Re: [xmca] William Frawley's "Vygotsky and Cognitive Science"

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

A good formulation occurred to me while I was munching fermented garlic sprouts for lunch. (It's a good thing that e-mail does not have enough band-width for odors).
 
Discourse is a kind of con-text; it's "con" because it's situation embedded, it's open ended, it's unfinalized unlike text. But it's "text" because it's the verbal processes embedded in the situation, it's open-endedness is the open-endedness of language which can always be edited and amended, and it's not unfinalizeable (as Bakhtin likes to say) but merely unfinalized the way that dialogue is unfinalized. (That would take a lot of garlic fumes to say in person.)
 
Pace Derrida, "il y a un hors-texte", and it's the "hors-texte", the context, which resists computationalism. Discourse is a kind of context, and texts are just the footprints that discourses leave as they disappear into contexts. So text is finalizeable, but discourse is not. That's why text is computable, but discourse is not. The mind is a discourse, a source of texts, not a text itself. 
 
PTL really wants to know about "the application of Vygotsky's proximal zones, how these could be extended with any rate of success through any means, to educational praxis within any cultural environment." 
 
One of the big problems we have in English teaching here in Korea is that the kids learn two line dialogues. Like this:
 
Ann: What a nice day!
Nami: Yes, it is.
 
You can see that the problem with this is PRECISELY that it's finalized. The kids see that too. So when we do it in class (as a kind of volleyball game, where you split the class down the middle and Ann's team says things and Nami's team answers, and they keep going or else the other team gets a point), we get this.
 
Ann: What a nice day.
Nami: No.
 
In order to keep all this from coming to grinding halt, we bring in a new rule, the rule of REPEAT and ASK. A proper move in the volleyball game looks like this:
 
Ann: What a nice day! 
Nami: A nice day? No, it isn't.
Ann: No, it isn't? Why not?
 
etc. 
 
Now you can see that the result is inter-psychological. And not predictable. You can also see that it's not a zone of proximal development but only a matter of learning. Development takes place when the children move from learning fixed phrases to learning more supple and subtle rules of phrase creation. 
 
Now, I USED to think that this was connected to the child's ability to stop "listen and repeat" and instead to imagine that they really ARE Nami or Ann, and Nami or Ann is NOT doing "listen and repeat" but actually creating new phrases. 
 
So I thought it was inextricably bound up with PLAY (and thus not really computible, since as Von Neumann points out, games are not computational, unless they are so complex as to be virtually uncomputable, like chess).  
 
But of course there is imaginative play that is very non-developmental. Consider this, from Tolstoy's Anna Karenina:
 
“Have you had a nice walk?” asked Karenin as he sat down in his armchair, drew toward him an Old Testament and opened it. Although Karenin had more than once told Serezha that every Christian ought to be well acquainted with Bible history, he often in Old Testament history had to consult the book, and Serezha noticed this. 
  
“Yes, Papa, it was very amusing,” answered Serezha, sitting down sideways on his chair and beginning to rock it, which was forbidden. “I met Nadenka” (Nadenka was Lydia Ivanovna’s niece who was being educated at her aunt’s house). “She told me you had received another Order, a new one. Are you glad, Papa?” 
  
“First of all, don’t rock your chair,” said Karenin. “Secondly, it’s not the reward but the work that is precious. I wish you understood that. You see, if you take pains and learn in order to get a reward, the work will seem hard; but when you work” (Karenin said this remembering how he had sustained himself that morning by a sense of duty in the dull task of signing a hundred and eighteen papers)—“if you love your work you will find your reward in that.” 
  
Serezha’s eyes that had been shining with affection and joy, grew dull and drooped under his father’s gaze. It was the same long familiar tone in which his father always addressed him and to which Serezha had already learnt to adapt himself. His father always talked to him, Serezha felt, as if he were some imaginary boy out of a book, quite unlike Serezha, and with his father he always tried to pretend to be that boy out of a book. 
  
“You understand me, I hope,” said the father. 
  
“Yes, Papa,” answered the boy, pretending to be that imaginary boy. 

 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education

--- On Sun, 1/24/10, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] William Frawley's "Vygotsky and Cognitive Science"
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Sunday, January 24, 2010, 8:09 PM



Thanks a lot, PTL. This is a great discussion to have. And if David K can
start a rumpus with this wild thing, so much the better.

One concern I have is that the average participant in XMCA will come to this
topic
out of time and with limited background (me for example!). So I looked up a
review that summarizes the contents of the book for the non-cogniseti (sp
from one of THOSE too!), that summarized chapter by chapter. Summarizes are
rarely
"objectively true" of course, and this summary is from the computational
side, but it might help those who have no idea how to get into the topics to
do so. The plato-wittgenstein polarity will perhaps help, perhaps not.

Rumpus it up, David.
mike
url of review:  http://acl.ldc.upenn.edu/J/J98/J98-3010.pdf



On Sun, Jan 24, 2010 at 12:38 PM, <p.lamplugh@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:

>  Dear XMCA community as a whole,
>                                  I must ask as to whether or not, as a
> first post in this community, if anybody
> is able to provide any reasonable
> back-reading to Frawley's work so
> mentioned in the title? It would also be
> of great pertinence to understand the
> premises on which he mounts a critique
> and advancement into this particular
> realm. I've only flicked through this
> work tentatively, which I hope will be
> proved as my most frivolous waste of
> time of the pat 2 years.   Opinions,
> criticisms, appraisals, anything, these
> are what i'm after, i'm thirsty for any
> new information. The point to me is the
> application of Vygotsky's proximal
> zones, how these could be extended with
> any rate of success through any means,
> to educational praxis within any
> cultural environment. I am also not
> asking for anybody to read the
> aforementioned book on my behalf, but I
> would like to hear some creative output
> from those whor contribute here,
> especially on what to look out for in
> this work.
>    Thanks thricefold,
>                     P.T.L.
>
> _______________________________________________
> xmca mailing list
> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>
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