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Re: [xmca] concepts

OK, thanks for that Jay. I understand your position and it is clearly well-founded. I will nonetheless keep working at what I am doing, and I really doubt that I will find myself elaborating and justifying folk theories. It is a fact, I believe, that human beings are born realists, and we will continue to spontaneously populate the world with independently existing things. But this does not stop us from acting as if we were meaning-making rather than manipulating objects. So I think there is value in a general theory of these reifications. 

Andy

Jay Lemke wrote:

I agree that there is  both a rhetorical-political dimension to the issue of "concepts" and a theoretical one. If you're talking to people who don't have any other way to make sense of some things except with a notion of "concepts", then you have to create some hybrid third-space or translation bridge or common pool in which to swim communicatively.

But I like to hope that I can offer interlocutors some alternative ways of talking about and so making sense of things, and that they might get to feel a bit more comfortable with it over time, and that I can then point out that their old language has a lot of drawbacks, without leaving them with no alternative to it (since they surely won't give it up without one).

This is an alternative rhetorical-political strategy to the one of trying to, as someone put it earlier, hollow out the usage of the old terms and fill them with new meanings. I'd change the metaphor there to something more like re-situate the old terms in new discourses, with new semantic relationships to a new network of terms (and some of the old ones).

I'm all for trying both these approaches and seeing what happens.

But I don't want to buy into the conventional discourse repertoire (Foucault's "discursive formation") that goes with taking some notion to be "a concept". If I do that, say, for "identity", then people expect that it's possible to define what identity "is", and to do so precisely and in a way that allows us to determine whether any given instance is an instance of "identity" or not. I frankly think that's crazy, and not the least bit productive for either scholarship or good thinking. And if there are good reasons to criticize various uses of the term identity, and various more extended discourses that incorporate the term (and these extended discourses are the relevant units in theoretical discussion, not the term) -- and there surely are -- these have nothing to do with trying to fit "identity" into a preconceived mold of what a good "scientific concept" ought to be. There is a term here, and an associated set of discourse patterns and extended meanings, but no "concept". Going around attacking the "concept" of identity would be pointless -- but it is just this sort of discussion one often gets.

Here I'm aiming my argument at the notion of concepts, but the bigger point about what the units of analysis for theoretical discourse and intellectual history are most usefully taken to be was made by Foucault in the Archeology of Knowledge (esp. the section on method, defining discursive formations, enunciative possibilities, etc.) a long time ago now, and on the basis of exhaustive research with the historical source texts for tracing major changes in ways of making sense of the world, especially in the social sciences (also in medicine, technology, etc.) over long periods of time (a few centuries). That work led him to the same conclusions as functional linguistic analyses of extended meaning-making in text, and by completely different methods, and operating on completely different scales. The conclusions in both cases are contrary to our folk-theories about words, meanings, and concepts. And way too much philosophical discussion of these matters really looks to me like not much more than efforts to elaborate and justify the folk theories.

I recognize the necessity of communicative compromise. But I also recognize some educational responsibility. The first in the shorter term, to ground the second in the longer term.

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 Apr 12, 2011, at 8:42 PM, Andy Blunden wrote:


Jay, you say "We make meanings with sign resources in contexts." But this is what a concept is, isn't it? And if you had to explain to someone what another concept, say "identity" or "situation" is, then you would have to come to the same kind of summary conclusion. Isn't there value in clarifying what a concept is with the concept of concept? But if you simply leave the concept of concept alone with its "mentalist, idealist, universalist baggage" then won't we have to do that with "identity" or "situation" and every other concept eventually? How will we talk under those conditions?
Andy

Jay Lemke wrote:

I liked Ana's questioning of the cultural value attached to particular views about concepts in her response to David's commentary on two little passages about Jinho.

David is extolling the formal aspect of meaning as a tool: classification, set theory, syllogistic reasoning. Ana is emphasizing the value of meaning as a tool for story-telling, for engaging someone in an imagined world, for projecting possibilities. David's first example is, from the second point of view, pedantic and artificial, a mere pretext for the exegesis of a a system of classification (i.e. all boys are either Korean or foreign. This boy is Korean.). There is no projected story, no engagement, at least relatively to the second one, which could be the opening of the saga of a Korean Naruto.

Of course this overstates things, but it does call attention to the multiple functions of verbal meaning-making, and its seems to me unwise to extol abstract classification and generalization at the level of the word-based category as being the higher "conceptual" function of language. I always try to understand Vygotsky's use of "the word" as meaning not individual isolated words (except sometimes) but more to speech, to utterance, to verbal meanings, which usually require a lot more than one word, or at least that word in a richly prepared context (verbal and/or nonverbal). A word, or a verbal meaning is not automatically a generalization. Isolated words have a "meaning potential" a probability distribution of possible meanings, and as they are combined with co-text and context, the net meanings they help to make get more specified, and can be either meanings about general propositions or meanings about specific instances. Words are sign-tools that when used in particular meaning-making practices can indicate categories, and relations among categories that count as generalizations, or equally well can be used to designate particular concrete things or tell very specific stories.

Isolated words are always the wrong unit of analysis when considering questions of meaning.

This applies even to the acquisition of single-word utterances in early childhood, as I think is now pretty well accepted.

So verbal meaning making does not automatically imply generalization or categories, though languages have devices for distinguishing through different wordings between meanings made about instances and meanings made as generalizations or through categories.

And the ability to support meanings about abstract categories is just one function of the linguistic system and our ways of using it, and not necessarily (indeed I would say rather obviously not) the highest or most valuable of its functions in use.

So what of "concepts," then? I think we have to distinguish between reasoning in terms of abstract categories to make general propositions, and doing so through language (which is the original sign system for doing so) and saying that this process entails "concepts". The process surely happens. It surely happens most of the time, and originally in intellectual-social development, through mobilizing the linguistic sign system (along with other sign modalities). None of that implies a model or analysis of the process in terms of "concepts". Depending obviously on what one means by a concept. I am pretty sure that this process does not take place by the deployment of some fixed (even expandable) repertoire of semantic primitives. Nor in terms of any unit of meaning that precedes and then gets "expressed in" language. The meanings come into being in and through the deployment of the linguistic signs and do not have any independent or prior existence (contra Platonism and its romantic revivals, contra the thesis of a "lingua mentis" and contra Fodor and maybe Pinker).

So whatever LSV may have meant by "concept", in linking it as he does to language and speech in development, he likely did not mean either idealist concepts or internal mental realities that then get expressed outwardly in speech.

The etymology, as was noted, for "concept" meant a taking or pulling together. A concept brings together instances, giving one name to many similar but different things. At least that's the received notion. But is it, itself, anything more than the name we use to do this? and as a name, merely part of more complex locutions we use to do this? or as makes more sense, developmentally and in semiotic analysis, merely the front-man for a complex systems of speech and gesture and integration with context, and generally a very multi-modal procedure for con-cepting a lot of stuff under a category-term? The object of study needs to be this whole complex of doings and meanings (as verbs) that produces the category result, and surely this is not anything one would call "a concept".

All that of course is just taking categories one at a time, and we know things are never that simple. Categories are made through distinctions, and so systems of categories get created and the meanings we make with any one category-term are interpretable in relation to to all the others (e.g. foreign vs. Korean). But there is lots of research on how categories get made and used linguistically and they all pretty much show that what you have to pay attention to are the complex processes by which the connections among things in the categories are foregrounded or backgrounded, making category use more flexible and indeed potentially ambiguous, polysemic, etc. Categories get merged and divided, new ones are formed out of the shards of older ones. ALL "concepts", not just scientific ones, come in such fluid and squabbling families. Scientific and especially mathematical category terms, defined by their family connections to one another (and in the case of scientific ones by links to nonverbal objects and activities), TRY to impose an artificial stability and fixedness (and in mathematics special conditions allow greater success in doing so) -- but these are hardly a model for how these matters usually go.

I think we have fallen culturally into the habit of saying that we think in terms of concepts, but I see no persuasive evidence that we do. We make meanings with sign resources in contexts, and some of those meanings sometimes have some of the features said to define a concept. Meanwhile the mentalist, idealist, universalist baggage that the notion drags in with it continues to do immeasurable harm in both education and psychology.

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 Apr 12, 2011, at 7:09 PM, Ana Marjanovic-Shane wrote:


Dear David and all,

Just a small remark or a question:

If the two lines you compare were a beginning of two novels, and someone
asked you which one of these novels would you prefer to read, what would be
your answer?

For some reason, I would be more intrigued to read the novel beginning with
the second line:

"Look! He has a blue sweater. He has no glasses. He has stripey hair. His
name is Jinho."

It seems not imprisoning me in the visual, but on the contrary, openiing my
eyes to see something interesting. The first one is telling me nothing that
I don't already know -- except that there is a Korean boy Jinho.  OK - so
what?

So even though you claim that the first line is conceptual, and that the
second one is a mere description of visuals, I am attracted to the second
line as a beginning of a possibly exciting story.

I wonder if the second line does not carry some other important properties,
other than conceptual but equally improtant?

Ana







_______________________________________

Ana Marjanovic-Shane
215-995-3207
e-mails: anamshane@gmail.com
           ana@zmajcenter.org





On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 11:45 PM, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>wrote:


Tonight I have to discuss the difference between the following.

T: Look! This is a boy. He's not a foreign boy. He's a Korean boy. This is
Jinho.

T: Look! He has a blue sweater. He has no glasses. He has stripey hair. His
name is Jinho.

It seems to me there are three important differences, from the teacher's
point of view.

a) The first one repeats the concept "boy" and the indefinite article used
to mark it as an example of the concept (actually, a number, as opposed to
an indicative or a demonstrative like "the" or "this" or "that"). The second
does not.

b) Imagine the teacher following up this information with the open question
"Tell me about Jinho". The first offers conceptual material ("foreign",
"boy", "Korean") that can be used by the children with ALL the other
characters in our textbook: Joon, Ann, Nami, Peter, Bill, and so on. The
second one does not.

c) Imagine the teacher following up the answers with a CRITICAL metaprocess
question "How do you know?" The first leads to a conversation about what
names are boy's names and what names are girl's names, which names sound
Korean and which sound foreign. The second merely leads back to the picture,
or back to the teacher's hearsay.

Ideologically, the first one suggests a model of a concept that is a
generalized and abstracted essence: "boy", "foreign", and "Korean" are all
essential QUALITIES (and not, actually, things). The second ALSO has an
implicit model of a concept; it is based on the possession of material
objects (and not essential properties).

It seems to me that for all three reasons, the first way of framing the
question provides a way OUT of the enslavement of the visual field and the
second does not. I remember that Larry speculated about concepts and
conceptualizations that emprison us. It seems to me that prisons are made of
much sturdier and sterner stuff.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education


--- On Mon, 4/11/11, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:


From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] concepts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Monday, April 11, 2011, 8:16 PM


Phillip,

I didn't mean any petard-hoisting, honestly! I just get excited at times
about ideas. Big ones, and little ones too.

Let me respond a bit more appreciatively to what you're saying. I'm most
interested at the moment, in my own work, in trying to understand Vygotsky.
I think I share that interest with some others here, but I'm equally sure
not everyone has the interest. But to me it's quite fascinating to struggle
to try to interpret and apply texts that I am separated from by time,
language, geography and economic system.

Is there power in knowledge? Do knowledge claims bolster positions of
professional expertise? Do academics not traffic in prestige and advantage
even as we make apparently neutral and detached pronouncements about trivial
details? Does success in every endeavor not "depend on a very complex
knowledge of and ability to manipulate determinative politics, discourses,
and institutions -- on professional competencies and social privileges that
constitute even the 'organic intellectuals'"? (That's Paul Bové beating up
on Charles Taylor in his foreword to Deleuze's book on Foucault.)

Yes, of course. I take Foucault very seriously. Does Vygotsky write about
any of this? No, not really. Does that mean he was not aware of it?
Impossible! This was a man who read Marx, who was living at the time of a
revolution whose stated aim it was to correct the distortions that an unjust
society had wrought on human beings, and who was in a position of power
himself when Stalin took control. How could he possibly not have been aware
of the connections between knowledge and power, the micro-politics of
concepts?

He did write occasionally, as in "The Socialist Formation of Man," of
topics such as the formation of the "psychological superstructure of man"
and of "the basic assumption that intellectual production is determined by
the form of material production." He wrote that "A fundamental change of the
whole system of these [societal] relationships which man is a part of, will
also inevitably lead to a change in consciousness, a change in man’s whole
behaviour." He even wrote of Nietzsche and questioned his assumption that
the will to power would continue to dominate human relations. By and large,
though, his writings let these things pass.

Just as at the beginning of T&S Vygotsky writes that of course emotion and
communication are intimately linked to thinking and speaking, but that they
must fade into the background in his analysis in that book, I read all
Vygotsky's texts assuming that politics and power are also in the
background, unspoken but not forgotten. Then, to me, it seems that what
Vygotsky was doing is similar to what Foucault was doing in his writings on
the ethics of self-formation. He is focused on the *formation* of subjects,
and of forms of subjectivity, as children grow into adults in whatever kind
of distorted social order they happen to be born into. Could he explicitly
put it that way? Did he have the space or time to spell out the whole story?
Or do we have to do it for him?

Bottom line, I don't see that a politics of concepts is in any clear way
incompatible with Vygotsky's project, as I grasp it. His 'concrete
psychology' of the Moscow tram driver would also be a study of the American
professor.

Martin


On Apr 11, 2011, at 8:52 PM, White, Phillip wrote:


ah, the bliss of being hoisted upon one's own petard!  thanks, Martin.

(;-)

yeah, Foucault's use of concept is constant.

what i was obliquely attempting to get at was that the term 'concept'

could be seen as highfalutin, rather than, say, the term "big idea".  (hah!
of course, my father would rebuke me with, "What's the big idea?!")

but what i mean is that concept is another word for idea.  and an idea

that appears to be difficult to grasp, abstract in short, could be seen as a
'big idea'.

it's about lingo, using latinate/greek words, rather than those little

ordinary daily words.

it even seems to me that when, say, i'm teaching about "community of

practice" - i guess we could say that's a pretty big concept, or even
"legitimate peripheral participation", that initially it seems abstract, but
once everyone in the class talks about it, that over time, with concrete
examples from experience, that "community of practice" no longer seems
abstract.  in fact, it seems quite real and people can identify it when they
observe it, just like they can identify the difference between an ornamental
pear tree and a comice pear tree.

takes me back to Bateson - that making sense of the world, recognizing

the patterns, is recognizing the difference that makes a difference.  and
it's that curious difference wherein a child over time can distinguish
bertween a cat and a dog and a horse and a donkey, and it's through
recognizing the difference that makes a difference.

so, while Foucault didn't suggest it, i'm suggesting that one of the ways

experts claimed expertise was to employ a vocabulary that would set the
profession apart from the everyday world of being.

am i being anti-intellectual?

because when with my students we been reading Lave, say, and there is

always someone who complains about her vocabulary, i always argue in support
of her vocabulary.

internal contractions.

phillip




Phillip White, PhD
University of Colorado Denver
School of Education
phillip.white@ucdenver.edu
________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On

Behalf Of Martin Packer [packer@duq.edu]

Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011 5:38 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] concepts

But,

Phillip,

wasn't Foucault's central concern in, say, The Order of Things, to

explore the *basis* on which human knowledge, or knowledges, are
constituted? In his terms, within a discursive formation there is a
dispersion of concepts. An ordering of words is used to order what can be
seen in the world. The point was not that there is no such thing as
'concept,' but that concepts are not neutral, natural maps of a preexisting
and independent reality. For example, he wrote of the "form of positivity"
of the sciences - "the concepts around which they are organized, the type of
rationality to which they refer and by means of which they seek to
constitute themselves as knowledge." To a great extent, his attention to the
material practices in which both objects and abstractions are produced was
drawn from Marx, so I don't think it is wildly incompatible with Vygotsky's
project.

Martin

On Apr 11, 2011, at 5:36 PM, White, Phillip wrote:


though really, i'm more with Jay on this point that there is no such

thing as a 'concept' -  i'm thinking that the practice of the word became,
what?, let's say 'insitutionalized', or 'valorized' during the enlightenment
project... that period which Foucault points to of ways of categorization
and classifications that emerged as professional experts exercised for
themselves the power to label, prescribe, diagnose, etc. etc., as in, for
example, the separation of madness and reason.

yeah ......

another one of my half-baked ideas!

phillip




Phillip White, PhD
University of Colorado Denver
School of Education
phillip.white@ucdenver.edu
________________________________________
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On

Behalf Of mike cole [lchcmike@gmail.com]

Sent: Monday, April 11, 2011 4:07 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] concepts

I agree, Monica. Its odd that we make such distinctions and then worry

that

we do not
know what a key term in the discussion (in this case, concept) is

supposed

to mean (we all find a way to make sense of it for ourselves however!)..

Martin and other conceptual knowers. LSV and Luria insisted that words

were

generalizations. How is that idea of generalization related to the idea

of a

concept?

A con-cept. With-cept? I have no conception!
mike

On Mon, Apr 11, 2011 at 1:13 PM, Monica Hansen <
monica.hansen@vandals.uidaho.edu> wrote:


Martin,

I have enjoyed reading your back and forth on this topic of concepts.
Examining the concept of concepts is indeed problematic, but it is the

crux

of the whole issue. Social/individual, internal/external,
physiological/mental, concrete/abstract, etc.

You ended with this:

"But to sever completely the links between everyday discourse and
scientific
discourse would be to prevent the informing of the former by the latter
that
LSV found so important."

I would just like to go one further: severing the links between

everyday

discourse and scientific discourse would prevent the former(everyday)

from

informing the latter(scientific). There can be no higher psychological
processes, no scientific concepts without everyday concepts because it

is

the specific and local nature of experience that informs all the others
(and
is informed by the others as well). It is the dialogic nature of

concepts

that makes them so fascinating and so powerful.


Monica


-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]

On

Behalf Of Martin Packer
Sent: Sunday, April 10, 2011 11:33 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] concepts


On Apr 10, 2011, at 12:33 PM, Martin Packer wrote:


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.

Jay's opening sentence neatly illustrates the difficulty of eliminating
'concept.' He writes of 'the notion' of a concept - which is to say, to
write about concepts he has to employ a concept, namely that of

'concept'!

(If that seems odd, try reading some Frege!)

As the Stanford Encyclopedia article points out, no one has

satisfactorily

defined a concept. But the seeming unavoidability of invoking something
like
'concept' follows from the fact that we humans (and perhaps animals

too;

another seemingly intractable debate) deal not so much with

particularities

as with generalities. We talk and write not about this think and that
thing,
but this 'kind' of thing and that 'type' of thing. We write not about

the

specific concept of 'rabbit,' but about 'the notion' of concept.

As Henry James once wrote, "The intellectual life of man consists

almost

wholly in his substitution of a conceptual order for the perceptual

order

in
which his experience originally comes." One may disagree with the
separation
of the two order that James' words seems to suggest, but it seems
implausible to deny that there are *two* orders.

Do this order of generalities involve complex interrelations or

systems, as

Jay suggests? Are they specified in practice, in ways that depend on
context? Yes, of course. I am deep in the middle of chapter 6 of T&S,

and

LSV wrote of all this, 70 years ago. We have already discussed here his
notion [!] of a system of generality, represented metaphorically by

lines

of
longitude and latitude on a globe.  He conceived of this system as
operating
in acts of thought that actively grasp their objects. He saw both the
dependence of generalities on language, and their distinction.

Should we avoid, as Jay recommends, claiming that "there are concepts

as

such"?  I'm not sure what this claim would amount to. There are, and

can

only be, "concepts for us." Should we avoid reifying concepts?

Certainly!

Should we remove the term from all scientific discourse, leaving it

only as

an "everyday locution"? That's a matter of taste, I suppose. But to

sever

completely the links between everyday discourse and scientific

discourse

would be to prevent the informing of the former by the latter that LSV
found
so important.

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Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
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