Re: [xmca] last on concepts

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Perhaps this is as good a moment as any to raise some general questions about spatial metaphor in LSV. I've struggled with his various uses of 'inner' and 'outer,' and I feel comfortable when he uses them to describe the different kinds of relations among a totality versus an aggregate.

But 'inner' and 'outer' also seem to be used in the sense of more psychological and less. And in chapter 7 we have the proposal that speech is outer and then all the rest (plans or planes or birds or whatever) are increasingly inner. Until we get to the "final step," which is the "undercurrent" or "subtext," the desire and volition that stand "behind" (or, confusingly, sometimes "next to") speech. Motivation is, we are told, "the last and most concealed internal plane of verbal thinking."

I do have some trouble with this. As Colin said, our most significant motives derive from our social relations, and arguably are out there *in* those social relations, not tucked deep inside us. I think I have an easier time reading someone's motives in their actions than I do their thoughts. But perhaps I'm being too modular? (It wouldn't be for the first time!)

Martin

On May 8, 2011, at 8:30 PM, Martin Packer wrote:

> Good point on the translation, David.  "плане" is a word used throughout the book, though nowhere else as frequently as in Chapter 7. At the end of Chapter 1, for example: 
> 
> Вторая часть нашего исследования посвящена теоретическому анализу основных данных о развитии мышления и речи в филогенетическом и онтогенетическом плане. 
> 
> The second part of our study is dedicated to the theoretical analysis of basic data concerning the development of thinking and speech on the phylogenetic and ontogenetic planes. 
> 
> Martin
> 
> On May 8, 2011, at 7:15 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
> 
>> I want to address one very narrow issue: the question of whether the psychological structure of a sentence can be distinguished from its grammatical structure by atemporal, and even non-linear, means.
>> 
>> In English, and also, I think, in Russian, the psychological subject (what is called "theme" in Hallidayan grammar) marked in a temporal, linear manner: it's the first thing you hear or see. 
>> 
>> Because form follows function rather than the other way around, our grammar has learnt to be rather flexible, and to allow things that really, on purely syntactic grounds, ought to come later in the sentence, to bubble up first. Instead of "I like apples" we encounter sentences like:
>> 
>> (I dislike pears, but...) Apples, I like.
>> Now, apples, THERE's something I like.
>> (Shakespearian): Apples like me. (i.e. "Apples please me").
>> 
>> But this isn't the only way of marking the psychological subject in English, and even in these examples fronting doesn't operate alone but only alongside stress and intonation, as a kind of "inner form" of the outer supra-segmental forms.
>> 
>> Furthermore, temporal and spatial marking of the psychological subject really isn't the rule in many other languages. In Korean, we use a special particle "eun/neun" to mark the psychological subject (the same thing is true in Japanese) and therefore the theme can appear either really appear almost anywhere in the sentence.  
>> 
>> And finally there are languages such as sign language that really DO operate on the principle of having a "screen" rather than a mouth, as Martin speculated. So we can easily see that the distinction between psychological and grammatical subject does not require a linear or spatial processing of different "planes".
>> 
>> I think there is no reason to consider the "planes" in Vygotsky's discussion two dimensional; we can easily imagine, for example, a "more thought" side to inner speech (e.g. "How do you feel about...?") and a "more speech" side as well ("What do you think of...?"). 
>> 
>> Allowing the planes to touch and mingle, as well as differentiate, would allow the model to be three dimensional (so long as we do not confuse the map with the territory, or the model with the phenomenon modeled) without the Charybdis like plug-holes we see in Professor Mack's diagramme.  
>> 
>> So where does the idea of non-touching, non-differentiated, flat, two dimensional "planes" come from? Well, of course, partly it is a translation problem: the sentence that we are arguing about really goes like this:
>> 
>> Это течение мысли совершается как внутреннее движение через целый ряд планов, как переход мысли в слово и слова в мысль. 
>> 
>> "The flow of thought is accomplished as an internal motion through a whole series of plans, as the passage of thought into word and words into thought." 
>> 
>> The word планов can mean a map, a target, a curriculum, a timetable, a model, a foreground, a background, etc. But it doesn't usually mean a two-dimensional geometrical plane, though. For that, Vygotsky uses the term плоскость (mostly in the chapter on Piaget).
>> 
>> However, I think it's not simply a translation problem. I think we non-Russians have, almost hard-wired into the way we think about language, the idea of modularity, of compartments, of black boxes that have inputs and outputs (e.g. Levelt's model of a language "processor").
>> 
>> Veresov is right on this. It's MUCH more likely that Vygotsky had in mind the foreplane and the backstage of a studio theatre, quite like the Moscow Arts Theatre, where he attended performances of Chekhov produced by Stanislavsky or the Vakhtangov Theatre, whre he saw Turandot.
>> 
>> David Kellogg
>> Seoul National of Education
> 
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