23 june 2000
from peter jones
dear colleagues
apologies for the rapid fire postings. i thought a good way to pursue the
issues raised about dialectics and about the relation between dialectics and
the interactionist, system dynamical approach outlined and advocated by jay
could be to go back to the argument over watt's governor in the embodied mind
paper. jay's discussion (posting 14 june) laid out an 'interactionist' take on
the governor and very nicely identified points of contact as well as crucial
differences in principle with the ilyenkov-inspired treatment in the paper. jay
argued that a key difference involves the question of 'representation' and
argued that his system dynamical approach would dispense with the idea of
representation altogether. here i quote directly the relevant section:
'It is just that in the non-representationalist lingo we would not say that the
symbolic artifact
has a direct correspondence to anything, that it represents or symbolizes an
action or a thing; we would say that a chain of correspondence is built by
human and nonhuman actors (the drawing, the steel) materially (i.e. eye-,
brain-, and hand- wise) interacting through time in ways that are at root
(i.e. by an iteration of this argument) a-theoretical and not symbol-mediated.
That is, we are saying that a symbol is not something
different from a tool, it is a special case of a tool, and not metaphorically
either it is not the idea of the symbol that mediates behavior, it is the
material form itself. The twist, and the miracle, the new emergent phenomenon
that makes it seem like symbols have a reality of their own (whether Ideal as
in Plato, or mental as in Descartes, or even social-ideal as it seems for
Ilyenkov) arises from what can happen in a complex dynamical material system
that has multiple levels of organization and an awesome number of possible ways
of connecting events on one level (receptor-photon interactions) with events on
much higher levels (turning the drawing right-side up).'
i will try to argue that this treatment is an instance of what engels refers to
(see directly preceding post) as a 'conflict of the results of discovery with
preconceived modes of thinking'. gulp. ok, so let's start with a couple of
simple points of clarification. 1) jay argues that 'it is not the idea of the
symbol that mediates behaviour': a slight, but crucial slip may be in evidence
here. the claim (in the paper) is not that it is 'the idea of the symbol that
mediates behaviour' but either 'the idea mediates behaviour' or 'the symbol
mediates behaviour'; that is, it is the idea of the governor that 'mediates'
(indeed motivates) watt's behaviour as designer, and that idea is given a
particular form, eg as a drawing; the drawing is a symbol which 'mediates'
behaviour. 2) jay attributes to ilyenkov (and others) the idea that 'symbols
have a reality of their own'. rather ambiguous. ilyenkov is surely saying that
symbols have a reality, ie they are real, they are really part of the system of
human activity or, to put it another way, symbolic qualities are a distinct and
irreducible dimension of the whole (dialectical) process. but he is not saying
(of course) that there is a 'reality' (a 'world') of symbols independent of
human activity. so now let us get on to more substantive issues.
the system dynamical approach,as discussed by jay, appears to have been
(relatively) successfully applied to certain types of phenomena (what jay i
think calls 'self organizing systems') perhaps including some of the cases of
bodily movement and so on which thelen and smith look at. the problem arises,
it seems to me, when the general results of such studies are uncritically
extended and projected onto other domains (and here is the issue of the
'limits' of this kind of approach, an issue brought up in andy's earlier
posting). jay argues against saying that 'the symbolic artifact has a direct
correspondence to anything, that it represents or symbolizes an action or a
thing' and prefers to say that 'a chain of correspondence is built by human and
nonhuman actors ... materially ... interacting through time'; on this view a
symbol 'is not different from a tool, it is a special case of a tool'. It is,
he claims, 'the material form itself '(of the symbol) that does the mediating.
And therefore, we have a chain of material correspondences between actors
(humans and tools) within which it is impossible (and would be wrong) to
identify some things as representations or symbols of others. this does sound
very materialist (with a small m!). clearly, there are advantages for science
and philosophy in trying to capture the samenesses between human (seemingly)
purposeful activity and other organic and inorganic processes. but there are
clearly disadvantages in trying to see a particular process through the frame
of a qualitatively different phenomenon, which i feel is happening here. jay's
solution seems so neatly to get rid of the very difficult philosphical issues
that have always surrounded the investigation of human thinking. but it does
not so much get rid of them (in the sense of resolve them) as make them vanish
by terminological sleight of hand. (jay, i'm sorry but i think your solution to
these problems is positively orwellian!). in place of the concept of symbolic
mediation, jay prefers to talk of a chain of actors interacting materially. if
we bear this in mind and look at the dynamic system in question - namely the
whole process of R&D (with testing and implementation) of watt's governor - we
will find plenty of 'actors' interacting materially. certainly, the functioning
of the governor itself is explicable entirely in such terms since the relations
between its working parts and raw material never at any stage require us to
postulate non material (or symbolic) entities or properties, the whole thing
coming down to the relevant physical, mechanical, chemical etc processes at
work in the thing. the governor is also, obviously, a tool and its functioning
as such within the whole process of manufacture is also entirely explicable in
terms of the material interactions between it and the other relevant 'actors'
within the system. but now consider the design of the governor, let us say the
detailed technical diagram of the artefact. jay argues that it is the 'material
form itself' that has the mediating function here. now, ilyenkov too would want
to say (as noted earlier) that it is this diagram, this object, (and not the
idea of it) which is the symbol (by virtue of its role within the system). but
by virtue of what properties of the diagram does it perform its function here?
the diagram is paper and ink (ie material): but the diagram does what it does
within the system not at all by virtue of the material propeties of paper and
ink. we could completely alter the 'material' of the design (put it onto cloth,
draw it on a blackboard with chalk, sculpt it in metal or clay) and this would
create quite different chains of material correspondence, in jay's terms, while
altering nothing (or at least nothing essential) in the functioning of the
design artefact within the whole process. and this is obviously not true of any
of the other tools (non human actors) within the system. so that if we replace
the functioning metal governor by a paper model (scaled down to 100th size) it
ain't gonna work - those chains of correspondence will be quite different (and
break down). the design does what it does not by virtue of the material chains
of correspondence between material bodies. its role and nature is not
capturable by natural scientific investigation (although it is capturable by
science). so now we have two different kinds of tool: one, like the governor
itself, which works through chains of correspondence interacting materially,
and one, like the design for the governor, which works through chains of
correspondence having nothing to do with the material properties and effects of
its 'material form'. of course, we can still prefer not to use the term
'symbol' for the second kind of tool but we must distinguish them not out of
some outmoded philosophical prejudice but because the actions of the two types
of 'tool' are different and indeed exactly opposite (what is true of the first
kind cannot be true of the second, and vice versa). in order to understand our
whole dynamic system, then, we need to understand it as a process of
interaction which involves the transformation of opposites (of material into
ideal and vice versa), ie dialectics. without the generation and functioning of
such symbolic forms, human practice could not exist; goal-directed action is
impossible without a goal but to have a goal means to have one thing within the
system which functions as the 'form' of another thing, without having anything
materially in common with it (and whose action within the system is therefore
not due to the material chains of correspondence jay describes). how this
works is a question for scientific investigation (infromed by dialectical
thinking which as engels puts it 'offers the analogue for, and thereby the
method of explaining, the evolutionary processes occuring in nature,
interconnections in general, and transitions from one field of investigation to
another'. ) from this point of view, jay's solution attempts simply to suppress
the paradoxical (dialectical) nature of the activity process by a theoretical
reduction modelled on other forms of self-organization.
anyway, enough!!! jay - over to you???
all the best
P
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