[Xmca-l] Re: conditional response

[HENRY SHONERD]

Peter,
Kudos to you for your kudos to Mike! Translating across space and time is probably what we do all the time, just at a smaller scale. Edelsky: the remembered present. I personally have to credit David K. for being so patient with me about ZPD, when I was first wading in chat waters. David was talking with Seth Chalkin at the time. Now I see how Bruner got flak from David, though I was irritated by having one of my icons of cognitive psych pummeled. Maybe everyone gets forgiven in the end. 
Henry

> On Apr 10, 2018, at 5:03 AM, Peter Smagorinsky <smago@uga.edu> wrote:
> 
> I hope I'm not overloading the list with my own baggage, but since Mike mentioned the zpd and translation issues, I'll attach a forthcoming article on what I consider to be a mistranslation, or at least deceptive translation of zpd. I should admit that I don't speak Russian, but have read a lot about translation given how much I rely on them when claiming a Vygotskian perspective. At the same time, I do think that after nearly 30 years of reading in this vein, I more or less get what LSV was up to (and as Mike says, Van der Veer, Valsiner, and others have informed this understanding, along with others), and always thought that the zpd/scaffolding bundle didn't sound very cultural-historical. So the paper situates the zpd discussion in the context of LSV's larger project and relies on a different translation of "proximal" to read "next," which I find more consistent with his emphasis on long-term human development, not today's instruction producing tomorrow's independence.
> 
> I assume that zpd is like thought and language: the first translation of the term got ossified in the profession's vocabulary and has been hard to dislodge, in spite of better (the 1987 Plenum, which Rene has written is itself highly problematic, yet which at least has a more accurate translation of thinking and speech) translations. But it's too easy for zpd to get reduced to short-term learning, as in the scaffolding metaphor, which Bruner developed based on the 1962 translation, generally considered these days to be too abridged and impressionistic by people who have read all 3 versions. Zone of next development (and Seth Chaiklin said that the Dutch translation is closer to "next" than "proximal" when we exchanged notes over the attached article) better captures what LSV was doing, broadly speaking.
> 
> While I've got the floor....Mike has been a bit apologetic about his team's editorial liberties with Mind in Society, and many people have begun taking critical stances toward it. I think it's presentist to view it as questionable work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presentism_(literary_and_historical_analysis)
> 
> The volume, as I understand it, was produced as an introductory, readable presentation of LSV's greatest hits to a new reading public. There was only the early Thought and Language to go on at the time in English. I think that introducing LSV by jumping into the deep end would have kept him obscure. The book's great success in getting a Vygotskian readership justifies the approach that the editors took at that time in the introduction of LSV to the West via English. It was the right decision at the time. 40 years later, the volume might appear to be over-edited, but hindsight, well, we all know about that, and hindsight can obscure the reasoning that motivated their decisions in the 1970s when Piaget ruled ed psych and cog psych was in ascendance. 
> 
> So I defend the volume, even if it is amenable to critique in 2018, because I'm not going to remove it from its cultural-historical setting. It got a lot of us reading LSV (though also, not to the editors' discredit, gave too many people a shortcut to understanding because its accessibility replaced the harder reading of Thinking and Speech and the rest of his oeuvre). I'll defend it on those grounds, and hope that others take a more historical view of its role in our own development of a Vygotskian conception of human development.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of mike cole
> Sent: Monday, April 9, 2018 8:11 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: conditional response
> 
> David and Peter --
> 
> Impossible to hold the beginning of the conversation stable with such interesting, related topics piling up. As a feeble attempt to claw my way back to the beginning.....
> 
> About conditional response & translation:
> 
> I took my first psychology course with Celeste McCollough at Oberlin college in 1955. She is famous in psychology for the "McCollough effect" (a perceptual color aftereffect that is contingent on pattern orientation). But the class she taught us was Skinnerian behaviorism mingled with Pavlov. The term was referred to as a condition*ed* reflex, as it often is still today. I had a very difficult time learning to distinguish conditioned from unconditioned learning. CS- US - UCS in some sort of combination. Confusing to me anyway.
> 
> The Russian term, uslovni ( условные) as in "uslovni refleks" is, as Peter points out most sensibly translated as conditional. If you do not understand it in this way, you do not understand what Pavlov was claiming. Nor do you understand the difference between Pavlov and Skinner. So translation makes a difference.
> 
> we started this part of the discussion with the example of *tongue* in the text. It is sort of doubly misleading. Firstly, before I saw the Russian text that David provided, I assumed that it was a mistranslation language.
> Nope. It was a mistranslation of rech (speech).
> 
> At this point, we also lose track of the relationship between Dewey and Vygotsky. There was a time when LSV referred to what he was engaged in as a form of instrumental psychology. As much discussed, the ideas of the two men were similar in many ways.
> 
> I published a discussion about the causes and consequences of mistranslating obuchenie as learning, not instruction. It messes with your understanding of a zone of proximal development.
> 
> There is at least one other example in *Mind and Society *I am sure there are many more.
> 
> Its a general problem. The perezhivanie discussion revealed, if nothing else, that the term is promiscuously translated and used in a variety of poorly marked ways, a major outcome of which, it seems, is a cottage industry in clarifications, extensions, and all sorts of discussions about the right way to define the term. And apply it.
> 
> This problem is endemic in the translation by Horsely Gantt of Luria's *Nature of Human Conflicts*.( Gantt is the same the guy who translated Pavlov -- yep the same guy who brought us conditioned reflex.). Particularly irksome is the variable way he translates oposredvovanie ( oposredsvovanie) so that the reader is left confused about a key concept of, as they say, cultural-historical psychology.
> 
> To me its great to have real experts like Rene and Jaan Valsiner and many others providing more adequate translations and providing a far deeper understanding of the texts and their intellectual, social contexts than we had in the 1970's.
> 
> But the problem of translation will never go away. So academics will have something to do, we can be sure.
> 
> :-)
> mike
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, Apr 9, 2018 at 3:58 PM, 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)
>> 
>> 
> <LCSI_2018.pdf>