[Xmca-l] Covid 19: Getting the Name Right

[David Kellogg]

I won't pretend to you that this is on my night table. Someone recently
sent me the following quote from Hegel:

“For although it is commonly said that reasonable men pay attention not to
the word but to the thing itself, yet this does not give us permission to
describe a thing in terms inappropriate to it. For this is at once
incompetence and deceit, to fancy and to pretend that one merely has not
the right *word*, and to hide from oneself that really one has failed to
get hold of the thing itself, i.e. the Notion. If one had the Notion, then
one would also have the right word.” (p.198) – sec. 329

Vygotsky liked to quote Tolstoy: Слово почти всегда готово, когда готово
понятие (the word is nearly (!) always read when the concept is ready) but
it seems to me that in this case he would have stressed the word "nearly".
There was a long debate over what to call Covid 19 at the WHO, and many
people (including Michael Lin at Stanford) opine that they got it wrong.

I think that they got it right, but that it took a while. I don't think it
is
non-argument to point out that repeated attempts to change the name to
"Chinese virus" or the nineteenth iteration of Covid or whatever are also
motivated and not in a good way.

More importantly (because as Hegel says mere incompetence and transparent
self-deceit are at stake in this instance) I think in most societies naming
is a process--a child has different names at different times of life, and
LSV is probaby wrong to treat naming as a single function of speech that is
simply replaced by signifying and does not itself develop.

What disturbs me about the Hegel quote (and LSV's obvious enthusiasm for
it) is that it seems to suggest that everything has, in the final analysis,
only one correct name. But perhaps it all depends on that final analysis.

David Kellogg
Sangmyung University











































































































































































Book Review: 'Fees, Beets, and Music: A critical perusal of *Critical
Pedagogy and Marx, Vygotsky and Freire: Phenomenal forms and  educational
action research'  in Mind Culture and Activity*

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Some free e-prints available at:

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New Translation with Nikolai Veresov: "L.S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works
Volume One: Foundations of Pedology"

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