[Xmca-l] Re: Metaphors

[Douglas Williams]

Hi--
I will hazard the thought that it might be fruitful to at least consider the cognitive linguistics literature on the topic (notably Lakoff, Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, and Turner, More than Cool Reason). I thought that they extended Sergei Eisenstein, and more broadly on Dewey and CHAT, though George Lakoff himself was not enthusiastic about syncretic approaches to his work, to put it mildly. I have not noticed syncretic approaches are common here. 

I think this is the territory Vygotsky approaches in The Psychology of Art. For example: 
"A work of art can be applied as a predicate to new, imperceptive phenomena or ideas, to apperceive them in the same way as the image in a word helps apperceive the new meaning. What we are unable to understand immediately and directly can be understood in a roundabout way, allegorically. The whole psychological effect of a work of art can then be entirely credited to this indirectness." 
I would be interested in seeing more commentary relating CHAT with that line of research. Certainly Vygotsky, Luria, and others of their group were thinking about these issues. 

Eisenstein/ Vygotsky /Luria’s project: Cinematic Thinking and the Integrative Science of Mind and Brain.

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| Eisenstein/ Vygotsky /Luria’s project: Cinematic Thinking and the Integrative Science of Mind and Br...Introduction When Sergei Eisenstein died on the 11th of February 1948, a post-mortem examination was conducted to establish the cause of death.  |
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| View on www.screeningthepast.com | Preview by Yahoo |
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The pre-linguistic brain that we share with mammals generally operates through imagistic narratives. This is something that dreams and memory formation make clear--the recent convergence of neuropsychological research with the classical method of memory palaces as a tool for recall, and the more recent commentary by Temple Grandin on the subject (Thinking in Pictures), simply underscores the degree to which language builds on an existing pattern of imagistic recall, and cogniition too, even among cows, Grandin tells us ("Cattle I have worked with have had the ability to apply previously learned skills to new situations, which also implies a capacity for thought.") Metaphor builds on these images to provide source domains for conceptual framing of new events, on the basis of past experience. Memory consolidation builds the narratives and refines the preferred frames.
I have thought from time to time that there is something kind of important about understanding this general idea, and I would be interested in seeing the insights of those of you who have doubtlessly studied the issue more deeply than I. Shared metaphors are deeply interesting (I think), for what they tell us about the system of socioeconomic interaction within which we are embedded. And of course, if you like art and literature, then all the better....

Regards,Doug


      From: Annalisa Aguilar <annalisa@unm.edu>
 To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu> 
 Sent: Sunday, December 21, 2014 10:20 AM
 Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Metaphors
   
Is this about where the metaphor thread picks up?

Please continue!

:)

Annalisa

________________________________________
From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu> on behalf of Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, December 20, 2014 12:59 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Metaphors

Horizontal development AS practices.
What KIND of practices?
Practices that develop "within"
Pracices which develop "across"

These metaphorical words [within, across, and also "between"] CARRY us as
performances which are form[ing] and formative.
Where?
In situated specific practices.
THIS adds to the vertical dimension

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On Sat, Dec 20, 2014 at 10:55 AM, larry smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com> wrote:

Message from Francine: 
This is a a good way of simplifying what has been discussed. 

And it is also a way to enter into a discussion of how a phenomenon like winter might be referred to as a thing (noun), as a process (verb like wintering in Aspen, or winterize your car), and even as a relational prepositional phrase, perhaps adverb

(In the bleak mid-winter). 

Also, gerunds are verbs that can function as nouns - I can't use wintering as a noun in an intelligent sentence- but let's use 'singing can lift your spirits.'

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From: hshonerd@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 08:39:19 -0700
To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Metaphors 

I am late to this, but I wonder if things, processes and relations capture pretty much everything about language and thinking. So nouns, as things, verbs, as processes and prepositions, as relations.

Henry 


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On Dec 19, 2014, at 4:48 PM, larry smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com> wrote:

Message from Francine: 
This is a a good way of simplifying what has been discussed. 

And it is also a way to enter into a discussion of how a phenomenon like winter might be referred to as a thing (noun), as a process (verb like wintering in Aspen, or winterize your car), and even as a relational prepositional phrase, perhaps adverb

(In the bleak mid-winter). 

Also, gerunds are verbs that can function as nouns - I can't use wintering as a noun in an intelligent sentence- but let's use 'singing can lift your spirits.'

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From: hshonerd@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 20 Dec 2014 08:39:19 -0700
To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Metaphors 

I am late to this, but I wonder if things, processes and relations capture pretty much everything about language and thinking. So nouns, as things, verbs, as processes and prepositions, as relations.
Henry 

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On Dec 19, 2014, at 4:48 PM, larry smolucha <lsmolucha@hotmail.com> wrote:

Message from Francine:

Just a thought - Is the use of nouns, verbs, prepositions a result of developing a written language based on an alphabet?

Language use in a culture with no written language would surely differ significantly.

And written languages based on hieroglyphs, pictograms, cuneiform, Norse Runes, Celtic oghams, etc. surely divide and frame experience differently.

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From: boblake@georgiasouthern.edu 
Date: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 16:43:24 -0500 
To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu Subject: 
[Xmca-l] Re: Metaphors

Hi Everyone,

I appreciate this thread's emphasis on the relativistic character of metaphoric language and find think that it supports Vygotsky's notion of the fluid nature of language as it emerges from socio-cultural and socio-historical contexts in meaning making (in contrast to biological determinism). Because each culture makes meaning in widely diverse ways, language forms and usage might have complex intricacies and shades of meaning on one concept alone. Along with the example of early 20th century Hopi's view of time, there are other more recent examples from the present day that suggest ways that language can shape thought.

Consider the Australian aboriginal language, Guugu Yimithirr, from north Queensland who have no words for right or left, in front of, or behind to describe location. Instead they use the points of the compass even when requesting that someone move over to make room. They will say “move a bit to the east.” To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they’ll say, “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” (Deutscher, 2010, p. MM 42)

The effect on the thinking of this group is phenomenal in orienting the speakers to their directional spatial environment to such a degree that roughly 1 out of every 10 words in conversational Guugu Yimithirr includes either north, south, east or west and is accompanied with precise hand gestures (ibid). Consequently in this culture, language acquisition involves constant awareness of spaces relative to the points of the compass.

Deutscher relays a fascinating story about the ways that memory is stored for the speakers of this language.

The story also serves as a clear example of Vygotsky’s notion of language as a mediating tool as a means of creating higher levels of consciousness through spatial kinesthetic approaches to meaning creation. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films (ibid). 

*Robert* 

Deutscher, G. (2010, August 29) Does your language shape how you think? *The New York Times* *Sunday Magazine, *p. MM 42. 

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On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 4:05 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote: 

Yes, Haliday is essentially a Whorfian, and that's one of things that brings him close to Vygotsky. (Compare, for example, Chomsky, who is essentially anti-developmental in his ideas about language, and who now rejects the leading role played by social communication and says that communication is epiphenomenal to language, whose original purpose is thought.) For Sapir, and for Whorf, in the beginning of every major onotogenetic, sociogenetic, and even phylogenetic change in language there has to be some change in the nature of communication. 

So what Andy says about the lack of the basis of modern science in Hopi applies perfectly well to English. When we read the scientific writings of Chaucer on the astrolabe, for example, we do not see words like "reflection", "refraction" or "alignment". Chaucer uses words like "bounce off", "bend through", and "line up" (note the use of prepositions, Helena!). Where did these words come from, and how did they make scientific English possible? 

Most of us have no problem saying that Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravitation. But it's only a slight exaggeration to say that what he really discovered was the meaning potential of words like "gravitation". Gravity is, of course, not a thing at all; that is, it's not an entity, but rather a process, the process of falling down, or falling in (preps, again!). So how and above all why does it become an entity? 

It's interesting to compare Newton's writings on optics with Chaucer's on the astrolabe. The "Opticks" has a fixed format that we recognize almost instantly today: Newton describes his equipment (the prism and the dark room); he then narrates his method as a kind of recipe ("First, I did this; then I did that") and draws conclusions, which he then formulates in mathematical terms (this is essentially the format of Vygotsky's lectures on pedology, so much so that when translating them we had some trouble determining the precise moment when Vygotsky turns to the blackboard to write his conclusion in the form of a law). 

In order to get them into mathematical shape, though, he has to make sentences that look a lot like equations. "The plumpness of the lens yields a greater refraction of the light", "The reflection of the light from the glass results of the light striking the flatness of the glass" "The curvature of the spectacle glass supplies the lacking plumpness of the eye". In each of these, a quality or a process which would normally be realized as an adjective or a verb is suddenly realized by a noun, creating an imaginary entity. 

That's grammatical metaphor. Something that is "canonically" realized by a verb ("to grow") is suddenly realized nominally ("growth"), or something that is canonically a quality ('red") is realized verbally ("redden"). We even find related clauses realized as verbs ("She did not know the rules. So she died" is realized by "Death was brought about through ignorance", all of these examples from Halliday). In fact, the Genetic Law that Vygotsky formulates in "Mind in Society" ("Every higher mental function is realized on two planes....") is really just one instance of grammatical metaphor. 

One of Chomsky's best known arguments for the radical innateness hypothesis is this. If I take a sentence like "Students who do not do their homework do not do well" and I want to make a question, how do I know which "do" to move to the front? Chomsky assumes that this knowledge is essentially innate; it is part of universal grammar. But you can see that "Do students who do not do their homework do well?" can be built up through a process of what we might call "discourse metaphor"--whereby clauses stand for exchanges: 

Mother: You did your homework, didn't you? 
Child: No. 
Mother: You didn't do your homework? Did you do well? 
Child: No. 
Mother: You didn't do well? 
Child: No. 
Mother: You didn't do you homework so you didn't do well. Do the other students do well? 
Child: Some of them. 
Mother: Who does well? Do students who do not do their homework do well? 

And this of course explains why wh-items like "who" and 'why" have two functions--one inside a clause, where it expresses an intra-mental function (grammar) and one between them where it expresses an inter-mental function (discourse). 

I realize that grammatical metaphor will seem rather dry and abstract and unpoetic to people who assume that metaphor is only of the lexical kind. But to me, and I think to most children, it is far far more powerful and far more important developmentally. In some ways, it's the lexical metaphor that is responsible for the disenchantment of the child's world, while the grammatical metaphor infinitely expands it. (And here, I'm afraid, I must stop--it's time for breakfast and anyway my one screen is used up!) 

David Kellogg 
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies 

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On 19 December 2014 at 15:15, Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com> wrote:
Helena and David, 

I wonder if this quote below from Benjamin Whorf (one of the so-called authors of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis - a kindred tradition to Vygotsky's) might be useful. In it Whorf is comparing the Hopi notion of "time" to the SAE (Standard Average European - including English) notion of "time" and how each of these languages offers different affordances of meaning. Whereas Hopi has a much more processual understanding, English has a much more reified/objectified/entified sense of time. (btw, I think the first paragraph is easier to follow than the second - and in that first paragraph you'll find our old friend "imagination"). 

David, 
does this jibe with what you were pointing to? 

-greg 

Taken from:
http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mousesite/Secondary/Whorfframe2.html 

["Such terms as summer, winter, September, morning, noon, sunset" are with us nouns, and have little formal linguistic difference from other nouns. They can be subjects or objects, and we say "at sunset" or "in winter" just as we say "at a corner" or "in an orchard." They are pluralized and numerated like nouns of physical objects, as we have seen. Our thought about the referents of such words hence becomes objectified. Without objectification, it would be a subjective experience of real time, i.e. of the consciousness of "becoming later and later"--simply a cyclic phase similar to an earlier phase in that ever-later-becoming duration. Only by imagination can such a cyclic phase be set beside another and another in the manner of a spatial (i.e. visually perceived) configuration. "But such is the power of linguistic analogy that we do so objectify cyclic phasing. We do it even by saying "a phase" and "phases" instead of e.g., "phasing." And the pattern of individual and mass nouns, with the resulting binomial formula of formless item plus form, is so general that it is implicit for all nouns, and hence our very generalized formless items like "substance, matter," by which we can fill out the binomial for an enormously wide range of nouns. But even these are not quite generalized enough to take in our phase nouns. So for the phase nouns we have made a formless item, "time." We have made it by using "a time," i.e. an occasion or a phase, in the pattern of a mass noun, just as from "a summer" we make "summer" in the pattern of a mass noun. Thus with our binomial formula we can say and think "a moment of time, a second of time, a year of time." Let me again point out that the pattern is simply that of "a bottle of milk" or "a piece of cheese." Thus we are assisted to imagine that "a summer" actually contains or consists of such-and-such a quantity of "time."

In Hopi however all phase terms, like "summer, morning," etc., are not nouns but a kind of adverb, to use the nearest SAE analogy. They are a formal part of speech by themselves, distinct from nouns, verbs, and even other Hopi "adverbs." Such a word is not a case form or a locative pattern, like "des Abends" or "in the morning." It contains no morpheme like one of "in the house" or "at the tree." It means "when it is morning" or "while morning-phase is occurring." These "temporal s" are not used as subjects or objects, or at all like nouns. One does not say "it's a hot summer" or "summer is hot"; summer is not hot, summer is only WHEN conditions are hot, WHEN heat occurs. One does not say "THIS summer," but "summer now" or "summer recently." There is no objectification, as a region, an extent, a quantity, of the subjective duration feeling. Nothing is suggested about time except the perpetual "getting later" of it. And so there is no basis here for a formless item answering to our "time." ]

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On Thu, Dec 18, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com> wrote:

David, 
I am with you and etremeley interested right up to this:

"But grammatical metaphors, such as the nominalizations that Newton and Galileo created to talk about gravity as an entity and to create sentences that look like mathematical equations, are highly productive, which is why they still form the basis of scientific writing and thinking today."

Can you slow down for a moment and give some examples? I lose you when you say "created to talk about gravity as an entity".

Thank you,

Helena
Helena Worthen helenaworthen@gmail.com

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On Dec 18, 2014, at 1:59 PM, David Kellogg wrote: 

As Helena points out, prepositions are from the "grammatical" end of what Henry has called the "lexicon-grammar" continuum (and what Halliday calls "wording" or "lexicogrammar"). What that means is that they have three properties that words from the more "lexical" end do not have: 

a) They are a closed class. You can't invent new ones. (You can, actually, but you can't teach people to use it, whereas if you invent a new name or a new noun like "lexicogrammar", you can). 

b) They are systemic. They are not liimited to specific semantic field (the way that "lexicogrammar" is limited to a particular area of linguistics) but can be used wherever nouns and adverbial phrases are used. 

c) They are proportional. They always have more or less the same effect, which is why when you say "there's a flaw in your argument" the "in" has more or less the same feeling to it as the "in" in "there's a fly in your tea". In contrast, the word "lexicogrammar" MIGHT, in Henry's hands, refer to a book or even a footnote. 

Now, the interesting thing for me is that these properties pretty much define the difference between learning and development, at least as I understand it from Koffka. Learning is adding on functions indefinitely while development works by reorganizing the closed set of functions you already have into new systems. Learning is skill specific and local, while development is quite global in its implications. Learning is non-proportional and doesn't generalize to create new systems, while development does. And this is why we learn vocabulary (and forget it just as readily) but grammar seems to grow on you and never goes away. 

For Halliday, lexical metaphors (e.g. "that little tent of blue that people call the sky") are simply metaphors from the non-productive end of the lexicogrammatical continuum, which is why they are crisp, concrete, and vivid. But grammatical metaphors, such as the nominalizations that Newton and Galileo created to talk about gravity as an entity and to create sentences that look like mathematical equations, are highly productive, which is why they still form the basis of scientific writing and thinking today.

For Halliday, the "break" into grammatical metaphor is the third great moment in child development (after the break into mother tongue and the break into disciplinary language in school work). 

Prepositions, of course, encode geometrical notions: "at" implies zero dimensions ('at a point'), "on' implies one or two ("on a line', 'on a plane') and "in" impies three ('in a space'). But because they are grammatical, and therefore productive, we also use them with time: 'at a point in time', 'on a morning/afternoon', 'in 2015'. Compare: "at Christmas' (a specific time), "on Christmas' (the very day), and "in Christmas' (season). 

David Kellogg 
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies 

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On 19 December 2014 at 04:32, Helena Worthen <helenaworthen@gmail.com wrote>: 

Yes to prepositions as metaphors. They "carry across" spatial relationships from the concrete material world into the conceptual imaginary world. There are not many of them (50 common ones, and between 70 and 150 total, including multi-word prepositions like "as far as" -- this is according to https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/prepositions.htm ). We don't make up new ones. They don't have synonyms. Apparently, in English, they evolved from and did the job done by inflections in parent languages, examples being cases and tenses. 

But there is real difference in meaning between an inflection like the dative or accusative cases in Latin and the spatial relationships suggested by contemporary prepositions. I'll bet someone else on this list knows a lot more about this. 

Helena Worthen 
helenaworthen@gmail.com 

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On Dec 18, 2014, at 9:58 AM, HENRY SHONERD wrote: 

I’m with Andy on prepositions as metaphors. They are clearly embodied, proprioceptive, symbolic, meaningful. A standard intro to linguistics (For example, Yule, The Study of Language) semantics is focused on “lexicon”: nouns, verbs, adjectives, absolutely no mention of prepositions, being part of grammar, as it is traditionally construed. Langacker and Halliday see no clear demarcation between lexicon and grammar, hence, lexico-grammar. (Lo and behold, my spell check wanted me to write lexicon-grammar, adding the “n”. The traditions holds! Keep them separate!) Word coinings are great data for imagination and creativity. Did Vygotsky do much of that? In translation from Russian is word coining ever practiced? 

Henry 

On Dec 18, 2014, at 2:54 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote: 

the kind of metaphor which I find most interesting is the metaphorical use of prepositions like: 
- "there is some value IN your argument" 
- "I'd like to go OVER that again" 
- "I'd don't see what is BEHIND that line of thinking" 
- "Let's go THROUGH that again" and so on. 
Andy 
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
*Andy Blunden* http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/

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larry smolucha wrote: 
Message from Francine Smolucha: 

Forgive me for replying to myself - 

In regard to combinatory imagination and the synergistic possibilities: In the Genetic Roots of Thought and Speech (1929) published in Thought and Speech (1934) [or Thought and Language as translated into English 1962] Vygotsky discussed how word meaning is more than the 'additive' value of the two components (the sensory-motor thought and the speech vocalization). He used the analogy of H2O in which two chemical elements that are flammable gases combine to produce water, which is neither flammable nor a gas. 

[Just a note for Newcomers - in the early 20th century European Developmental Psychologists used the word 'genetic' to mean 'developmental' hence the Developmental Roots of Thought and Speech or in the case of Piaget's Genetic Epistemology read as Developmental Epistemology. And to those XMCARs who mentioned earlier synthesis and synthesis based on metaphoric thinking - definitely - we even see this in Vygotsky's example of H2O.

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From: lsmolucha@hotmail.com 
To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu 
Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 16:18:07 -0600 
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Imagination 

Message from Francine Smolucha: 

Combinatory or recombinative imagination could be synergistic and produce something new that is more than the sum of the parts. It does not have to mean that "imagination is nothing more than the recombining of concrete experiences, nothing really new can ever be imagined" (David Kellogg's most recent email.) A couple things to consider: 

(1) Sensory perception involves some element of imagination as the brain has to organize incoming data into a pattern (even at the simplest level of the Gestalt Law of Closure or Figure/Ground Images). 

(2) Memories themselves are reconstructed and not just photographic. 

(3) The goal of reproductive imagination (memory) is to try to accurately reproduce the sensory-motor experience of some external event. Whereas, the goal of combinatory imagination is to create something new out of memories, dreams, musings, and even sensory motor activity involving the actual manipulation of objects and symbols. 

(4) I think it would be useful to think of the different ways that things and concepts can be combines. For example, I could just combine salt and sugar and f

I can add water and it dissolves a bit  But adding heat changes the combination into a pancake. [Is this synergistic?] 

Sorry I have to go now - I am thinking of more examples to put the discussion in the metaphysical realm. 


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Date: Wed, 17 Dec 2014 20:05:49 +0900 
From: dkellogg60@gmail.com 
To: xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Imagination

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

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On 16 December 2014 at 14:24, HENRY SHONERD < hshonerd@gmail.com wrote:

I meant to ask: What does it mean that Ribot, as an associationist, “sees imagination as a rather distal form of attention”? 
Henry

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On Dec 15, 2014, at 5:19 PM, David Kellogg < dkellogg60@gmail.com > wrote: 

On the one hand, Ribot is really responsible for the division between higher and lower psychological functions. On the other, because Ribot is an associationist, he sees imagination as a rather distal form of attention. And, as Mike says, he does associate it with the transition from forest to farm, so in that sense he is responsible for the division between the two great periods of semio-history: the literal and commonsensical world of the forest where attention has to be harnessed to fairly prosaic uses in life and death struggles for existence, and the much more "imaginative" (that is, image based) forms of attention we find in the world of the farm,where written accounts (e.g. calendars) are kept, where long winter months are wiled away with fables, and we are much more likely to encounter talking animals (but much more rarely talking plants!). Here attention has to be more voluntary. 

Vygotsky rejects all this, of course. I think he has a very clear understanding of the kind of Rousseauvian romanticism that underpins Ribot here, but above all he rejects associationism. Vygotsky points out the LOGICAL flaw in Ribot's argument: if these productive practices really are the true source of volitional attention and thus of imagination, there isn't any reason to see a qualitative difference between human and animal imagination, because of course animals are perfectly capable of volitional attention (and in some ways are better at it than humans). Without a theory of the difference language makes, there isn't any basis for Ribot's distinction between higher and lower psychological functions at all. 
David Kellogg 
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies 

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On 16 December 2014 at 01:02, mike cole <mcole@ucsd.edu > wrote: 

Lots of interesting suggestions of new kinds of imagination, thanks to all for the food for thought. Ribot, not Robot, Henry. He was apparently very influential around the time emprical psychology got going in the late 19th century. I had seen work on memory before, but not imagination. 

Robert-

Does generative = productive and reflective equal reproductive? Overall I am pondering how to link up empirical studies of development of imagination to these various categories --- The cost of being a relative newcomer to the topic. 
mike 

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On Sun, Dec 14, 2014 at 10:19 PM, HENRY SHONERD < hshonerd@gmail.com > wrote: 

Forgive me coming late to this! Robot is now on my bucket list. This business of movement recycles our cross-modal musings from some weeks in our metaphorizing. (I just got an auto spell correct that segmented the last two words of the previous sentence as “met aphorizing”. Puns, according to my Wikipedia is a kind of metaphor. :) 

Henry

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On Dec 14, 2014, at 10:57 AM, mike cole < mcole@ucsd.edu > wrote: 

Andy- 

It was the Russians who pointed me toward Kant and they are doing contemporary work in which they claim Vygotsky and his followers as an inspiration. Some think that LSV was influenced by Hegel, so its of course interesting to see those additional categories emerge. 19th Century psychological vocabulary, especially in translation, seems awfully slippery territory to me. The word, "recollection" in this passage, for example, is not a currently used term in counter distinction to "memory." Normal problems. There are serious problems in contemporary discourse across languages as our explorations with out Russian colleagues have illustrated. 

That said, I feel as if I am learning something from theorists who clearly influenced Vygotsky and early psychology -- when it was still possible to include culture in it. Ribot has a book called "Creative Imagination" which, interestingly links imagination to both movement and the meaning of a "voluntary" act. Parts of it are offputting, primitives thinking like children stuff that was also "in the air" for example. But at present the concepts of creativity and imagination are thoroughly entangled, so its curious to see that the two concepts are linked. Just cause its old doesn't mean its useless, he found himself writing. mike Its difficult, of course, to know the extent to which pretty old approaches to a pesum 

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On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 4:39 PM, Andy Blunden < ablunden@mira.net wrote >: 

I know we want to keep this relatively contemporary, but it may be worth noting that Hegel's Psychology also gave a prominent place to Imagination in the section on Representation, mediating between Recollection and Memory. He structured Imagination as (1) Reproductive Imagination, (2) Associative Imagination (3) Productive Imagination, which he says leads to the Sign, which he describes as Productive Memory. 

In other words, the transition from immediate sensation to Intellect is accomplished through these three grades of Imagination. 

Andy

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*Andy Blunden* http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/

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mike cole wrote:

Here are some questions I have after reading Strawson and Williams. Kant et al (including Russian developmentalists whose work i am trying to mine for empirical strategies and already-accumulated results) speak of productive imagination. The Russians write that productive imagination develops. At first I thought that the use of productive implies that there must be a kind of ?imagination called UNproductive imagination. But I learned that instead the idea of RE-productive imagination appears and is linked to memory. So, it seems that imagination is an ineluctable part of anticipation and memory. 
Imagine that! 
mike 

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On Sat, Dec 13, 2014 at 12:16 PM, HENRY SHONERD < hshonerd@gmail.com>: 

Strawson provides a long view historically on imagination (starting with Hume and Kant), Williams a more contemporaneous look, and provides a space for imagination not afforded by the socio-cultural as fixed. This, coupled with Pelaprat and Cole on Gap/Imagination, gives me a ground to take part in the thread on imagination. 

Of course, I start with preconceptions: Vera on creative collaboration and the cognitive grammarian Langacker on symbolic assemblies in discourse and cognitive domains, particularly the temporal. Everyday discourse, it seems to me, is full of imagination and creativity. I am terribly interested in two aspects of temporality: sequence and rhythm (including tempo and rhythmic structure), which I think must both figure in imagination and creativity, for both individual and distributed construals of cognition and feeling. 
Henry 

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On Dec 13, 2014, at 12:01 PM, Larry Purss < lpscholar2@gmail.com> wrote: 

Henry, Mike, and others interested in this topic. 

I too see the affinities with notions of the third *space* and the analogy to *gap-filling* I am on holiday so limited access to internet. However, I wanted to mention Raymond Williams and his notion of "structures of feeling" that David K references. This notion is explored under the notion of historical *styles* that exist as a *set* of modalities that hang together.

This notion suggests there is a form of knowing that is forming but has not yet formed [but can be "felt" [perceived??] if we think imaginatively.

Raymond explores the imaginal as *style* 
Larry 

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On Fri, Dec 12, 2014 at 4:38 PM, HENRY SHONERD < hshonerd@gmail.com> wrote: 

Mike and Larry, 

I promise to read your profer, but just want to say how jazzed up I am now about this thread. My mind has been going wild, the mind as Larry construes it. I ended up just now with a triad, actually various triads, finally found my old friend Serpinski. Part now of my notebooks of the mind, as Vera would construe it. I’ll be back! Gap adentro, luega pa’ fuera. 

Fractally yours, 
Henry 

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On Dec 12, 2014, at 5:09 PM, 

mike cole < mcole@ucsd.edu wrote: 

For those interested in the imagination thread, attached are two articles by philosophers who have worried about the issue. My current interest stems from the work of CHAT theorists like Zaporozhets and his students who studied the development of imagination in a manner that, it turns out, goes back to Kant's notion of productive imagination. I am not advocating going back to Kant, and have no intention of doing so.

But these ideas seem worth pursuing as explicated in the attached texts.

Through reading the Russians and then these philosophers, I came upon the idea that perception and imagination are very closely linked at several levels of analysis. This is what, in our naivete, Ettienne and I argued in our paper on imagination sent around earlier as a means of access to the work of the blind-deaf psychologist, Alexander Suvorov. Moreover, such views emphasize the future orientation of the perception/imagination process. I believe that these views have direct relevance to Kris's paper to be found on the KrisRRQ thread, and also speak to concerns about the role of different forms of symbolic play in development. So here are the papers on the imagination thread. Perhaps they will prove useful for those interested. 

mike 

[Imagination and Perception by P.F. Strawson.pdf]