[Xmca-l] Association and Mediation

[Andy Blunden]

I agree. At the level of *psychology*, there is no substantial 
difference between association and mediation, either concept can be used 
to arrive at the same conclusions and explain the same data. But what 
marks out the mediation approach is that it highlights one particular 
range of entities - the tools and signs which are cultural products, 
produced by earlier generations of human beings and passed down for us, 
bringing with them the wisdom of our forebears. That is, the difference 
is only in the *historical* perspective.
Yes?
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*Andy Blunden*
http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/


David Kellogg wrote:
> Let me--while keeping within the two screen limit--make the case for
> Vygotsky's obsession with discrediting associationism. I think it's not
> just about mediation; as Michael points out, there are associationists who
> are willing to accept that a kind of intermediary associationism exists and
> some mediationists who are willing to accept that as mediation. Vygotsky
> has far more in mind. How do we, without invoking religion, explain the
> uniqueness of our species?
>
> Is it just the natural egocentrism that every species feels for its own
> kind? From an associationist point of view, and from a Piagetian
> perspective--and even from a strict Darwinian one--true maturity as a
> species comes with acknowledging that there is nothing more to it than
> that: we are simply a singularly maladaptive variety of primate, and our
> solemn temples and clouded towers are but stones piled upon rocks in order
> to hide this. The value of our cultures have to be judged the same way as
> any other adaptation: in terms of survival value.
>
> Making the case for the higher psychological functions and for language is
> not simply a matter of making a NON-religious case human exceptionalism.
> It's also, in a strange way, a way of making the case for the vanguard role
> of the lower classes in human progress. For other species, prolonging
> childhood is giving hostages to fortune,and looking after the sick and the
> elderly is tantamount to suicide. But because artificial organs (tools) and
> even artificial intelligences (signs) are so important for our species, it
> is in the societies and the sectors of society where these "circuitous,
> compensatory means of development" are most advanced that lead our
> development as a species. The wretched of the earth always been short on
> rocks and stones to pile up and on the wherewithal for material culture
> generally. But language and ideology is quite another matter: verily, here
> the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
>
> I think the idea of imagination is a distal form of attention is simply the
> logical result of Ribot's model of imagination: he says there are only two
> kinds of imagination: reproductive, and recombinative. So imagination is
> nothing more than the recombination of concrete experiences, and nothing
> really new can ever be imagined. But as Vygotsky says, when you hear the
> name of a place, you don't have to have actually been there to be able to
> imagine it. So there must be some artificial memory at work in word meaning.
>
> You probably know the hoary old tale about Archimedes, who was given a
> crown of gold and who discovered that the gold had been mixed with silver
> by measuring the displacement of an equivalent quantity of gold. Well, we
> now know that this method doesn't actually work: it's not possible to
> measure the differences in water displacement that precisely. The method
> that Archimedes actually used was much closer to the "principal of
> buoyancy" which Vygotsky always talks about.
>
> And how do we know this? Because of the Archimedes palimpsest, a velum on
> which seven texts were written at right angles to each other. Because
> parchment was so expensive, the velum was scraped and written over every
> century or so, but because the skin it was made of was soft, the pressure
> of the writing preserved the older texts below the new ones when the old
> text was scraped off. And one of the lower texts is the only known Greek
> copy of Archimedes' "On Floating Bodies".
>
> Neither the relationship of these texts to meaning nor their relationship
> to each other is a matter of association (and in fact they are related to
> each other by a kind of failed dissociation). But it's quite similar to the
> way that word meanings are reused and develop anew.
>
> (Did I do it? Is this two screens?)
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>   
>