And, can i repeat my request for what people are talking about in their
various invocations of the term, consciousness? How many meanings
floating around there.
Is there also one correct way of defining consciousness or are people
using that term as a pseudoconcept while thinking they are thinking
scientifically?? I fear the
latter. But will celebrate learning how and when I am wrong and how to know.
mike
On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
<mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
After reflecting on Bakhtin's ideas of utterance and genre, and its
comparison with Vygotsky's concepts, I think I can offer an answer
to my own question.
Bakhtin is concerned only with speech and texts, whereas LSV was
concerned with all kinds of artefacts and actions. So there is a bit
of an atom (physics) / molecule (chemistry) type relation here, with
distinct but compatible sciences having overlapping domains of
phenomena.
It seems to me that an action which begins and ends when control
passes to and from the individual (like with an utterance) is of
psychological interest. It is larger than the action conceived by
Activity Theory.
But actions are always enacted in a social context (ie working with
someone, for someone, against someone, under someone etc), and
demarcating them in the same way as utterances would give us a
larger unit which would be useful in understanding collaborative
action, and in the final analysis all action is collaborative. But
we still need the smaller unit in which the action is aimed at a
single goal, ok, like a generalization of "meaning" to see what one
person is doing, and there is no harm in the idea of nesting these.
Anyway, ...
Andy
Mike Cole wrote:
Sorry this came to me via gmail in two disparate threads.
So Andy IS talking about operations-actions.
Tony asks about broken tools, which, in a way, typos are.
To put a tiny bit more flesh on my questions about
consciousness. A standard
procedure in my college classes when issues of
reading instruction come up is to ask a student to read a
passage from the
assigned readings out loud. Sans typos, the standard
reaction, even with text that student can discuss pretty well,
is that the
person who reads out loud cannot say anything about the
content of the paragraph read.
What does this mean for the discussion of consciousness?
Why is reading aloud a standard practice in reading instruction
classrooms?
mike
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 1:33 PM, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com <mailto:vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>>wrote:
Dear Monica:
The ref is to Problems of the Development of Mind, Progress
Publishers,
1981. See also pp. 65-66:
“Thus in the course of attaining a general isolated goal
intermediate goals
may also be identified as a result of which the unitary
action is split up
into several spearte successive actions. This is especially (66)
characteristic of those cases in which the action is
performed under
conditions that make it difficult to carry it out with the
help of
operations that have been formed earlier. The opposite
process consists of
strengthening previously isolated units of activity. This
happens when the
objectively attained intermediate results merge together and
the subject is
no longer conscious of them. Accordingly one can see the
processes of
division or conversely consoldation of the units of mental
images: a text by
a child just learning how to read is broken down in his/her
perception into
separate letters or even into the graphic elements of the
letter. At a later
point in this process whole words or even sentences become
the perceptual
elements.”
You can see that ANL is really considers "consciousness" to
be a)
awareness, and b) volition. This gets him into a terrible
contradiction: the
fluent reader is deliberately unconscious of text as text.
But how is it
possible to be deliberately unconscious of text as text
unless you are
conscious of it?
Why not just say that we are aware of text but that we are
deliberately not
foregrounding or highlighting it because we are busy
foregrounding and
highlighting something else?
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Tue, 8/18/09, Monica Hansen
<monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu
<mailto:monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu>>
wrote:
From: Monica Hansen <monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu
<mailto:monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu>>
Subject: RE: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?
To: "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'"
<xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>>
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2009, 12:05 PM
David:
You wrote:
And on p. 237 we have an unmitigated disaster, when this
passable model of
a physical skill is used to produce a theory of reading in which
consciousness has no part in the recognition of text.
“When a person is reading, for example, it seems to him that
both the ideas
expressed in the book and the outward graphic form of their
expression, i.e.
the text itself are recognized identically-both the one and
the other. In
fact, however, that is not wholly so; in fact only the ideas
and their
expression are presented in consciousness and the outward
aspect of the text
may only seem to be conscious, as it usually is when there
are omissions,
crude typographical errors, etc.”
I have two questions, please:
1.) What Leontiev are you reading? You give page numbers,
but I don't know
the original source. (Haven't even started that yet, but
apparently need
to...)
2.) What do you mean in this comment? Can you expand? It
looks to me like
he is not suggesting that consciousness has no part in text
recognition, but
that the reader is usually unaware of the part of the
process that is not
conscious.
Thanks,
Monica
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
<mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu>
[mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
<mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu>] On
Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 4:29 PM
To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>;
Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?
Andy--
I thought you meant "action" as opposed to operation as
opposed to
activity. If that's the case then I think that your question
should be
"where does an action begin and end?" rather than "when".
In Problems of the Development of Mind, Leontiev tries to
solve this
problem. If, for example, you have not completely
automatized the operations
of changing gears on the car, then each operation becomes a
conscious
action, with a discernible goal, not simply something that
is the helpless
prey of operational conditions. Once you have automatized
the operations of
changing gears on the car, then changing gears becomes
itself the operation,
and goal directed actions include things like going around a
corner.
I am not happy with this solution (I'm also not happy with
Bakhtin's purely
objectivist definition of the utterance, for similar
reasons). On p. 235,
Leontiev gives the example of a trained marksman which is
almost identical
to his example of shifting gears. The process of aiming and
steadying his
grip and breathing and so on are considered automatized:
“For the trained
marksman noneof these processes is an independent action and
their
objectives are not singled out in his consciousness.”
This is actually untrue, as the recent example of the Navy
SEAL marksmen
who freed a ship captain taken hostage by Somali pirates
will show. But even
if it WERE true it would be irrelevant to language.
I think it was Bakhurst who pointed out that a lot of
Leontiev's ideas are
really lead to a kind of Piagetianism without Piaget. Here,
though, his
ideas lead to a kind of skills theory without Gagne or Anderson.
Essentially, Leontiev is taking the position that all skill
learning is the
automatization of declarative knowledge in the form of
procedural knowledge.
This is why Leontiev (and also Wertsch) like examples of
sensorimotor skills
and hand to eye coordination; the Anderson model handles
this quite well for
hte most part.
On p. 236, Leontiev writes: “These transformations of
unconscious content
in conscious and vice versa that occur in connection with a
change of the
place occupied by the content in the structure of the
activity, can now be
understood neurophysiologically.” p. 236.
And on p. 237 we have an unmitigated disaster, when this
passable model of
a physical skill is used to produce a theory of reading in which
consciousness has no part in the recognition of text.
“When a person is reading, for example, it seems to him that
both the ideas
expressed in the book and the outward graphic form of their
expression, i.e.
the text itself are recognized identically-both the one and
the other. In
fact, however, that is not wholly so; in fact only the ideas
and their
expression are presented in consciousness and the outward
aspect of the text
may only seem to be conscious, as it usually is when there
are omissions,
crude typographical errors, etc.”
The reason I am not very happy with Bakhtin's definition of
the utterance
is twofold. First of all, many turns (and in fact almost all
"feedback"
turns that a teacher takes) consist of several utterances
within a single
turn.
T: How are you all today? (one turn, and one utterance)
S: Fine, thanks, and you? (one turn, but three utterances)
So it's actually much more useful to define an utterance as
a POTENTIAL
turn than as an actual one. But even this definition is too
objectivist for
what I want to do.
It does not help us at all at the most crucial moment of
language
development, the transformation of inter-mental vertical
constructions in
discourse into intra-mental horizontal constructions.
Imagine a small child nagging a parent for an ice lolly on a
hot day. The
child can only utter one or two word turns, but the child
can do this for
HOURS, using gestures, intonation, tears and tandrums.
An older child has learned to ventriloquate objections and
respond to them,
to incorporate the adults turns into his or her own, like this;
"You promised me I could have a lolly if it was hot and I'm
really hot and
thirst and I know it won't spoil my supper and besides you
promised."
Now this is only OBJECTIVELY a single utterance; when we
begin to analyze
it we realize that it is a vitiated dialogue. The same thing
is true of
paragraphs, of novels and so on, all of which a purely
OBJECTIVIST analysis
would render as a single utterance.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
.
--- On Mon, 8/17/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com
<mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>> wrote:
From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com <mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>>
Subject: Re: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?
To: ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>, "eXtended
Mind, Culture, Activity" <
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu <mailto:xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>>
Date: Monday, August 17, 2009, 10:22 AM
Pepper's discussion of "events" as units of analysis within
a contextualist
world view might be helpful, Andy. World Hypotheses
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Andy Blunden
<ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
I'll look in my Dewey and see what I can find. Then
there's the internet
which has lots of Dewey.
It occurred to me that Bakhtin's utterance is delimited
by turn-taking,
and
this is quite a nice definition for a pragmatic theory
of social
interaction
etc. And then I realized that Vygotsky's conception
seems to be very
elastic
on this point. Word-meaning shorter and much more
cognitivist, the
'double
stimulation experiments' more like Bakhtin's
turn-taking, but the child
development stuff much more open ended. And then
'activity' carries this
connotation of being on-going and not delimited, which
gives it quite
different implications I think.
And I certainly go with Im Anfang war der Tat.
Andy
Mike Cole wrote:
Some time before it ends, Andy?
For sure I recommend that you take a look at Dewey's
early critique of
the
reflex arc concept in dealing with
this issue. Which was in the beginning, anyway, the
word or the deed?
mike
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Andy Blunden
<ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net><mailto:
ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>>> wrote:
Can anyone tell me whether there has ever been any
discussion about
when an action begins and ends? (By "action" I
mean in the technical
sense of Activity Theory.)
Andy
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