[xmca] More on Martin: Consciousness vs knowledge?

Thanks to David K's reminder I returned to Bakhurst's article in the *Companion
of Vyg. *Eventually
I want to bring the issue of reason/logic back to the issue of
child/primitive thought and development
(again) but for the moment, want to my frequent puzzlements about the term
consiousness.

Martin argues that we should consider LSV's developmemtal theory as a the
development, NOT the development
of knowledge or tool use. I think this might be better approached from and
AND/BOTH, not an either/or position.

First, as bakhurst points out, the word for consciousness in Russian is
so-znanie, "literally with-knowledge", or, we
might say, co-knowledge. I like this reminder because it fits precisely with
the idea of consciousness being located
in the interaction between person and environment in Parker and Marx, or the
phrase at the end of *Thinking and Speech
*to the same effect.

Second, I would like to relate his to the claim that LSV created a
materialist psychology that cut away the idealist half of what
preceded his cultural-historical proposal. For this I go back to Vygotsky's
1930 article in the series on the cultural development of the child
that is reprinted in *The Vygotsky Reader. *First he puts up his triangle
(A-X-B) and writes (p. 61).

Each of these connections AX and BX is the same kind of conditional reflex
as AB. ... The only new features are the substitution of two
connections for one, the construction or combination of nervous (neural? mc)
connections, and the direction given to the process of connection by
means of a sign. Thus *new features consist not in the elements but in the
structure of the cultural methods (of remembering).

*He then goes on to discuss "The Structure"

Although each method of cultural behaviour consists, as it is shown by the
analysis, of natural psychological processes, yet that method unites
them not in a mechanical but a structural way. In other words, all processes
forming part of that method form a complicated functional and
structural unity. This unity is effected, first, by the task which must be
solved by the given method, and secondly, by the means by which that method
can be followed.

The same problem, if solved by different means, will have a different
structure.

... It is precisely the structure which combines all separate processes,
which are the component parts of the cultural habit of behavior, which
transforms this
habit into a psychological function, and which fulfills its task with
respect to the behavior as a whole.

So if consciousness is emergent from our interactions with our environments,
and if those interactions form a complex whole, the precise structure of
which changes to specifics of goal and means, then studying the genesis of
mediated interaction = studying the genesis of consciousness.

A re-solution or a blind alley?

mike
...
Th*e inclusion in any process of a sign remodels the whole*
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Received on Sat Mar 8 13:23 PST 2008