[Xmca-l] Re: Oliver Sacks/Romantic Science
Peg Griffin
Peg.Griffin@att.net
Tue Sep 1 11:54:47 PDT 2015
As far as I understand those terms (nomothetic and idiographic), the combined motor method does unite them and so arrives at dual stimulation, given the non-accidental mosaic.
But I don't know that my understanding goes far enough or too far!
Peg
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-l-bounces+peg.griffin=att.net@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces+peg.griffin=att.net@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 2:08 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Oliver Sacks/Romantic Science
Is that simultaneously uniting the nomothetic and idiographic, Peg? That is the way Luria talked about it.
mike
On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Peg Griffin <Peg.Griffin@att.net> wrote:
> Just in a short-hand:
>
> Concrete Specific: Zasetsky (The man with the shattered world)
>
> Concrete General: People with traumatic brain injury during WWII
>
> Abstract General: Brain is a mosaic of specific domains with actions
> that interact in dual stimulations (not pure will)
>
> Abstract Specific: A man acts to recall using images; it fails on a
> certain target. The man starts appears to abandon the recall by
> acting an intimately related system – e.g., reciting the alphabet.
> But the recital is “interrupted” when it bumps into the original
> recall target and the recall is successful.
>
>
>
> For diagnosis and/or treatment, we must rise to the concrete specific.
>
>
>
> Sorry I don’t have time to develop this further but I am sure many on
> this list do, and I know that Luria and Sacks did so in wondrous and
> glorious instances.
>
> Peg
>
>
>
>
>
> From: Andy Blunden [mailto:ablunden@mira.net]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 11:21 AM
> To: Peg Griffin; 'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'
> Subject: Re: [Xmca-l] Re: Oliver Sacks/Romantic Science
>
>
>
> Could you give an example, Peg?
> andy
>
> _____
>
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
>
> On 2/09/2015 1:14 AM, Peg Griffin wrote:
>
> What has always helped me – and helps me appreciate Luria and Sachs –
> with rising to the concrete is this funny little square I made (based
> on the even funnier JoHari window after Joseph Luft and Harrington
> Ingham, I heard). I can think better by working to fill in each of the four cells in
> the square about an issue of interest. It helps me think about
> genetically primary examples in mathematics curricula, too.
> Concrete Abstract
> Specific
> General
>
> A romantic square,
> Peg
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces+peg.griffin=att.net@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:
> xmca-l-bounces+peg.griffin=att.net@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Rod
> Parker-Rees
> Sent: Tuesday, September 01, 2015 4:55 AM
> To: ablunden@mira.net; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Oliver Sacks/Romantic Science
>
> Thanks for posting this, Andy.
>
> I found Luria's account fascinating, particularly because of his
> reference to 'the beauty of the art of science' and his observation
> that 'The eye of science does not probe “a thing,” an event isolated
> from other things or events. Its real object is to see and understand
> the way a thing or event relates to other things or events'.
>
> We are able to communicate because we are able to agree (more or less)
> on ways of organising experience into shareable categories but our
> communication ranges across a whole spectrum of ways of using these
> categories. Luria refers to classical and romantic branches of science
> but he also acknowledges the differences between 'poetic' use of
> language and more routine, formulaic forms of communication. The
> romantic focus on an 'individual' can only ever be conducted in the
> medium of a very un-individual language and no person's life could
> possibly be understood without reference to relationships with other
> persons which then spread roots and branches out to a forest of connections, causes and consequences.
>
> David wrote of the impossibility of 'rising' to the level of theory if
> one were to immerse oneself in the study of an individual case and
> Luria cites Marx's description of science as 'ascending to the
> concrete'. As Luria goes on to conclude 'People come and go, but the
> creative sources of great historical events and the important ideas
> and deeds remain' so, in this sense, what matters is the contribution
> individuals make to something bigger and more enduring than themselves
> but Luria also writes that 'Romantics in science want neither to split
> living reality into its elementary components nor to represent the
> wealth of life's concrete events in abstract models that lose the properties of the phenomena themselves'.
>
> I think Luria's account of Sherashevsky's mental experience is
> particularly interesting because it may reveal something about how all
> minds work, albeit that Sherashevsky's 'limen' may have been 'set'
> lower than most people's, allowing him to notice the sensory
> associations which words bring with them in a way which, for most of
> us, may occur only at a pre-conscious level. This provides a
> particularly powerful reminder of the inescapable fact that every
> person's use of a shared language (whether of words, gestures,
> behaviours or any other units of meaning) is just the surface of a
> pool of connections and associations which can never be shared with or
> known by anyone else. However romantic our focus may be, we can only
> go so far in understanding another person's understanding and much
> less far in communicating that to other people (knowing someone is a
> very different thing from being able to share that knowledge in a
> rich and meaningful way). And of course, on the other side of the
> spectrum, classical scientists who pretend that their knowledge is
> entirely pure and untainted by the personal associations that swirl beneath the limens of their knowing are just inventing stories!
>
> I apologise for rambling but I am particularly interested in what lies
> beneath the concrete because of my focus on how very young children
> are able to make sense of a world which, for adults, is so powerfully
> dominated by abstractions.
>
> All the best,
>
> Rod
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces+rod.parker-rees=plymouth.ac.uk@mailman.ucsd.edu
> [mailto:xmca-l-bounces+rod.parker-rees=plymouth.ac.uk@mailman.ucsd.edu
> ]
> On Behalf Of Andy Blunden
> Sent: 01 September 2015 05:17
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Oliver Sacks/Romantic Science
>
> Try this, in Word this time.
> Andy
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> On 1/09/2015 1:32 PM, mike cole wrote:
>
> It might be helpful to this discussion if someone would post the
> chapter on Romantic Science from Luria's autobiography which MUST be
> somewhere public in pdf. It appears that I do not have one.
>
> After reading what the person said, then discussion of the ideas seems
> appropriate. Ditto Sacks, who has written a couple of extended essay's
> on his view of Romantic Science.
>
> It is true that the Russian psychologists, erudite as they were, were
> not sociologists. Nor were they anthropologists. The nature of their
> enterprise encompassed those fields and more.
>
> Doing Romantic Science and immersing oneself in the individual case in
> no way excludes inclusion of sociology, anthropology, in their work.
> Nor does Luria argue so.
>
> mike
>
>
> On Mon, Aug 31, 2015 at 7:29 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com
> <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com> <mailto:dkellogg60@gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> I think the problem with this view of romantic science
> is that it
> completely precludes building a psychology on a
> sociology. In that sense
> (and in others), Vygotsky wasn't a romantic scientist
> at all. Vygotsky
> certainly did not believe in "total immersion in the
> individual case"; such
> an immersion is a refusal to rise to the level of
> theory. I'm not sure
> Luria was romantic that way either: "the Man with a
> Shattered Mind" and
> "The Memory of Mnemonist" are really exceptions.
> Remember the main
> criticism of Luria's book "The Nature of Human
> Conflicts" was always that
> it was too quantitative.
>
> There are, of course, some areas of psychology that
> are well studied as
> case histories. Recently, I've been looking into
> suicidology, and in
> particular the work of Edwin Shneidman, who pioneered
> the linguistic
> analysis of suicide notes (and who appears to have
> been influenced, as
> early as the 1970s, by Kasanin and by Vygotsky's work
> on schizophrinia).
> Now you would think that if ever there was a field
> that would benefit from
> total immersion in the individual case, this is one.
> But Shneidman says
> that suicide notes are mostly full of trite, banal
> phrases, and as a
> consequence very easy to code--and treat quantiatively
> (one of his first
> studies was simply to sort a pile of real and
> imitation suicide notes and
> carefully note the criteria he had when he made
> correct judgements). And of
> course the whole point of Durkheim's work on suicide
> is that the individual
> case can be utterly disregarded, since the great
> variations are
> sociological and the psychological variables all seem
> trivial, transient,
> or mutually cancelling when we look at suicide at a
> large scale (as we must
> these days). Shneidman says he has never read a
> suicide note he would want
> to have written.
>
> David Kellogg
>
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 1, 2015 at 9:21 AM, Andy Blunden
> <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net> <mailto:
> ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
>
> > As little as I understand it, Larry, Oliver Sacks'
> style of Romantic
> > Science was his complete immersion in the individual
> case before him, and
> > development of a science of complete persons. The
> paradigm of this type of
> > science was Luria. A limit case of "Qualitative
> Science" I suppose. The
> > opposite is the study of just one aspect of each
> case, e.g. facial
> > recognition, and the attempt to formulate a
> "covering law" for just this
> > aspect.
> > Andy
> >
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> > *Andy Blunden*
> > http://home.pacific.net.au/~andy/
> <http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/> <
> http://home.pacific.net.au/%7Eandy/>
> > On 1/09/2015 8:40 AM, HENRY SHONERD wrote:
> >
> >> Mike,
> >> I recall in an obituary in the NYTimes that
> naysayers were cited in
> >> reviewing Oliver Sacks’ life work. I am wondering
> if some of that push back
> >> was related to his practice of romantic science,
> which, if I understand
> >> from things Andy has written, involves immersion in
> the phenomena of
> >> interest in search of a unit of analysis. Goethe,
> for example, immersed
> >> himself in the phenomena of living things. His
> writing prefigures the cell
> >> as a unit of analysis, but the technology of
> microscopes could not confirm
> >> such a unit until later on. Your contrasting Bruner
> and Sacks makes me
> >> wonder if the subject, not just the object, is at
> issue. Different styles
> >> of research bring different construals. This may be
> the bane of
> >> objectivist, empiricist science but does it really
> make Sacks less of a
> >> researcher and just a lowly clinician?
> >> Henry
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>> On Aug 30, 2015, at 7:02 PM, mike cole
> <mcole@ucsd.edu <mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu> <mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>>
> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Hi Laura-- I knew Oliver primarily through our
> connections with Luria and
> >>> the fact that we
> >>> independently came to embrace the idea of a
> romantic science. He was a
> >>> shy
> >>> and diffident person. You can get that feeling,
> and the difference
> >>> between
> >>> him and Jerry Bruner in this regard in the
> interview with them that
> >>> someone
> >>> pirated on
> >>> to youtube.
> >>>
> >>> Jerry is very old but last heard from by me,
> engaging intellectually all
> >>> the while.
> >>>
> >>> mike
> >>>
> >>> On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 5:18 PM, Laura Martin
> <martinl@azscience.org <mailto:martinl@azscience.org> <mailto:
> martinl@azscience.org>>
> >>> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Thanks, Mike. A number of years ago I had the
> privilege of spending an
> >>>> evening with Sacks when Lena Luria was visiting
> Jerry Bruner and Carol
> >>>> Feldman in NY. I stood in for Sylvia who
> couldn't make the dinner - it
> >>>> was
> >>>> an extraordinary evening in many ways. Do you
> ever hear from Bruner? I
> >>>> wonder if he's still active.
> >>>>
> >>>> Laura
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Sent from my iPad
> >>>>
> >>>> On Aug 30, 2015, at 3:29 PM, mike cole
> <mcole@ucsd.edu <mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu> <mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu>>
> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> Dear Colleagues ---
> >>>>
> >>>> I am forwarding, with personal sadness, the news
> that Oliver Sacks has
> >>>> succumbed to cancer.
> >>>> Its not a surprise, but a sad passing indeed.
> >>>> mike
> >>>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> >>>>
> >>>> Date: Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 3:07 PM
> >>>> Subject: NYTimes.com: Oliver Sacks Dies at 82;
> Neurologist and Author
> >>>> Explored the Brain’s Quirks
> >>>> To: lchcmike@gmail.com <mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com> <mailto:
> lchcmike@gmail.com>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> Sent by sashacole510@gmail.com
> <mailto:sashacole510@gmail.com> <mailto:sashacole510@gmail.com>:
> Oliver Sacks Dies at
> 82; Neurologist
> >>>> and Author Explored the Brain’s Quirks
> >>>> <
> >>>>
>
> http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCKC2wiZPkcVUieQKbejxL4
> a <
> http://p.nytimes.com/email/re?location=InCMR7g4BCKC2wiZPkcVUieQKbejxL4
> a&user_id=bd31502e6eb851a9261827fdfbbcdf6d&email_type=eta&task_id=1440
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> &user_id=bd31502e6eb851a9261827fdfbbcdf6d&email_type=eta&task_id=1440972441657668®i_id=0>
> >>>> By
> >>>> GREGORY COWLES
> >>>>
> >>>> Dr. Sacks explored some of the brain’s strangest
> pathways in
> >>>> best-selling
> >>>> case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife
> for a Hat,” achieving
> >>>> a
> >>>> level of renown rare among scientists.
> >>>> Or, copy and paste this URL into your browser:
> http://nyti.ms/1LL040D
> >>>> <
> >>>>
>
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> >>>> get unlimited access to all New York Times
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> >>>> Subscription Options.
> >>>> <
> >>>>
>
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> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>> --
> >>>>
> >>>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a
> natural science with an
> >>>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>> --
> >>>
> >>> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a
> natural science with an
> >>> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>
>
>
> --
>
> It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an
> object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
>
>
>
>
>
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It is the dilemma of psychology to deal as a natural science with an object that creates history. Ernst Boesch
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