[Xmca-l] Re: conditional response

[David Kellogg]

Yes, I remember this point, and it's something we've discussed in our
translation group at some length.

Here's what I think. Suppose I am writing for my students. They will not
know what a conditional response is. They will think it differs from what
they have always called a conditioned response. I could explain that they
have been taught wrongly, and that they have learned wrongly, and that the
actual translation should be "conditioned response".

They will wonder what the difference is. They will soon figure out that in
fact I mean exactly the same thing, at least in terms of my ideational
(representational) meaning: I am talking (they will think) about a dog
salivating at the sound of a bell.So they will wonder what the
interpersonal intention of my correction is. Because my students are Korean
students, and they are quite sensitive both to the value of tradition and
to the value of apparently unmotivated attempts to undermine it, they will
assume that I am being arrogant and making their lives more difficult than
necessary to fill an otherwise empty ego. And because I have lived here for
twenty years, I will not say that they are wrong, not least because if
there is a difference, it actually speaks in favor of the "mistranslation".

"Conditional" will not take an agent, that is, we do not say "conditional
by me". "Conditioned" does take an agent: I conditioned a response, ergo
the response was conditioned by me. In Vygotsky's 1930 model (roughly, what
we read in HDHMF, with the four levels of higher behavior in Chapters 3 and
4) the difference between natural instinct and enculturated habit is not in
the response at all, but rather in the conditions--natural or
artificial--that evoke that response. In the case of instinct, the
conditions are merely conditional--where the condition is food, there is
salivation. But in the case of habits, the response is conditioned: there
is always the possibility of a "by", whether to indicate the
instrumentality or the actor.

The "conditioned by" response, not the conditional response, was how humans
transformed hunting and gathering into herding and farming. Awareness of
this agency enabled Vygotsky to transform an essentially physiological
theory, reflexology, into a cultural-historical one, which became CHAT.
This wasn't his last step, but it was a crucial one.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University

Recent Article in *Early Years*

The question of questions: Hasan’s critiques, Vygotsky’s crises, and the
child’s first interrogatives
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09575146.2018.1431874>

Free e-print available at:
https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/6EeWMigjFARavQjDJjcW/full


On Tue, Apr 10, 2018 at 7:58 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:

> I wrote this in Smagorinsky, P. (2011). Vygotsky and literacy research: A
> methodological framework. Boston: Sense.<https://www.
> sensepublishers.com/product_info.php?products_id=1374&osCsid=
> 388e4357ae448e518709d4a68ffd2e18> I think Knox might have been the
> translator (maybe Knox and Stephens?)
>
>
> I use conditional response rather than the incorrectly translated
> conditioned response to account for Pavlov's finding that people and
> animals-most famously, dogs-respond to stimuli in relation to the
> conditions that have surrounded their prior responses to similar stimuli.
> According to the author of the uncredited forward to Volume 2 of Vygotsky's
> Collected Works,
>
> In the interest of contributing to the formation of a coherent English
> terminology for Russian psychological texts, this series has joined in the
> use of the term conditional reflex for the older conditioned reflex, both
> in Volume 1 and in the present volume. By the time Watson adopted the
> Pavlovian formulation as a cornerstone for behaviorist psychology in the
> 1910s, Pavlov's uslovnyi had been mis-translated "conditioned" (as a
> Russian passive past participle), and the whole process was designated as
> "conditioning" (see Boring, 1950). At mid-century, however, Osgood (1953)
> suggested that "Pavlov meant that the occurrence of the reflex to a novel
> cue was literally conditional [sic] upon certain operations" and observed
> that "in contemporary American psychology ['conditioned' had] become
> practically synonymous with 'learned.'" (in the unattributed Foreword to
> Vygotsky, 1993, pp. vii-viii; emphasis in original; [sic] in original)
>
>