[Xmca-l] Re: units of analysis? LSV versus ANL

Sat Oct 18 14:07:23 PDT 2014

Hi Holli--

As you can see from the discussion, agreement is not easy to come by when
trying to nail down some key distinctions in the CHAT tradition (including
whether or not it is a good idea to combine CH and AT!).

Re you question about action/activity I am attaching a paper by Jim Wertsch
that focuses on action. He has an interesting discussion of his views vis a
vis Leontiev in his book on LSV and the Social Foundations of Mind. But
sending people off to read books tends to produce an
infinite regress in the local conversation, so maybe an article at your
fingertips will help.

Both Jim and Vladmir Zinchenko have argued, as Jim puts it in the title of
this article, for "the primacy of mediated action" (adding action "in
context") to the formulation. Others, such as Yrjo Engestrom have argued
that "the activity is the context"). Whichever way you go, I think a common
thread is the need to take a relation stance -- action-in-relation to
(activity/context).
Thinking relationally is tough (relatively)[?]

I hope this is useful.
mike

On Fri, Oct 17, 2014 at 9:41 PM, Tonyan, Holli A <Holli.Tonyan@csun.edu>
wrote:

> Can you explain more about "action" versus "activity"?  These two terms
> get used a lot in nuanced ways and I get confused.  If there is a place
> where this is already delineated, could you please point me in that
> direction?
>
> Also, I am not familiar with defect-compensation.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Oct 17, 2014, at 9:35 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
> >
> > <html>
> > Martin, I think the issue is that we have certain concepts which are
> intrinsically both subjective and objective (action, activity, meaning,
> experience for example) but we also have other concepts which are
> intrinsically either objective or subjective (behaviour, weight, thinking,
> consciousness, mood for example). Of course, because subject and object are
> mutually constituted, any of these domain-specific concepts also entails
> relations to the other domain. Otherwise we have nonsense. If I say "The
> Stock Market crashed in 1929" I am not talking about a state of mind,
> though obviously states of mind were entailed in this event. Likewise "I'm
> in a bad mood today" is not a statement about events in my life, even
> though these may be the cause.
> >
> > What Vygotsky has done which allows him to develop a nondualistic
> psychology is that he took as his *most fundamental* concept "action". His
> other key concepts, his units of analysis for the various investigations,
> are also concepts which are intrinsically subjective/objective. E.g., word
> meaning, defect-compensation, perezhivanie. This is it: choose as your unit
> of analysis a concept which is a unity of objective and subjective.
> >
> > ANL would agree with his, but in his critique he is trying to muddy the
> water by claiming that Vygosky takes as his fundamental concept,
> "consciousness".
> >
> > Andy
> > ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> >
> https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=http-3A__home.pacific.net.au_-7Eandy_&d=AAICAw&c=Oo8bPJf7k7r_cPTz1JF7vEiFxvFRfQtp-j14fFwh71U&r=nc0IzcQ7AJuG1zNoaB3azX4jLwOThkgntuk4nvTAto4&m=gKMMa479BWWTMz0UJqBIkjS5I75PRZR54MHJbhn8NCY&s=lsnDPs27Ct58Y8MBNnCw3hdGxQkaKKMS-MEISlsP3JM&e=
> >
> > Martin John Packer wrote:
> >> Who says that emotional experience is "subjective," Huw? LSV writes
> throughout The Problem of the Environment that perezhivanie is the child's
> relationship to social reality. In my book that makes it personal, not
> subjective. The word "subjective" doesn't occur once in the text. It is
> certainly a common assumption in today's dualistic psychology that
> experience is subjective, a mental state.That would indeed be idealist.
> But since LSV is avoiding dualism...
> >>
> >> Martin
> >
>
>

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