Judy,
Although Jennifer's post did directly reference Gibson and compatibility, I
was more directly referring to the last paragraph where she wrote:
"Okay, for me this sounds like the environment "exists as is" and the
perceiver absorbs information objectively - without mediation. Would
Vygotsky agree? My understanding was that all perception is "seen through"
cultural tools, like language, internalized relations, etc."
When I composed the last post, my presupposition was that most people on
xmca know about Vygotsky but fewer know about Gibson, hence I presupposed
that many would like to know about the compatibility between sem eco and
Vygotsky/AT (ref Eugene's voting booth). A fair presupposition in my mind
although I see from mike's post that's arrived just now that Gibson is more
widely known in CHAT circles. We all always start from presuppositions
anyway, right?
Bill's rewriting of Alfred's earlier posts and notes, plus my own reading
and interpretation of several of the papers on Alfred's web site, especially
the piece, "The concrete mind heuristic", led me to the recognition that
sem eco, despite its own self-understanding, reproduces a model in which an
autonomous individual subject constructs a world out of an initially given,
unmediated external environment. .
In the "concrete mind heuristic" Alfred wrote:
"As a rule the perceptual systems selectively refer to only those
*qualities of the world* that have proven important at least in some stage
of the evolution of the respective phylae in the the phyletic strains, it
seems to have been advantageous for the living systems to evolve beyond just
acquiring matter, energy and information out of the world, but in addition
to act on sectors of that world; e.g., by removing or collecting and
composing material for burrows or nests, by cultivating symbionts etc."
This particular passage is of interest since in addition to stating that
"information" is acquired from the world, it allows for a second order
operation by which living systems act on the world, and hence the
development of social memory/culture in the "external" domain. But notice
that the "qualities of the world that have proven important (etc)" are not
framed as needs that are being satisfied through the process of activity
systems in which the actions, perceptions, purposes, etc. of concrete
individuals are formed and which generates consciousness as such. This was
the point of my citation of Leont'ev's comments about the disappearance of
unity of purpose and need. Meaning simply doesn't exist without purpose and
consequently there are no "qualities of the world" (or the environment)
given to any concrete subject independent of those activity systems.
Later in the same article, "From the point of view of an observer with a
given set of receiving capabilities (including man the scientist), his
surrounds looks as a multitude of entities ( . . . Gebilde . . . ) which
can be conceived as formation of matter and energy." These formations as
such are given to the observer which can in fact be none other than the
perceiving individual as he states, " . . . these entities are of course the
product of our perceptual-cognitive apparatus which might or might not
refect something of their "true" nature."
Addmittedly, sem eco relativizes the concept of "information", i.e., it is
always "the result of an encounter between two entities, a resultant of the
meeting of a sender and a receiver, whereby the receiver never simply takes
the information of the sender, but always creates a third". But this
formulation merely pushes the problem to another level which the concept of
"affinities" is meant to resolve; one structure "receives" information from
another structure on the basis of the so-called affinities, whose nature
Alfred compared to Kant's schemata which I have already discussed in a
separate post.
This is interesting since there are Kantian type statements in the "concrete
heuristic" article that don't mix well with the idea that there is
information drawn directly from the encounter between an individual
perceiving subject and that subject's "umwelt". (the choice of this word is
also interesting insofar as it connotes a motivational character of the
environment (see Heidegger, Being and Time, 1962:93, ftn. 1)). For example
Alfred writes, "Space is firstly a character of the
perceptual-cognitive-actional organization of the individual." A kantian
transcendental aesthetic?? This is contrasted with "place" which is "a
system of meaning". This separation is characteristic of the underlying
model which is basically still one which has not solved the problem of the
relationship between action and consciousness -- although I must admit that
neo-Kantian and postivistic elements are mixed in the sem eco formulation in
a way that defies simple untangling.
So to finish this for now, it would seem to me for at least these reasons
that the proposals of sem eco depend on the idea that the individual subject
directly perceives qualities that are independent of cultural historical
mediation as proposed in Leont'ev and other activity theorists. I question
the sustainability of any theory built on such premises.
Paul H. Dillon
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