[Xmca-l] Re: From Thinking to Speech

[Avram Rips]

David, May the memories of your mother give you comfort. I think the word is Mitzvah.

Sent from my iPhone

> On Apr 25, 2019, at 5:42 PM, David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Thanks to all who expressed condolences, and especially to all who expressed curiosity about my mother's work. 
> 
>  I have a very early memory of my father explaining death to me, from a physicist's point of view (i.e. thermodynamically--one of the first papers he wrote with my mother had to do with the commonalities between entropy of information and entropy of energy). When I was writing yesterday it seemed to me that I was around three years old when it happened, but now it occurs to me that I must have been seven, as it had to do with the suicide of a colleague of my mother's, whose child I used to play with in elementary school.
> 
> SON: So when we die, we go to heaven and live there forever, like astronauts who can't come home?
> FATHER: When we die we just become part of something else.
> SON: What do we become part of?
> FATHER: The earth.
> SON: And what happens when the earth dies?
> FATHER: We become part of the sun.
> SON: And what happens when the sun dies?
> FATHER: What's left of the sun and the earth and us--we all go out into space together.
> SON: So we do go to heaven and live forever!
> FATHER: Yes, we go to heaven forever. No, we don't live there.
> 
> Dad is still writing papers on what we can find out about the interstellar medium--our future home!--from the dust that pings on the surface of spacecraft. But to me it still doesn't explain the real mystery. To me, the metamorphosis of my mother from the warm, living, breathing body I came out of sixty years ago into a bag of ashes I scatter into the Thames still does not seem quite as hard to understand as her metamorphosis from the author of "Ada: A life and a legacy" into a person who could only repeat the last three words she heard. (As Vygotsky said that Lenin said: the leap from feeling to thinking is as large--or even larger--than the leap from non-sentience to sentience...)
> 
> During the twelve years of my mother's double reverse leap into non-sentience, Mike pointed out to me more than once that from a cultural-historical as well as from the linguistic point of view, the subjects of every funeral are the mourners: the "mizpah", in this case the continuing inquiry, is always what is left behind, even if it is just one footprint in indelible ink.
> 
> David Kellogg
> Sangmyung University
> 
> New Article: 
> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in understanding narratives by
> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> 
> Some e-prints available at:
> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
> 
> 
> 
>> On Thu, Apr 25, 2019 at 10:36 AM Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org> wrote:
>> Yes, as ever a riveting story, David.
>> 
>> Neuroscience achievements seem to be (1) cataloguing the effects of pathology, (2) observing which regions of the brain which are active in various circumstances (both of which are like studying human psychology with a radio telescope from space) and (3) observing and intervening in the nerves providing input and output to the brain. And yet they remain convinced that as soon as they get the next imaging device they will be able to see thoughts. One of these people should be kidnapped and forced to read Vygotsky for a week before being released. .... not that I really believe that would have any effect.
>> 
>> Andy
>> Andy Blunden
>> http://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm
>>> On 25/04/2019 7:33 am, Peter Feigenbaum [Staff] wrote:
>>> David,
>>> 
>>> Please accept my sincere condolences on the passing of your mother. And thanks so much for sharing the enriching highlights of your mother's scientific and literary history and contributions, as well as your own attempt to get the Guardian to publish her obituary - and a more truthful account of the Ada Lovelace story. What a fascinating patchwork of stories! (Shame on the Guardian!)
>>> 
>>> I'm also pleased that you found a brilliant way to weave in the news story from the BBC website that appeared today about the brain implants that can 'read' the articulatory signals that lead to speech production. I became very excited when I saw that piece this morning. It didn't occur to me that it served as a verification of LSV's proposal about the layers that 'thinking' passes through on its way to becoming 'speaking'.  
>>> 
>>> Bravo!
>>> 
>>> It's always a treat to hear from you.
>>> 
>>> Best wishes,
>>> Peter
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>>> On Wed, Apr 24, 2019 at 4:42 PM David Kellogg <dkellogg60@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> In the early 1970s, my late mother, who had been one of the very first programmers of a computer that has a compiling language (the ORDVAC at the Naval Research Laboratory in Bethesda, Maryland), begain to hear of Ada Lovelace, sole legitimate daughter of Lord Byron, and supposedly the first programmer of Charles Babbage's "analytical engine" back in the 1840s. There had already been one biography of Ada and the defense department was interested in naming its programming language after her, but my mother thought this would be a good chance to do right by an early female pioneer in a notoriously male field. So she got a contract to write a scientific biography of Ada for MIT Press ("Ada, a Life and a Legacy", 1986).
>>>> 
>>>> But research can baffle your book proposal. My mother soon discovered that Ada struggled with some of the most basic concepts in algebra, and that Babbage, who was obviously ghost-writing her papers, was using the Byron name to make claims he would never be able to sustain (e.g. that the "analytical engine" could do algebra the way computers do today). She tood a deep breath, published anyway, and died almost completely ignored three and a half decades later: Ada Lovelace is still lauded as the world's first computer programmers, and when I sent an obituary of my mother to the Guardian (attached), they rewrote it to downplay my mother's own contribution and play up the contribution of Ada. When I objected they agreed to publish nothing instead, so I am circulating this obituary on xmca partly because I have no other way to publicly commemorate her scientific work.
>>>> 
>>>> One of the many, but more minor, reasons I have for admiring the work of Alex Kozulin is that he has                   always drawn our attention to the many, minor and not so minor, ways in which Vygotsky's work really WAS confirmed by subsequent research even though it formed no part of it because of the geopolitical isolation of the USSR. For example, in "Vygotsky's Psychology: A Biography of Ideas", Kozulin shows how Vygotsky not only foresaw the outcome of the ape language debate but predicted how it would be resolved. He also shows how the dispute with Piaget over egocentric speech was resolved decisively in Vygotsky's favor.
>>>> 
>>>> Here's another, minor, example. In Chapter Seven of Thinking and Speech LSV made the apparently unverifiable claims that feeling (the affective-volitional impulse to speak), thinking, and inner speech are separable "planes" of verbal thought. He made these claims partly on the basis of introspection and partly on the basis of ontogenetic data, but also on the basis of verbal art (Uspensky, Stanislavsky, and of course that wonderful passage of Anna Karenina where Constantin and Kitty seem to share inner speech through the children's game of "Secretary"). The far flung nature of his argument made it easy to ignore. But if Vygotsky is correct, then there is no ready-made "thought" which can be picked up by brain scans and synthesized into speech: the only way we could synthesize fully developed speech in speech impaired individuals would be to intercept the actual signals sent to the articulators.
>>>> 
>>>> Take a look at this.
>>>> 
>>>> https://www.bbc.com/news/health-48037592
>>>> 
>>>> Sometimes the research DOES support the proposal. But sometimes it does take a while. 
>>>>  
>>>> David Kellogg
>>>> Sangmyung University
>>>> 
>>>> New Article: 
>>>> Han Hee Jeung & David Kellogg (2019): A story without SELF: Vygotsky’s
>>>> pedology, Bruner’s constructivism and Halliday’s construalism in understanding narratives by
>>>> Korean children, Language and Education, DOI: 10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>> To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>> 
>>>> Some e-prints available at:
>>>> https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/KHRxrQ4n45t9N2ZHZhQK/full?target=10.1080/09500782.2019.1582663
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> -- 
>>> Peter Feigenbaum, Ph.D.
>>> Director, 
>>> Office of Institutional Research
>>> Fordham University
>>> Thebaud Hall-202
>>> Bronx, NY 10458
>>>  
>>> Phone: (718) 817-2243
>>> Fax: (718) 817-3817
>>> email: pfeigenbaum@fordham.edu
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