Re: [xmca] Imitation and the Zoped: Time to summarize?

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Hi Lois, David,

I've been worrying about this apparent divergence between Wittgenstein and Vygotsky for some time, so I'm pleased to see it come up in the discussion. I am a big fan of Wittgenstein, and like Lois I read him as arguing against the notion of essence, certainly if this is defined in terms of characteristics that all exemplars have in common. His position seems to be that all concepts, even those used in science, are polymorphic.

On the other hand I am also a big fan of Vygotsky, who clearly sees some purchase in the notion of essence. LSV does, as David points out, seem to see two factors common to all games. (Is it just a coincidence that both W and LSV take games as a central example?) Yet at the same time LSV also argues that whatever a concept is, it is not those characteristics that all exemplars have in common. At least he argues this way in his later writing. In Educational Psychology he was still close to the traditional view:

"When I say the word, ‘lamp,’ having in mind an entire class of homogeneous objects, I am thereby making use of the results of a vast amount of analytic work that has already been completed, i.e., the work of decomposing all the objects already in my experience into their constituent components, into assimilations, i.e., the collocation of similar elements, and of the synthesis of the remaining elements into an integral concept” (177).

But later his position had changed dramatically:

"It is completely clear that if the process of generalizing is considered as a direct result of abstraction of traits, then we will inevitably come to the conclusion that thinking in concepts is removed from reality, that the constant represented in concepts becomes poorer and poorer, scant and narrow. Not without reason are such
concepts frequently termed empty abstracts. Others have said that concepts arise in the process of castrating reality. Concrete, diverse phenomena must lose their traits one after the other in order that a concept might be formed. Actually what arises is a dry and empty abstraction in which the diverse, full-blooded reality is
narrowed and impoverished by logical thought." (Pedology of the Adolescent)

LSV goes on to suggest that "A real concept is an image of an objective thing in its complexity. Only when we recognize the thing in all its connections and relations, only when this diversity is synthesized in a word, in an integral image through a multitude of determinations, do we develop a concept."

What is missing from any suggestion that the essence, or concept, of a game consists of, or centers around, the two elements of rules and an imaginary situation is, it seems to me, this role of language and the recognition of complexity. Abstracting those two elements must be accompanied by a synthesis of the complexities of their relationship. David is surely correct to point to the dynamic ontogenetic transformations in games, and this needs to be captured, grasped, by any adequate concept of game. Such a concept also needs to be guided by what people *call* a game, by the ways language is used metaphorically and poetically to point to something that we are doing and suggest that, whatever else it may be, it is worth thinking of as a game.

Martin




On Jan 5, 2011, at 10:22 PM, Lois Holzman wrote:

> David, 
> Your understanding of Wittgenstein is so different from mine! Throughout PI, the Blue and Brown Books, The Philosophy of Psychology, etc. he rails against any essences so it fascinates me that you think he is saying there's no external commonality but there might be something essential. 
> Some other thoughts off your post:
> In speaking of the shift from visualization to abstract rules are you saying something different from Vygotsky's discussion of the shifting relationship between rules and imagination? I have always found it helpful, IN PRACTICE, to see this in relation to what Vygotsky says about the shift from rules that come into existence in the creating of the play, to rules that are determined beforehand. As you know, Newman andI coined the terms rules-and-results and rules for results for this phenomena (by analogy to tool-and-resul and tool for result). As for formulating roles as rules, isn't this precisely the problem, i.e., that which stifles continuous development?
> Thanks,
> Lois
> 
> 
> Don't forget to check out the latest at http://loisholzman.org
> 
> Lois Holzman, Ph.D.
> Director, East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy
> 920 Broadway, 14th floor
> New York NY 10010
> Chair, Global Outreach for UX (www.allstars.org/ux)
> tel. 212.941.8906 ext. 324
> fax 718.797.3966
> lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org
> www.eastsideinstitute.org
> www.performingtheworld.org
> loisholzman.org
> www.allstars.org
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jan 5, 2011, at 9:44 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
> 
>> I love that quote from Philosophical Investigations too, and I have used it many times. It was probably the third or fourth time that I used it in a seminar that I was struck by Wittgenstein's insistance on the word "look" (as opposed to "say" or "think" or even "play") and it occurred to me that what he is really saying is not that there is nothing in common, but rather that there is no external, visual, phenomenological trait that links all the games. But there may be more essential ones, and so too, mutatis mutandis, with language.
>> 
>> It seems to me that what Wittgenstein is really doing is giving a specific instance of Marx's comment that if the essence of things were actually readable from their external features, there would be no need for scientific inquiry whatsoever. In fact, there is not one but TWO features that all games have in common, namely imaginary situations on the one hand and abstract rules on the other.
>> 
>> The problem is not simply that neither one is phenomenological, accessible either through inspection or introspection. The problem is also that they are constantly shape-shifting: games which begin with visualizable roles become those that have only abstract rules, a chess game goes from being a proxy "war" to being what von Neumann so correctly calls a super-human feat of calculation rather than a contest (because in theory there is only one right move in each situation). 
>> 
>> And it seems to me that it is precisely THIS metamorphosis, the shift from the visualizable role to the purely abstract concept, that forms the ZBR in the situations I am talking about. For younger children, it may be the ability to go from the visual to the merely visualizable, but for my kids it's a matter of mastery and graspture: being able to dispense with the visualizable in their thinking altogether and being able to formulate roles as rules.
>> 
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National University of Education
>> 
>> 
>> --- On Wed, 1/5/11, Lois Holzman <lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>> From: Lois Holzman <lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org>
>> Subject: Re: [xmca] Imitation and the Zoped: Time to summarize?
>> To: lchcmike@gmail.com, "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
>> Date: Wednesday, January 5, 2011, 7:52 AM
>> 
>> 
>> I wonder if I missed something about the ZBR...
>> 
>> Also I wonder where you, Mike, see a lack of clarity, or what clarity would look like. I see variations and differences of opinion.
>> 
>> Regarding kinds of imitation I think there is no "essence" or any one thing that one could say ties them all together or that they have in common. Here's a place where Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" is so helpful (to me).  For those who are not familiar, I quote portions of some passages from Philosophical Investigations: 
>> 65.   Here we come up against the great question that lies behind all these considerations.-For someone might object against me: "You take the easy way out! You talk about all sorts of language-games, but have nowhere said what the essence of a language-game, and hence of language, is: what is common to all these activities, and what makes them into language or parts of language. So you let yourself off the very part of the investigation that once gave you yourself most headache, the part about the general form of propositions and of language." 
>> 
>> And this is true.—Instead of producing something common to all that we call language, I am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word for all,—but that they are related to one another in many different ways. And it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all "language". I will try to explain this. 
>> 
>> Consider for example the proceedings that we call "games". I mean board-games, card-games, Olympic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don't say: "There must be something common or they would  not be called 'games'" but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at that. To repeat: don't think, but look!—Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious relationships. ...
>> 
>> 67. I can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than "family resemblances"; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cries-cross in the same way.—And I shall say: 'games' form a family.  
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> I really love this guy!
>> 
>> Lois
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Don't forget to check out the latest at http://loisholzman.org
>> 
>> Lois Holzman, Ph.D.
>> Director, East Side Institute for Group and Short Term Psychotherapy
>> 920 Broadway, 14th floor
>> New York NY 10010
>> Chair, Global Outreach for UX (www.allstars.org/ux)
>> tel. 212.941.8906 ext. 324
>> fax 718.797.3966
>> lholzman@eastsideinstitute.org
>> www.eastsideinstitute.org
>> www.performingtheworld.org
>> loisholzman.org
>> www.allstars.org
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jan 1, 2011, at 11:00 PM, mike cole wrote:
>> 
>>> It is my sense that perhaps we have reached a plateau in our discussion of
>>> Imitation and the Zoped.
>>> We have a number of examples of different "kinds" of imitation. But
>>> surprisingly (why did I not see this coming?) we were less clear about zoped
>>> than imitation, and perhaps owing to this lack of clarity we veered of to
>>> consider (e.g., we used the method of dual stimulation on ourselves)
>>> imagination and creativity as a way of better specifying the senses in which
>>> we meant "imitation."
>>> 
>>> The question for me is, where to now? My intuition tells me that we ought to
>>> consolidate our accumulated material about imitation in relation to
>>> imagination and creativity and then return to consider what a zoped is (I am
>>> talking about pedagogy with a little magic here, Lois, since it is part of
>>> my understand  of the ZBR, but can translate among acronyms if they do not
>>> proliferate too much!)
>>> :-)
>>> 
>>> I am pretty clear about David's advice that take the unconcious/conscioius
>>> distinction seriously. It is going to become important when we think about
>>> imitation vis a vis the zoped.It is my sense that we are collectively
>>> unclear on  this score. Ana ( I think! So many interesting notes), suggested
>>> that even adults may (perhaps must) imitate unconsciously as a condition of
>>> social interaction. That accords with my experience in dealing in a local
>>> language that is not my own and a variety of unsystematic observations that
>>> Ana's note brings to mind. Ana also reminds of the many social-pragmatic
>>> functions of different kinds of imitation, making any hard and fast scale
>>> difficult to create.
>>> 
>>> Now all we need is for the New Year's Fairy to jump up and hand us a
>>> summary!
>>> 
>>> 
>>> mike
>>> __________________________________________
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