[Xmca-l] Re: Trust and Science

Sat Sep 28 08:16:46 PDT 2019

The varying meanings and potential abuses of the connection between imagination and trust appear to be activity specific.  This can be seen even in the same activity, i.e., trust and imagination may be abused.  For example, I took pains for many years to illustrate that children’s construction of intersubjectivity in social imaginative play requires trust in one another.  Children make the proleptic assumption that their potential partners are sincere, know something about the topics proposed for imaginative play, and will participate in the negotiations of assumed joint imaginative pasts and anticipated futures.  However, this may not always be the case.  As Schousboe showed, children may abuse play to institute their own abusive agendas as evidenced in her example of two five year old girls pretending that actual urine in a bottle was soda pop  trying to make a three year old girl to drink it.  This clearly supports exploring how we can/should inquire what Alfredo calls the third dimension.  More to the point, how do we teach right from wrong in shared imagination?  Vadeboncoeur has been addressing the moral dimensions of imagination in her recent work.

Artin

Artin Goncu, Ph.D
Professor, Emeritus
University of Illinois at Chicago
www.artingoncu.com/

From: xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of Alfredo Jornet Gil
Sent: Saturday, September 28, 2019 9:35 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Trust and Science

Yes, Greg, I agree there is all grounds and rights to question trust and imagination, but I am less inclined to think that we can do without them both. So, if there is a difference between imaginative propaganda aimed at confusing the public, and imaginative education that grows from hope and will for the common good, then perhaps we need a third element that discerns good from evil? Right from wrong? That may why, in order for people to actually engage in transformational action, what they need the most is not just to understand Climate Change, but most importantly, Climate Justice. Don’t you think?

Alfredo

From: <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of Greg Thompson <greg.a.thompson@gmail.com<mailto:greg.a.thompson@gmail.com>>
Reply to: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
Date: Saturday, 28 September 2019 at 16:05
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Re: Trust and Science

Note that there is a great deal of trust and imagination going on right now in the US. We have the most imaginative president we’ve had in years. He can imagine his way to bigly approval ratings and a massive inaugural turnout. He imagines that trying to get dirt on an opponent is a “beautiful conversation”. And if you watch the media these days, he has a cadre of others who are doing additional imagining for him as well - they are imagining what the DNC is trying to do to ouster this president, they are imagining what Joe Biden might really have been up to with that prosecutor. And what makes matters worst is that there is a rather large contingent of people in the US who trust this cadre of imaginative propagandists and who trust Trump and believe that they are the only ones who have the real truth.
So I guess I’m suggesting there might be reason to question imagination and trust (and this all was heightened for me by a dip into the imaginative and trust-filled land of conservative talk radio yesterday - but you can find the same message from anyone who is a Trump truster - including a number of politicians who are playing the same game of avoiding the facts (no one on those talk shows actually repeated any of the damning words from Trumps phone call) while constructing an alternative narrative that listeners trust).
Sadly,
Greg

On Sat, Sep 28, 2019 at 5:17 AM Alfredo Jornet Gil <a.j.gil@ils.uio.no<mailto:a.j.gil@ils.uio.no>> wrote:
Henry, all,

Further resonating with Beth et al’s letter, and with what Henry and Andy just wrote, I too think the point at which trust and imagination meet is key.

A couple of days ago, I watched, together with my two daughters (10 and 4 years old respectively) segments of the Right to a Future event organized by The Intercept https://theintercept.com/2019/09/06/greta-thunberg-naomi-klein-climate-change-livestream/ , where young and not-so-young activists and journalists discussed visions of 2029 if we, today, would lead radical change. It was a great chance to engage in some conversation with my children about these issues, specially with my older one; about hope and about the importance of fighting for justice.

At some point in a follow-up conversation that we had in bed, right before sleep, we spoke about the good things that we still have with respect to nature and community, and I–perhaps not having considered my daughter’s limited awareness of the reach of the crisis–emphasized that it was important to value and enjoy those things we have in the present, when there is uncertainty as to the conditions that there will be in the near future. My daughter, very concerned, turned to me and, with what I felt was a mix of fair and skepticism, said: “but dad, are not people fixing the problem already so that everything will go well?”

It truly broke my heart. I reassured her that we are working as hard as we can, but invited her not to stop reminding everyone that we cannot afford stop fighting.

My daughter clearly exhibited her (rightful) habit of trust that adults address problems, that they’ll take care of us, that things will end well, or at least, that they’ll try their best. In terms of purely formal scientific testing, it turns out that my daughter’s hypothesis could easily be rejected, as it is rather the case that my parent’s generation did very little to address problems they were “aware” of (another discussion is what it is meant by “awareness” in cases such as being aware of the effects of fossil fuels and still accelerating their exploitation). Yet, it would totally be against the interest of science and society that my daughter loses that trust. For if she does, then I fear she will be incapable of imagining a thriving future to demand and fight for. I fear she will lose a firm ground for agency. Which teaches me that the pedagogy that can help in this context of crisis is one in which basic trust in the good faith and orientation towards the common good of expertise is restored, and that the only way to restore it is by indeed acting accordingly, reclaiming and occupying the agency and responsibility of making sure that younger and older can continue creatively imagining a future in which things will go well at the end.

Alfredo

From: <xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l-bounces@mailman.ucsd.edu>> on behalf of Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org<mailto:andyb@marxists.org>>
Reply to: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
Date: Saturday, 28 September 2019 at 04:38
To: "xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>" <xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu<mailto:xmca-l@mailman.ucsd.edu>>
Subject: [Xmca-l] Trust and Science

Science is based on trust, isn't it, Henry. Only a handful of people have actually measured climate change, and then probably only one factor. If we have a picture of climate change at all, for scientists and non-scientists alike, it is only because we trust the institutions of science sufficiently. And yet, everyone on this list knows how wrong these institutions can be when it comes to the area of our own expertise. So "blind trust" is not enough, one needs "critical trust" so to speak, in order to know anything scientifically. Very demanding.

Important as trust is, I am inclined to think trust and its absence are symptoms of even more fundamental societal characteristics, because it is never just a question of how much trust there is in a society, but who people trust. It seems that nowadays people  are very erratic about who they trust about what and who they do not trust.

Probably the agreement you saw between Huw and me was probably pretty shaky, but we have a commonality in our trusted sources, we have worked together in the past and share basic respect for each other and for science. Workable agreement. I despair over what I see happening in the UK now, where MPs genuinely fear for their lives because of the level of hatred and division in the community, which is beginning to be even worse than what Trump has created in the US. A total breakdown in trust alongside tragically misplaced trust in a couple of utterly cynical criminals! The divisions are just as sharp here in Oz too, but it has not go to that frightening level of menace it has reached in the UK and US.

Greta Thunberg talks of a plural, collective "we" in opposition to a singular personal "you." She brilliantly, in my opinion, turns this black-and-white condition of the world around in a manner which just could turn it into its negation. Her use of language at the UN is reminiscent of Churchill's "we fill fight them on the beaches ..." speech and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. There's something for you linguists to get your teeth into!

Andy

________________________________
Andy Blunden
Hegel for Social Movements<https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
Home Page<https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
On 28/09/2019 2:42 am, HENRY SHONERD wrote:
Andy and Huw,
This is a perfect example of what I was talking about in the discussion of your article on Academia: Two philosophers having a dialog about the same pholosophical object, a dialog manifesting an experience of common understanding. In the same way that two mathematicians might agree on a mathematical proof. I have to believe that you are not bull shitting, that you really have understood each other via your language. So, of course this is of interest to a linguist, even though he/I don’t really get the “proof”. I may not understand the arguments you are making, but I can imagine, based on slogging through thinking as a lingist, what it’s like to get it.

I think this relates to the problem in the world of a lack of trust in scientific expertise, in expertise in general. Where concpetual thinking reigns. So many climate deniers. So many Brexiters. But can you blame them entirely? Probably it would be better to say that trust isn’t enough. The problem is a lack of connection between trust and the creative imagination. It’s what Beth Fernholt and her pals have sent to the New Yorker.

Henry

On Sep 27, 2019, at 6:40 AM, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org<mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:

Thanks, Huw.
The interconnectedness of the "four concepts," I agree, they imply each other, but nonetheless, they remain distinct insights. Just because you get one, you don't necessarily get the others.
Hegel uses the expression "true concept" only rarely. Generally, he simply uses the word "concept," and uses a variety of other terms like "mere conception" or "representation" or "category" to indicate something short of a concept, properly so called, but there is no strict categorisation for Hegel. Hegel is not talking about Psychology, let alone child psychology. Like with Vygotsky, all thought-forms (or forms of activity) are just phases (or stages) in the development of a concept. Reading your message, I think I am using the term "true concept" in much the same way you are.
(This is not relevant to my article, but I distinguish "true concept" from "actual concept." All the various forms of "complexive thinking" fall short, so to speak, of "true concepts," and further development takes an abstract concept, such as learnt in lecture 101 of a topic, to an "actual concept". But that is not relevant here. Hegel barely touches on these issues.)
I don't agree with your specific categories, but yes, for Vygotsky, chapters 4, 5 and 6 are all talking about concepts in a developmental sense. There are about 10 distinct stages for Vygotsky. And they are not equivalent to any series of stages identified by Hegel. Vgotsky's "stages" were drawn from a specific experiment with children; Hegel's Logic is cast somewhat differently (the Logic is not a series of stages) and has a domain much larger than Psychology.
The experienced doctor does not use what I would call "formal concepts" in her work, which are what I would call the concepts they learnt in Diagnostics 101 when they were a student. After 20 years of experience, these formal concepts have accrued practical life experience, and remain true concepts, but are no longer "formal." Of course, the student was not taught pseudoconcepts in Diagnostics 101. But all this is nothing to do with the article in question.
Hegel and Vygotsky are talking about different things, but even in terms of the subject matter, but especially in terms of the conceptual form, there is more Hegel in "Thinking and Speech" than initially meets the eye.
Andy
________________________________
Andy Blunden
Hegel for Social Movements<https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
Home Page<https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>
On 27/09/2019 4:32 pm, Huw Lloyd wrote:
The "four concepts", for me, are four aspects of one understanding -- they imply each other.

Quoting this passage:

"The ‘abstract generality’ referred to above by Hegel, Vygotsky aptly called a ‘pseudoconcept’ - a form of abstract generalization, uniting objects by shared common features, which resembles conceptual thinking because, within a limited domain ofexperience, they subsume the same objects and situations as the true concept indicated by the same word.
The pseudoconcept is not the exclusive achievement of the child. In our everyday lives, our thinking frequently occurs in pseudoconcepts. From the perspective of dialectical logic, the concepts that we find in our living speech are not concepts in the true sense of the word. They are actually general representations of things. There is no doubt, however, that these representations are a transitional stage between complexes or pseudoconcepts and true concepts. (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, p. 155)"

My impression from your text, Andy, is that you are misreading Vygotsky's "Thinking and Speech". Implicit LSV's whole text of vol. 1 is an appreciation for different kinds of conception (3 levels: pseudo, formal, and dialectical), but the terminology of "concept" is only applied to the formal concept, i.e. where Vygotsky writes "concept" one can read "formal concept".

In vol. 1, the analysis of the trajectory of the thought of the child is towards a growing achievement of employing formal concepts. These formal concepts are only called "true concepts" (not to be confused with Hegel's true concept) in relation to the pseudo (fake or untrue) formal concepts. The pseudo concepts pertain to a form of cognition that is considered by Vygotsky (quite sensibly) to precede the concepts of formal logic.  This is quite obvious to any thorough-going psychological reading of the text.

However, within the frame of analysis of the text there is another form of conception which is Vygotsky's approach towards a dialectical understanding. None of Vygotsky's utterances about dialectics (in this volume) should be conflated with the "true concept" which he is using as a short-hand for the "true formal concept", similarly none of Vygotsky's utterances about "pseudo concepts" should be confused with formal concepts.

I hope that helps,
Huw

On Sat, 21 Sep 2019 at 06:37, Andy Blunden <andyb@marxists.org<mailto:andyb@marxists.org>> wrote:
I'd dearly like to get some discussion going on this:
It will be shown that at least four foundational concepts of Cultural Historical Activity Theory were previously formulated by Hegel, viz., (1) the unit of analysis as a key concept for analytic-synthetic cognition, (2) the centrality of artifact-mediated actions, (3) the definitive distinction between goal and motive in activities, and (4) the distinction between a true concept and a pseudoconcept.
https://www.academia.edu/s/7d70db6eb3/the-hegelian-sources-of-cultural-historical-activity-theory
Andy
--
________________________________
Andy Blunden
Hegel for Social Movements<https://brill.com/view/title/54574>
Home Page<https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/index.htm>

--
Gregory A. Thompson, Ph.D.
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http://byu.academia.edu/GregoryThompson
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