[Xmca-l] Re: Fate, Luck and Chance

[mike cole]

I really appreciated the opportunity to return to these texts. I am really
caught by the discussion of rudimentary functrions and where the discussion
leads because it brings me to a long standing concern of mine.
Cross-cultural comparisons which conclude that "primitives think like
children." This potential in LSV's work has been realized too often to make
us certain what is being claimed.

My concerns are reflected in the following cut and past from Andy's
appropriation.

--------------Rudimentary functions in the system of higher cultural forms
of behavior and analogous, developed, and active functions of the same kind
in more primitive systems make it possible for us to connect lower and
higher systems genetically. They supply a point of support for a historical
approach to higher mental functions and for connecting the psychology of
primitive man with the higher psychology of man. Also, ***they provide a
scale for transferring data from ethnic psychology to experimental
psychological research** * and a measure of homogeneity and similarity of
mental processes elicited in a genetic experiment and of higher mental
functions. Appearing as a connecting link, a transitional form between
experimentally simplified forms of behavior and the psychology of primitive
man, on the one hand, and higher mental functions on the other, rudimentary
forms are a kind of knot that joins three areas of study, a kind of focus
in which all lines of cultural development meet and intersect, a kind of
center of the whole problem. They lie halfway between what we observe in an
experiment in child psychology and ethnic psychology and what we call
higher mental functions that are the final link of all of cultural
development.
--------------------
what are these links between "experimentally simplified forms of behavior"
and the "psychology of primitive man?"

Are current people engaged in such research providing those links?

mike

On Wed, Nov 19, 2014 at 5:55 PM, Martin John Packer <mpacker@uniandes.edu.co
> wrote:

> On Nov 19, 2014, at 4:56 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > "objective"
> > just means that something is seen as not subject to change by a
> > discourse community, even where that discourse community consists of
> > just me and my lonely self.
>
> Perhaps, David. But with time and effort and study we can come to view
> that something differently, no?
>
> There's a small but growing literature on "constitution" - the way that a
> water molecule is constituted of, not caused by, hydrogen and oxygen. And
> the article I was reading today was making an interesting distinction
> between 'internal constitution,' as in the case of water, and 'external
> constitution,' as in the case of money. What makes a coin a token of
> monetary value is *external* to it: the social institutions of banking and
> the practices of buying and selling. These don't cause it, they constitute
> it. The coin, taken at face value, is objective. But once we study it as it
> circulates through these practice and institutions, we come to see that its
> objectivity does not mean it cannot change. On the contrary.
>
> Although LSV like to talk about the constituents of a meaningful word as
> 'internal' to that word, it seems more accurate to see them as external in
> the same sense as the constituents of a coin or a bill are necessarily
> external to it.
>
> Martin
>



-- 
It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.