Peter,
Kozulin from Vygotsky in Context in T&L states the following which seems
pertinent.
pp xxxvii
"Vygotsky returned to the problem of inner speech in connection with the
study of generalization vs contextualization of word meaning. He made a
distiction between word meaning (znachenie), which reflects a generalized
concept, and word sense (smysl), which depends on the context of speech. The
sense of a word is the sum of all the psychological events arroused in a
person's consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, complex, fluid whole,
which has several zones of unequal stability. Meaning is only one of the
zones of sense, the most stable and presise zone. A word acquires its sense
from the context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its
sense"
"According to Vygotsky, the predominance of sense over meaning, of sentence
over word, and of context over sentence are rules of inner speech. While
meaning stands for socialized discourse, sense represents an interface
between one's individual (and thus incommunicable) thinking and verbal
thought comprehesible to others. Inner speech is not an internal aspect of
talking; it is a function in itself. It remains however, a form of speech,
that is, thought connected with words. But, while in external speech thought
is embodied in words, in inner speech words must sublinate in order to bring
forth a thought."
I guess I would see the designative and expressive as getting close to the
differentiation of meaning and sense as used by Vygotsky. Kozulin later
differentiates sense / meaning via Vygotsky as,
"Inner speech becomes the psychological interface between, on the one hand,
culturally sanctioned sybolic systems and, on the other hand, private
"language" and imagery".
I would see designative and expressive meaning as complementary, and that is
my understanding of what Vygotsky was getting at when he argued "meaning" is
the stable zone of sense. If we agree with Vygotsky formulations or not, I
do not think he was moving from one plilosophy of meaning to another, but
rather he saw them as complementary in a multilectical sort of way.
I would take sense then as not the inarticulated but a dialectic between the
inarticulated and the articulated (meaning).
Nate
Nate Schmolze
http://www.geocities.com/nate_schmolze/
schmolze@students.wisc.edu
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"Overcoming the naturalistic concept of mental development calls for a
radically new approach
to the interrelation between child and society. We have been led to this
conclusion by a
special investigation of the historical emergence of role-playing. In
contrast to the view
that role playing is an eternal extra-historical phenomenon, we hypothesized
that role playing emerged at a specific stage of social development, as the
child's position in society changed
in the course of history. role-playing is an activity that is social in
origin and,
consequently, social in content."
D. B. El'konin
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-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Smagorinsky [mailto:smago@peachnet.campuscwix.net]
Sent: Sunday, April 02, 2000 3:18 PM
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: Re: sense/meaning
Mike, good questions that plague me still--I think the distinction is
important, if not always clear to me.
Briefly, as I understand Vygotsky, sense refers to that which is
unarticulated (inner speech) and meaning refers to that which is
articulated (represented). Any help out there on this?
Peter
At 10:59 AM 4/2/00 -0700, you wrote:
>hi Peter --
>
>In reading your paper, I kept finding myself wondering about the role
>of a sense/meaning distinction in your thinking. A lot of he time I felt
>myself wanting to replace uses of the term meaning with the term sense.
>Perhaps a way to get at my question is with the following question: Is
>it useful to speak of "personal meaning" or "making meaning of the text"
>and if so when (in contrast with spaking of "personal sense" and
>"making sense of the text."
>
>I believe that my confusions are related to issue of designative and
>expressive aspects of meaning and whether they are completmentary or
>incommsurable, but am too confused to be sure.
>mike
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