Re: [xmca] activity (was concepts)

[Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>]

On 20 April 2011 10:43, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> I appreciate all the thoughtful good will going into the attempts to find
> common grounding and explore one's own thinking in this/these
> thread/threads.
>
> I fear i violated Tony's reasonable 2 cents rule because I, too, have had
> too little time to write and the intermixing of pieces of threads and thus
> added to the difficulties.
>
> I believe that Andy identified one problem when he pointed out that Huw,
> coming from a somewhat different (and relevant!) tradition(s) introduced
> concepts such as activity as he understood them from, say, Maturana or
> Bateson. So, for example, he pointed to Jim Wertsch's *Mind as Action* as a
> source for explication of the concept of activity using the pole vaulting
> example.


Kind of.  I'm saying mediation and activity go together.  In, for example,
the scheme Wertsch provides (p204, VATSFOM):

Activity -- Motive
Action -- Goal
Operation -- Conditions.

A good place, it seems, to locate the use of concepts (i.e. those things
gained during dual stimulation experiments) is in the regulation of Action.

However, I'd say that the concept used influences the dynamics, as it can
change the situation.

Consider this simplified account.  A man is queuing at a supermarket.  He
only has 10 dollars (or some other currency), yet he needs the food to feed
his family.  He's got a number of items, all of which he needs, though they
might tally up to more than 10 dollars.  Let's say they add up to 9.99.  If
he can confidently do the math and has done so, his whole experience will be
different to the circumstances he'd be in if he found those kind of
conceptual operations difficult.  He wields these concepts in the act of
doing the math (the concepts mediate this act).  But these circumstances
will also mediate his activity as a whole as they influence his
understanding.

Huw



> But, Jim uses this example to talk about mediated action in
> context, his preferred unit of analysis at the time (at the end of
> *Vygotsky
> and the Social Formation of mind-*- which you can find whole on the
> internet
> but not download- he DOES discuss notions of activity following LSV).
>
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