Re: [xmca] concepts

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

For anyone who wants to wade into this topic I strongly recommend the entry on concepts in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

<http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concepts/>

Martin

On Apr 9, 2011, at 11:52 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:

> Jay, I am writing on this topic at the moment, so I want to follow up on your claim. There is a maxim: how you answer the question "What is a concept?" is half way to answering the question "What is ..." anything. I think your answer is an evasion.
> 
> In his /Philosophical Notebooks/, Lenin quotes Hegel:
> 
>   "Here and there in this mesh there are firm knots**
>   <../../../../../archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/preface.htm#LCW38_92c>
>   which give stability and direction to the life and consciousness of
>   spirit; these knots or nodes owe their fixity and power to the
>   simple fact that having been brought before consciousness, they are
>   independent, self-existent Concepts of its essential nature."
> 
> Hegel: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlprefac.htm#HL1_37b
> Lenin: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/preface.htm#LCW38_92c
> 
> I most certainly agree that to answer to the question "What is a concept?" is very confronting, but if we can't answer it satisfactorily, then we are really saying that we can't answer /any /question satisfactorily. Human life involves having these "firm knots" here and there, doesn't it?
> 
> What do you think?
> Andy
> Jay Lemke wrote:
>> Steve,
>> 
>> Maybe the notion of a "concept" might be a bit like that of a "gene" in the sense that a gene is a sort of functional unit, but it has no simple material reality in itself. If a gene is whatever in the DNA-RNA-cellular machinery activity that leads to the production of a particular enzyme (a protein molecule), it's a pretty complex functional system but hardly a material object or even a single material phenomenon. If we were to suppose something like this for the notion of a "concept", then maybe I could live with it.
>> 
>> But I'm not sure even such an approach would save the notion. First one has to know to what function a concept corresponds. I don't think concepts come one by one, to start with. What we know from discourse semantics tells me that a concept, or more properly in this context a semanteme or better a thematic node (better because semanteme carries a lot of old-fashioned reductionism with it, ala Wierzbicka in recent times), is always part of a family or system of nodes related by semantic relations (agent-process, token-type, etc.). The systems or thematic networks are instantiated in discourse/text by grammatical constructions relating one node to another in wording, and by relations among these to produce complex sentences and extended text. You don't find them in isolation, or at least they don't retain much specific meaning if you have, say, just a list of isolated words. The meaning potential of a word is defined by all the networks it might fit into, and the meaning gets more specified when the co-text and context tells you which one is the best fit.
>> 
>> LSV certainly had this idea when talking about scientific or fully developed conceptual thinking. But even everyday "concept" use is much the same, as discourse analysis shows quite clearly. People just tend to be less aware of it when doing everyday thinking/speaking, and so deploy the thematic networks in more routine and less flexible ways. But just because there is a phenomenon that one might call "conceptual thinking" or "meaning-making mediated by linguistic thematic networks" doesn't mean that there are concepts as such.
>> 
>> A lot of the mess in science teaching comes from the notion, common in the everyday thinking of scientists, and mis-appropriated into the "scientific" thinking of educators and some people in the "learning sciences", that there are these Big Concepts and that learning them means you understand the basics of a science. It's nothing like that at all. What you have to learn is to mobilize whole thematic networks in flexible, and canonical, ways (the trick is doing both at the same time!). Moreover, of course, it's not all about language, though that's the easiest part to analyze. Thematic networks can also be realized in graphs, diagrams, equations, and practical actions, and normally in a complex mix of all of these in the activity of working scientists. So you have to learn talking-representing-doing as a complex, situated activity.
>> 
>> This can't be reduced to learning, knowing, or using "concepts". Concept-centered education is not grounded in careful analysis of what's actually going on. It's inherited from older Cartesian mentalist models, and it has retained the prestige of associated mental-vs-manual labor ideologies.
>> 
>> A sufficiently sophisticated model of situated, distributed, interactive, embodied sign-mediated cognition can "rescue" the notion of "a concept" for some rhetorical purposes, but I really think it's too risky and unwise to do so, given how much wrong-headedness (and handedness) seems to come attached to it historically and culturally-ideologically. LSV used such notions because there wasn't much else available in his day, and he made great progress in understanding the practices and processes of meaning-making, but he did not have ready access to the linguistics and semiotics of more recent decades (though people like Voloshinov and Bakhtin were beginning such work, and related work in literary stylistics and folklore studies was also beginning, some of it in Moscow I think). 
>> We have now added to the original linguistic progress, the notions of multimedia or multimodal semiotic mediation, the integration of these into action/activity, and a much better sense of what is actually going in in the whole-body-artifact-other-person-environment interaction. The notion of a "concept" seems pretty limited compared to all this, though you could decide to just use it as a convenient term for a thematic node. But I don't think that's what it's been intended to mean during its intellectual history. I'd leave it as an everyday locution, and drop it from efforts at a scientific discourse of these matters.
>> 
>> JAY.
>> 
>> 
>> Jay Lemke
>> Senior Research Scientist
>> Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
>> University of California - San Diego
>> 9500 Gilman Drive
>> La Jolla, California 92093-0506
>> 
>> Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
>> School of Education
>> University of Michigan
>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
>> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke 
>> Professor Emeritus
>> City University of New York
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Mar 30, 2011, at 9:50 PM, Steve Gabosch wrote:
>> 
>>  
>>> Jay, I've recently been doing some research on Vygotsky's theory of concept development, so your comment about not believing "anything is a concept" has my attention.  Your perspective would be helpful to me.  What language and ideas that have developed since LSV's time are you referring to - as you describe them, materialist ideas that have more thoroughly worked out the deconstruction of the Cartesian divide and with it, all things "mental" - that have made the idea of "concept" seem like a silly notion and apparently no longer useful to you?
>>> 
>>> - Steve
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Mar 30, 2011, at 5:39 PM, Jay Lemke wrote:
>>> 
>>>    
>>>> So do the Jewish or early Christian sacralized writings actually say it's all that bad to cross-dress? both ways? and why would the matter even come up?
>>>> 
>>>> Did they have pink rags for girls and blue ones for boys?
>>>> 
>>>> Poor Joan, but she probably knew, as we all do, that no governing authority in history has ever cared about justice, just about appearances. Including our own today.
>>>> 
>>>> And speaking of justice, why is it that homosexuality is said to be immoral, rather than unjust? I think there's something deeply revealing in this, and perhaps relevant to xmca's continuing trouble with figuring out what a concept is.
>>>> 
>>>> Personally, I don't believe anything is a concept. It's kind of a silly notion, frankly. With no disrespect to LSV, who was operating with the language and ideas available to him. But I think we've since worked out a little more thoroughly the consequences of materialism for the deconstruction of the Cartesian divide, and with it, all things "mental".
>>>> 
>>>> Nonetheless, one can ask, are there "moral concepts"? Are they different from, say, scientific concepts? everyday concepts? Is "justice" a moral concept? Is it the only moral concept? On what grounds other than being unjust can something be said to be immoral? Absent God.
>>>> 
>>>> As he seems to have been when Joan was burned alive for her disobedience to the principle that gender-conforming men alone shall wield social power and authority.
>>>> 
>>>> JAY.
>>>> 
>>>> Jay Lemke
>>>> Senior Research Scientist
>>>> Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
>>>> University of California - San Diego
>>>> 9500 Gilman Drive
>>>> La Jolla, California 92093-0506
>>>> 
>>>> Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
>>>> School of Education
>>>> University of Michigan
>>>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
>>>> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
>>>> 
>>>> Professor Emeritus
>>>> City University of New York
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> On Mar 30, 2011, at 4:58 PM, Jenna McWilliams wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>      
>>>>> Here's a nice analysis of our Great Christian Hero, Joan of Arc, by recovering Catholic and awesome feminist Sady Doyle. She writes about her girlhood fascination with Joan of Arc, which led to her desire to look again at her hero through adult eyes. She writes:
>>>>> 
>>>>> "[W]hat a lot of people don’t realize – what I didn’t realize, until I read up on it – is that they didn’t actually kill her for heresy. Her answers, when they tried to trip her up and make her say or confess something heretical, were typically-yet-shockingly smart and charismatic and convincing; she did so well, and won so many people over, that they had to stop questioning her in front of an audience. What they killed her for was cross-dressing.
>>>>> 
>>>>> As soon as Joan got away from home, Joan started to wear men’s clothes. It started well before she joined the army. She referred to herself as “The Maid,” and refused to answer when they asked her if “she had wanted to be a man,” but the men’s clothes were very important to her. And she refused to stop wearing them in prison: She said, at one point, that it was to deter rapists (they were much harder to take off than women’s clothes, it was harder to get at her crotch, even aside from the image thing) and at another point simply that God told her to wear them. She told them that even if they killed her for it, she couldn’t and wouldn’t stop cross-dressing. So, so much of the trial and imprisonment was focused simply on trying to make her stop. At one point, exasperated, she snapped out at a captor, “give me a woman’s dress to go to my mother’s house, and I will take it.”
>>>>> 
>>>>> But cross-dressing was against Biblical law. And Joan couldn’t read. So they got her to sign a paper saying, in part, that she promised to stop wearing men’s clothes – a paper she could not read, that most everyone agrees they misrepresented so that she would sign it – and they shaved her head so that she wouldn’t have a boy’s haircut, and they stripped her and put her in a woman’s dress,  and then, the next time she dressed like a boy again, that was when they killed her.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Because she was a bitch: “Master Jean Le Fèvre, doctor of sacred theology, declared this woman to be obstinate, contumacious, disobedient.”
>>>>> 
>>>>> Because she was a slut and a queer: “[Her actions] are contrary to the honesty of womankind, forbidden by divine law, abominable to God and man, and prohibited under penalty of anathema by ecclesiastical decrees, such as the wearing of short, tight, and dissolute male habits… it is notorious that when she was captured she was wearing a loose cloak of cloth of gold, a cap on her head and her hair cropped round in man’s style. And in general, having cast aside all womanly decency, not only to the scorn of feminine modesty, but also of well-instructed men, she had worn the apparel and garments of most dissolute men… [This] is blasphemy of Our Lord and His saints, setting at nought the divine decrees, infringement of canon law, the scandal of her sex and womanly decency, the perversion of all modesty of outward bearing, the approbation and encouragement of most reprobate examples of conduct.”
>>>>> 
>>>>> Because she thought she was so fucking smart: “Master Denis Gastinel, licentiate in civil and canon law, gave his opinion in the following form… ‘[This] woman is scandalous, seditious, and wanton, towards God, the Church, and the faithful. She takes herself for an authority, a doctor and a judge.’”
>>>>> 
>>>>> And then they burned her alive."
>>>>> 
>>>>> (full post here: http://tigerbeatdown.com/2011/01/09/running-toward-the-gunshots-a-few-words-about-joan-of-ar/)
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> ~~
>>>>> 
>>>>> Jenna McWilliams
>>>>> Learning Sciences Program, Indiana University
>>>>> ~
>>>>> http://www.jennamcwilliams.com
>>>>> http://twitter.com/jennamcjenna
>>>>> 
>>>>> ~
>>>>> jenmcwil@indiana.edu
>>>>> jennamcjenna@gmail.com
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Mar 30, 2011, at 1:39 PM, Jay Lemke wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>        
>>>>>> I thought I should add a bit more here, because in the xmca context Jenna raised the attention-to-sexualities issue in relation to learning and learning communities, while in the blog it's all a bit more about political strategy in relation to the wider digital media and learning community.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I've recently written a Forum piece for Cultural Studies of Science Education responding to a paper from two Canadian authors detailing ideological bias concerning sexualities in a standard biology textbook. To be published relatively soon.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> I made some points there about our educational responsibility to address students sitting in front of us every day in our classrooms who otherwise never hear issues of gender complexity and sexualities addressed anywhere in our rather outdated curricula. Matters that are of far greater concern to them than most of what is in our curricula, especially if they don't identify as normatively heterosexual, and even if they do. American culture (and we're not the only ones, though among the worst) is ridiculously reticent about anything concerning sexuality and is preoccupied with moral anxieties about the subject. This would be laughably Victorian (including as Foucault notes the associated hypocrisy relative the the general cultural obsession with sex) if it weren't for the fact that a lot of young people are seriously in need of informed intelligent discussion and sophisticated knowledge about the diversity of real-world sexualities, as opposed to the reductionist fantasies of one dominant normative mode and a few marginalized Others.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> As I noted in the blog, we are all queer in our sexualities in one way or another. The number of different sexualities is truly staggering, sexualities intersect and interact in complex ways with various aspects of gender identity, social class, age, ethnic culture, and certainly childhood and adolescent development. How could they not be critical factors in learning? Even without going as far as Freud did in seeing sexuality as pervasive throughout culture (though to some extent he was probably correct in this), and just as we more or less accept today that pretty much everything is "gendered" (i.e. stereotypically more associated with masculine vs feminine identities, themselves entirely reductionist notions), it follows that these matters are also sexualized (because sexuality and gender are one system so far as identity is concerned). In my Forum article I note that Science (as a cultural phenomenon) and science education (as a professional identity) are not just masculinized, they are hetero-normatively masculinized (i.e. in common language, male and straight).
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> A biology course that pretends there are only two sexes, in one-to-one correspondence with two genders, and mentions neither same-sex activity among numberless nonhuman species, nor the biologically significant frequency of intersexuals at birth, nor chromosomal combinations such as XXY and XYY and their phenotypes, nor the non-reproductive functions of sexual attraction in humans and other species -- and a host of other matters -- is not preparing students to deal intelligently with a primary aspect of human diversity. A history course that omits to mention the non-normative sexualities of important historical figures (while being obsessed with every other detail about its Great Men) or the history of oppression of sexuality minorities is likewise doing a disservice, first to students who don't feel comfortable with normative sexualities, and then to every student who lives in a world filled with sexuality diversity. A literature course that does not point out how many canonical writers (especially poets writing in English) had non-normative sexualities, while adducing every other detail of their lives to "explain" their writings is disingenuous at least and intellectually fraudulent at worst. But all this is taken for granted as business as usual in 21st century "education".
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> It may already be enough of a leap to require some intellectual honesty about what we think of most immediately as "non-normative" sexualities: i.e. gay men and boys and lesbian women and girls. But what I mean by saying we are all at least a little bit queer in our sexualities encompasses far more. Non-normative attractions to those younger or older than we're supposed to desire, to those fatter or thinner, to those of other races and colors, to those with physical disabilities or deformities, even in some communities to those of the wrong religion or social class. And beyond desires, to modes of expression of sexuality, in dress and manner, in practices involving the "wrong" kind or degree of pleasure or pain, flexibility of movement or bondage and restriction, non-genital sexuality and a whole host else. How can there not be, in real fact, a queer majority with respect to the diversity of non-normative feelings, desires, and practices?
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> And how can our sexualities not be omni-present in the development of identity, and so in the critical contexts of learning? If this is not an obvious fact, I think it can only be because for generations our dominant culture and our academic disciplines have deliberately refused to pay attention to it.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> JAY.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Jay Lemke
>>>>>> Senior Research Scientist
>>>>>> Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
>>>>>> University of California - San Diego
>>>>>> 9500 Gilman Drive
>>>>>> La Jolla, California 92093-0506
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Professor (Adjunct status 2009-11)
>>>>>> School of Education
>>>>>> University of Michigan
>>>>>> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
>>>>>> www.umich.edu/~jaylemke
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Professor Emeritus
>>>>>> City University of New York
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> On Mar 29, 2011, at 9:37 AM, Jenna McWilliams wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>          
>>>>>>> Several members of this listserv attended the recent MacArthur Foundation-sponsored Digital Media & Learning Conference in Long Beach, California. During and since the conference, I've been involved in conversations about a notable lack of queer studies-focused work in this year's program. Some of this conversation is accessible online, on danah boyd's blog and on mine. (Links: http://www.jennamcwilliams.com/2011/03/28/some-thoughts-on-queering-dml and http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2011/03/24/the-politics-of-queering-anything.html.)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Most of the people I've talked with about this issue come from the "digital media" side of Digital Media & Learning, and I've been wondering about folks who fall more on the "learning" side of things. It seems to me that there's a general lack of attention given to integrating queer studies work with learning theory and work in educational research, though with a few (extremely notable) exceptions. I wonder if xmca folks have thoughts on this issue that might help me figure out the true lay of the land in this respect.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Thanks in advance for any thoughts you might have. (And, of course, if you WANTED to visit and comment on my blog and the conversation I've been having with danah in the comments section there, I would certainly not be offended by this.)
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> best to all,
>>>>>>> jenna
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> ~~
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> Jenna McWilliams
>>>>>>> Learning Sciences Program, Indiana University
>>>>>>> ~
>>>>>>> http://www.jennamcwilliams.com
>>>>>>> http://twitter.com/jennamcjenna
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> ~
>>>>>>> jenmcwil@indiana.edu
>>>>>>> jennamcjenna@gmail.com
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> 
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> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> *Andy Blunden*
> Joint Editor MCA: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
> Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
> Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
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