Re: [xmca] Consciousness of budgets and workloads

[Paul Dillon <phd_crit_think@yahoo.com>]

mike, 

"UC is stopping paying N days a year but not easing up on the workload!! now
its grad student exam reading time. sigh"

Well, California has an enormous budget deficit, right?,  they're trimming where they can: one man's fat is another man's lean.  But not to worry,  soon pot will be legal in CA and the state will have so much money from the pot tax that they'll probably pay you to take time off !!!!

Paul

--- On Mon, 6/22/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Consciousness
To: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
Cc: "Culture ActivityeXtended Mind" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, June 22, 2009, 3:45 PM

I'll work through this more carefully david, but when Zinchenko refers to
carpet bombing in relation to fabric/tissue seems like
he means fabric. Similarly, when babelfish translates tkan' as fabric, its
hard for me to argue.

In posting the Vygotsky quote from the trio of articles I was not making a
back handed argument or any argument at all,
just trying to fill in with some translating (without looking at your
translation from Seve or Meccaci) of my own in hopes it
would help you, ugh, triangulate. And when I pointed to the section from the
article what had originally caught my attention
was his insistence that the triangular relation was not a string of
reflexes, but a new structure, such that specifically human
psych functions are emergent properties of that structure and had not/have
not carefully considered the issue of the ordering
of elements into structure and visa versa that you were focused on.

Sorry if this turned out to be a distraction. You know my view: Its up to us
to come to our conclusions based on what we
can figure out now in 2009 given our life experiences and interpretations of
what others have written, and then test them
against some problem that confronts us.  Is tissue a better tool than
fabric. Depends upon what sort of story you are trying
to weave or what sort of scab you hope will form to stop the flow of blood.

UC is stopping paying N days a year but not easing up on the workload!! now
its grad student exam reading time.
sigh

mike

On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 5:26 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> In Vygotsky, is it "the fabric of consciousness"...or "the tissue of
> consciousness".
>
> Take a look at p. 172 of your Minick. He's got "Tolstoy is not concerned
> with the concepts that the chid acquires in learning a system of scientific
> knowledge but with words and concepts that are woven into the same fabric as
> those that have developed in the child."
>
> But here's Seve: "Tolstoy speaks of the concept in relation to the
> teaching of literary language to children. Therefore, what he has in mind I
> not the concepts that the child acquires during the process of assimilation
> of a system of scientific knowledge but words and concepts of current
> language, which, previously unknown and therefore new, are inserted into the
> tissue of childish concepts which have already been formed."
>
> And here's Meccaci: "Thus he has in mind not the concepts that are
> acquired by the child in the process of assimilating a system of scientific
> understanding but words and concepts of ordinary language which are new or
> unknown to the child, which are inserted into the tissue of the childish
> concepts which is already formed."
>
> At the beginning of 6.6 (p. 224 in your Minick) we've got this: "How is the
> individual concept--this stitch that we tear away from a living integral
> fabric--intertwined and interwoven with he system of concepts present in the
> child?"
>
> In Seve, it's this: "How is the isolated concept, like a cell which we
> have detached from the whole, living tissue, interlaced and woven into the
> system of child concepts, out of which it cannot appear, survive, and
> develop?"
>
> Here's Meccaci: "An isolated concept, a cell which we have torn from the
> living, whole tissue--how is it interlaced with the whole tissue of the
> system of child concepts within which it must appear, live, and develop?"
>
> There are a lot of instances of this throughout! In fact, EVERY place where
> Vygotsky says "tissue" and "cell", Minick has "fabric" and "stitch". In one
> place, Vygotsky even talks about "dendritic cells" (that is, nerve cells),
> and it is still translated as "stitch".
>
> So we checked with Vygotsky himself:
>
> "Как отдельное понятие, эта клеточка, вырванная нами из живой, целостной
> ткани, вплетена и воткана в систему детских понятий, внутри которой она
> только может возникать, жить и развиваться?"
>
> Which is WELL beyond the limits of my Russian, but here's what a quick
> Babelfish gives:
>
> "As separate concept, this cell, pulled out by us from the living, of
> integral cloth, it is intertwined and interwoven into the system of
> children's concepts, inside which it only can to appear, to live and to be
> developed?"
>
> This looks like "tissue" and not "fabric" to me, and that is how we've
> translated it throughout.
>
> I've got two other points about what you said yesterday, Mike. The first
> has to do with the TRIANGLE of mediation. At the beginning of Thinking
> and Speech (bottom of p. 40 in your Minick translation), Vygotsky warns:
>
> "(T)here is a great deal that we once believed to be correct that has been
> excluded from this book because it represented simple delusion on our part."
>
> Of course, it would be nice to have a more complete list at this point.
> What exactly were the "simple delusions" that had to be excluded? Well, one
> thing that IS clearly missing from Thinking and Speech (which is almost
> NEVER missing from any of LSV's pre-1930 work on thinking and speech) is the
> triangle of mediation, the idea of subject-object mediated by tools/signs,
> etc.
>
> The second problem goes back to the lesson of the water molecule, which
> also figures in Chapter One and Again in Chapter Seven (and also in
> Bakhtin/Medvedev's "Formal Method"). Minick says that "to say that water
> consists of hydrogen and oxygen is to say nothing that relates to water
> generally or to all its characteristics. It is to say nothing that relates
> to the great oceans and to a drop of rain, to water's capacity to
> extinguish fire and to Archimedes' law".  (See p. 45, and also p. 244).
>
> But Seve and Meccaci says that the whole problem is that it DOES say
> something that relates to all of these phenomena equally, and therefore it
> has nothing to say about the concrete problems concerned with the analysis
> of thinking and speech (e.g. explaining the structure, functions, and
> history of consciousness).
>
> Here's the Russian again:
>
> Это есть, скорее, возведение к общему, чем внутреннее расчленение и
> выделение частного, содержащегося в подлежащем объяснению феномене. По самой
> своей сущности этот метод приводит скорее к обобщению, чем к анализу. В
> самом
> деле, сказать, что вода состоит из водорода и кислорода, значит сказать
> нечто такое, что одинаково относится ко всей воде вообще и ко всем ее
> свойствам в равной мере: к Великому океану в такой же мере, как к дождевой
> капле, к свойству воды тушить огонь в такой же мере, как к закону Архимеда.
>
> So it looks to me like Vygotsky is once again complaining about
> OVER-ANALYSIS, but making the rather subtle point that such overanalysis
> leads to OVER-GENERALIZATION. The trick is to find in the particular the
> laws of the general phenomenon under investigation (viz. consciousness), and
> not general laws in general.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
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