Re: [xmca] last on concepts

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

This whole concepts thing is still nagging at me, and making me grumpy with my students! 

LSV describes the microgenesis of thinking in two places in T&S: chapter 7, and sections 6 and 7 of chapter 6. And he does so in apparently completely different ways! Chapter 7 is all about movement among the five planes from thought to word or vice versa, with concepts not mentioned even once, I believe. Chapter 6 is about acts of thought, concepts in relations of generality, and words are mentioned in only one or two paragraphs, of such grammatical complexity that I am currently looking for a native Russian speaker to disambiguate them for me.

So what is the relationship between the two passages? The key, I believe, is that in both chapters LSV makes the claim that thinking is always relating two things (in chapter 7 he writes: “all thinking tends to unite one thing and another”; in chapter 6 it is: “every thought establishes a link between parts of reality, represented [представленным] in some way in consciousness”). In chapter 7 it's clear when he says this that he's talking about the penultimate plane, that of "thought itself." (The five planes are as follows: (1) outer form of the word; (2) inner form of the word; (3) inner speech; (4) thought itself; (5) motivation.) So it seems to me the way to interpret the sections in chapter 6 is that they too are dealing with this plane. And that means that concepts operate on the plane of thought itself (or that thinking itself operates with concepts), at a point where words have "disappeared" or "died," depending on ones translation (or not yet been born, if one is moving in the opposite direction, from thought to speech).

This is more evidence, in my view, that concepts are not word-meanings. Natalia asked me in a side message if I did not think that words in inner speech have inner form. It's a good and a tricky question, and on reviewing the text I would say that I think LSV considered inner speech to contain 'inner form,' but that this 'meaning' is progressively replaced by sense - which can, he argued, become separated from words. By the time we get to thought itself words are no longer involved in the processes of thinking. 

Of course, that still leaves a lot of details to be worked out about concepts and the relations of generality they form.

Martin

By the way, there are five difficult paragraphs that I would welcome help on. Perhaps the most opaque to me is this one:

316. Если самое значение слова принадлежит к определенному типу структуры, то только определенный круг операций становится возможным в пределах данной структуры, а другой круг операций становится возможным в пределах другой структуры. В развитии мышления мы имеем дело с некоторыми очень сложными процессами внутреннего характера, изменяющими внутреннюю структуру самой ткани мысли. Есть две стороны, с которыми мы всегда сталкиваемся в конкретном изучении мышления, и обе имеют первостепенное значение.

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