Dear Monica:
The ref is to Problems of the Development of Mind, Progress Publishers,
1981. See also pp. 65-66:
“Thus in the course of attaining a general isolated goal intermediate goals
may also be identified as a result of which the unitary action is split up
into several spearte successive actions. This is especially (66)
characteristic of those cases in which the action is performed under
conditions that make it difficult to carry it out with the help of
operations that have been formed earlier. The opposite process consists of
strengthening previously isolated units of activity. This happens when the
objectively attained intermediate results merge together and the subject is
no longer conscious of them. Accordingly one can see the processes of
division or conversely consoldation of the units of mental images: a text by
a child just learning how to read is broken down in his/her perception into
separate letters or even into the graphic elements of the letter. At a later
point in this process whole words or even sentences become the perceptual
elements.”
You can see that ANL is really considers "consciousness" to be a)
awareness, and b) volition. This gets him into a terrible contradiction: the
fluent reader is deliberately unconscious of text as text. But how is it
possible to be deliberately unconscious of text as text unless you are
conscious of it?
Why not just say that we are aware of text but that we are deliberately not
foregrounding or highlighting it because we are busy foregrounding and
highlighting something else?
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Tue, 8/18/09, Monica Hansen <monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu>
wrote:
From: Monica Hansen <monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu>
Subject: RE: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?
To: "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, August 18, 2009, 12:05 PM
David:
You wrote:
And on p. 237 we have an unmitigated disaster, when this passable model of
a physical skill is used to produce a theory of reading in which
consciousness has no part in the recognition of text.
“When a person is reading, for example, it seems to him that both the ideas
expressed in the book and the outward graphic form of their expression, i.e.
the text itself are recognized identically-both the one and the other. In
fact, however, that is not wholly so; in fact only the ideas and their
expression are presented in consciousness and the outward aspect of the text
may only seem to be conscious, as it usually is when there are omissions,
crude typographical errors, etc.”
I have two questions, please:
1.) What Leontiev are you reading? You give page numbers, but I don't know
the original source. (Haven't even started that yet, but apparently need
to...)
2.) What do you mean in this comment? Can you expand? It looks to me like
he is not suggesting that consciousness has no part in text recognition, but
that the reader is usually unaware of the part of the process that is not
conscious.
Thanks,
Monica
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: Monday, August 17, 2009 4:29 PM
To: mcole@weber.ucsd.edu; Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?
Andy--
I thought you meant "action" as opposed to operation as opposed to
activity. If that's the case then I think that your question should be
"where does an action begin and end?" rather than "when".
In Problems of the Development of Mind, Leontiev tries to solve this
problem. If, for example, you have not completely automatized the operations
of changing gears on the car, then each operation becomes a conscious
action, with a discernible goal, not simply something that is the helpless
prey of operational conditions. Once you have automatized the operations of
changing gears on the car, then changing gears becomes itself the operation,
and goal directed actions include things like going around a corner.
I am not happy with this solution (I'm also not happy with Bakhtin's purely
objectivist definition of the utterance, for similar reasons). On p. 235,
Leontiev gives the example of a trained marksman which is almost identical
to his example of shifting gears. The process of aiming and steadying his
grip and breathing and so on are considered automatized: “For the trained
marksman noneof these processes is an independent action and their
objectives are not singled out in his consciousness.”
This is actually untrue, as the recent example of the Navy SEAL marksmen
who freed a ship captain taken hostage by Somali pirates will show. But even
if it WERE true it would be irrelevant to language.
I think it was Bakhurst who pointed out that a lot of Leontiev's ideas are
really lead to a kind of Piagetianism without Piaget. Here, though, his
ideas lead to a kind of skills theory without Gagne or Anderson.
Essentially, Leontiev is taking the position that all skill learning is the
automatization of declarative knowledge in the form of procedural knowledge.
This is why Leontiev (and also Wertsch) like examples of sensorimotor skills
and hand to eye coordination; the Anderson model handles this quite well for
hte most part.
On p. 236, Leontiev writes: “These transformations of unconscious content
in conscious and vice versa that occur in connection with a change of the
place occupied by the content in the structure of the activity, can now be
understood neurophysiologically.” p. 236.
And on p. 237 we have an unmitigated disaster, when this passable model of
a physical skill is used to produce a theory of reading in which
consciousness has no part in the recognition of text.
“When a person is reading, for example, it seems to him that both the ideas
expressed in the book and the outward graphic form of their expression, i.e.
the text itself are recognized identically-both the one and the other. In
fact, however, that is not wholly so; in fact only the ideas and their
expression are presented in consciousness and the outward aspect of the text
may only seem to be conscious, as it usually is when there are omissions,
crude typographical errors, etc.”
The reason I am not very happy with Bakhtin's definition of the utterance
is twofold. First of all, many turns (and in fact almost all "feedback"
turns that a teacher takes) consist of several utterances within a single
turn.
T: How are you all today? (one turn, and one utterance)
S: Fine, thanks, and you? (one turn, but three utterances)
So it's actually much more useful to define an utterance as a POTENTIAL
turn than as an actual one. But even this definition is too objectivist for
what I want to do.
It does not help us at all at the most crucial moment of language
development, the transformation of inter-mental vertical constructions in
discourse into intra-mental horizontal constructions.
Imagine a small child nagging a parent for an ice lolly on a hot day. The
child can only utter one or two word turns, but the child can do this for
HOURS, using gestures, intonation, tears and tandrums.
An older child has learned to ventriloquate objections and respond to them,
to incorporate the adults turns into his or her own, like this;
"You promised me I could have a lolly if it was hot and I'm really hot and
thirst and I know it won't spoil my supper and besides you promised."
Now this is only OBJECTIVELY a single utterance; when we begin to analyze
it we realize that it is a vitiated dialogue. The same thing is true of
paragraphs, of novels and so on, all of which a purely OBJECTIVIST analysis
would render as a single utterance.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
.
--- On Mon, 8/17/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] When does an action begin and end?
To: ablunden@mira.net, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, August 17, 2009, 10:22 AM
Pepper's discussion of "events" as units of analysis within a contextualist
world view might be helpful, Andy. World Hypotheses
On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 8:19 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:
I'll look in my Dewey and see what I can find. Then there's the internet
which has lots of Dewey.
It occurred to me that Bakhtin's utterance is delimited by turn-taking,
and
this is quite a nice definition for a pragmatic theory of social
interaction
etc. And then I realized that Vygotsky's conception seems to be very
elastic
on this point. Word-meaning shorter and much more cognitivist, the
'double
stimulation experiments' more like Bakhtin's turn-taking, but the child
development stuff much more open ended. And then 'activity' carries this
connotation of being on-going and not delimited, which gives it quite
different implications I think.
And I certainly go with Im Anfang war der Tat.
Andy
Mike Cole wrote:
Some time before it ends, Andy?
For sure I recommend that you take a look at Dewey's early critique of
the
reflex arc concept in dealing with
this issue. Which was in the beginning, anyway, the word or the deed?
mike
On Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 6:05 PM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net<mailto:
ablunden@mira.net>> wrote:
Can anyone tell me whether there has ever been any discussion about
when an action begins and ends? (By "action" I mean in the technical
sense of Activity Theory.)
Andy
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Andy Blunden (Erythrós Press and Media)
http://www.erythrospress.com/
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