Re: [xmca] More on Martin: Consciousness vs knowledge?

Mike,

I didn't mean that Cs is not social. It is *social,* but studying its
development is not a matter of (a social version of) genetic epistemology,
at least as Piaget defined that enterprise.

On 3/9/08 1:45 PM, "Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Wow. Consciousness is only possible as co-knowledge (so-znanie) but its not
> social? Who is the con-spirit-or, or what?

And I can't resist rsponding to this... (below)

> In a note where I was asking Martin's help on a closely related issue, he
> referred to something he called (approximately), "simple stimulus
> consciousness" which didn't interest him. But this simple
> consciousness/knowledge that you see a rock in front of you does interest
> me! (And I am clearly boring in THIS regard!). Why am I interested? Because
> I believe that the mechanisms of this "simple" form of consciousness REQUIRE
> imagination,

I didn't mean to say that this simple Cs is uninteresting, but only that it
develops into more complex forms: that Cs changes. What I would now like to
try to add is that I think that V was working towards the view that concepts
are in interaction, and so transform Cs. I say this to agree with your
proposal that imagination is needed with even the simple forms of Cs.

I can see (at least) two accounts of concepts in V's writing. In Crisis and
in Educational Psychology he presents the first account. Later (in Pedology
of the Adolescent for example) he rejects this account and substitutes a
second.

The first is that concepts are a form of abstraction, facilitated by naming.
In Crisis, for example, he writes:

³Everything described as a fact is already a theory. These are the words of
Goethe to which Munsterberg
refers in arguing the need for a methodology. When we
meet what is called a cow and say: ³This is a cow,² we
add the act of thinking to the act of perception, bringing
the given perception under a general concept. A child
who first calls things by their names is making genuine
discoveries. I do not see that this is a cow, for this
cannot be seen. I see something big, black, moving,
plowing, etc., and understand that this is a cow. And
this act is an act of classification, of assigning a singular
phenomenon to the class of similar phenomena, of
systematizing the experience, etc. Thus, language itself
contains the basis and possibilities for the scientific
knowledge of a fact. The word is the germ of science
and in this sense we can say that in the beginning of
science was the word² (47)

This idea that we "add" the act of thinking *to* the act of perception seems
just like Kant, to me.

The second account comes later. In the Pedology of the Adolescent he first
rejects the view that concepts are abstract and mental (again citing Goethe,
this time critically):

³Here we come close to establishing one of the central points that must be
explained if we are to overcome the usual error relative to the break
between form and content in the development of thinking. From formal logic,
traditional psychology adopted the idea of the concept as an abstract mental
construct extremely remote from all the wealth of concrete reality. From the
point of view of formal logic, the development of concepts is subject to the
basic law of inverse proportionality between the scope and content of a
concept. The broader the scope of a concept, the narrower its content. This
means that the greater the number of objects that the given concept can be
applied to, the greater the circle of concrete things that it encompasses,
the poorer its content, the emptier it proves to be. The process of forming
concepts according to formal logic is extremely simple. The points of
abstracting and generalizing are internally closely connected with each
other from the point of view of one and the same process, but taken from
different aspects. In the words of K. Bühler, what logic terms an
abstraction and generalization is completely simple and understandable. A
concept from which one of the traits is taken away becomes poorer in
content, more abstract and augmented in scope, and becomes general."

In its place he proposes that a concept is a process that penetrates deeply
into the concrete character of reality, in a complex unity of judgment,
apperception, interpretation, recognition, and we could add imagination, no?

"The concept begins to be understood not as a thing, but as a process, not
as an empty abstraction, but as a thorough and penetrating reflection of an
object of reality in all its complexity and diversity, in connections and
relations to all the rest of realityŠ. Thus, we see that for the
psychologist, the concept is an aggregate of acts of judgment, apperception,
interpretation, and recognition. The concept taken in action, in movement,
in reality, does not lose unity, but reflects its true nature. According to
our hypothesis, we must seek the psychological equivalent of the concept not
in general representations, not in absolute perceptions and orthoscopic
diagrams, not even in concrete verbal images that replace the general
representations ­ we must seek it in a system of judgments in which the
concept is disclosed² (54-55).

So, to gloss this, conceptual thinking is a transformed consciousness in
which multiple psychological functions work together.

Martin

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Received on Sun Mar 9 12:14 PDT 2008