Re: [xmca] last on concepts

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Martin:
 
It's a puzzle! But it's a puzzle that my class is tackling this week and next, so we will share our thoughts with you (and hopefully with your class too).
 
Vygotsky has just nailed Piaget for STRUCTURALISM. Piaget's impermeable distinction between everyday concepts and academic concepts (e.g. between "my family" and "the nuclear family", which is the example we are using) has removed the latter from the spotlight of all psychological inquiry. 
 
Vygotsky says that if academic knowledge can have no real relationship with thinking than there isn't any relationship between teaching-learning and development, between WHAT the child learns and HOW the child thinks. It's not just a matter of "inert knowledge (Whitehead)" or "encapsulation (Engestrom)"; it's a matter of the fundamental incommensurability of content and structure.
 
Then the passage you cite, which comes just before Section FIVE of Chapter Six in the 1934 edition, and just before Section EIGHT of Chapter Six in the 1956/1982 editions. Here's what I've got:
 
"If the meaning of a word itself belongs to a determined type of structure, there is thus only one given circle of operations which is possible in the framework of this structure, another circle of operations being possible in the framework of another structure."
 
For example, let's say that the child is only capable of using words to POINT ("this" and "that" and so on). Then anything outside the immediate visual purview is completely beyond the child's circle of operations.
 
Let's say the child is capable of using the words to DENOMINATE but not to PREDICATE ("water", "apple"). Now things outside the immediate visual purview are within the framework of this structure, but the past and the future are circles of operations that are beyond the child's circle of operations.
 
Let's say that the child is capable of using the words to PREDICATE ("This was water", "I will have an apple"). Now things in the past and in the present are within the circle of operations, but only as concrete objects. There is no abstract system in which a nuclear family is at the core of every extended family, or there are two kinds of "household unit", namely an extended family and a nuclear family.
 
I think this is essentially what we have in our data: the child insists on thinking of the "nuclear family" as just a name for his own family and his friends families, and when the teacher insists this is not the case, that it refers to "modern" families as opposed to families in the Joseon Dynasty, the child assumes the teacher is talking about single parent families!
 
Vygotsky then continues like this: 
 
"We are dealing in the development of thinking with very complex processes of an internal character, which modify the internal structures of its very tissue." 
 
There is a a paragraph break here in 1956/1982 but not in 1934. I think what Vygotsky means by "complex processes of an internal character" is that the type of generalization is no longer simply the formation of a larger and larger circle of operations including more and more "stuff", it is a qualitative transformation--even an IMPOVERISHMENT, in terms of empirical content--of meaning. 
 
When the child begins to think about "nuclear families" in the abstract, there is a LOSS and not just a GAIN; the families of the child's friends disappear form the circle of operations and are replaced by nameless faceless hordes of families down through history.
 
Vygotsky goes on:
 
"There are only two aspects which we always encounter in the concrete study of thinking, and both of these are of primordial importance."
 
The first one is "the growth and development of child concepts or word meanings". I think THIS part is an attempt by Vygotsky to get around a very tricky problem. He cannot use the word "complex", because that's now forbidden; teaching in complexes was outlawed in 1931. 
 
If he says "the functional equivalent of a concept" then he reduces his account to a purely functionalist account, and this section is all about how new structures (e.g. indication as opposed to ostension, nomination as opposed to indication, signification as opposed to nomination) enable new functions. So he uses "word meanings". 
 
And yes, you are right, this means that word meanings are NOT equivalent to concepts, EXCEPT for children thinking and talking in concepts. 
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
A correction to the sloppy notes I wrote on this three years ago:
 
If, for example, the word “apples” belongs to the determined structure which indicates a group of concrete objects (that is, a complex), then only a given circle of operations is possible (indicating, naming, referring, etc.). Another circle of operations (e.g. classifying, defining, exemplifying) is possible within the limits of another structure (a scientific concept of the “apple” as opposed to crabapples, hawthorns, pears, etc.). The transition from the indicative, nominative function of language to the signifying, conceptualizing function modifies the internal structure of the very tissue of thinking: the correct use of plurals and the article system are the phylogenetic (should be SOCIOGENETIC, CULTURAL, not phylogenetic) manifestations of this transformation, and they may happen well before the ontogenetic transformation of child thinking takes place, in the form of pseudoconceptual thinking.
 
dk
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
--- On Thu, 5/5/11, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:


From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Subject: Re: [xmca] last on concepts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Thursday, May 5, 2011, 7:25 PM


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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