[Xmca-l] Re: just as food for thought

[mike cole]

Haydi and Dear Colleagues at large in XMCA.
PLEASE USE SUBJECT LINES THAT MARK THE SPECIFIC TOPIC WHEN IT IS
APPROPRIATE.

Haydi -- excuse me for using your subject line as an example. But it comes
at the right time.
We ALL get caught up when reading XMCA message and they evoke many next
thoughts,
sometimes on other or related topics.

Your message beings referring to "this issue", but your subject line, the
subject line of this reply,
does not orient me to what "this issue" is.

Perhaps I can invoke a general social understanding that old people are
slow and have difficulty
multitasking to get such a norm adopted in the community?

mike

On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 7:30 AM, Haydi Zulfei <haydizulfei@rocketmail.com>
wrote:

>
>
> More  generally,  in  his  writings  on  this  issue,  Vygotsky  was
>  concerned  to establish  two  very  important  principles.  The  first
>  was  that  the  intellectual  devel-
> opment  of  the  individual  cannot  be  understood  without  taking  into
>  account  his  or her  interactions  with  other  people  in  his  or  her
>  social  environment;  as  he  puts  it, “the  levels  of  generalization
>  in  [the  thinking  of]  a  child  correspond  strictly  to  the levels
>  in  the  development  of  social  interaction”  Vygotsky,  19.56,  p.
>  432;  quoted in  Wertsch,  1983,  p.  26).  And  the  second  was  that
>  this  social  environment  is itself  influenced  by  the  wider  culture
>  which  varies  according  to  the  forms  and organization  of  labor
>  activity  that  are  practiced  and  the  material  and  semiotic tools
>  that  are  employed.
>
> ...
>
>
> In  one  form  or  another,  these tensions  are  resolved-at  least
>  partially-in  the  dynamics  of  social  action  and interaction  which
>  involve  the  use  of  language  and  possibly  other  mediating  tools as
>  well;  in  some  cases,  the  resolution  may  also  result  in
>  modification  of,  or addition  to,  the  culture’s  available  repertoire
>  of  mediating  tools.  Furthermore, from  the  perspective  of  the
>  individual,  participation  in  such  collaborative  action and
>  interaction  provides  the  opportunity  for  him  or  her  to
>  appropriate  the  pro- cesses  involved,  which,  when  internalized  and
>  integrated  with  their  existing resources,  as  Vygotsky  explains,
>  transforms  the  way  in  which  they  tackle  similar problems  in  the
>  future.  However,  since  internalization  always  involves  a
>  con- struction  based  on  the  individual’s  existing  resources,  the
>  process  that  is  inter- nalized  may  itself  be  transformed,  leading
>  to  subsequent  innovatory  forms  of externalization  in  contexts  of
>  social  action  and  interaction  which,  in  turn,  may introduce  change
>  into  the  semiotic  system.
>
> ...
>
>
> In  this  definition,  Halliday  draws  a  clear  distinction  between
>  doing  and  mean- ing,  while  seeing  them  both  as  forms  of  semiotic
>  behavior,  more  generally conceived.  Maintaining  this  distinction,
>  therefore,  it  seems  to  follow  that,  al- though  one  can  talk
>  (i.e.,  can  mean)  about  what  one  is  doing,  did,  or  might  do, the
>  actual  “doing”-  although  a  form  of  semiotic  behavior-is  not
>  itself  “mean- ing,”  except  in  the  case  of  “doing  in  language.”
>
> ...
>
>
> That  is  that  this  formulation  fails  to  recognize  the  tool-like
>  function  of language  in  the  achievement  of  the  goals  of  semiotic
>  activity  more  broadly conceived.  In  Vygotsky’s  terms,  meaning
>  linguistically  is  only  one-albeit  the most  important-form  of
>  semiotic  mediation,  and  to  understand  its  significance on
>  particular  occasions,  one  must  look  at  the  goals  of  the  activity
>  it  mediates.  To recall  Leontiev’s  argument  (quoted  above,  p.  57),
>  “The  tool  mediates  activity  and thus  connects  humans  not  only
>  with  the  world  of  objects  but  also  with  other people.”  In
>  so&cultural  theory,  as  this  quotation  makes  clear,  language  is
>  cer- tainly  a  powerful  and  versatile  tool.  However,  it  is  the
>  activity  that  it  mediates that  has  conceptual  and  historical
>  primacy;  for  it  is  through  action  and  activities that  we  are
>  related  both  to  each  other  and  to  the  external  world  (Minick,
>  1987).
>
> Best
> Haydi
>
>
>


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