[Xmca-l] Re: On the difference between the social and the societal

[Wolff-Michael Roth]

Alfredo,
Yea, I think it is more productive to ask, "What if ...?" than to say
something in absolute terms, such as "Marx [really] meant ..."

You will also note that I am pointing to specific patterns and to the
likelihood that those patterns arise by chance are small.

So one question would have serious consequences: "What if personality is
the ensemble of societal relations?" How would we have to rethink
ourselves, our institutions in the context of crime and violence? What
would this mean for rethinking education?

Michael


Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Applied Cognitive Science
MacLaurin Building A567
University of Victoria
Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>

New book: *The Mathematics of Mathematics
<https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-mathematics-of-mathematics/>*

On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 7:01 AM, Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@iped.uio.no>
wrote:

> Thanks for sharing, Michael. Surely translation is, has been, and will
> probably continue being an issue in CHAT discussions. I guess that one
> thing is making absolute statements about the meaning of a word, and
> another more productive one is to explore what otherwise non-visible
> differentiations may emerge from following that translation. I was indeed
> happy to find that about half of the article is devoted to showing the
> implications that making the distinction may have across a number of
> issues/fields.
> Alfredo
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>
> on behalf of Wolff-Michael Roth <wolffmichael.roth@gmail.com>
> Sent: 11 January 2018 15:33
> To: Andy Blunden; eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: On the difference between the social and the societal
>
> Hi Andy,
> I appreciate your knowledge of Marx and Hegel, and I am not saying that you
> do not understand Marx. I am showing that certain things are not thematic
> in English translations because it does not make a conceptual distinction.
> The one I am after allows tying the particular and the general-universal to
> the distinction between the merely social and the societal.
>
> In the extreme case that I am referring to: If, as Vygotsky and Leont'ev
> state, personality is the ensemble of societal relations, then murders, of
> which there are so many in the US, do not have somehow deviant
> personalities, but instead reflect the relations of U.S. society. This is
> for me an interesting way to think, which allows understanding why  all the
> prisons in the US will fail, even if the prison industry will get bigger
> and bigger.
>
> Also, in the article I am saying, let's take the importance of the
> distinction as a hypothesis, and then test it out in the different fields.
> If it turns out that the patterns I show are chance occurrences even
> despite their very low probability, then so be it. But it is more
> scientific to test and reject hypotheses than to reject them beforehand.
>
> Michael
>
>
>
>
> Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> --------------------
> Applied Cognitive Science
> MacLaurin Building A567
> University of Victoria
> Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
> http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>
>
> New book: *The Mathematics of Mathematics
> <https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-
> directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-
> mathematics-of-mathematics/>*
>
> On Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 6:22 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
>
> > Michael, I studied Marx from 1968 on, but I never learnt the
> > word "societal" until the 2000s, on this list actually. I
> > thought it was just an academic pretension, but someone
> > explained to me the distinction intended. 40 years of
> > studying Marx before hearing the word "societal" does *not*
> > mean I never understood Marx. Really! German, like English,
> > has plenty of words which are used with a number of
> > different meanings, with varying degrees of difference.
> > Should I claim that German-speakers do not understand the
> > meaning of "Gestalt" because in German "Gestalt" has the
> > same meaning as "form" in English? "Gestalt" has a clear
> > meaning, not to be confused with "Form" in every language
> > except German.
> >
> > Andy
> >
> > Andy Blunden
> > http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
> > On 12/01/2018 1:05 AM, Wolff-Michael Roth wrote:
> > > Hi, some of you may be interested in this article where I show that
> > English
> > > translations of Marx are missing some important distinctions, without
> > which
> > > some aspects just do not make any sense.
> > >
> > > http://dx.doi.org/10.17169/fqs-19.1.2988
> > >
> > > This has repercussions on such things as the student learning of
> > > *universal *concepts rather versus individual (local) "meanings". There
> > are
> > > certain nouns that in Marx, Vygotsky, Leont'ev etc. always are modified
> > by
> > > societal but never by social (including personality, consciousness).
> > >
> > > German and Russian versions of the same works (Marx, Vygotsky,
> Leont'ev)
> > > will have a strict equivalence of gesellschaftlich = obshchestvenij
> (En:
> > > societal) and sozial = social'nij (En: social), whereas English texts
> > only
> > > use the adjective social.
> > >
> > > Michael
> > >
> > >
> > > Wolff-Michael Roth, Lansdowne Professor
> > >
> > > ------------------------------------------------------------
> > --------------------
> > > Applied Cognitive Science
> > > MacLaurin Building A567
> > > University of Victoria
> > > Victoria, BC, V8P 5C2
> > > http://web.uvic.ca/~mroth <http://education2.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/>
> > >
> > > New book: *The Mathematics of Mathematics
> > > <https://www.sensepublishers.com/catalogs/bookseries/new-
> > directions-in-mathematics-and-science-education/the-
> > mathematics-of-mathematics/>*
> > >
> > >
> >
> >
>