Re: [xmca] Consciousness, Piaget

[Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>]

Carol  Macdonald says
Many years ago (in 1976 exactly) when I read Piaget's theory of perception,
he put consciousness between the subject and object. It is outside of the
mind.  Much later I wondered whether this conception would somehow fit with
LVS's perception of mind. Can anybody comment on this primitive perception?


2009/9/4 Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>

> Your multi-lingualism, as always, David, is very helpful, along with your
> broad and close readings.
>
> I am a very late comer to the issues of consciousness, having been raised
> in
> the era when the term
> was exorcized by American psychology. You can find my first halting steps
> at
> coming to grips with
> the idea in *Cultural Psychology, *in the chapter where I describe the
> analysis of question-asking reading that Peg  Griffin invented and which I
> still work with as a  teaching tool. There we replace the solid triangle
> with a triangle that is "open at the front end" putting time along the
> bottom line and having a gap
> between the mediated and direct connections between subject and object.
> That
> process of filling that
> gap is the process of consciousness. This idea appears in a different
> nascent form in analysis of
> fixed images on the retina that can be found at
> http://lchc.ucsd.edu/People/MCole/PHYSIO326.pdf
> The fixed image data make clear that tripartate nature of HUMAN
> consiousness, where discoordination is constituitive of consciousness.
> elsewhere i have written about taking the russian term,
> voobrazhenie  into-image-making as THE fundamental cognitive act.
>
> All of these involve, I believe,
> a) awareness
> b) noticing
> c) selection
> d) potential anticipation
>
> But there are so many more and many different ways of thinking of the
> matter. False consciousness is a term I worry about a lot.
>
> Color me self conscious.
> mike
> On Thu, Sep 3, 2009 at 4:03 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com
> >wrote:
>
> > Tony, Mike:
> >
> > We translated Piaget's "prise de conscience" as "seizure of
> consciousness",
> > except that in Korean the verbal noun has the more psychological sense of
> > "grasping" as when you grasp a meaning that you didn't really understand
> in
> > a phrase that you have heard many times. So, to nominalize, the "prise de
> > conscience" is the "graspture of awareness" or the "rapture of
> awareness".
> > Every child is an awareness raptor.
> >
> > I think that one important thing to grasp here is that "conscience" in
> > French is not really the homuncular "consciousness" we have in English,
> any
> > more than it is the obvious false friend, the meaning of a moral
> > "conscience" that we find in English writings on ethics. It has a number
> of
> > OTHER meanings that attracted Vygotsky to Piaget, to wit:
> >
> > a) awareness
> >
> > b) noticing
> >
> > c) selection
> >
> > d) potential anticipation
> >
> > It seems to me that all of these can be conceptualized as moments in the
> > passing of the child from a relatively passive, reactive state to a much
> > more voluntary, volitional one.
> >
> > Last night, I was re-reading Engestrom's old book "Learning by
> Expanding",
> > which some of our teachers are busy translating into Korean. In Chapter
> Five
> > he does try to tackle the question that I think gives the "prise de
> > conscience" its real importance, which is the question of whether and at
> > what point learning is REVERSIBLE--at what point the laying down of
> > socioculturally accumulated experience becomes the creation of new
> content
> > for the next phase of sociocultural progress.
> >
> > I think Engestrom sees Vygotsky's preliminary considerations of history
> > (which he describes, it seems to me incorrectly, as phenomenological),
> his
> > laboratory experiments (what Paula and Carol replicated), his empirical
> > classroom observations (Chapter Six of T&S) and his theorizing as moments
> of
> > a single process which can be REVERSED in order to yield the next, higher
> > phase of expansion. The first process works from outside in, and the
> second
> > from inside out.
> >
> > The problem, it seems to me, is the crisis. the "prise de conscience" is
> > really a crisis par excellence, and a crisis is by definition NOT
> > reversible. For example, awareness is not simply the end point of
> noticing
> > done backwards, nor is noticing the endpoint of attentional selection in
> > reverse. Obviously, active anticipation requires awareness, noticing,
> > and attentional selection, but not vice versa.
> >
> > So the crisis obeys different laws, and we can also expect post-critical
> > development to be different from precritical development in important
> ways.
> > In physics, a shock wave cannot, by definition, be understood with the
> same
> > mathematics we use to describe continuous phenomenon. And the shock
> > reverberates: if a crisis is generally restructuring, we have to expect
> that
> > the laws of the next phase of social progress are going to be in some way
> > fundamentally different.
> >
> > David Kellogg
> > Seoul National University of Education
> >
> > ---
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > xmca mailing list
> > xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
> >
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>



-- 
Visiting Researcher,
Wits School of Education
6 Andover Road
Westdene
Johannesburg 2092
011 673 9265  082 562 1050
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca