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

[Andy Blunden]

I think it likely, Mike, that Vygotsky was not fully aware of mire he 
was walking into with that speculation. I think there is an inherent 
danger in both Marx and Hegel's approach in respect to cross-cultural 
social science. I do not say a weakness or a fallacy, because I think 
all the concepts necessary to clarify these problems are present in 
Hegel, Marx and Vygotsky. But none of them were fully aware of the 
pitfalls awaiting them in this area. In my personal view, it was only 
the alignment of social forces which arose after World War Two and the 
Post-War Settlement between the USSR and the USA, that the conditions 
emerged for Marxists to understand this problem.

The other point which you have said often troubles you, Mike, is this 
issue of the presence of the ideal in ontogenesis. It is this which 
distinguishes ontogenesis from phylogenesis and, with qualifications, 
cultural-historical genesis. I think your work in "Cultural Psychology. 
A Once and Future Discipline" where you showed how cultural difference 
prejudiced the results of experiments in a way which is usually as 
invisible to the researcher as it is to the subject, provided the key 
insight here. For example, Luria's observation that Uzbek peasants were 
"childlike" because they organised groups of items into functional sets, 
rather than according to contingent attributes (as suggested by formal, 
bureaucratic logic), is, I think, a completely wrong conclusion to draw 
from the data.

Nonetheless, I do think that ontogenetic development, when studied with 
the aid of dual stimulation using cultural artefacts, and the study of 
historical or cross-cultural psychology, have great potential to shed 
light on one another. But only with full consciousness of the complexity 
of the exercise. To an orthodox Marxist who has somehow avoided the 
women's movement and the civil rights movement, talking alone will never 
explain the problem.

Andy

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


mike cole wrote:
> 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
>>
>>     
>
>
>
>