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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