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Re: [xmca] The Ubiquity of Unicorns: conversation
Steve--
Thanks for the warm welcome.
I thought my response to the ongoing discussion would be useful,
but I can see that it will take more work on my part to demonstrate
the relevance of what I'm proposing.
I should also add that my orientation to LSV, private speech, and
word meaning is not just conceptual, but also practical. While I truly
enjoy the erudite philosophical discussions on this listserve, and find
them helpful in sharpening up crucial concepts, there is research to be
done to verify these ideas, and that enterprise involves making concrete
decisions about conceptual possibilities.
As for your synopsis of my ISCAR presentation, you did a fine job. All I
would add (and this was not spelled out sufficiently in my presentation)
is a fuller description of the properties that emerge when speaking and
thinking "converge". As I see it, that momentous convergence that LSV
points to is none other than the momentous activity of a child uttering
her first meaningful word. Several aspects of that new activity need to
be made explicit.
First, it's not just thinking and speaking that converge inside a child's
head; the whole activity is a convergence of infant and caregiver as well.
That is, a child's first word is spoken "to someone", and therefore
constitutes the very first instance of the infant engaging in interpersonal
conversation--even though the infant is unaware of the rules and
conventions for conducting this new activity. Fortunately, adults step in
and do the work of creating a state of mutual involvement until the child
is competent enough to do so on her own.
Which leads to the second point: if conversational activity is born with a
child's first meaningful word, then tracking the growth and development of
conversational understanding and skills needs to be a central aim of
Vygotskian research. Since the convergence of speaking and thinking is
also the same event in which word and meaning come together as one
to form a new activity, tracking conversational development is intertwined
with the development of word meaning.
To respond to your first question--is word meaning an activity of "meaning
through language use" or does it refer to a particular psycholinguistic
structure--the answer is: both. Speech communication, word meaning, and
conversation are, in my view, conceptually interchangeable. These terms
all refer to the activity of making meanings with speech sounds. Thus,
particular speech structures are woven into the activity. That's the great
thing about "activity"--it's a material process involving material
structures,
and from it can come "ideas" and "idealizations"!
If Vygotsky's claims about word meaning and its development are to be
tested using empirical data, then the concept of word meaning needs to be
translated and transposed so that it can take the form of an empirical
methodology--while retaining its basic features. Personally, I don't know
of
one private speech researcher who uses LSV's concept of word meaning
when analyzing speech data--and to me, that suggests something is very
wrong. So I have been focused on augmenting the concept of word meaning
in order to create a corresponding method that can capture word meaning
and its development from a data-analytic perspective. That involves making
certain conceptual choices, particularly regarding the linguistic units.
Your suggestion that there could be any number of linguistic units that
might
be proposed is certainly valid. My justifications for choosing words,
sentences,
and conversation as the three major levels in the organization of speech
communication are based on both conceptual and pragmatic grounds. We
need a method of studying this phenomenon developmentally from a data
perspective, and this scheme seems tome to be the most workable one.
Does that help clarify my viewpoint?
Peter
-----xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu wrote: -----
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
From: Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: 10/28/2009 07:19AM
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Ubiquity of Unicorns: conversation
Welcome, Peter! I liked your presentation and paper at ISCAR 2005 a
lot, and am very glad to see you getting involved here on xmca.
Your post outlines a very interesting concept, extending Vygotsky's
concept of word-meaning to the linguistic unit of conversation.
I took a quick re-look at your 2005 paper, A Dialectical Model of
Vygotsky's Theory of Speaking and Thinking. I like the way you
describe Vygotsky's three stages of thinking/speech development, and
the way you propose a fourth that completes the full developmental
"cycle".
Here is a quick synopsis of your paper (in my clumsy terms). As you
describe them, each of these stages takes two 'forms', so to speak, a
speaking form and an intellectual (thinking) form.
The paper describes Vygotsky's three stages of speaking/thinking as:
1) interpersonal speech, which combines the speaking form of external
social speech dialogues, and the intellectual form of implicit
practical thinking;
2) personal speech, which combines the speaking form of external
private speech monologues and the intellectual form of explicit verbal
thinking; and 3) personal speech, which combines the speaking form of
internal inner speech monologues and the intellectual form of explicit
verbal thinking.
To these stages outlined by Vygotsky, you suggest a fourth stage:
4) interpersonal speech, which combines the speaking form of inner
speech/social speech with internal monologues and external dialogues,
and the intellectual forms of explicit and implicit verbal thinking
and practical thinking.
In this post, you extend Vygotsky's concept of word-meaning beyond the
word and the sentence to the conversation as a unit of analysis. A
key element that emerges in the second and third stages of speaking/
thinking development - that element being the monologue, or inner
speech - creates the basis for the fourth stage. And the monologue is
also a key element of how you are looking at conversation. Very
interesting analysis!
Please correct the rough edges of my synopsis - and where I am off-base.
As for considering conversation a "third level" linguistic unit,
following the word and the sentence, I have a naive question. The
term "word-meaning" that Vygotsky uses in Russian - znachenie slova -
as I understand it (via Holbrook Mahn's paper at a recent AERA
conference), means something more like "meaning through language use"
rather than "individual-word-meaning". In this sense, Vygotsky may
not have been referring specifically to any linguistic unit when he
spoke of word-meaning. Yes? No?
As for linguistic units, I have another naive question. Apologies for
using non-technical terms here. We have things like parts of words,
words, phrases, combinations of phrases, sentences, and then perhaps
sequences of directly related sentences. And then, of course, we have
conversations. And the distinctions can get a lot more complicated
than that when we look at syntax. This leads me to ask: what permits
us to say that "words" are one level, "sentences" are a second level,
and that "conversations" are a third? Are we skipping any necessary
levels? Or creating a level that we shouldn't?
I don't mean to undermine the idea of that different structural levels
contain, transmit and transform meaning in qualitatively different
ways. Units smaller than sentences, complete sentences, and
conversations are clearly on very different levels. My question is:
how can it be demonstrated and explained that these three levels are
the right ones for this job?
It would be very sweet and simple if this were the case ...
- Steve
On Oct 27, 2009, at 8:34 AM, Peter Feigenbaum wrote:
> Greetings, fellow members of XMCA.
>
> My name is Peter Feigenbaum, and I’m a private speech researcher.
> Some of
> you may know me from my presentations
> at ISCAR. I have been following several of the threads on this
> listserve
> for the past few weeks (time permitting!), and I
> believe I might have something useful to contribute to this particular
> topic.
>
> What prompted me to chime in is the frustration expressed by Michael
> Glassman regarding how to construct the question
> of meaning in such a way that brings “activity and rules systems and
> words
> all into some type of transactional field”. I have
> been working on an augmentation of LSV’s analysis of “word meaning”
> that
> might be just what Michael’s seeking.
>
> In LSV’s day, the field of linguistics recognized only two structures
> capable of subserving speech communication: words
> and sentences. But there is a third linguistic structure that
> entered the
> discipline several decades ago and, although it is
> still marginal as opposed to mainstream, it has the potential to
> transform
> our concept of word meaning and to enable us
> to devise a methodological unit of analysis that can track this
> activity
> throughout childhood. I am referring to: conversation.
>
> Most linguists and developmental psychologists don’t think of
> conversation
> as a linguistic structure; instead, they regard
> it more as a social or even behavioral activity that happens to be
> useful
> in organizing the interpersonal exchange of
> linguistic utterances. But once you get past the obvious turn-taking
> conventions that regulate the superficial participatory
> structure of speech communication, you find a deeper set of rules that
> govern how participants are expected to “think”.
> For example, most cultures have a tacit rule about “sticking to the
> topic”.
> If you have ever doubted such a rule, just try
> speaking in non-sequiturs and see how far you get before the listener
> gently suggests you consider checking in to rehab.
>
> In 1977, C.O. Frake asserted that, in order to become a competent
> communicator with speech, it is not sufficient to know
> how to speak grammatically, or even sensibly; one must also know how
> to
> speak “appropriately”. Are there rules for social
> appropriateness with speech? Dell Hymes thought so. In 1962 he
> proposed
> that ethnographers go out and record what he
> called an “ethnography of speaking” for every culture. By that he
> meant “a
> specification of what kinds of things to say, in
> what message forms, to what kinds of people, in what kinds of
> situations”.
> Consider, by way of example, “familiar” and
> “formal” verb endings in French, Spanish, Italian, and other
> languages. So
> powerful is the influence of formal and familiar
> social relations and social situations on our conversations that these
> relations ended up being institutionalized in language
> in the form of their very own words! (And pity the person who
> missteps and
> uses terms that are reserved for familiars in
> the context of a formal situation).
>
> More importantly, however, there are two other fundamental
> structures of
> conversation that make it tremendously advantageous
> to include conversation as the third “layer” in Vygotsky’s analysis
> of word
> meaning: one is the division of conversation into
> alternating “speaking” and “listening” roles, and the other is the
> “initiation-response” structure of conversation, which obliges
> speakers and listeners to play certain proscribed functional roles
> on their
> respective turns at talk. In fact, the real power of
> conversation lies in the initiation-response structure, IMHO, which
> defines
> (implicitly) how two utterances are related in
> a conversational sequence. The very best illustration that I know of
> is the
> question-answer pair, which uses the cultural
> convention of initiation-response to set up a predictable cognitive
> relationship between the two utterances. Once a child
> learns how questions are conventionally related to answers, and how
> answers
> are conventionally related to questions
> (as in the TV game show, Jeopardy), he or she becomes capable of, and
> attentive to, using questions strategically—yes,
> I mean consciously, volitionally, and deliberately—to get at desired
> answers. The initiation-response structure of conversation
> has all of the linguistic properties that are necessary for a
> speaker to be
> able to use one utterance to get at another. This is
> the basis for the self-regulatory, self-reflective, self-monitoring
> qualities of private speech--in its later stages.
>
> In Chapter 7 of Thought and Language, LSV walks through his analysis
> of
> word meaning, which follows the same path as
> the ontogenetic development of verbal thinking, or inner speech. In
> the
> final step of the movement "inward" from word
> to thought, LSV refers to Stanislavky's approach to word meanings that
> highlights the role of the speaker's communicative
> intentions. LSV ends that topic with the claim, "To understand
> another's
> speech, it is not sufficient to understand his words--
> we must understand his thought. But even that is not enough--we must
> also
> know its motivation. No psychological analysis
> of an utterance is complete until that plane is reached." I believe
> this
> gets at the heart of Michael (Glassman's) concerns.
> To know what a speaker's utterance "means", a listener/data analyst
> must
> consult the words and their lexical meanings,
> the sentence (in which the words are embedded) and its propositional
> (literal) meaning, the sentence's grammatical
> structure, the conversational context (related utterances, prior
> topics,
> etc.), and the situational context in order to appropriately
> infer the speaker's intention. Only after answering the ultimate
> "why did
> he say that?" can a listener come close to grasping
> what the speaker "meant". Incidentally, my mentor, John Dore, an
> analyst of
> the development of children's conversational
> skills and competencies, created a coding scheme for capturing a
> speaker's
> communicative intentions. He applied
> John Searle's analysis of "speech acts" to conversation, enabling a
> data
> analyst to identify the "conversational acts"
> produced by speakers on an utterance-by-utterance basis.
>
> There is much more that conversation lends to Vygotsky's analysis of
> word
> meaning--besides the "transactional space"
> it provides in which word meanings are exchanged--but I won't take
> any more
> time or space here. I fear I’ve already worn out
> my welcome! Let me just end by saying that Chapter 7 of Thought and
> Language confused me for the longest time by its
> references to the movement from “outside to inside”, from “word to
> thought”. But once I began to cast this movement in terms
> of basic conversational roles, it became clear (to me, at least)
> that LSV
> was referring all along to the activity of *listening*
> (i.e., word > thought)--as opposed to the activity of speaking (i.e.,
> thought > word), which embodies the reverse movement.
> No wonder he likened his investigation of "thinking" to that of
> astronomers
> studying "the dark side of the moon"--listening
> is certainly the "dark side" of speaking!
>
> Thanks for your indulgence. Hope this helps, Michael.
>
> Best wishes to all,
> Peter
>
> P.S. If anyone cares to hear more about this, such as how the
> addition of
> the conversational layer affects LSV's analysis
> of the *development* of word meaning, I would be more than happy to
> come to
> your university in person and deliver a
> presentation on the topic! (I've been very busy lately developing this
> idea.)
>
> Peter Feigenbaum, Ph.D.
> Associate Director of Institutional Research
> Fordham University
> Thebaud Hall-202
> Bronx, NY 10458
>
> Phone: (718) 817-2243
> Fax: (718) 817-3203
> e-mail: pfeigenbaum@fordham.edu
>
>
>
> "Michael
> Glassman"
>
> <MGlassman@ehe.os To
> u.edu> "eXtended Mind, Culture,
> Activity"
> Sent by: <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> xmca-
> bounces@webe cc
> r.ucsd.edu
>
> Subject
> RE: [xmca] The Ubiquity of
> Unicorns
> 10/24/2009 11:42
> AM
>
>
> Please respond to
> "eXtended Mind,
> Culture,
> Activity"
> <xmca@weber.ucsd.
> edu>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Hi Michael,
>
> I have been mulling over your question about meaning for the last day
> trying to figure out how to convey it in a way that bring activity and
> rules systems, and words all into some type of transactional field.
> I have
> been feeling trapped because as soon as I say what meaning means I am
> reifying it, from an objective, almost realist perspective. It is so
> damned hard to escape the realist and idealist traps that are lurking
> everywhere. If I was going to describe what meaning is I would have
> to do
> it through showing an activity where meaning is determined by
> transient and
> yet very powerful rule systems (perhaps an addendum to Marx's false
> consciousness). Then this morning I came across the column
>
> "We Know What he Means" by a very good columnist named Bob Herbert.
> I hope
> this link goes through.
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/opinion/24herbert.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
>
> Meaning is definitely being established by Guiliani and Bloomberg in
> theses
> sequence of events. Words are being used as instruments (some might
> say
> weapons) to achieve a goal. The fact that those who speaks the
> words, and
> probably many of those who listen, do not in any way agree with the
> superficial aspects of the conversation (e.g. New York is in danger of
> becoming 1967 Detroit) very specific meanings are at the same time
> being
> established in order to achieve goals. What is interesting is that I
> wonder how people who don't know the rules around urban politics
> would take
> the words - and I would suggest that the words actually have a much
> more
> delimited meaning to them. However if those individual continued
> reading
> Bob Herbert's columns for a year, or good Herbert and racial
> politics, they
> would I believe be able to get the same meaning as those who are
> from New
> York.
>
> Michael
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Wolff-Michael Roth
> Sent: Fri 10/23/2009 3:58 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] The Ubiquity of Unicorns
>
>
>
> Hi Michael,
> you must have misunderstood me. We have two interconnected orders,
> one of sound patterns, which we hear or read as words, the other one
> some world generally. I didn't write about "meaning" because I don't
> (try to) use it, because it is overused and abused. The two orders
> are interwoven, and a sound can change the other order, "Step aside"
> may get a person to move and therefore the world changes, but it also
> may earn you a fist on the nose, and the two effects are different.
>
> I think Wittgenstein and especially later philosophers would agree
> that there is NO system of rules sufficient to explain language in
> use, which was precisely the point in the discussion between Derrida
> and Searle on speech act theory, and the various interpreters of the
> exchange, as people like Culler and Habermas subsequently further
> elaborate.
>
> The rules themselves are made as we go, and this is what I attempt to
> capture (at least in part) with the notion of con/texture and con/
> texting, where text not only "means" but also establishes the very
> context within which it definitively "means" (to use your verb). (See
> I can mention use, thereby also use, and the difference between
> mention and use becomes undecidable, in the very sentence preceding
> this parenthesis.)
>
> I have no idea in which sense you use "meaning". What does someone
> understand when they understand the "meaning". What is "meaning"? The
> trouble is with the word that users point to something obliquely.
> What is the "meaning" of Bildung?
>
> Michael
>
>
> On 23-Oct-09, at 11:23 AM, Michael Glassman wrote:
>
> But Michael,
>
> Isn't this taking something of a realist approach to words? That is
> that certain words mean certain things, which the reader can actually
> know and therefore use to help interpret of the meaning of the text
> around them. This means that there are certain words that can be
> known and can't be known, based on experience. I am thinking of
> Wittgenstein's observation of the chess game, where if you saw two
> people playing from a distance you would think they were playing the
> same game with the same rules you were playing, but this is only an
> assumption, because they do not share the community's understanding
> of the rules. But I am thinking that Wittgenstein saw this more as
> an issue of cultural capital rather than absolute knowledge. If it
> is important to teach an individual the rules of the game you can
> teach them. I think somebody like Rorty might argue that this was
> inevitable as long as the players, those reading the text, were
> interested and active in the understanding. When an individual
> writes a text he is writing at least to some degree to teach what all
> the meanings of the word are. So somebody reading a text reads the
> word Bildung in the text, he or she is confused, but is interested in
> understanding. They return to the text again as they attempt to get
> their horizon to meet with the author's (hat tip to Gadamer). In the
> end the reader may not be able to describe Bildung outside of the
> text, outside of the authors specific vision. And may not be able to
> describe it to somebody who is not sharing that particular horizon.
> But they understand the meaning and the role that word is playing in
> the text in an important way.
>
> Michael
>
> ________________________________
>
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Wolff-Michael Roth
> Sent: Fri 10/23/2009 2:04 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] The Ubiquity of Unicorns
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
>
> On 23-Oct-09, at 10:51 AM, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org wrote:
>
> consciousness has developed. David Kellogg has provided numerous
> examples
> of how native Korean speaking people do not grasp basic concepts of
> the
> english language. Some of the low achieving students I work with have
>
>
> I think, with Heidegger, Derrida, Rorty, Wittgenstein, Davidson,
> Deleuze, and others, that the difference between knowing a language
> and knowing one's way around the (cultural) world is undecidable.
> Concepts are not just concepts of English language, they are
> irreducibly interwoven with the way of life.
>
> This is why Anglo-Saxons tend to have difficulties with activity
> (Tätigkeit, deyate'nost) and activity (Aktivität, aktivnost'). This
> is why there is no concept like Bildung, because in the conduct of
> life of Anglo-Saxons, there is no equivalent segmentation to which
> the concept could refer, and there is no inter-concept relation where
> such a distinction would be useful.
>
> I do find the concept of "concept" problematic, because it is being
> used on this list without working out just what it stands for. (in
> general use, it appears like meaning that is somehow related to
> words.)
>
> Michale_______________________________________________
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