Re: [xmca] Missing Negation?

[Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>]

I am not sure David--children can count by imitation in a most impressive
way long before they have any concept of number.
Carol

On 22 September 2011 13:39, David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:

>
>
>
>
>
> I'm translating Chapter Three of Tool and Sign, and I find it quite
> unnerving. On the one hand, it appears, to be little more than a restatement
> of the end of the previous chapter, sometimes word for word (e.g. "We stand
> before a conclusion of enormous theoretical importance"). And on the other
> hand, we really DO stand before a conclusion of enormous theoretical
> importance,
>
> This is, I think, the very first explicit formulation of the genetic law,
> to the effect that each and every psychological function appears in the
> process of cultural development twice: once as an inter-psychological (that
> is, interpersonal. And therefore social, and therefore cultural-historical)
> category and then again as an intra-psychological (that is, an
> inter-functional, and therefore internal, So it seems entirely appropriate
> to tell each leg and each foot separately exactly:where we stand.
>
> In fact, when we read it more closely, we see that what appears to be
> redundancy is really just generalization and abstraction: Vygotsky and Luria
> arrive at the genetic law by:
>
> a) generalizing their previous observation that what appears to be
> speechless thinking at the beginning of development and at the end of
> development can nevertheless be shown to be brought about, in its mature
> form, through speech.
>
> b) generalizing their previous finding the symbolic activity such as speech
> cannot be explained either through invention or through habit formation, or
> indeed through any purely individually based function, either purely
> biological or purely psychological, but only through the interpersonal,
> social, and therefore historico-cultural formation of the personality.
>
> c) generalizing their previous finding that the basic finding that lower
> forms of perception empirically investigated in the previous chapter (viz.
> perception, attention, and memory) are not really connected, either to each
> other or to the corresponding higher forms. But paradoxically, the higher
> forms ARE connected, both to each other and to the lower forms,
> which continue to  participate in a kind of segmentary, subordinate manner
> in their operation.
>
> And the way they generalize is by using counting and calculation as an
> example, because that's really as far as they can get form speech. In fact
> the stuff on counting is the ONLY new empirical material in this WHOLE
> chapter. So right in the middle of Chapter Three, the eighteenth of 26
> paragraphs, Vygotsky and Luria start talking about counting. And they say:
>
> Мы приходим к выводу, что развитие счета сводится к участию в нем основных
> психических функций, переход от дошкольной арифметики к школьной не есть
> простой, непрерывный процесс, но процесс преодоления первичных элементарных
> закономерностей и замены их новыми, более сложными. Покажем это на
> конкретном примере.
>
> Now, I take this to mean:
>
> "We come to the conclusion that the development of counting can (NOT--DK?)
> be reduced to the participation in it of basic psychological functions, and
> the transition from pre-school arithmetic to  school arithmetic is not a
> simple, continuous process, but one of overcoming primary elementary
> patterns and replacing them with new and more complex ones. Let us show this
> with a concrete example."
>
> I know, I know. There isn't a "not" there. But there should be, shouldn't
> there?
>
> David Kellogg
> Hankuk University of Foreign Studies
>
>
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-- 
*"All labour that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be
undertaken with painstaking excellence."*
*-  Martin Luther King, Jr.*
**
*Visiting Lecturer
Wits School of Education
Research Fellow*
*Linguistics Dept: Unisa
*
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