The long message I sent this afternoon seems not to have gone through?!?
Why me?
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Hello xmca
I'm glad I put my muddle on display, as it generated so many interesting
and enlightening responses. And thanks Mike C for bringing Mike T in. Let
me have another round of chiselling on my developing understanding. By the
way, Bill Barowy, I hope that
>how can the chimps come to know the ends of the
>others?
and
>Emulation seems distinguished in the imitator knowing the
>goal of the imitatee. How is this possible?
has been clarified by the subsequent contributors: it is possible when
'ends' and 'goal' are used with reference to the results of completed
actions: the young chimp witnessing the log turned over or the blade of
grass come up with ants on it, the cat witnessing the doorhandle pulled
down and the door opening, me witnessing somebody climb out of the water
onto the rocks at a spot where I never went swimming before (learning that
this spot affords getting in and out of the sea in my own awkward style :-)
Bill's contribution also made me see how part of my distress with the
imitation vs. emulation distinction derives from the classroom environment.
I am, after all, an educationalist NOT a psychologist by training (one of
the things I have been getting from the *Cultural Psychology* so far is
another round in my grappling with the somewhat alien perspective of the
psychological discipline: people who have gone the path of experimental
training seem to arrive from an entirely different direction even when they
end up in roughly the same place as me). Anyway, in the classroom,
evidently, there are good reasons to reverse the signs, or to be extremely
wary of "methods" being copied through the clue-seeking variety of
Imitation. As Jay expresses it:
>learning action sequences which are not
>integrated into a whole activity by exhibiting their result-object
-- e.g. kids doing arithmetic by going through the steps, without having
"witnessed" what's supposed to be "edible", "liberating", "refreshing" with
the result of the completed action.
Now, I think that what kids are able to do (for better and worse) in the
classroom is already the fruit of several years of experience with
both//all kinds of learning (language++), and so a different problem from
what Mike C addresses in the phylogenetic chapter. I realize that it
influences my reactions to the argument, but I need to bracket it. This is
a conundrum about beginnings. And there the disturbance boils down to the
theoretical positions on intentions, mental representations etc.
Obviously there is some fundamental difference between Apes and Men
(however obscure... ;-) or Mike would have invited a chimp informant into
our discussion... gorillas would compete with us for oil resources, baboons
fashion spearheads from bog iron... It's not just modesty that keeps them
back. So the phylogenetic question is: what was the condition/
/characteristic allowing us humans to get on the escalator of accumulation
of ideal-material cultural artifacts AND keeping the apes off? We don't
know: we weren't there in the Beginning, and with all our methods of
research we STILL have a real hard time unthinking all that "we" have
learned since; getting a clue to ancestral being-in-the-world.
SOME feature about patterns of intergenerational learning seems a pretty
good candidate, that's where I see the Imitation/ /Emulation model as a
potentially useful cognitive tool (especially in the sense of generating
debates).
I was hoping that Jay would produce one of his analytic pieces on the
issue, and I think putting result-focus/ /method-focus AND the
completed-process/ /uncompleted process on the table was very helpful. As
was Eugene's involvement of others in the learning of the learner through
the concept of 'co-regulation', which Jay also does more implicitly by
using 'participation'. I sympathize with these approaches integrating the
learner in her activity system: re-focusing the research interest in
processes of learning and development to concern social processes rather
than individual processes, making the group-system rather than the
individual-system the unit of analysis. Which connects quite nicely to the
comparison for similarities and differences between Merlin Donald's and
Arne Raeithel's positions that Mike C does earlier in the phylogenetic
chapter (C P6 -- Donald representing the individual approach and Raeithel
the collective approach).
Which is neat, because it carries over to Jay's reminder of mimicry-as-play
and to Arne R's way of using "style" for these _particular_ ways of
approaching a certain goal by certain means (means which COULD be used in
other ways towards the same result). What Jay writes in his last paragraph
about how operations and actions performed in the course of mimicry-as-play
enter the behavioral repertory as resources potentially used towards OTHER
end-results as well as towards the original end-result, allowing for
creativity and innovation AS WELL AS for a measure of cultural stability
sounds very promising as a candidate for the
difference-that-makes-a-difference (and very much like Arne's point in his
-94 MCA symposium).
Where we (aligning myself with Eugene M and Jay L) disagree with Mike T
would be concerning the need for including in our theoretical model
>the notion of mental representations (of the mental states of
>model actor)
or
>purpose-ends
existing as
>part of our own culture's folk-theory of minds; certainly language
>bound, probably phylogenetically (not to say, culturally-historically)
>unprecedented
=2E..but isn't this precisely the sort of disagreement where it is extremely
hard to reach agreement on the *methods* for settling the issue through
research?
and here I mean to end
Eva