Re: [xmca] When does an unbroken action begin and end?

[Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

Andy--

Don't speeches and texts "pass control to and from an individual"??

And, can i repeat my request for what people are talking about in their
various invocations of the term, consciousness? How many meanings floating
around there.
Is there also one correct way of defining consciousness or are people using
that term as a pseudoconcept while thinking they are thinking
scientifically?? I fear the
latter. But will celebrate learning how and when I am wrong and how to know.
mike

On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 3:10 AM, Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net> wrote:

> After reflecting on Bakhtin's ideas of utterance and genre, and its
> comparison with Vygotsky's concepts, I think I can offer an answer to my own
> question.
>
> Bakhtin is concerned only with speech and texts, whereas LSV was concerned
> with all kinds of artefacts and actions. So there is a bit of an atom
> (physics) / molecule (chemistry) type relation here, with distinct but
> compatible sciences having overlapping domains of phenomena.
>
> It seems to me that an action which begins and ends when control passes to
> and from the individual (like with an utterance) is of psychological
> interest. It is larger than the action conceived by Activity Theory.
>
> But actions are always enacted in a social context (ie working with
> someone, for someone, against someone, under someone etc), and demarcating
> them in the same way as utterances would give us a larger unit which would
> be useful in understanding collaborative action, and in the final analysis
> all action is collaborative. But we still need the smaller unit in which the
> action is aimed at a single goal, ok, like a generalization of "meaning" to
> see what one person is doing, and there is no harm in the idea of nesting
> these.
>
> Anyway, ...
>
> Andy
>
> Mike Cole wrote:
>
>> Sorry this came to me via gmail in two disparate threads.
>> So Andy IS talking about operations-actions.
>> Tony asks about broken tools, which, in a way, typos are.
>>
>> To put a tiny bit more flesh on my questions about consciousness. A
>> standard
>> procedure in my college classes when issues of
>> reading instruction come up is to ask a student to read a passage from the
>> assigned readings out loud. Sans typos, the standard
>> reaction, even with text that student can discuss pretty well, is that the
>> person who reads out loud cannot say anything about the
>> content of the paragraph read.
>>
>> What does this mean for the discussion of consciousness?
>> Why is reading aloud a standard practice in reading instruction
>> classrooms?
>> mike
>>
>>
>> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 1:33 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
>> >wrote:
>>
>>  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
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>
>>>>   Andy Blunden (Erythrós Press and Media)
>>>>>
>>>> http://www.erythrospress.com/
>>>
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>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>>  --
>>>> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>>> Andy Blunden (Erythrós Press and Media) http://www.erythrospress.com/
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> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
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