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Re: [xmca] A Flock of Already Roasted Pigeons



Thanks to SNUE for lots more to think about. Except to object that i was not
judging
relative frequency of nounization in world languages (I simply have no basis
for knowing!) it seems we have a lot of agreement.

What did you folks think of the Hutchin's piece, which is laid out in length
in his
harvard u press book.

Back to my local teaching obligations.
mike

On Sun, Apr 5, 2009 at 4:38 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

>
> Mike--I'm forwarding your messages to the others concerned. Actually,
> Yongho and Shushu are both ex-SNUE (undergrad and grad school) and now work
> as teachers. Yongho's doing a Ph.D. (and Shushu appears to be doing sporadic
> research in salsa dancing) and we only meet once a week. But here's what I
> think.
>
> 1, the socio-institutionally arranged-for concept. Right NOW we are making
> sense of Chapter Six in Thinking and Speech, so I think that the idea of
> "instructed" concepts is more specific (hence probably more useful) than the
> alternative you propose (which I think expands Yongho's "artificial
> concepts"). But of course this isn't true in the contexts you suggest and
> it's not even true in other chapters of T&S (e.g. Chapter Four).
>
> So I think we are not at all hostile to the move you propose. In fact,
> we've been noticing all the long that Vygotsky does an awful lot of the same
> thing, laying VIOLENT hands on terms taken from other people (e.g.
> "syncretism" from Piaget, "complexes" and "pseudoconcepts" from the Sterns,
> and "potential concepts" from the Buhlers) and hollowing them out like a
> gourd in order to place the brilliant candle of his own thinking inside.
>
> So we get "subject-dominated" for syncretic, "object-dominated" for
> complexes, and "abstraction" for potential concepts, just to take the
> examples from Chapter Five. But of course the operation he performs on
> spontaneous concepts (everyday concepts) and nonspontaneous ones (science,
> instructed, socioculturally arranged for concepts) in Chapter Six is in
> every respect the same.
>
> 2. Grammatical reification, or the creation of concepts in the image of
> objects by language. I think you overestimate the degree to which this is
> universal even in English. Halliday denies that it is an aspect of English
> before the sixteenth century; he points to its utter absence in the
> scientific writing of Chaucer. I note that your own coinage,
> "social-institutionally arranged for concept" is something of a move in the
> other direction.
>
> Of course, Russian, German, French and Standard Average European languages
> generally practice grammatical reification to a very high degree, and
> Halliday makes the point that they all start to do so at roughly the same
> time (around the sixteenth century). Galileo is to Italian almost exactly
> what Newton is to English.
>
> But academic language in Chinese, probably the oldest institutionally
> arranged for register on earth which is still used, does not emphasize nouns
> at all; if anything what is stressed is the stative verb (which corresponds
> roughly to the copula plus adjective construction in English). Note that
> even Vygotsky, whose scientific thinking is not exactly Russian OR German OR
> French, abandons the "noun-like" concept in Chapter Six, where his model of
> the concept is not one of Sakharov's blocks or even a group of them but
> rather the abstract relation represented by "because" and "although".
>
> These relations are not necessarily linked to any particular semantic or
> grammatical form. We can say:
>
> I'm ugly. But I'm gentle. (relator realized as conjunct)
> I'm ugly, but I'm gentle. (circumstance realized as conjunction)
> Although my appearance may displease, I am gentle (process realized by verb
> and subject)
> Although my ugliness may disgust, I am gentle. (quality realized as a noun)
> When the shock of my ugliness passes, you will see that I am gentle (entity
> + modifier realized as noun and prepositional phrase).
>
> In English these forms are not, to borrow your term,
> socially-institutionally equal: there is a distinct sense in which the later
> terms are more formal and more adult.
>
> Why does any of this matter? Well, I think it matters because we are
> finally offering a STRUCTURAL and not simply a FUNCTIONAL model for
> development. In Standard Average European languages it is a double move: the
> child first has to RECONSTRUE complex discourse as complex grammar. Then the
> child reconstrues complex grammar as complex morphology, creating scientific
> concepts.
>
> So why are scientific concepts always words with complex morphology? I
> think one reason is that they tend to be FOREIGN in derivation; they tend to
> be words borrowed from phrases in foreign languages. This helps us make them
> strange, transform them into "objects" of contemplation and hierachization.
> Which brings me to...
>
> 3. The unicorn. Shushu has pointed out that the Sakharov blocks test is NOT
> made of artificial concepts at all but of two everyday concepts (height and
> diameter) which are artificially combined. In this sense it's very similar
> to what happens when we try to teach foreign language concepts by
> relabelling various native language meanings. The unicorn and the wizard are
> both examples of synthesizing two everyday concepts into a new non-existent
> one.
>
> But as with Shushu's foreign language example (and as "synthesis" implies)
> the result is rather greater than the sum of the parts: a unicorn is rather
> more than a horse with a cow's horn stuck in its forehead. Very often the
> use of foreign language terms as scientific concepts (because ALL languages
> really DO have THAT in common) has the same effect: making the familiar
> strange really does make it something more than familiar.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
> --- On Sun, 4/5/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> > Subject: Re: [xmca] A Flock of Already Roasted Pigeons
> > To: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> > Cc: "Culture ActivityeXtended Mind" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> > Date: Sunday, April 5, 2009, 8:46 AM
> > Hello SNUE
> >
> > I am sympathetic to the conceptual moves you are promoting
> > in the note below, but as so often happens, especially when
> > is an autodidact in such matters, as I am certainly, in the
> > ideas of LSV and language, answers keep begeting questions.
> >
> >
> > So here are a couple of more.
> >
> > 1. Can we move beyond "instructed" concepts to
> > "social-institutionally arranged for concepts?" I
> > ask because it seems to me that the broader
> > category (not sure how broad it is and intuit that it needs
> > delimiting), ought to cover cases such as those illustrated
> > by the work of Ed Hutchins
> >
> > on Trobriand discourse, Max Gluckman on law in traditional
> > African societies, and other such cases. Easy access to the
> > Trobriand example
> > is at http://lchc.ucsd.edu/Histarch/fe79v1n2.PDF
> >
> >
> > 2. I am puzzling over the senses in which it is true that
> > "Concepts do not "exist" as objects, and yet
> > scientific language in English tends to treat them as
> > such."  Not so in Russian? English does seems real
> > good at entification and turning processes into things, but
> > I am again intuiting, with very limited
> >
> > knowledge of a few other languages, that it is not unique
> > in this respect.
> >
> > 3. And then there is the case of a unicorn. There are a lot
> > of aspects of that poem that I find intriguing. Just one is
> > that if I ask a class of, say,
> >
> > 300 undergraduates if they have every encountered a
> > unicorn, at first no one will to admit to having seen one.
> > Then I ask them to vote on the following
> > question by raising their hands: "If you had to guess,
> > would you consider a unicorn good or bad." 99.99% raise
> > vote for good. Hmmmm, they know if its good or bad, but have
> > never encountered one. And, after some discussion they get
> > around to acknowledging that many have in fact encountered,
> > in some materialized, "objectified" form, a
> > unicorn.
> >
> >
> > I am among this naive majority.
> >
> > Ditto with respect to Wizards, very important entities in
> > my life and not as non-existent concepts.
> >
> > I know there are lots of different questions in these
> > ruminations and now I have to turn to the serious business
> > of pretending to be an educator (another
> >
> > concept with very difficulty to pin down objects!), it
> > being Sunday, when I get to work "on my own."
> > Efforts at enlightenment, including reprints,
> > warmly accepted!
> >
> > mike
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 9:40 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> >
> >
> > Mike--
> >
> >
> >
> > Thanks to you and your freind Reindeer for the unicorn.
> > It's a welcome addition to something that my former grad
> > students and I were discussing over roasted pigeons,
> > Shanghai pasta and a mean Australian Merlot.
> >
> >
> >
> > I told our group about your etymological analysis and
> > suggested that "scientific concepts" (that is,
> > "научных понятий") really means
> > "instructed concepts" or "taught
> > concepts" in the same way that oбучeния really
> > means something like "instructed learned".
> > That's why Prout translates the term as "academic
> > concepts"
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Yongho pointed out that in Korean, and in Japanese, and in
> > Chinese, the term we use for "spontaneous" as
> > opposed to "nonspontaneous" concepts is really
> > "naturally occurring" as opposed to
> > "artificial". Obviously, we have to be careful not
> > to confuse artificial concepts in the sense of instructed
> > concepts with artificial concepts in the sense of the
> > experimental ones of Chapter Five. But Vygotsky does say, at
> > the beginning of Chapter Six, that there is a sense in which
> > instructed concepts are artificial.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Now, Shushu says that science concepts are really just one
> > kind of "instructed concept". Other kinds include
> > ethical concepts (which are taught in Korea as opposed to
> > natural morality children bring from home), aesthetic
> > concepts (as opposed to naive realism), and of course the
> > kind of sociological concepts which Vygotsky is REALLY
> > talking about in Chapter Six (e.g. "proletarian"
> > as opposed to "My daddy is a worker"), which most
> > Western academics would probably NOT accept as scientific.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > In Korea there is also a special, polite register of Korean
> > that is used informal education and which needs formal
> > instruction. And of course ALL foreign language word
> > meanings, for reasons that Vygotsky makes very clear, are
> > instructed concepts. The "analogy" between science
> > concepts and foreign language concepts is not just an
> > analogy; it's a pointer to a deepgoing psychic
> > affinity.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > This affinity is what Yongho is pointing to when he argues
> > that spontaneous means "natural" rather than
> > simply "random" or "aleatory" and that
> > nonspontaneous means in some sense "artificial" or
> > "designed" instead of purely
> > "scientific". This is why Jay says that science
> > concepts are really just distinguished by their position in
> > a set of thematic relations (they "fit in" to a
> > hierarchy as opposed to just "following on" from a
> > given common graphic-visual purview).
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Of course, as "fit in" and "follow on"
> > suggest, it is partly a matter of a paradigmatic
> > relationship between concepts instead of the concrete
> > syntagmatic one of everyday life, the sort of thing LSV
> > notes when he argues that the reason why similarity
> > relations emerge conceptually before difference ones do is
> > because they require a hierarchy, a structure of
> > generalization, while differences can be noted
> > perceptually.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > So, I think this is how our group would mull over your
> > questions, although of course if you were actually here we
> > would be too busy being Korean and deferential and plying
> > you with wine and kimch to give such direct answers.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > MIKE: 1) LSV appears to believe that scientific concepts
> > only arise in school, where school entails special forms of
> > discourse and written language. Does that imply that people
> > who have not attended school or acquired writing think only
> > in everyday concepts?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > SNUE: I think we would say NO, because science concepts are
> > only ONE form of volitional, hierarchized, and
> > paradigmatized concept. There are other kinds. People in
> > courtrooms use volitional concepts, and so do practitioners
> > of religious rites. Every painting is a volitional concept.
> > Even people who have followed a programme of apprenticeship
> > instead of formal instruction will be able to describe their
> > knowledge in a fairly volitional way.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > MIKE: 2) What is the relation between
> > indicative/nominative/----->naming things that cannot
> > exist and everyday/scientific distinction.
> >
> >
> >
> > SNUE: I think we'd say that the connection is this.
> > Concepts do not "exist" as objects, and yet
> > scientific language in English tends to treat them as such.
> > So because of the way our language works we need some way of
> > naming things that do not exist.
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > Halliday points out that making the word "growth"
> > out of the verb "grow" or "depth" out of
> > the word "deep" is an instance of METAPHOR, a
> > creation of a thing that never was and never can be, purely
> > for the convenience of creating hierarchies and writings
> > sentences that look a little like mathematical equations.
> > (Eunsook and I did  something on this, actually:
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a907046497~db=all~order=page<http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content%7Econtent=a907046497%7Edb=all%7Eorder=page>
> >
> >
> >
> > (as always pdfs available from the author on request!)
> >
> >
> >
> > David Kellogg
> >
> > Seoul National University of Education (SNUE)
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
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