That's a mistranslation, Steve. Vygotsky doesn't say that the
"critical issue" is the functional use of signs in a manner
"appropriate to human speech", whatever that might mean.
He says that that the use of the sign must “correspond” to the
way humans use speech, that is, that it must be a functional
equivalent in the same way that the child’s complexes are
functionally equivalent to the adult’s concepts.
Если верно, что интеллект шимпанзе
способен овладеть человеческой речью
и что вся беда только в том, что он
обладает не звуковой
подражательностью попугая, он,
несомненно, должен был овладеть в
эксперименте условным жестом,
который по своей психологической
функции совершенно соответствовал бы
условному звуку. Вместо звуков ва-ва
или па-па, которые применял Иеркс,
речевая реакция шимпанзе состояла бы
в известных движениях руки, которые,
скажем, в ручной азбуке глухонемых
означают те же звуки, или в любых
других движениях.
Суть дела ведь заключается вовсе не в
звуках, а в функциональном
употреблении знака, соответствующего
человеческой речи. "If it is correct, that the
intellect of the chimpanzee is capable of mastering human speech and
that its entire misfortune consists only in that it lacks the
capacity for sound imitation of the parrot, it will, undoubtedly,
have to master in the course of the experiment the conditional
gesture, which about its psychological function would completely
correspond to conditional sound. Instead of the sounds va-va or pa-
pa, which Yerkes used, the speech reaction of the chimpanzee would
consist in given motions of the hands, let us say, in the manual
alphabet of deaf mutes indicate the same sounds, or in some other
motion. The essence of the matter indeed lies not at all in the
sounds, but in the functional use of the sign, which
corresponds to human speech."
Vygotsky begins with the hypothesis that the chimpanzee is basically
a perfectly capable language user who has been disabled only in the
peripheral skills of speech production, rather like a deaf-mute
child. That is why he uses “its entire misfortune” instead of
“the difficulty” and “mastering” instead of
“acquiring” (Minick's words).
Vygotsky cleverly ties this hypothesis to the behaviorist view that
there is nothing more to speech than behavior, using the word
“conditional”, which is the correct translation of what we
usually, but incorrectly, call the “conditioned reflex”.
Pavlov’s great idea was not simply that animals could be
“conditioned” or trained. It was that a response was
"conditional", that it depended on a stimulus. That stimulus was by
nature not natural at all, but rather completely arbitrary and at
bottom utterly meaningless.
This idea that language consisted of ARBITRARY signs and MEANINGLESS
connections was at the very heart of Saussureanism, and the
combination of Pavlov and Saussure led to a kind of intellectual
disaster. When we fully recover, hopefully some time in the present
century, we will probably consider the twentieth century, to be a
kind of medieval dark ages of linguistics in general and foreign
language teaching in particular.
The combination of behaviorism and structuralism proved almost
irresistible: on the one hand, learning was simply a matter of
controlling what learners do, and we don't have to bother with messy
issues like what they think or what the might mean. And on the
other, we have a view of grammar like a machine that corresponds
perfectly to the computational model of human cognition; a computer
which has input and output in the form of a potentially infinite
supply of meaningless sentences.
I think this corresponded almost perfectly to the intellectual
atmosphere in which you and I grew up; a period in which the
cultural and ideological bankruptcy of civilization was common
knowledge, but it was combined with a very high degree of scientific
and technical solvency that was very hard to overlook and easy to
confuse with a coherent research agenda for the humanities and the
social sciences: a mechanically perfect form of despair.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Fri, 7/16/10, Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com> wrote:
From: Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] perception/conception etc
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, July 16, 2010, 7:49 PM
David's post got me looking at the text. I have a side question
that goes along with some of David's thoughts - about what Vygotsky
meant by "functional use of signs in a manner appropriate to human
speech."
The passages David analyzes follow Vygotsky's discussion of the
possibility that chimps could respond to sign language - an
interesting idea he picks up from Yerkes. He says that the chimp
could be able to "master a conditioned gesture" with hand
movements. "The critical issue is not the use of sounds, but the
*functional use of signs* in a manner appropriate to human speech."
The next paragraph begins with "Since experiments of this kind have
not been carried out, we cannot predict with any certainty what the
results would be."
We now know the answer to Vygotsky's question - chimps under human
tutelage can indeed get pretty good with both hand-based sign
language and keyboard-based sign use, eventually acquiring a
vocabulary of up to maybe 250 words, or something like that, in the
case of Washoe. I understand that chimps trained this way also
sometimes use it with one another, to a limited extent. But there
are also severe limits on what these chimps actually do with these
signs. We also now know there are cases of some other highly
trained animals that seem to be able to use signs to a limited
extent. How does what we now know about teaching animals to use
signs influence the answer to that critical question Vygotsky asked
- can chimps "functionally" use signs in a manner appropriate to
human speech? What exactly did Vygotsky mean by this formulation?
- Steve
On Jul 16, 2010, at 6:56 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
Dear Martin:
Thanks for the second dose of Barsalou; I'm digesting it. It's not
concise like the other one!
But it seems to me that in both cases the crucial text for
comparison here is Chapter FOUR of Thinking and Speech. Let me
present THREE paragraphs for close scrutiny, corresponding to pp.
106-107 of the Minick translation (but the Minick translation
really leaves a lot to be desired here, just in terms of English
grammar!).
I'm pretty clear on the first two paragraphs, but the third one is
hard for me to understand. Help from Russianophones much
appreciated, as usual!
Но все, что мы знаем о поведении
шимпанзе, в том числе и из опытов
Иеркса, не дает ни малейшего
основания ожидать, что шимпанзе
действительно овладеет речью в
функциональном смысле. Мы полагаем
так просто потому, что мы не знаем ни
одного намека на употребление знака
у шимпанзе. Единственное, что мы
знаем об интеллекте шимпанзе с
объективной достоверностью, это не
наличие ≪идеации≫, а тот факт, что
при известных условиях шимпанзе
способен к употреблению и
изготовлению простейших орудий и
применению ≪обходных
путей≫. "Everything that we know about the behavior of the
chimpanzee, including what we know from the experiments of Yerkes
gives us not the least foundation for expecting that the chimpanzee
can actually assimilate speech in the functional sense. We assume
this simply because we know of not one single case of sign use in
chimpanzees. All that we know about the intellect of chimpanzee
with objective certainty is not the presence of “ideation”, but
simply the fact that under given conditions the chimpanzee is
capable of the use and the production of the simplest instruments
and the application of “detours”."
Why does Vygotsky insist that there is not one single case of sign
use in chimpanzees? He has just said that not only the experiments
of Yerkes but also the more thorough and reliable work of Kohler
showed that chimps could (for example) use social-expressive
gestures, beckon to and invite each other, and even use “simple
explanations” such as reaching for a stick to explain the use of a
stick or moving a box. Why doesn't that count?
Vygotsky sees two things as partial steps in the direction of sign
use, and neither one is sufficient. The first is the use and
production of the simplest instruments. Now, the fact that Vygotsky
does NOT consider this to be enough to qualify the chimpanzee as a
sign user tells us that Vygotsky DOES make a distinction between
tools and signs. This distinction is later obscured by Leontiev and
even explicitly denied by activity theorists (and even in MCA we
find articles that speak of "tools for signs").
Vygotsky does not obscure this distinction. The material of a sign
is not essential to its function. But the material of a tool is.
Functionally, tool use does not necessarily include ideation, for
either the producer of the tool or for the consumer. I can produce
tools without knowing very specifically what they are going to be
used for, and I can and do consume, for example, food, clothing and
shelter without know very specifically about the tools which
produced them. The same thing is not true of a sign; in order to
understand a sign as a sign, we have to revisit the conditions of
its production: we must always know who is using it and why.
The second partial step towards ideation that Vygotsky sees in
chimpanzee behavior looks, at least at first glance, more
promising. It is the use of “detours”. I at first thought what
was meant was a «short cut», but in fact almost the opposite is
the case.
Imagine, for example, a U-shaped cage. A banana is placed near one
of the arms of the “U” but it is out of reach even using a
stick. The chimpanzee can, however, use a stick to PUSH the banana
near the other arm of the “U” and then walk around the “U”
to get the banana. So the chimpanzee uses a detour and not a
shortcut to get the banana.
Now it will be seen that this really does involve a very early form
of ideation, because the chimpanzee has to have an imaginary
picture of the situation in order to achieve the solution. So why
can’t we consider this to be a precursor of sign use?
I think Vygotsky would probably answer that although there are the
rudiments of ideation, this ideation is qualitatively different
from social ideation. It is not a culturally shared ideation; it is
an ideation which is really a kind of mental copy of the visual
field.
Мы не хотим вовсе сказать этим, что
наличие ≪идеации≫ является
необходимым условием для
возникновения речи. Это вопрос
дальнейший. Но для Иеркса несомненно
существует связь между допущением
≪идеации≫ как основной формы
интеллектуальной деятельности
антропоидов и утверждением о
доступности человеческой речи для
них. Связь эта столь очевидна и столь
важна, что стоит рухнуть теории
≪идеации≫, т.е. стоит принять
другую теорию интеллектуального
поведения шимпанзе, как вместе с ней
рушится и тезис о доступности
шимпанзе
человекоподобной речи. "We do not want to
completely affirm that the presence of “ideation” is the
necessary condition for the appearance of speech. That is another
question. But for Yerkes there is undoubtedly a connection between
the assumption of “ideation” as the basic form of the
intellectual activity of anthropoids and the assertion of the
accessibility of human speech for them. This connection is so
obvious and important that it is sufficient for the theory of
“ideation” to crumble , i.e., it is enough to accept another
theory of the intellectual behavior of chimpanzee, for the whole
thesis concerning the chimpanzees access to human like speech to
collapse."
I think that Vygotsky does not want to set up ANY single criterion
for the appearance of speech.
First of all, that would go against his triangulatory method of
examining phenomena from a functional, a structural and a genetic
point of view simultaneously.
Secondly, if a phenomenon really does have a single necessary and
sufficient cause, then at least from a causal-dynamic point of
view, that cause is not a cause at all; it’s part of the
phenomenon itself, and consequently the explanation is not an
explanation (this is what Vygotsky says about, for example, the use
of “libido” or “Gestalt” or “personality” in his essay
the Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology).
Thirdly, this is a book about thinking and speech, and for the
purpose of his argument, it is absolutely essential that ideation,
which is a phenomenon of thinking, should be both linked to and
distinct from speech. Vygotsky is going to argue that thinking and
speech do not diverge from a single common root as physiological
functions do (adaptation), but rather converge from separate roots
as cultural and historical phenomena do (exaptation).
В самом деле, если именно ≪идеация≫
лежит в основе интеллектуальной
деятельности шимпанзе, то почему
нельзя допустить, что он так же
человекоподобно ≪решит задачу≫,
представляемую речью, знаком вообще,
как он решает задачу с применением
орудия (правда, и тогда это остается
не больше чем предположением, а
отнюдь не установленным фактом). "In
fact, if “ideation” alone is the basis of the intellectual
activity of chimpanzee, then why can we not assume that the
anthropoids would “resolve a task” expressed in speech, or in
the use of general signs, as they solve problems with the
application of instruments (this would, of course, be no more than
an assumption, far
from an
established fact)."
This is the bit where I get lost. As usual, Vygotsky takes several
logical leaps that are not really spelled out in the text.
If, as Yerkes assumes, the mental capacity for ideation is at the
basis of the chimpanzees practical intelligence (and not, as Kohler
argues, the chimp’s ability to notice and make use of affordances
actually present in the visual field) then we should be able to ask
yes/no questions and get coherent answers.
We do this all the time with children in foreign language classes.
The teacher assumes that the child has the idea, but not the
language in which it is expressed, and so we ask yes/no questions
and we find, very often, that children can guess what we mean and
answer appropriately, using “yes” or “no” or using their
hands to show “X” or “O”.
It seems to me that Vygotsky is asking why it doesn’t occur to us
to ASSUME that we can do this with chimpanzees. After all, chimps
do solve tasks with tools, and in some cases (e.g. the “detour”
described above) there is clear evidence of rudimentary ideation.
But we don’t assume that the chimp will answer a simple yes/no
question by, for example, using a pencil or another tool to mark
“X” or “O” on a test.
It seems to me that Vygotsky is not asking why we cannot do this
with chimpanzees. Whether we can or cannot do it with chimpanzees
is a matter of hypothesis and future empirical research (and in
fact Savage-Rumbaugh’s work suggests strongly that it is possible).
What Vygotsky is asking is why we don’t look at the chimpanzee
with this ASSUMPTION, with this HYPOTHESIS. Perhaps it is because
we suspect that “ideation” is far from being the only basis, or
even the main basis, of chimpanzee thinking. Perhaps we suspect
that what chimpanzees think with is a lot more like a percept than
a concept.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Thu, 7/15/10, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:
From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] perception/conception etc
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, July 15, 2010, 3:37 PM
A few days ago Andy commented on a paper by Barsalou that Mike had
sent around. I am attaching another paper by the same author, with
the question, how similar is this analysis of cognition to what LSV
was writing about in T&L?
Martin
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