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David Bakhurst
Queen's University
On the social constitution of mind: Bruner, Ilyenkov, and the
defence of cultural psychology
The focus of this paper is "strong culturalist theories of mind,"
i.e., those that argue that culture is "constitutive" of mind and
thus that the nature and content of an individualÕs mental life
cannot be understood independently of the culture of which that
individual is a part. While such theories can be advanced on
empirical grounds, it is tempting for the culturalist to seek some
broad philosophical arguments that will show that the opposing
positions (e.g., reductionism, eliminitivism) rest on fatal
conceptual confusions. But how realistic is it to look to
philosophy for a vindication of strong culturalism?
The paper sets out Jerome BrunerÕs recent defence of a strong
culturalist position and, after exploring ambiguities and
unclarities in Bruner's view of the status of the mental, considers
whether his position can be strengthened by appeal to the
writings of Russian philosopher Evald Ilyenkov. It is argued
that, although Ilyenkov's work nicely complements Bruner's, it
falls short of conclusively resolving the issue in favour of
culturalism. Nevertheless, Ilyenkov's work is a powerful source
of metaphors, ideas and arguments that force us to interrogate
the images of mind and world that predominate in our
intellectual culture and often (tacitly) influence the building of
empirical theories. His work thus illustrates that there is a
significant role for philosophers to play in the defence of
culturalism even if it is unrealistic to expect a compelling a priori
defence of the position.
R. Keith Sawyer
University of California, Santa Cruz
Creativity as Mediated Action: A Comparison of Improvisational
Performance and Product Creativity
This paper elaborates the notion of mediated action through a
comparison of group improvisational performance and the
product-oriented creative domains studied by psychology.
Semiotically mediated interaction is central to both forms of
creativity: in group improvisation, the interaction is paralleland
simultaneous, communication between performers is mediated
by musical or verbal symbolic structures, and is thus synchronic;
in product-oriented creative domains, interaction between
creating individuals is mediated by ostensible products in the
domain, the interaction is over long time spans, and thus is
historical or diachronic. After presenting a model of mediated
action, six interactional dimensions of contrast are described
which are characteristic of both synchronic and diachronic
creative interaction. By demonstrating these processual parallels
between synchronic and diachronic creativity, the model suggests
that the study of performance has several implications for the
broader study of creativity. The focus on processes of symbolic
interaction represents an application of the mediated action
concept to both product creativity and improvisational
performance.
Ritva Engestrom
University of Helsiniki
Voice as Communicative Action
In microsociological studies of talk as social action, the active
subject is typically depicted as someone who interacts rather than
acts. In other words, conversations produce intersubjective
understandings rather than meanings based on the referential
and semantic contents of talk. This paper formulates an
alternative approach to the analysis of institutional
conversations, based on an expanded unit of action. In this
expanded unit, people act on a jointly constructed object which is
outside the "social system" constituted by the parties themselves.
Bakhtin's notions of utterance, social language, speech genre and
voice are interpreted and integrated into a coherent system
within the framework of activity theory. The proposed
theoretical approach is applied in an examination of transcript
data from videotaped doctor-patient encounters from a Finnish
primary care clinic. A set of voices present in medical
consultations is identified. Analyses of data examples
demonstrate the robustness of this set of voices as well as the
appearance of new, emergent voices in sequences of locally
produced interactional disturbance and innovation.