RE: [xmca] last on concepts

["Denise Newnham" <dsnewnham@bluewin.ch>]

Dear Steve, Martin and David,

I was reading once more through the whole discussion and there are several places that left me thinking. Steve you quoted LSV on his argument against Piaget. 

 "One could not more clearly express the concept that the need for logical thought, or the need for the knowledge of truth itself...

 AND LATER

"it is similar to the general concept that the physical world is a function of social agreement....

LSV is making use of a group of words that he perceives as concepts. I find it difficult to say that they are word meaning. It appears that the concepts here required judgment and levels of reflection at all the five levels before the words needed to make sense and give meaning could retire to the shadows.

I found the Zinchenko's (In Daniels,"thought and work", 2007) article quite troubling as he wrote "However, Vygotsky's formulations did have contradictory elements. Sometimes these contradictions appear not just on the same page, but in the same phrase. Consider, for instance, his statement: "we were interested in one thing-the discovery of the relation between thought and word as a dynamic process as a way from thought to word, the creation and embodiment of thought in a  word" (Luria, 1982. P. 38). IF thought was not created in the word, then it is not there, and never has been; and if thought was not embodied, then it was there and , as Mandel'shtam would say "returned into the palace of shadows"...etc etc 

So what was the use of the word concept in the extracts above and the concepts that are given as examples of being concepts? The formation of a concept to my mind in its levels relies on this understanding and once understood the following question comes to mind, is the formation of a concept the same in all minds?

I like the image of thought and word being dialectically tied by a red line. 

Denise




-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On Behalf Of David Kellogg
Sent: dimanche 8 mai 2011 08:17
To: Culture ActivityeXtended Mind
Subject: Re: [xmca] last on concepts

Steve:
 
I think that thinking and speech have what we would call, in Korea, "jeong", or in China "yuanfen". "Jeong" and "yuanfen" are both indicate a fateful encounter that neither party can ever forget, no matter what their previous or subsequent history. Unsurprisingly, both "jeong" and "yuanfen" have romantic connotations, and both are symbolized by a red thread, which is something that Vygotsky likes to use too.
 
So Chapter Four, which is in some ways our most "schematic"and general chapter (because it mixes up the phylogenetic, the sociogenetic, and even the ontogenetic), describes how thinking becomes verbal and speech becomes rational, somewhere around age two. 
 
This is, it seems to me, the genesis of verbal thinking. And once past that fateful point, neither thinking nor speech will ever forget each other, and neither can ever be quite the same again. Vygotsky explicitly REJECTS Buhler's idea that "Werkezeudenken" (practical activity) in adults is somehow non-verbal. Once thinking has been verbalized, you can never really go back to the pre-cultural, natural state of thinking; everything you think will be at least potentially and often really verbal.
 
The units in which verbal thinking takes place are verbal: they are word meanings, even if they sometimes do not actually leave the "palace of shadows". You may not have time to completely verbalize these word meanings, but they are nevertheless completely verbal in their psychological nature. After all, when you READ something, you are thinking in a completely verbal manner, even though you are going MUCH faster than you would ever be able to speak, and it is even possible to take in blocks of text in a non-linear manner.
 
Concepts are another example of how thinking and speech can never really forget their fateful meeting at age two. As ought to be clear (not least from the work of Jay Lemke) concepts come in a structure which is paradigmatic rather than syntagmatic; they grow on tall trees with deep roots, and do not proliferate temporally like crabgrass. Yet precisely in their thematic relations (overconcepts, examples, specific cases) they are clearly examples of verbal thinking.
 
In Chapter Five (Sections Seven and Eight) Vygotsky reminds us that generalization is really only ONE of the two intellectual "roots" of the concept and it is in some ways antithetic to the other, namely abstraction. I always think of this as "adding on" versus "taking away": generalization involves expanding the pile of shared features and abstraction involves cutting away the merely important to reveal the absolutely essential (and yes, I think that Vygotsky's concept of concepts is essentially essentialist). 
 
English speakers tend to use GENERALIZATION: we say, for example, "I like apples" rather than "I like the apple". Koreans, in contrast, use ABSTRACTION:  they say "I like the apple". A really rational thinker, say, a Korean three year old, might find an expression like "I like apples" rather puzzling, expecting a rider that excludes rotten, unripe, and sour apples.
 
Except in a metaphorical sense, we cannot say that a good saxophone solo has lexicogrammar. The sax plays notes, not vowels or consonants, and a musical line is neither a noun phrase nor a verb phrase. But if you imagine that, say, Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins have no intonation, no stress, no phrasing, then you are mired in what we can only call a "natural" state of musicality (see the end of Chapter Four, Section Three), the state in which dogs howl at phonograph records. Good saxophone is "talky" music in much the same way that Mozart is, and it is no accident that jazz has selected a main instrument that sounds or can be made to sound very like a human voice. 
 
Classical music too eventually settled on string instruments to carry the main melodic line rather than brass or woodwinds or percussion). Last night I went to see Poulenc's opera "The Dialogue of the Carmelites", which is surely one of the most undialogic operas ever written. It's wordy but not talky, the music is woody rather than stringy, with two harps that can never quite agree to disagree. In the libretto, everybody says exactly the same thing, and one is hardly surprised when the Carmelites go on singing after their heads are cut off.
 
But today I am sitting in my office, listening to Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B minor. Dvorak wrote it after the death of his sister-in-law, with whom he was hopelessly in love. It's a threnody and a love letter with everything removed except thought and motive. Is there sense? Well, there is certainly something sensuous, and it is not animal; it is scarcely even human.
 
(Rostropovich! How is it possible to be unhappy on a planet shared with such a sensiblity?)
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education  

 

--- On Sat, 5/7/11, Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com> wrote:


From: Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] last on concepts
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Saturday, May 7, 2011, 5:57 PM


My computer is back.  Yea.

Afterthought on my last post - I knew I shouldn't have tried to discuss sense vs meaning and the "disappearance" of word meaning without T&S in front of me, let alone writing in a rush.    I went home and reread 7.5 in T& S and can see I got both of those issues wrong in my last message.   Meaning is of course one aspect of sense (not the other way around) and Vygotsky does appear to be saying that the word disappears when we get past plane 3 (inner speech) and enter plane 4 (thought).

This opens some questions to ponder.  While Vygotsky does seem to by saying that words only begin in the third plane, inner speech, he refers to **all five** planes as "verbal thinking."

This adds a fourth term to consider, along with word meaning, concept, and generalization - what did Vygotsky mean by verbal thinking?

- Steve


On May 6, 2011, at 9:05 PM, Steve Gabosch wrote:

> 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.
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