Re: [xmca] conservation

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Dear Columbian colleagues--- The literature on this topic goes way back both
historically and ontogenetically.

At I noted earlier, some of the early work is summarized in LCHC (1983)
which is in the lchc publications at lchc.ucsd.edu. There is a book by
Micahel Siegal (1991) on this topic, and article by Rochel Gelman early
on, 1972. This same line of discussion generated the "its all there at
birth" literature by, among others, Baillargeon, Spelke, Wynn, et al. for
conservation of number, causality, etc.

Other than Martin's initial question about LSV's view, in what context to
what ends would you like to take this up?

Back on the weekend.
mike

On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <
jlarream@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:

> Hi, all,
> Martin's example is wonderful. But assuming that there's something
> perceptual is a much less parsimonious hypothesis than exploring in depth
> the issue or word meaning or a conversational feature, for example. Was the
> question followed up by others? Often, in conservation tasks the
> experimenter falls to the temptation to bring about "spectacular effects"
> and fails to test whether there are simpler ways to account for the child's
> answers. Sorry, but still skeptical.
>
> Jorge
>
>
> Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
> Profesor Asociado y Director
> Departamento de Psicología
> Universidad de los Andes
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Feb 26, 2010, at 9:52 AM, Martin Packer wrote:
>
>  David, Mike, Jorge...
>>
>> I do know Margaret Donaldson's book questioning the child's understanding
>> of the researcher's language in conservation and other Piagetian tasks. And
>> just recently Rod mentioned Valerie Walkerdine's work showing how 'more' and
>> 'less' are understood in terms of everyday family practices.
>>
>> But I show a brief video when I teach this topic in my undergraduate
>> classes; I think it may even have come with Mike's textbook, as an
>> instructor's resource. I watched it again yesterday. In one segment, the
>> adult places one graham cracker in front of the child and two in front of
>> herself, then asks, do you think that we shared those fairly? The child
>> looks mildly offended and says no, because you have two and I have this. The
>> adult then breaks the child's cracker into two pieces! She asks, now is it
>> fair? The child replies, with a big smile, yes, because we both have two!
>>
>> I can't convince myself that this is entirely a linguistic phenomenon,
>> though differences in word meaning may certainly play a role. There's
>> something perceptual too. At this time in his work, although Vygotsky had
>> died before any conservation tasks were performed, Piaget was still arguing
>> that the child needs to come to appreciate basic dualisms, such as that
>> between appearance and reality. Vygotsky, of course, argues forcefully
>> against this in Thought and Language. How would he have extended the
>> arguments he made about egocentric speech to lack of conversation? Would he
>> have suggested that changing word meaning transforms the child's perception,
>> so a cracker broken in half no longer is perceived as two?
>>
>> Martin
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>
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