Martin, David,
My computer is in the shop for repairs - a bottle of water got away
from me - so I have not been able to participate or keep up with
this discussion, which has an interesting center question - how did
Vygotsky explain the relationship between word meaning, concept, and
generalization?
Martin lists the five planes Vygotsky uses to describe the complex
transformations from word to thought (or thought to word). In Ch 7
sections 7.2 thorugh 7.5 (end) he analyzes the five planes in the
order from exterior toward the interior - (1) the plane of the
external aspects of speech, (2) the semantic plane, (3) the plane of
inner speech, (4) the plane of thought itself, and (5) the plane of
motivation.
Vygotsky used a memorable metaphor at the end of Ch 7, which fits
into some of the points both Martin and David make - Vygotsky
likened thoughts (the fourth plane) to a cloud which showers words,
and motivation (the fifth plane) to the wind that sets the cloud in
motion.
A question I've been pondering is: which of these five planes
correspond to the notions 'word meanings', 'concepts', and
'generalizations'? Martin brings this very question up.
It seems reasonable to eliminate the first and last planes as
candidates for "planes" within that which the three notions
represent exist.
Vygotsky makes it very clear that the first plane, the external
aspects of words, (such as sounds), are quite different from word
meanings. Likewise, he differentiates the "first" plane from all
the "inner" planes of thinking and speech. He explains that the
semantic plane is the first of the inner planes (making it the
second plane overall, going from out to in).
And it also seems reasonable to eliminate the last or fifth plane,
motivation. Vygotsky saw motivation as affect and volition, and
other processes that set the cloud of words into motion.
It does not appear that Vygotsky viewed word meaning, concept or the
generalization as existing on the first or fifth "planes." Do
others also see it this way?
This leaves us the second, third and fourth planes (the semantic
plane, inner speech, thoughts themselves) to sort out how Vygotsky
conceived them in relationship to the three terms we've been
pondering - word meanings, concepts and generalizations.
One possibility is that Vygotsky saw these three terms as not
corresponding to the same planes. For example, perhaps his use of
the term 'word meanings' corresponded to processes that occur in all
three of these planes, but used the terms concepts and
generalizations to refer to only one or two of the planes. If this
is so, we need to find places where he says something like this.
This would be a strong argument in favor of differentiating 'word
meaning' from 'concept' and 'generalization'.
Another possibility is that Vygotsky believed that all three terms
relate to processes found in all three planes, but do so in
qualitatively different ways. If that is the case, we need to find
places where Vygotsky explains how concepts, generalizations and
word meanings refer to **different aspects** of what he called the
(2) semantic plane, (3) inner speech, and (4) thoughts themselves.
This would provide an interesting argument for differentiating the
'concept' from 'word meaning'.
Still another possibility is that Vygotsky saw the relationships
between the planes and the processes these terms refer to
differently depending on the **direction** of the movement between
thought and word - from out to in (understanding) or from in to out
(speaking). Again, evidence would need to be found to support
this. If it is indeed found that it was Vygotsky's intention, for
example, to think of the concept, generalization and word meaning as
"synonymous" going from thought to word, but **not** synonymous when
going from word to thought ... that would be an interesting twist,
wouldn't it?
There are undoubtedly other possible combinations. I'll mention one
more - the most obvious, because Vygotsky explicitly says this -
that he saw the three terms as referring to essentially the same
process, going both directions, and therefore saw these terms,
insofar as they are referring to processes taking place in "inner"
planes (as psychological processes related to verbal thinking), as
"synonymous." There is pretty solid evidence for this
interpretation, but that does not mean we should not carefully
consider other possibilities, such as the above or others.
********
I think Martin's point about word meanings are progressively
"replaced" by sense needs to be closely examined. Vygotsky explains
that sense is a particular form of word meaning. It is not the
opposite of word meaning, it is not a process that replaces word-
meaning altogether. It is an extremely important aspect of
meaning. And he does emphasize that sense becomes more predominant
over external, social meanings as we go further inside
But do we want to say that sense entirely **replaces** social
meaning in plane 3, inner speech, or thought, plane 4?
Also, the idea that word-meanings altogether completely disappear at
the level of thought is not one I have so far seen Vygotsky
suggesting. Please point me to what I am missing. He uses the
example of observing a boy on a street His point is to compare how
different his observation is within the third plane (inner speech,
with details) from the thought plane, which took in the scene as a
whole. But is Vygotsky actually saying that word meaning - and
therefore verbal thinking - disappears entirely in the fourth plane,
the plane of thought, (or did not yet appear in any way), that words
are now altogether not at all involved in the process of thinking?
Sorry if this message is rambling - I've run out of time on this
store computer - no time to edit ... LOL
- Steve
Martin,
On May 06, 2011, at 04:54 PM, David Kellogg
<vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:
Vygotsky uses the word "moment" a lot, even when he is talking about
space or logic. For example, he says that there are three "moments"
in a particular data set in Tool and Sign, even though they clearly
overlap.
Vygotsky also uses "stage" and "step" a lot, even when he is talking
about temporally overlapping processes. For example, he
differentiates the association, the collection, the chain, the
diffuse complex, and the pseudoconcept as stages of a particular
step, even though in many of his examples (e.g. his gloss of
Idelberger and the first words of Charles Darwin's grandson) they
are superimposed.
In Chapter Seven, Vygotsky uses the rather obvious remark that an
expression like "the victor at Jena" means the same person as "the
vanquished of Waterloo" to point out that object reference and
meaning do not coincide. But what he means is exactly what Halliday
and Jay Lemke mean: they are in fact simultaneously. But they are
logically separate.
Now, how does all this work out in PRACTICE? Of course, you are
right. It all takes time in the real world. I think that's why
Vygotsky is always distinguishing between the phasal aspects of
language (in which he includes lexicogrammar and even object
reference) and the semantic aspects (which are hierarchical and
choice driven rather than linear and time driven)
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Fri, 5/6/11, 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: Friday, May 6, 2011, 4:24 PM
That's an interesting proposal, David. How do you deal, though, with
the way LSV writes of "the complex flow from the first, vaguest
moment of the origins of a thought until its final completion in a
verbal formulation" (#27), and the "motion from thought to word and
vice versa, from the word to the thought. This relation is
represented in light of psychological analysis as a developing
process, which traverses a number of phases and stages"; "This flow
of thought is accomplished as internal motion through a whole series
of planes, the passage from thoughts in words to words in
thought" (#29)?
This sounds to me like passage in time. When he insists that to put
a thought into words is to transform it, reorganize it, and embody
it - "In transforming itself into language, the thought is
reorganized and modified; the idea is not expressed, but finalized
in the word" (#32) - this sounds to me not merely a logical
realization, but a temporal process - a "motion from thought to
speech" (#41).
Indeed, he emphasizes that speech itself necessarily unfolds in time
because thought has to mark the words of an utterance with emphasis
in order to make them comprehensible: " it is obvious that the
speech utterance cannot immediately emerge in its entirety" (#45);
"Thought impresses logical stress down on the words of the phrase,
marking in this way the psychological predicate, without which any
phrase becomes incomprehensible. Speaking requires a passage from
the internal plane to the external, while understanding assumes
reverse motion, from the external plane of speech to the
internal" (#52).
Whereas a Chomskian grammar has all the words of an utterance
prepared simultaneously, and the fact that they are emitted in
sequence is merely an artifact of performance (if we had screens
instead of mouths one could imagine the whole grammatical structure
being displayed at once), in LSV's account of the microgenesis of
speaking from thinking the words need to unfold in time in order
that pacing and emphasis can distinguish what he calls the
"psychological structure" of the sentence from its "grammatical
structure" (#35).
Martin
On May 6, 2011, at 3:17 AM, David Kellogg wrote:
I think that the "five planes" are not modular in the Fodor sense.
I think they represent non-reducible options rather than discrete
moments of time or planes in space.
When Halliday talks about the "stratification" of gesture into
language proper, he speaks of three planes: soundings (roughly,
phonology), wordings (roughly, lexicogrammar), and meanings
(pragmatics, semantics, thinking). I have some problems with
collapsing semantics and pragmatics like this. But I have no
problem with Halliday's basic argument, which is that the
relationship between sounding, wording, and meaning is not
causality: it's REDUNDANCY. It's not the case that a sound
'causes" a word or that a word 'causes" a meaning. Instead, the
relationship of a sound and a word is REALIZED in meaning; it
REDOUNDS in an ideal form we call meaning.
Jay Lemke points out that there is no one to one correspondence
between any two planes, because if there was the existence of that
separate plane would be entirely unnecessary. That means that a
sounding does not correspond to a particular wording which in turn
corresponds to a specific meaning. What happens instead is that a
sounding realizes a particular correspondance of wording and
meaning. Or, if you like, a correspondence of sounding and wording
realizes a particular meaning.
I think that's why Vygotsky emphasizes, not the kind of "time" or
"space" dimension we would normally associate with his use of
planes, but instead that, for instance, a particular motive does
NOT correspond to a specific thought, but can be differently
realized in different thoughts, a particular thought does NOT
correspond to a particular inner speech form, but can be
differently realized in different inner speech forms, a particular
inner speech form does NOT correspond to a particular word but can
be differently realized by different words. It's not that the
planes are really separated in either time or space; it's that they
they are LOGICALLY separated because each plane involves some
choice and because previous choices enter into that plane as a done
deal; the process of redundancy is now realized in a product.
Motive and thought are joined and then realized in inner speech,
and then motive, thought, and inner speech are joined and realized
as the word.
That's how I understand it, anyway! And that's why it seems right
to me to see a concept as a historical extension of this process.
The invention of concepts is the sociocultural continuation of the
same process of psychological stratification, abstraction, and
selection that precipitates "meaning" out of "sense",and the
learning of concepts is the reverse movement in psychology.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
A word does not stand for a meaning; instead, a meaning
it stands for "a wording standing for a meaning". A meaning is not
represented by a at ANY level, because if there was that l in
the A separate comment on the five planes. I
--- 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.
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca