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Re: [xmca] Re: xmca Digest, Vol 45, Issue 47



In "Learning by Expanding", Engstrom quotes V P Zinchenko as claiming that "word meaning" is very close to being a special case of "tool mediated action". I think this is correct and one could add "joint" as it is invariably other people that one shares meaning with, not things, and meaning which is not shared is nothing.

A word is no more nor less ideal than a key or a dollar or a wine bottle or a white shirt or an automobile or an open hand, but how can we counterpose words or any artefact to activity? Activity uses artefacts and is impossible without them; things are only artefacts insofar as they are incorporated in Activity.


Andy

Martin Packer wrote:
But Andy, if we're following Ilyenkov's lead, don't words have an ideal
character that activity lacks?

Martin


On 2/17/09 9:11 PM, "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

(2) Apart from artefacts, is also activity. Doubtbless
activity is implicit in meaning in some way, but it is
unclear to me. I think it is a mistake to make the
foundation of consciousness just words, rather than practice.

Andy

Mike Cole wrote:
Without the time (or skill to switch to cyrrilic!) I have been thinking
about Kolya's questions, ,David.

For those who forget in the stream of xcma chatting, Nikolai asks:
where Vygotsky posits word meaning as
unit of analysis of human consciousness?
In which text and on what page? From what Vygotsky's work it is taken? Could

I ask you to make a quotation from Vygotsky?
Thank you in advance
Nikolai

I was thinking how nice it would be to know how to search the vygotsky
corpus online in Russian, which I do not know how to do.

And remembering fragments of why I thought David's comments resonated
strongly
with my own intuitions, formed in part, by LSV.

such as (no quotations or page numbers, just failing memory here):

meaning is the most stable form of sense-- every totally stable? really?
word meaning changes in development
the closing of *Speech and Thought *that David points to, the drop of water,
perhaps,
being in my eye.
The citation of the fragment from Doestoevsky where a bunch of guys are
standing
around saying, it seems, the word "product of defecation" (oh poo!) and
every one
is using the same word and every one is both saying the same thing and
saying something different.

Don't all of these and many other examples (Paula, are the Sakharov -LSV
blocks of any help here?) point to the general conclusion that David was
asserting?

Might our Russian friends join Nikolai and help us to understand the core of
the issue
David raised? Is he incorrect? Can you search the corpus and help us to
understand
if we are misleading each other?
mike

On Tue, Feb 17, 2009 at 5:26 PM, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

Dear Professor Veresov:

Let me begin by saying how much we enjoy your work here in Korea. Our group
has been discussing your 2005 "Outlines" article "Marxist and non-Marxist
aspects of the cultural historical psychology of L.S. Vygotsky" since we
read it last year, and I found your 2006 article "Leading activity in
developmental psychology" very useful in figuring out why I don't accept the
whole construct of "leading activity".

I think that BOTH works are really quite central to the periodization
problem under discussion, but I also think that BOTH works refer mainly and
centrally (and thus for me somewhat misleadingly) to a period of Vygotsky's
oeuvre that is quite different from the one I have in mind.

The 2005 article places a good deal of stress on early Vygotsky, a Vygotsky
who is almost non-Vygotskyan, or at least non-psychological, Vygotsky in his
early twenties, a student of the humanities with a very strong sense that
nothing human is alien to them.

The 2006 article in contrast seems to me to place a great deal of stress on
the post-Vygotsky period, and I was very surprised and pleased to read that
the work on "leading activity" is really not as far as I had thought from
the fragments LSV left behind in his unfinished "Child Development".

Elkonin, at any rate, seems to have been fully aware that the "leading
activity" is in no way typical or characteristic of a particular period
(though Leontiev and lately Karpov have said exactly the opposite). The
problem remains that I do not see any place for the crisis in this work, and
there is no question but that MY Vygotsky, LATE Vygotsky, the Vygotsky of
Thinking and Speech gives the crisis an absolutely central (one might even
say a critical) role.

Of course, when I said that word meaning is a unit of analysis for human
consciousness I am not simply repeating what others have said (e.g. Werstch
1985). On the contrary, I mean what for me is the most mature and therefore
in some ways least characteristic moment of Vygotsky's own work; I might
even call it the "leading activity" of his thinking.

I meant, especially, the very last three paragraphs of Thinking and Speech.
I have always found this to be a little like the last page of "Origin of
Species", rather more than a conclusion, but a whole revolutionary program,
complete with a clarion call in the very last six words:

Осмысленное слово есть микрокосм человеческого сознания.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education.





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--
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Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 Skype andy.blunden
Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
http://www.marxists.org/admin/books/index.htm

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