular word purposeful? Anyway, just a
question.

Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org
Sent: Tuesday, November 21, 2006 9:48 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] New Valsiner SEmiots paper on MCA website at lchc

Well David:

If you are truely interested about Valsiner's ideas he is more then
happy
to converse through e-mail. When i wrote my master's paper i found this
correspondence very helpful. Until then let me just point out that
Valsiner is a Developmental Psychologist and veiws all human action
through
that lense. I also believe that he would agree with Pierce's pragmatics
and if this makes him a realist, so be it. I will leave the rest of the
explaining of this paper to Valsiner. About there being no distinction
between inter- and intra- is that dualism as an idea is rejected and
that
communication is a large body of water, sometimes we swim in the water
and
sometimes we sit on the shore and merely observe.

eric

 

                      "Kellogg"

                      <kellogg@snue.ac To:
<mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>, "eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity"
                      .kr> <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>

                      Sent by: cc:

                      xmca-bounces who-is-at web Subject: Re: [xmca] New
Valsiner SEmiots paper on MCA website at lchc
                      er.ucsd.edu

 

 

                      11/18/2006 08:51

                      PM

                      Please respond

                      to "eXtended

                      Mind, Culture,

                      Activity"

 

 

Help! I'm having a lot of trouble with Jaan Valsiner's new paper, "The
Overwhelming World". I think there are three problems, in particular:

a) I can't decide if Valsiner is a realist or not. If so, why isn't
"pleromatization" a form of schematization, since any artistic
representation of the world must necessarily represent a simplification?

b) I can't decide if pleromatization is ONLY a form of externalization.
If
so, why can't we simply consider it an iterative from of schematic
representation? Why does it have to have a different conceptual
structure?

c) I can't decide if Valsiner is really serious when he denies the
distinction between inter-personal and intra-personal knowledge. If so,
how
does ANY knowledge come into being?

I must confess an interest; I am a realist painter, heavily influenced
the
Dutch masters, as you can see if you examine:

http://www.absolutearts.com/portfolios/l/lifang/

One of my good friends, Wolfgang in der Wiesche, however, is not:

http://www.xtendedline.de/

When he was in the kunstschule in Brauschweig, though, they had to
produce
one pencil sketch that was as realistic as possible. While everybody
else
was covering themselves in sweat and eraser dust to draw lemons or
landscapes or even human faces, he took a very small price tag off a
pencil
in a stationary store and reproduced that almost perfectly.

I see a fair amount of this cheating in my data, which is mostly
children
improvising in a second language. The kids have a strong tendency to
OVERspecify their nouns:

S: I like an apple.

Lest we attribute this some Piagetian stage of concrete before formal
operations (or sensorimotor famliarity with the object "apple" but not
the
conceptual category "apples"), I should add that they have a comparable
tendency to UNDERspecify their verbs, providing neither tense, number,
or
aspect, and overusing "to be".

S: I'm play.

It's as if the kids live in a schematized world where every noun is a
concrete apple and every verb is an abstract process of "being",
"doing",
or "having". We can explain this by saying that the kids interpret the
world as Wolfgang did, in a way that ensures ease of expression rather
than
accuracy of reproduction.

In the same way, why can't we explain Valsiner's "pleromatization" as
the
selection and iteration of schematizations rather than as a direct
response
to the overwhelming world?

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of
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