[Xmca-l] Re: how to broaden/enliven the xmca discussion

[mike cole]

Assimilate is a very unfortunate word choice. I wonder what the Russian was.
mike

On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 6:08 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> Dmitry Leontyev's main speech to ISCAR (at the pre-conference on Monday)
> was all about the dualism between sense and meaning, including the Russian
> terms (was it mysl and znachnie or something?) and the German Sinn and
> Bedeutung, and he preferred in ENglish to use "personal meaning" and
> "public meaning" to clarify the difference, because "sense" is so
> polysemic. A wonderful dualistic world, simply divided between internal,
> psychological sense and non-psychological, material/external meaning. The
> clearest explication of the fallacy of AN Leontyev's approach I have ever
> witnessed.
>
> Anyway, as I understand it, "meaning" is objectively fixed in words by the
> objective relations between words and words, words and things, and between
> things. "Sense" is the internal psychological reflection of this external
> world. So in the "Evolution of the Psyche" I read:
>
>    "Meaning is the reflection of reality irrespective of man’s
>    individual, personal relation to it. Man finds an already prepared,
>    historically formed system of meanings and assimilates it just as he
>    masters a tool, the material prototype of meaning. The psychological
>    fact proper, the fact of my life, is this, (a) that I do or do not
>    assimilate a given meaning, do or do not master it, and (b) what it
>    becomes for me and for my personality in so far as I assimilate it;
>    and that depends on what subjective, personal sense it has for me."
>
> So I guess "primitive consciousness" is sort of like these people who vote
> for George Bush because "he's my kind of guy," and don't reflect on it. :)
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>
>
> mike cole wrote:
>
>> I, to, have returned to Leontiev's develoment book following David's
>> suggestion. Still reading,
>> but passages such as the following really dicombobulate me.
>>
>> "The coincidences of sense and meanings is the main feature of primitive
>> consciousness."
>>
>> mike
>>
>> On Thu, Oct 9, 2014 at 4:21 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:
>> ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>>
>>     This discussion has sent me back to looking at A N Leontyev's
>>     "Development of Mind." For all his faults, ANL expended a lot of
>>     energy in tracing the phylogenetic evolution of activity (which
>>     for ANL is a broad category, inclusive of unconscious activity).
>>     He traces the evolution of behaviour (as in animals without a
>>     central nervous system operating on a reflex basis) through
>>     conditioned reflexes and habits to operations (scripts which can
>>     be moved from one situation to another and adapted to conditions
>>     without conscious awareness) to actions (consciously determined by
>>     their immediate goal) to activities (where the goal is remote from
>>     the immediate actions, and a whole series of actions are required
>>     to meet the goal). Then he is able to trace the movement back and
>>     forth between behaviour, operational activity, actions and
>>     activities in both ontogenesis and microgenesis. I have always
>>     been a bit impatient with this kind of move (reifying a theory of
>>     human activity into Nature and then importing it back), but I have
>>     to say it was a useful exercise. And clarifying.
>>     Here is a link to an excerpt from part of this work:
>>     http://www.marxists.org/archive/leontev/works/1981/evolution.htm
>>     Andy
>>     ------------------------------------------------------------
>> ------------
>>     *Andy Blunden*
>>     http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>>     <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
>>
>>
>>     David Kellogg wrote:
>>
>>         All of which has to be sung with screams of pain (Strauss has, you
>>         see, stacked the deck in Rousseau's favor). But maybe both
>>         singing and
>>         speech are exaptations of something that is functionally
>>         neither and
>>         not specific to humans at all, which for want of a better name
>>         we can
>>         call activity WITHOUT thinking.
>>
>>         David Kellogg
>>         Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal with a natural science with an
>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch.
>>
>>
>>
>


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