[Xmca-l] Re: Отв: Отв: Re: Ilyenkov, Marx, & Spinoza
David Kellogg
dkellogg60@gmail.com
Wed Aug 2 14:47:55 PDT 2017
Dear Sasha:
Thanks for the reply. I took the time to read the English version of your
paper with great interest and large areas of agreement. But the areas of
disagreement, which I'll talk about in another post on "free will as
infinite selection", were actually the zones of greatest interest.
I think Vygotsky doesn't accept conventionality as a pervasive principle in
language, and neither do I. Take, for example, Vygotsky's example
"blackbird". We can say that the phonemes/graphemes (the language-specific
sequence of vowels and consonants) is conventional; we know this because
other languages do it differently. But once we take the "salto mortale" of
accepting that "black" means the (original) color of ink and "bird" means a
winged animal descended from the dinosaurs, the pairing of "black" and
"bird" to describe the blackbird is natural and not conventional: it obeys
laws that are clear even to the half-enculturated child.
I think that is why Vygotsky can give many examples of "child made"
language ("mazoline", etc.) that are non-conventional and why he can link
these Mondegreens to actual etymological processes and actual words
("sidewalk"). Saussure's principle applies to language in only one place,
and it happens to be the only place in which Saussure was completely
competent as a linguist: sounding. Saussure's principle does not apply to
either wording or meaning: these are not purely conventional but natural.
I think Vygotsky did not accept Pavlov as a human psychologist, but only as
an animal behaviorist. Of course, he was deferential, just as you or I
would defer to Mike (who was once an animal behaviorist himself), and just
as Mike himself would defer to a Luria or a Bernstein. Mere bad manners
doesn't make you an original thinker. I will agree to call this deference
discretion: Vygotsky didn't like to pick fights and lose them.
I think that's why Vygotsky concentrates his fire on Watson, and Thorndike
and not Pavlov, why he points to Pavlov the animal behaviorist's insightful
remarks about the sign to shame his psychologist colleagues (this is
similar to what he does in shaming Piaget and Freud with the biologizing
Bleuler), and why he uses Pavlov's metaphor of a "telephone switchboard"
for his own purposes
I didn't just include the Chuck Berry song in memory of a great musician; I
think that the lyrics show us the very point you are making about the sign.
You are certainly right that by itself, treated as just another instrument,
the sign doesn't have the power to confer free will on the human marionette
that Watson, Thorndike--and Pavlov--imagine. If a human is a puppet on a
string, it doesn't help to put another puppet in control of the string and
then put the human in control of the other puppet.
But that's not what signs do. That's only what casting lots, tying knots,
and counting on your fingers APPEAR to do. When humans have do these
things, they try to go beyond the appearance. They imagine that casting
lots conveys messages from God, that knots tie themselves (as the Russian
formalists said), and that counting on fingers taps into some World Three
of eternal discoveries (Popper).
And when they have been giving these unlikely explanations for thousands of
years, some humans begin to notice that the voice of the gods sounds very
familiar, that the knot tying of one child is unlike that of another, and
that some cultures count toes and elbows. Dorothy looks under the curtain
and realizes that the Wizard of Oz is only a wizened old man, and it turns
out you don't need his help after all. Soon people are making decisions in
their own heads, remembering with imaginary knots, and memorizing Maxwell's
equations.
Of course, you and I get the joke. This is no more happening "inside the
head", with an "individual" memory, than it is happening in a lot, a knot,
or on your fingers. It's happening in a whole culture--many thousands of
years of thinking. But the thinking isn't "passed on" through language;it
is recreated and re-elaborated with every generation. The telephone
switchboard, like the conventional phoneme/grapheme, is useful at one point
and one point only: helping the caller get in touch with Marie. But the
actual communication between father and daughter is not conventional or
automatic at all. It's natural; i.e. it's hard work.
David Kellogg
Macquarie University
On Mon, Jul 31, 2017 at 8:15 AM, Alexandre Sourmava <avramus@gmail.com>
wrote:
> David, thank you for your kind advice with more exact translation of word «
> условный». I agree with you, that the best translation will be
> “conventional”. This term coincides well enough with Vygotsky’s idea that
> mature word in development of infant’s speech is something entirely
> "random", "reason-less", and "irrational", something established by mere
> agreement (conventions). (See “Орудие и знак в развитии ребенка”) As for
> Vygotsky's attitude to Pavlov and his entirely Cartesian theory, I’ll agree
> with your idea again. I do think that similarity of Vygotsky's and Pavlov's
> conceptions is based not on mere discretion. Pavlov’s “teaching” was
> canonized as something ideologically obligatory substantially later, closer
> to 1950 – the year of so called Pavlovian session of the Soviet Academy of
> Science. So a fresh trauma of this “historical event” evidently shade in
> Luria’s and Leont’ev’s mind the earlier situation. The affinity of
> Vygotsky's idea of HMF and Pavlov's Second Signaling System is not
> something coincidental. Anyhow, this subject deserves serious inquiry.
> Sasha
>
>
> четверг, 27 июля 2017 1:57 David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> писал(а):
>
>
> Translation is tough. For example, the French word "arbitraire" in de
> Saussure has none of the sense of "random", "reason-less", and "irrational"
> that we find in "arbitrary". It's actually more like the "arbitrator" that
> we find in "arbitration": a better translation would be "conventional" or
> even "conditional". All Saussure really wants to tell us is that any sound
> can be made to express anything. It's not so much that "everything has a
> name" (as Helen Keller put it). It's more like everything can be named. The
> confusion between what IS meant in a language or a register or a semantic
> code and what CAN BE meant in a language or a register or a semantic code
> is really the crux of Labov's demagogic (not to say "reasonless" or
> "irrational") critique of (Basil) Bernstein.
>
> I'm not a native speaker of Russian. But it seems to me that условности
> is better translated in the same way: conditionality, or conventionality.
> Since the sign is "neutral" in the sense that it could be almost anything,
> the bulk of the meaning making still falls to the receiver of the sign.
> Once we understand that THIS is the way that Vygotsky and Volosinov are
> using notions like "neutral sign," "conditional reflex", "conditionality",
> I don't see that there is any difference between Vygotsky's position and
> Spinoza's.
>
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
>
> On Wed, Jul 26, 2017 at 7:27 AM, Alexandre Sourmava <avramus@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> Hi, Larry!
>
>
>
> Thank you for your attentionto the article.
> Your retelling of the topic is quite correct.
> However, I think it can be useful to add my little comment concerning the
> topicunder discussion.
> Bernstein’s position is substantially spinozian and thereby antisemiotic.
> Evidently, he bluntly contradicts to Vygotsky’sattempts to use arbitrary
> sign as a magic key designed to solve the problem of freedom (independence
> from mechanical causality).
> Thus Vygotsky insisted that
> ”Looking from the very broad philosophical perspective the whole realm
> ofhistory, culture, and language is the realm of arbitrariness. So the
> method ofconditional reflex acquires a very broad meaning of a
> natural-historical methodconcerning human, of a tie that binds history and
> evolution together.”
> («В самом широком философском смысле этого терминавесь мир истории,
> культуры, языка — это царство условности. В этом смысле методусловных
> рефлексов приобретает широчайшее значение методаприродно-исторического в
> применении к человеку, узла, который связывает историюи эволюцию»
>
> ВыготскийЛ. С. Психологическая наука в СССР. В кн.: «Общественные науки в
> СССР(1917-1927 гг.)». М., 1928, с. 30.)
>
> There exists a prejudice that so called “Cultural-historical theory”
> withits arbitrary signs is a sophisticated antithesis to coarse Pavlov’s
> mechanicalapproach. Alas, that is far from reality. In fact, these two
> theories are identical.That is the reason why Nicolai Bernstein who was
> Vygotsky’s good friend had neverreferred to his ideas.
>
> Sasha Surmava
>
> вторник, 25 июля 2017 4:29 Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> писал(а):
>
>
> I see.
>
> This is a slightly different context. The original meaning
> of "paradigm," before the popularisation of Thomas Kuhn's
> work, was a "founding exemplar."
> "Exemplar" presumably has the same etymology as "example."
>
> The idea of "an example" as being one of numerous instances
> of a process is a different concept, the opposite really.
>
> Andy
>
> ------------------------------ ------------------------------
> Andy Blunden
> http://home.mira.net/~andy
> http://www.brill.com/products/ book/origins-collective- decision-making
> <http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making>
>
> On 25/07/2017 2:01 AM, Larry Purss wrote:
> > Andy,
> > I will reference where I got the notion of linking
> > [example] and [framework]. If this becomes interesting
> > will open another thread.
> > From David L. Marshall titled : "Historical and
> > Philosophical Stances: Max Harold Fisch, a Paradigm for
> > Intellectual Historians" -2009-
> >
> > PAGE 270:
> >
> > "Max Fisch constitutes an alternative to any intellectual
> > historical method insisting that practiontioners remain
> > agnostics about the value of the ideas they study. It is
> > the chief contention of this essay that he is a 'paradigm'
> > for intellectual historians, a paradigm in the original
> > Greek sense of an *example* and in the DERIVED
> > contemporary sense of a *framework* within which the
> > community of research can proceed. Indeed it is just such
> > *doubling* of the philological object qua example into a
> > carapace for ongoing action and thought that Fisch
> > explored in a variety of ways during his half century of
> > creative intellectual work. "
> >
> >
> > Andy, not sure if this is adequate context, but the
> > relationality of [example : framework] through the concept
> > *paradigm* seemed generative??
> >
> > On Mon, Jul 24, 2017 at 7:21 AM, Andy Blunden
> > <ablunden@mira.net <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
> >
> > "actions" or "an action" ... no extra word is needed.
> > Extra words like "singular," "individual" or "single"
> > only confuse the matter. "Examples" is too vague.
> >
> > Cannot make sense of the rest of your message at all,
> > Larry.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > ------------------------------ ------------------------------
> > Andy Blunden
> > http://home.mira.net/~andy <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy
> <http://home.mira.net/~andy>>
> > http://www.brill.com/products/ book/origins-collective-
> decision-making
> <http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making>
> > <http://www.brill.com/ products/book/origins-
> collective-decision-making
> <http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making>>
> >
> > On 25/07/2017 12:17 AM, Lplarry wrote:
> >>
> >> Andy,
> >>
> >> Following your lead it may be preferable to say
> >> single (individual) to indicate the uniqueness of
> >> variable social actions. This doubling (by
> >> including both terms) may crystallize the intended
> >> meaning as you mention.
> >>
> >> Andy is this vein can we also include the term
> >> (examples)?
> >>
> >> Then the moving TRANS forming from single
> >> (individual) social acts towards (practices) would
> >> indicate the movement from examples to exemplary
> >> actions and further movement (historicity) toward
> >> (framework) practices.
> >>
> >> (framework) practices being another doubling.
> >>
> >> So moving (transforming) from single social examples
> >> through exemplary social examples crystallizing in
> >> social framework practices.
> >>
> >> Is this reasonable?
> >>
> >> Or not
> >>
> >> Sent from my Windows 10 phone
> >>
> >> *From: *Andy Blunden <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>
> >> *Sent: *July 24, 2017 6:57 AM
> >> *To: *eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> >> <mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd. edu <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
> >> *Cc: *Alexander Surmava <mailto:monada@netvox.ru>
> >> *Subject: *[Xmca-l] Re: Ilyenkov, Marx, & Spinoza
> >>
> >> Larry, when you say "Action IS individual," did you
> >> mention
> >>
> >> to say that *actions* - the individual units of
> >> *action* are
> >>
> >> individual? In which can it is of course a tautology.
> >>
> >> But *action* is irreducibly *social*, and so is every
> >>
> >> "individual" action. Or better, so is every
> >> "singular" action.
> >>
> >> A lot of relevant differences are coded in the English
> >>
> >> language by the use of the count-noun or mass noun
> >> form, but
> >>
> >> on the whole the set of words (action, actions,
> >> activity,
> >>
> >> activities) and the set of words (practice,
> >> practices) have
> >>
> >> no systematic difference running across all
> >> disciplines and
> >>
> >> schools of thought. For us CHATters, "activities" are
> >> practices.
> >>
> >> If you read Hegel and Marx, there is an added issue: the
> >>
> >> German words for action (Handlung) and activity
> >> (Tatigkeit)
> >>
> >> are more or less inverted for Hegel, and he doesn't use
> >>
> >> Aktivitat at all.
> >>
> >> Andy
> >>
> >> ------------------------------ ------------------------------
> >>
> >> Andy Blunden
> >>
> >> http://home.mira.net/~andy <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy
> <http://home.mira.net/~andy>>
> >>
> >> http://www.brill.com/products/ book/origins-collective-
> decision-making
> <http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making>
> >> <http://www.brill.com/ products/book/origins-
> collective-decision-making
> <http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making>>
> >>
> >>
> >> On 24/07/2017 11:42 PM, Larry Purss wrote:
> >>
> >> > Alexander, Mike,
> >>
> >> > Thanks for the article.
> >>
> >> > Moving to page 51 I noticed that when referencing
> >> Bernstein he contrasted (action) with (practice) and
> >> did not REPEAT (identity) the thesis about the role
> >> of practice in knowing).
> >>
> >> > Two formulas:
> >>
> >> > • Knowing THROUGH ‘action’
> >>
> >> > • Verification of knowing THROUGH ‘practice’
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > These two formulas closely RESEMBLE each other but
> >> do not co-incide
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > Action IS individual
> >>
> >> > Practice IS a social category.
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > Sociohistorical (practice) in the final analysis is
> >> nothing other than the SUM total of the actions of
> >> individual who are separate.
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > Individual action is LIKE a single experiment.
> >> They are alike in that both individual action & a
> >> single experiment are poorly suited to the role of :
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > A philosophical criterion of (truth).
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > I do not have the background to intelligently
> >> comment, but did register this theme as provocative
> >> FOR further thought and wording.
> >>
> >> > And for generating intelligent commentary
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > Sent from Mail for Windows 10
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > From: Ivan Uemlianin
> >>
> >> > Sent: July 20, 2017 11:17 AM
> >>
> >> > To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> >>
> >> > Cc: Alexander Surmava
> >>
> >> > Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Ilyenkov, Marx, & Spinoza
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > Yes very interesting thank you! (Ilyenkov fan)
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > Ivan
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> > --
> >>
> >> > festina lente
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> >> On 20 Jul 2017, at 18:00, mike cole
> >> <mcole@ucsd.edu> <mailto:mcole@ucsd.edu> wrote:
> >>
> >> >>
> >>
> >> >> This article might prove of interest to those who
> >> have been discussing
> >>
> >> >> LSV's sources in
> >>
> >> >> marx and spinoza.
> >>
> >> >> mike
> >>
> >> >> <Ilyenkov_and_the_Revolution_ in_Psycholog.pdf>
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >> >
> >>
> >
> >
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> --
> David Kellogg
> Macquarie University
>
> "The Great Globe and All Who It Inherit:
> Narrative and Dialogue in Story-telling with
> Vygotsky, Halliday, and Shakespeare"
>
> Free Chapters Downloadable at:
>
> https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/2096-the-great-
> globe-and-all-who-it-inherit.pdf
>
> Recent Article: Thinking of feeling: Hasan, Vygotsky, and Some Ruminations
> on the Development of Narrative in Korean Children
>
> Free E-print Downloadable at:
>
> http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8Vaq4HpJMi55DzsAyFCf/full
>
>
>
--
David Kellogg
Macquarie University
"The Great Globe and All Who It Inherit:
Narrative and Dialogue in Story-telling with
Vygotsky, Halliday, and Shakespeare"
Free Chapters Downloadable at:
https://www.sensepublishers.com/media/2096-the-great-globe-and-all-who-it-inherit.pdf
Recent Article: Thinking of feeling: Hasan, Vygotsky, and Some Ruminations
on the Development of Narrative in Korean Children
Free E-print Downloadable at:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/8Vaq4HpJMi55DzsAyFCf/full
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