[Xmca-l] Re: RES: Re: Child Development: Understanding a Cultural Perpsective

[David Kellogg]

Yes, I think that "pre-adulthood" might be better, but I was trying to keep
everything to single syllables. Marketing again.

As Andy says, the problem is really one of reliability, and I'm not doing
very well on that just now. Ultimately I think that reliability can only be
guaranteed by having a native speaker of Russian go over them. But even
that is not enough: there has to be a LOT of contextual information, and
the further away we get from Vygotsky's life and work the more that has to
be provided. In Korea, we found the only way of doing this was having
"boxes" after almost every other paragraph. With the text on the "Negative
Phase of the Transitional Age" that's going to be even more important.

For example, the title is not Vygotsky's. It's from the work of Charlotte
Buhler, and Vygotsky is actually arguing AGAINST the idea that there is a
negative phase of the transitional age. He wants to use "the transitional
age" to refer to a stable period from 13-14 to 17 or 18; what we call
adolescence. It's stable because the neoformations--gender identity,
aesthetic judgement, academic concepts--are permanent in nature. "Phase" is
the term Vygotsky uses for the distinction between an early stable and a
late one. What Buhler is calling the "negative phase" is really not a
negative phase of a stable period. It's the Crisis at Thirteen.

But crises are also age periods. That is, they have a social situation of
development, central and peripheral lines of development, and
neoformations. They are different from stable periods in three ways:

a) A stable period is empirically marked by increased capabilities while a
crisis is typically marked by decreased ones.

b) A stable period has well defined borders (the crises) but no well
defined peak. The crisis is the other way around; with a well defined peak
but no clear boundaries.

c) A stable period creates stable neoformations which last; the
neoformations of the crises are "sublated" and set aside, appearing only as
subordinate moments of a stable neoformation (e.g. phatic speech, paralyzed
will, manneristic behaviour).

There also seems to be a fourth difference Vygotsky is less explicit about
that has to do with the balance of power on the axis between the
personality and the environment. It's as if in the crises the chid is
trying to "turn the tables" on the environment, becoming the source of
development rather than simply the site of development. So for example in
proto-speech the child is trying to "be" language, and in proto-will the
child is trying to "will" itself on the world. It's almost like the child
is trying to establish its own little USSR, in defiance of the capitalist
world outside. Because I'm a linguist I tend to think of this as the
relationship between figure and ground, putting "sharing" or "dialogue"
(communication) as figure and "about-sharing" or "narrative"
(generalization) as ground in the stable periods and putting "sharing" as
ground and "about-sharing" as figure in the crises.

David Kellogg
Macquarie University


On Mon, May 22, 2017 at 11:54 PM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
wrote:

> David, your point that concepts live in families or societies makes good
> sense to me. But would not you also say the same of words? Your system
> makes sense in all the cases you mention in this last post (pre-we, etc),
> but the one on "pre-life" is harder to digest by the very logic of the
> system you are presenting to us. On the one hand, it seems to suggest
> continuity of development with adulthood. On the other hand, if something
> like "grand-life" was to be the neo-formation related to "pre-life", it
> seems as if the whole of adulthood was dumped together in one long period
> (not to mention the unfortunate sense that before life there was something,
> but not life). Words are only "labels" in very limited cases (like in some
> of Vygotsky's experiments in which invented words are given as stimuli),
> and so they also relate to each other as members of families or "groups".
> But then, using one or the other (like the compound "pre-life" in a
> sequence of periods) matters for how well a typology system works.
>
> More so than to the problematic use of a label, I wanted to call attention
> to the term "pre-life" in order to raise the issue that the borderline
> between childhood and adulthood, and dis/continuities thereof, appears to
> be an unresolved issue. I see Vygotsky has a point in defending the object
> of study of the particular field of pedology. But I do also agree with
> Martin's remarks that Vygotsky also was defending the *qualitative* leap
> that separates different age periods within child development itself, which
> nonetheless did not lead him to establish a different discipline for each
> period.
>
> Alfredo
>
>
>
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com>
> Sent: 21 May 2017 23:52
> To: Andy Blunden; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: RES: Re: Child Development: Understanding a
> Cultural      Perpsective
>
> Yes, I gathered that, from your "Yes?". A very interesting demonstration of
> how important it is to actually meet people and get use to their
> intonation. I still regret not having a pint with Huw in London, because I
> sometimes find his comments a little too condensed.
>
> The Russian is not Vygotsky: it's Tolstoy. It's this:
>
> 'Слово почти всегда готово, когда готово понятие.'
>
> (Word nearly always ready when ready concept.)
>
> It seems to me that to say that the word is ready when the concept is ready
> doesn't imply either word first or concept first. To a linguist, the
> relationship is not causal or temporal: we don't say that a concept
> "causes" a word, or that a word "causes" a concept, because they are
> different orders of matter. We don't say "meaning first" or "word first"
> because we have to model language parsimoniously, so that it is neutral to
> whether we are taking the point of view of the speaker or the hearer. The
> relationship is simply that of realization: that is, the word is the
> realization of the meaning, and the meaning is an activation (as Vygotsky
> says, "volitilization") of the word.
>
> But I was making a different point having to do with what Alfredo called my
> "labelling". My terminology wasn't supposed to be a label on a jar of
> concept. Concepts don't live in jars; they live in families and societies,
> just like the people who make them. So I was trying to choose names like
> "pre-we", "pre-speech", "pre-will" on the one hand and "grandwe",
> "grandspeech", and "grandwill" on the other to show how the critical
> neoformations were BOTH individuals AND related to other critical
> neoformations, and BOTH distinct from and linked to stable neoformations.
> These two points were exactly the points that came up in Martin's post.
>
> Actually, we've been here before. If you think of language as a kind of
> sandwich:
>
> meaning
> wording
> sounding
>
> You can see that the relationship between the three strata is realization.
> But the names, or if you like the labels, are chosen accordingly: the
> "~ing" is there to show that they are linked because they are all processes
> and the roots "mean~",  "word~", and "sound~" are there to show that they
> are distinct because they are different orders of matter. I guess I was
> trying to design my "labels" the same way. It's a good thing I don't work
> in a marketing department; I'd get canned.
>
> --
> 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
>
> On Sun, May 21, 2017 at 11:30 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> > My interest, David, was (1) that you had inverted the claim with which I
> > am familiar, and (2) I have always been curious as to the basis for the
> > confidence Vygotsky has for his claim. Of course the point you make about
> > the concept arising as part of the perception of the problem (Marx says
> > "Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to
> > solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself
> > arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already
> > present *or at least in the course of formation*.") is correct. But my
> > point is that Vygotsky is making a point about the place of the *word* in
> > concept-formation in this excerpt, not the social/technical context or
> the
> > problem/solution issues.
> >
> > Ad (1). "The word is almost always ready when the concept is" (neglecting
> > the important "almost always") means word first, then concept. "The word
> is
> > only ready when the concept is," (with the important "only") means
> concept
> > first then word. So you've completely inverted Vygotsky's claim. Ad (2) -
> > you may be right David, I know you read the Russian as well, or Master
> Lev
> > may be mixed up. I don't think it's cut and dry like this. But the
> > inversion was my point of interest. It would get to long-winded to go
> into
> > the question itself, as I see it.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > Andy Blunden
> > http://home.mira.net/~andy
> > http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making
> > On 21/05/2017 7:41 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> >
> >> Yes, Vygotsky cites that passage in Tolstoy three times in Thinking and
> >> Speech (and he also cites it elsewhere, e.g. in "Thinking in School
> Age" in
> >> the Lectures on Pedology). But I don't want to be the fundamentalist on
> the
> >> list; I think it's more important to grasp the context in which he's
> citing
> >> this. It's always an emphasis on something Andy himself has often noted:
> >> Marx's remark that human beings set themselves only the tasks that they
> can
> >> solve (which is, after all, the whole basis for the zone of proximal
> >> development and the functional method of dual stimulation).
> >>
> >> It's not just that we don't perceive problems as problems until we
> >> perceive them as potentially soluble; it's also because objectively the
> >> solutions to problems evolve alongside the problems themselves. So that
> for
> >> example, as Ruqaiya Hasan remarks, the reason why language is able to
> >> fulfil so many of our needs is that many of those needs are created by
> >> language use.
> >>
> >> I think Vygotsky is saying the same thing about concepts; they only
> arise
> >> when the problems they solve have arisen in development. They do not
> arise
> >> simply because we teach the labels that they have, and they don't fail
> to
> >> arise just because we are not using the right label. In any case the
> idea
> >> that the word is only ready when the concept is (which I think is what
> Andy
> >> is objecting to, although it's hard to tell) is certainly implicit in
> the
> >> way Vygotsky names his own concepts: they only emerge when the content
> has
> >> become clear and the place in a system of concepts that have also
> emerged
> >> is established.
> >>
> >> Here's what Vygotsky says his report to the section on psychotechnics of
> >> the Communist Academy in November 1930:
> >>
> >> "I don't think that the adult never develops, but I think that he
> >> develops obeying other rules, and for this development the lines which
> >> characterize his development are different from those of that of the
> child,
> >> and it is the qualitative particularity of child development is the
> direct
> >> object of the pedologist. For me, to speak of a pedology of the adult is
> >> not only false from the point of view of the very name of pedology but
> >> above all from the point of view of isolating in a single unique line
> the
> >> process of child development and the process of adult transformation. I
> >> repeat: the same laws cannot embrace at one and the same time the
> internal
> >> changes in child development and the changes of later ages. It is not
> >> excluded for science, and for psychology in particular, to study those
> >> changes which are produced at ripe age or in old age, but I do not
> >> associate these two problematics and I don't think that this object
> belongs
> >> to the category of phenomena that pedology deals with. "
> >>
> >> (I'm taking this from a PhD thesis by Irina Leopoldoff-Martin of the
> >> University of Geneva, No 561, p. 287).
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sat, May 20, 2017 at 10:03 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net
> >> <mailto:ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
> >>
> >>     "The word is almost always ready when the concept is" Yes?
> >>
> >>     Andy
> >>
> >>     ------------------------------------------------------------
> >>     Andy Blunden
> >>     http://home.mira.net/~andy <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy>
> >>     http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-
> decision-making
> >>     <http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-
> >> decision-making>
> >>
> >>     On 20/05/2017 9:07 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
> >>
> >>         Alfredo:
> >>
> >>         Just two quick points, and then I shall get back
> >>         to Vygotsky--we are having
> >>         our weekly on-line seminar today here and in
> >>         Seoul, and it's all about the
> >>         Pedology of the Adolescent and "The Negative Phase
> >>         of the Transitional Age".
> >>
> >>         First--I don't think pre-life or any of the terms
> >>         I offered are "adequate
> >>         labels" for the neoformations. In fact,
> >>         "neoformation" is not an adequate
> >>         label either (Vygotsky takes it from geology!) In
> >>         Vygotsky, the label is
> >>         just a place holder, it's a kind of mnemonic, a
> >>         way of remembering
> >>         something that hasn't actually even been really
> >>         said yet. "The word is only
> >>         ready when the concept is," remember?
> >>
> >>         ...
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> 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
> >>
> >
> >
>