Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Saussure

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Andy:
 
Here's what LSV says on the very last page of Thinking and Speech, penultimate paragraph:
 
"If the perceiving and thinking consciousness make available different methods for the reflection of reality, then they are different types of consciousness. Therefore thinking and speech hold the key to understanding the nature of human consciousness. If language is as ancient as consciousness, if language is practical consciousness that exists for other people and consequently for me as well, if the curse of matter, the curse of the moving layers of air weighs heavily on pure consciousness”, then it is obvious that not one thought but conciousness as a whole is connected with speech and with the development of the word. Factual studies show at every turn that the word plays a central role in consciousness as a whole, and not merely in its separate functions. The word is truly in consciousness that which, as Feuerbach says, is impossible for one person but possible for two. It is the most direct and immediate expression of the nature of human
 consciousness."
 
Apparently the quotations from the German Ideology were very heavily edited in the 1956 edition (by Leontiev and Luria), and that is why Minick leaves a lot of this out (in particular the stuff about the curse of moving air).
 
So LSV agrees with Marx, Andy: language is practical consciousness, which exists for others and therefore for myself. Analysis into units naturally depends on what we are analyzing, and in this case it is not pole vaulting or paining. It makes perfect sense that the unit LSV should use in order to solve the problem of thinking AND speech, the interfunctional links between consciousness generally and practical consciousness, should be the meaningful word.
 
Martin: You can see that the reference to "the curse of the moving layers of air" is really a reference to phonetics, that is, to the MATERIAL side of meaning that Mike is talking about.
 
As a Chinese speaker, I agree with the book you have that says that the phoneme as laid out in Chomsky and Halle is dead. But that's not the phoneme that Saussure was talking about, nor is it the phoneme that Vygotsky means.
 
Consider the example I gave: "back" and "bag". Or "cap" and "calf". Or even "can" and "can't".
 
If I stand at one end of a large room and say these words to you standing at the other, how can you tell which word I am saying? The Chomsky and Halle, distinctive features, answer is that you listen to see if the final phoneme is voiced or unvoiced. But the final phonemes are STOPS. This mans that they never actually leave my mouth, and you probably only imagine that you hear them. 
 
How do you imagine them? It is easy to find out. Lengthen the vowel of "back" so that it sounds like the vowel of "bag". Then add the sound /k/ instead of /g/. Someone standing at the end of room will hear "bag" and not "baaaaaack". 
 
This is because the most general unit of contrast in real, living, spoken language, the language as it is actually used, practical consciousness for others and therefore for myself as well, is not the Chomsky/Halle distinctive feature or even the IPA phoneme. It's the syllable. That's why all the phonemes in Chinese are the size of the syllable, and the attempt to romanize Chinese after liberation never worked out. 
 
Saussure is, if anything, even more holistic than this. He points out that in the case of "Je l'apprends" and "Je la prends", the whole utterance and not just the syllable has to be disambiguated somehow. But the way language is normally used, the whole utterance is too large and unique, and the distinctive feature too small and general. The syllable, which is the length of the vast majority of meaning-laden words used by small children, is just right.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education


--- On Mon, 7/27/09, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:


From: Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Saussure
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, July 27, 2009, 8:23 PM


Martin,
We've been round this mulberry bush before, so I suspect David might agree with you, but I differ.

As I recall, LSV claims that word-meaning is the unit of analaysis for intelligent speech and therefore the "microcosm" of consciousness.

So LSV agreed with Marx, as do I, that practice, or artefact mediated action is the unit of analysis of consciousness.

all linguists of course disagree. But I wonder if a painter would agree, or a gymnast?

Andy

Martin Packer wrote:
> David, ...
> meaningful-sound is a concrete phenomenon, located in place and time. And he promises that we will thereby find the unity of thinking and speech, of generalization and social interaction, of thinking and communication, of intellect and affect. In short, of consciousness.
> 
> No? Yes?
> 
> Martin
> 
> On Jul 25, 2009, at 3:25 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
> 
>> Martin:
>> 
>> Yes, definitely! If you read pp. 49-50 in the Minick translation of Thinking and Speech, we get Vygotsky's remarks on Saussure's phonology in pure form. Of course, he rejects (again and again) the Saussurean view of semantics; it's nothing but associationism. But since he rejects associationism on the basis of its arbitrariness, its lack of an intelligent link, and its lack of system, he has to reject Saussurean phonemes too, no?
>> 
>> No! As you say, there are two points here for Vygotsky to appropriate. The first is that the phoneme is part of a gestalt, specifically, a contrast with some other word (e.g. "back" and "bag"). But the second is that that gestalt is defined by MEANING and not by sound.
>> 
>> Here is where Vygosky really parts company, not only with Saussure and structuralism but also with Gestaltism. For Saussure, the relationship between phoneme and meaning is entirely arbitrary; but for Vygotsky it is fully determined by the social situation of development.
>> 
>> For Gestaltism, the structural relationship is not unique to language; it's shared with perception. But for Vygotsky the consciousness that is created by thought is never reducible to the consciousness that is created by perception.
>> 
>> The question I have is what Saussure would have made of all this. Saussure was actually quite skeptical about his own system; he had good reason to instruct his wife and students not to publish any of his work. And as the article Mike sent around (on the Mandelshtam poem) makes clear, he had big big problems with precisely the concepts at issue: the arbitrariness and linearity of language.
>> 
>> Notice that Vygotsky doesn't really use the word "phonetic" very much. The word which is usually translated as "phonetic" is actually "phasal". But in the example Vygotsky gives about the psychological vs. grammatical predicate/subject, where he talks about psychological/grammatical gender, and number, and even tense, it is very clear that for Vygotsky ALL the linear aspects of language, the aspects which (unlike thought) include TIME in their compositionality, are to be considered "phasal", not just phonetics.
>> 
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education
>> 
>> --- On Fri, 7/24/09, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Intensions in context and speech complexity ; From 2-?
>> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Friday, July 24, 2009, 8:03 AM
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jul 23, 2009, at 2:46 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
>> 
>>>   I think Vygotsky actually finds the single kernel of truth in Saussure's course when he argues that a science of phonetics needs to be founded on MEANING MAKING and not on the physical description of noises people make with their mouths. However, his ability to find this kernel in a mountain of structuralist chaff should not deceive you; he is no uncritical consumer of Saussureanism.
>>> 
>> David,
>> 
>> Coincidentally I was reading yesterday the section in Problems of Child Psychology (vol 5 of the Collected Works) where Vygotsky again makes this point.  It is evidently Saussurian linguistics that V is enthusiastic about: he refers to it as phonology and contrasts it with an older phonetics which focused solely on articulatory definitions. Phonology has the advantage of seeing the sounds of language as a system, and so the child never learns a single sound in isolation but always one sound against the background of the others. V points out that this is a basic law of perception: figure/ground, and also that the ground in the case of oral language is provided by the speech of adults (so the 'ideal' endpoint of development is present and available from the start, as emphasized in the passage that Lois quoted a few days ago).
>> 
>> V is critical once again of analyses that divide a phenomenon into elements and in doing so lose the properties of the whole. Phonology, he says, has the advantage that in studying the sounds of a language as a system it doesn't divide it into separate elements, nor does it lose the central property of language, namely that it has meaning. V adds that sounds always have meaning: "the phoneme," he writes "is not just a sound, it is a sound that has meaning, a sound that has not lost meaning, a certain unit that has a primary property to a minimal degree, which belongs to speech as a whole" (271).
>> 
>> V's analysis makes a good deal of sense to me. But my own limited knowledge of Saussure - guided in part by Roy Harris' writing - has indeed included the dogma that the sound level of language carries no meaning. You are saying, I think, that V has a reasonable reading of Saussure, if not the canonical one. Can you say more about this way of reading Saussure? V seems to be suggesting that the child does not learn first sounds, then words, but always acquires the sounds of language in the context of the use of words in communicative settings, and this has the consequece that the sounds would be aquired as aspects of a meaningful unit. Am I on the right track here?
>> 
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> 
> Martin Packer, Ph.D.
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> Psychology Department
> Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA 15282
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