[Xmca-l] LSV versus ANL

[Andy Blunden]

Returning to Leontyev's critique of Vygotsky, ANL claimed that 
perezhivanie, as a manifestation of the whole personality, cannot be the 
determinant of personality, because that would be a logical circle. But 
it seems to me that ANL failed to understand how Vygotsky’s analysis by 
units allows him to avoid the reductionism into which ANL then ventures. 
If a complex process is to be explained by something _else_, then its 
analysis is _reduced_  to the analysis of that something else. Analysis 
by units allows Vygotsky to avoid reductionism because the analysis 
begins from a concept of the whole complex process represented in a 
unit, not the whole, but a small fragment of the whole, such that the 
whole can be seen as being made up of very many such fragments only. 
Absent Vygotsky's method of analysis by units, and Leontyev's Activity 
Theory is in danger of collapsing to a reductionism that actually 
explains nothing.

Andy

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