Re: [xmca] Generalization Is Not Abstraction Again

[mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

That image of dancing perezhivanie, David, was really helpful to think with.

Adopting the newly minted convention of focusing on one part of a complex
proposal, I want to poke at my own understanding by way of getting you to
say more about Piaget's guess about the changing dynamics of the movement of
the two coordinates:

*But this condensation and this transference are not so absurd nor so deeply
affective in character as in dreams or autistic imagination.*

The linking of the attributes "absurd" and "deeply affective" to changes
along the rational-autistic (totally egocentric) dimension. Is it correct to
supposed that during development perezhivanie to the extent that which
perezhivanie dances in the direction of reason and displacement, affect is
reduced. Is the emotion/cognition distinction, thus a product of movement
toward the rational/less aftective in development accounts for the
dry/rationalist educated adult as the high point of development. I believe
that Achille's interpretation of the fish as sad problematize this point.

Anyway, your provoking as thought provoking message on this talk are
encouraging. In different ways, you comment on possible link between ch5/6
and the New Yorker cover. The linking work you have done seems important to
me, perhaps because I am trying to put chapter 5/6 together in a single
cognitive system!

I want to collate a few introspective accounts I have collected off line and
offer them up as part of the discussion.
Anon
mike
On Sun, Jul 4, 2010 at 11:39 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:

> Paula:
>
> Let's imagine for a moment that Vygotsky is a rather obstreperous child. He
> doesn't play with blocks; he tends to play with the possessions of his
> elders. Sometimes he will pick up a thing and knock the stuffing out of it,
> and he will drag it around like a blanket for a few years, and then plump it
> up with something completely new.
>
> We know that Vygotsky did this with terms like "syncretic", "complex",
> "pseudoconcept" and even "concept", words he did not coin but used until
> they were threadbare and then filled with completely new content. We know
> that he did this with the blocks experiment as a whole (which he and
> Sakharov pinched from Ach and Ribat by way of Uznadze and who knows who
> else).
>
> You see, I think he did the same thing with the word "stimulus", and even
> with the word "mediation". Each word marks a very different period in
> Vygotsky's development, and each word marks a period where he has a new way
> of thinking but does not have a new way of referring to it yet. I think can
> easily see this in concept of StM2 you refer to: it's behaviorist
> terminology with a completely new, cultural historical, causal-dynamic
> content.
>
> If, as you (and Valsiner) say, the accumulated perizhvanie of the child is
> a "stimulus-means" that cannot be either discounted nor factored out, which
> can be neither controlled nor ignored, then the whole rationale of referring
> to stimuli and means is obviated, and alone with it all of the
> terminological baggage up to and including any notion of "mediation" that
> does not include an account of the IDEOLOGICAL content (that is, the
> semiotic value, the ducks or fish or pelicans or turtles which other people
> are standing there pointing at).
>
> One final example, and then I'm done. This is Vygotsky quoting Piaget on p.
> 27 of the Labirint edition of Thinking and Speech:
>
> Пиаже, следуя за Ларсоном, полагает, что ≪между этими функциями сгущения и
> перемещения и функциями обобщения (которое является видом сгущения) должны
> иметься промежуточные звенья. инкретизм как раз и является самым
> существенным из этих звеньев≫ (1, с. 174).
>
>
>
> Here's what Meccaci's got for this:
>
> "Piaget, following Larsson, supposes that 'between these two functions and
> those of generalization (which is a sort of condensation) and abstraction
> (which is a kind of displacement) there must be all the intermediate links
> of a chain. Syncretism is precisely the most important of these links'”.
>
>
> Now, this is wrong. Vygotsky doesn't say that Piaget says that abstraction
> is a kind of displacement at all. He leaves that part out, as Seve, who is
> very scrupulous about Vygotsky's use and misuse of Piaget, does:
>
> 'Piaget, following Larsson in this, supposes that “between these two
> functions” of condensation and displacement “and that of generalization
> (which is a sort of condensation) (…) there must be all the intermediate
> links. Syncretism is precisely the most essential of these links' ”.
>
> But Piaget really DOES say that abstraction is a kind of displacement.
> Right here on p. 161 of the Routledge Classics edition of Language and
> Thought of the Child:
>
> "As we have suggested elsewhere, there must be every kind of intermediate
> type between these two functions and process of generalization (which is a
> sort of condesnation) and abstraction (whch is a sort of transference). Now
> syncretism is precisely the most important of these intermediate links. Like
> the dream, it 'condenses' objectively disparate elements into a whole. Like
> the dream, it transfers, in obedience to the association of ideas, to purely
> external resemblance or to punning assonance, qualities which seem rightly
> to apply only to one definite object. But this condensation and this
> transference are not so absurd nor so deeply affective in character as in
> dreams or autistic imagination. It may therefore be assumed that they form a
> transition between the prelogical and the logical mechanisms of a thought."
>
>
> So we've got condensation and transference in the Piagetian period of
> autistic thought. These are think "linked" in the period of egocentric
> thought by a "central link", which is syncretism. Vygotsky often talks about
> the "central" link in a chain, and I used to have a terrible time with this,
> because of the extremely literal nature of my imagery, but it works pretty
> well if we imagine a central, egocentric speech link to which two links
> (condensation and transference) are attached at the autistic end and two
> OTHER links (generalization and abstraction), like dancers holidings rings
> that are on a loop of string. This image has the advantage of suggesting
> convergent lines of development (condensation and transference) which meet
> in syncretism and transform each other, but then are driven functionally
> again in generalization and abstraction, rather the way speech and thinking
> do.
>
> So here's what I think. Vygotsky DOES differentiate between abstraction and
> generalization. They are two different things, and they are two separate
> roots of conceptual thinking. But his distinction does not appear deus ex
> machina in Chapter Five. In fact, it doesn't even appear deus ex machina in
> Chapter Two, where he just barely refrains from attributing the distinction
> to Piaget by judicious elipsis. It is something he made up by playing with
> condensation and transference, Freud's two favorite cigars.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
> --- On Sun, 7/4/10, Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za> wrote:
>
>
>
> From: Paula M Towsey <paulat@johnwtowsey.co.za>
> Subject: RE: [xmca] New Conceptual Image Example
> To: "'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Sunday, July 4, 2010, 12:13 PM
>
>
> These posts in response to the New Yorker cover have got me thinking about
> thinking quite a bit too.  One of these thinkings is this:  it is perhaps
> just as well that Sakharov developed such an effective method for
> investigating concepts, because by eliminating the need for huge amounts of
> prior experience to engage in the experimental task, the bare bones of the
> structures of preconceptual thinking modes in developing word meanings
> could
> be revealed.  And the point of revealing these modes of operation is so
> that
> we can see what the processes of developing word meanings look like when
> less influenced by prior experience, when nudged towards more logical
> approaches by the guiding influence of the signifying use of language.
>
>
>
> I'm not suggesting a tabula rasa, but a base line; a pretty good place to
> begin looking at what thinking sans systemisation looks like
> ontogenetically
> (and perhaps may have looked like phylogenetically too).
>
>
>
> My mother often observes of me "When all you have is a hammer, everything
> looks like a nail".  So here I am again, hammering away with some of my
> (prior) experience with "The Blocks" and with what seems to be my (sole)
> measure of generality: an abiding interest in complexive modes of thinking.
> Thinking about the New Yorker cover raises for me the question of a
> particular element that subjects (or, in this case, those who have
> responded
> to Mike's invitation for a microgenetic introspective report) bring to the
> research situation - what Valsiner calls the StM2: our prior experience.
> It's hard not to quote him chapter and verse:
>
>
>
> "The second kind of Stimulus-Means (StM-2) are semiotically encoded
> personal-cultural experiences that an individual subject carries with them
> into any new experimental situation.  The personal understanding of the
> given situation, its role in social life (as well as for the subject him-
> or
> herself) is constructed instantly by the person, when entering into the
> field.  It is based on all previously lived-through experiences.
>
> This interpretation activity of the subject is not controllable by the
> experimenter, and it cannot be eliminated.  Vygotsky's methodological idea
> was to turn that inevitably uncontrollable moment of human interpretation
> into the target of investigation." (2000, p. 79)
>
> This view of the research situation is not exactly brand new to researchers
> on this forum, and so you may be wondering why on earth I would be quoting
> it to begin with: the angle I want to pursue takes this StM2 as its
> starting
> point, whether we're forming new concepts in response to blocks and words,
> or whether we are interpreting and attaching symbolic meaning to birds and
> fishes in a particular configuration.
>
>
>
> What's also got me thinking about thinking is the almost unconscious ease
> with which we as adults employ two of our intricately linked intellectual
> "resources": our "structures of generality" and our prior experience.  Now,
> I'm not for a minute intending to reinvent an argument for introspection
> here, but want to suggest that if you look at how they are separated out in
> Chapter 5 of T&S, perhaps the purposes of analysis there could also begin
> to
> fit out here.
>
>
>
> Remember that for starters the design of the blocks experiment was that the
> solution to the problem did not depend (greatly) on prior experience.  When
> the need for prior experience to solve the problem was taken out of the
> experimental situation, what Vygotsky was hoping to reveal was a picture of
> what a child's thinking would look like without the directing influences of
> the language of the adults around them.  In the experimental design, two
> simple pairs of word meanings - tall/short, and big/small - (easily
> accessible meanings that don't depend on a vast amount of prior experience
> to acquire) could be combined to form four new concepts for which there
> were
> no readily available words in the given language (big+tall, big+short,
> small+tall, small+short a.k.a. lag, bik, mur, and cev).  And how the
> children went about forming these new word meanings revealed their modes of
> thinking, their structures of generality, their means of acquiring word
> meanings, which, as David Kellogg points out, don't necessarily coincide
> with the functions of thinking, with our ability "to actually do stuff"
> mentally.  But before we move on to the measures of generality, could we go
> back to our structures...
>
>
>
> The important thing to remember about these structures of generality or
> generalisation is that they are developmental both in an ontogenetic sense,
> and in a microgenetic sense.  Unlike Piagetian modes, which are discarded
> when a new one comes about through equilibration, we continue to see the
> world with all of these Chapter 5 modes throughout our lives, and we invoke
> them in interesting and novel ways, in combination or alone, even at times
> employing the different modes themselves in a chain-like series of movement
> towards a particular understanding.  These Chapter 5 modes are
> characteristic of a particular feature that Mike reminded me of again quite
> recently: they are, says LSV, like coexisting geological layers of the
> earth's crust.
>
>
>
> BUT (to use the Kelloggian emphasis of all caps), what differentiates the
> way we as adults draw on our repertoire of modes compared to children who
> are still operating with complexive modes is that we "have a system" - or,
> as LSV puts it more clearly, "a systemic point of view".  This isn't to say
> that we necessarily invoke a systematic, systemic point of view all the
> time, or that our modes of operation constantly demonstrate a high degree
> of
> systemisation, but that we can.  And that we can so easily bestows
> immediate
> access to a variety of approaches in what seems to be an easy-to-direct
> course of action.  These measures of generality allow us, as David says, to
> "do stuff" mentally, to do stuff within a system, because we have moved
> from
> the concept-for-others to the-concept-for-myself.  But the ability to do
> this comes about for most adults so effortlessly for most of the time that
> I
> think it sometimes makes it difficult to remember that the interaction is
> not as smooth for developing perspectives - an element I recently and
> clumsily referred to it as "the jerkiness of development", which David so
> clearly restated (thank heavens) as "by which Paula means the nonlinearity,
> the crisis-ridden nature of development".
>
>
>
> And so you may be wondering what has happened to "prior experience" in all
> of this.  I don't intend to raise an argument here for Galston's composite
> photograph (building up a picture through lots and lots of layers like
> snapshots) either, except to suggest a speculative comparison of the two
> activities: how prior experience is engaged in the blocks-and-words
> activity
> and how it affects responses to something like the birds-and-fishes (it was
> only when reading Steve's post that I realised how much I'd missed out - I
> would have been hard pressed to name the image "Sky and Water" (even though
> mine was a scuba approach, from 30 m below)).
>
>
>
> How are our responses to birds-and-fishes similar to the responses to the
> blocks activity, if at all, and how, crucially, are they different?
> How/where/what/whatever the source of our exposure to particular kinds of
> experience, some of them present us with a degree of systematisation
> inherent to whichever particular discipline or form of societal knowledge
> it
> may happen to be.  So then, in the way that the links being made by people
> (all adult people) on the forum in response to the New Yorker cover reveals
> first and foremost to me a drive to find something in and about the
> connections which has meaning according to one system or another -
> evolutionary, artistic, conservationist, political, symbolic, and so on.
>
>
>
> Also, maybe, it would be interesting to see how a bunch of hairdressers
> would respond.  Or a group of engineers.  Or the three-year-olds at the
> preschool down the road.  Or a cafe of disinterested teenagers.
>
>
>
> Best,
>
> Paula
>
>
>
> _________________________________
>
> Paula M Towsey
>
> PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
>
> Faculty of Social Sciences
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
> Behalf Of Steve Gabosch
> Sent: 03 July 2010 08:21
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] New Conceptual Image Example
>
>
>
> The original 1938 M.C. Escher poster upon which this New Yorker cover is
> based is called "Sky and Water".  Google images made finding that
>
> out easy.   Useful Wikipedia article at
>
> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_and_Water_I>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_and_Water_I
>
>
>
> The points made by Kevin and others on its implications with regard to the
> Gulf oil spill strike me as right on the money.  Water turns to oil indeed.
>
>
>
> How do I react introspectively, subjectively?  I guess this is more of a
> macro reaction (political) than a micro analysis (purely psychological),
> but
> this is how I react.  I respond to the oily pelican as a metaphor for even
> more than just the oil disaster, which itself I take as a sign.  To me,
> this
> clever cover suggests (possibly not entirely self-consciously) how
> **pervasive** that oil disaster is
>
> - that not only is modern capitalist society destroying the planet eco-
> system, but it is also undermining humanity itself.  Subtly corrupting a
> popular Escher poster like this (adding an oily pelican and a
>
> turtle) is an ironic statement to me about how destructive capitalism has
> become, symbolized by the Gulf oil catastrophe.  Nothing - not the sky, the
> water, the birds, fish, amphibians, etc. - and not even the deep ocean
> itself - is safe under this social system.  And now this
>
> death grip drips and oozes from our classic art on magazine covers.
>
> No animals or humans can be safe in such a world.  That's my reaction,
> anyway.
>
>
>
> - Steve
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Jul 2, 2010, at 6:55 PM, O'Connor, Kevin wrote:
>
>
>
> > I had the exact first impression as Andy, that it's an Escher drawing.
>
> > My attention was drawn to the center, and I gradually worked out from
>
> > there to the top and bottom, and also gradually noticed the different
>
> > species.  I wondered about the tortoise, and about the haziness of the
>
> > bottom levels in the water - but it wasn't until I got to the pelican
>
> > and saw the black drops
>
> > - from the beak, from the wings, from the tail - that I suspected that
>
> > this was oil, and that the drawing is a commentary on a devastated
>
> > ecosystem.
>
> > Interesting that color, which in the original simply provides
>
> > contrast, in this drawing is meaningful in representing the oil.  In
>
> > fact it changed from water to oil before my eyes after seeing the
>
> > drops.
>
> > Kevin
>
> >
>
> >
>
> > On 7/2/10 9:07 PM, "mike cole" < <mailto:lchcmike@gmail.com>
> lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
>
> >> Interesting, Andy.
>
> >> What else might be there?
>
> >> Any Americans awake to take a peak?
>
> >> mike
>
> >>
>
> >> On Fri, Jul 2, 2010 at 5:58 PM, Andy Blunden < <mailto:
> ablunden@mira.net>
> ablunden@mira.net>
>
> >> wrote:
>
> >>
>
> >>> Yes, I used almost this exact image on my PowerPoint to illustrate
>
> >>> "Gestalt" when I did my talks on CHAT in April. (See Attached) So my
>
> >>> microgenetic report is somewhat invalidated. I recognised it as an
>
> >>> Escher drawing (or in his style) immediately ... so I began by
>
> >>> presuming that the white and black figures were both birds, and only
>
> >>> then realised that the black / white figures were birds / fishes,
>
> >>> and then only because you asked did I notice the variation in
>
> >>> species and finally the tortoise, so I started to think of Darwiniam
>
> >>> themes ... and finally wondered what the pelican had in its mouth
>
> >>> and why?
>
> >>>
>
> >>> Andy
>
> >>>
>
> >>> mike cole wrote:
>
> >>>
>
> >>>> The New Yorker has done it again. If you have a minute, take a look
>
> >>>> at this week's cover.
>
> >>>> In the process of looking new meanings will emerge. How they emerge
>
> >>>> appears to differ from person to person. I would REALLY appreciate
>
> >>>> a microgenetic introspective report from anyone with the time. I
>
> >>>> have now collected three examples of such, including my own and all
>
> >>>> three are different.
>
> >>>>
>
> >>>> I sure wish I could get to ask Vygotsky and Eistenshtein to do this
>
> >>>> and report to us about it!!
>
> >>>> mike
>
> >>>>
>
> >>>>  <http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2010-07>
> http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2010-07
>
> >>>> _______________________________________________
>
> >>>> xmca mailing list
>
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>
> >>>>  <http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca>
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>
> >>>>
>
> >>>>
>
> >>>>
>
> >>> --
>
> >>> --------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> >>> ----
>
> >>> *Andy Blunden*
>
> >>> Home Page:  <http://home.mira.net/~andy/<http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>>
> http://home.mira.net/~andy/ <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/>
>
> >>> <http://home.mira.net/%7Eandy/
>
> >>> >
>
> >>> Videos:  <http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos>
> http://vimeo.com/user3478333/videos
>
> >>> Book:  <http://www.brill.nl/scss> http://www.brill.nl/scss
>
> >>>
>
> >>>
>
> >>> _______________________________________________
>
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> >>>
>
> >>>
>
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