Re: [xmca] last on concepts

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Steve,

I'll throw in my 2 cents here...  In chapter 4 LSV traces the phylogenetic roots of both thinking and speaking, albeit in the somewhat indirect way of turning to studies of primates and other animals. (The direct route would be the study of hominids, which is still not easy to do - though the recent work on the evolution of language from a single source in Africa around 60,000 years ago is a fascinating step in that direction.) 

His conclusion is that there is evidence in animals both of a practical, instrumental kind of problem solving that goes beyond mere trial-&-error, and a kind of communication using sounds and gestures. But chimps, for example, show no evidence of "ideation," which he defines as the capacity to operate on the basis of non-actual or absent stimuli. (Had he seen, though Richard Attenborough's videos of Capuchin moneys drying pine nuts for a week and then skillfully using huge stones which they transport considerable distance to crack them? I think not.) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3udzhDvsG-s>

And animal communication, he argues, is primarily that of emotional reaction, and the sounds made do not function as signs. (There is considerable debate over this issue today, too.)

Then, in the same chapter, he returns to ontogenesis and argues that in the young child too there is speech that is not yet intellectual, and thinking that is not yet verbal.  Stern had claimed that child language has three roots, a tendency to express feelings, a tendency to communicate with others, and an "intentional" tendency, that is to say, an ability to represent objects on the world, which is unique to humans and cannot be found in any animal. LSV had rejected this explanation as empty, presuming what it needed to explain - the capacity for semiosis. His explanation of this capacity is that it is the consequence of the meeting and interaction of the two lines of development. He reviews his own research on inner speech, introduced in chapter 2, to describe the four moments of this meeting. It is still possible for an adult to have speech without thinking, or thought without speaking. But LSV's principle interest in T&S is the interaction of the two lines that leads to verbal thinking.

Martin
 
On May 9, 2011, at 5:10 PM, Steve Gabosch wrote:

> David,
> 
> Thanks for your always intriguing comments, such as the ones from a couple days ago, copied below.
> 
> I've been needing some help understanding the last statement in the following paragraph from Vol 1, p 115, the Minick translation.  It relates directly to your comments (and also a question Jay asked a couple weeks ago, if I remember), about practical activity and verbal thinking.
> 
> The meaning of the final sentence puzzles me:
> 
> "Moving now from the issue of the genesis of inner speech to the issue of how it functions in the adult, the first question we encounter is one that we have addressed earlier in connection with issues of phylogenesis and ontogenesis: Are thinking and speech necessarily connected in the adult's behavior"  That is, can the two processes be identified with one another?  All that we know that is relevant to this issue forces us to answer this question in the negative.  The relationship of thinking and speech in this context can be schematically represented by two intersecting circles.  Only a limited portion of the process of speech and thinking coincide in what is commonly called verbal thinking.  Verbal thinking does not exhaust all the forms of thought nor does it exhaust all  the forms of speech.  There is a large range of thinking that has no direct relationship to verbal thinking.  In this category, we could include the instrumental and technical thinking that has been described by Buhler and what is commonly called practical intellect."
> 
> According to the last sentence, Vygotsky appears to have included "the instrumental and technical thinking that has been described by Buhler and what is commonly called practical intellect" into the category of non-verbal thinking.
> 
> Could you or someone help me understand this statement?
> 
> - Steve
> 
> 
> On May 7, 2011, at 11:17 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
> 
>> 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
>> 
>> 
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