A key issue in how we analyze the role of play or fantasy in
activity is what distinction we make between 'immediate' and
'mediated' activity. So, e.g. Ana Shane suggested that the
fantasy situation is distinct from and to be compared with
"objective, given, present world/situation". But in this sense I
don't think we have 'immediate' activity, since all activity is
mediated by meaning, or at by something that functions like a
sign or symbol, except perhaps in the very earliest stages of
human development. Both Piaget and Vygotsky, and so far as I know
everyone in the field, assumes that the onset of fantasy and
make-believe play itself depends on, or is an aspect of,
rudimentary semiosis, even before (and perhaps much before) there
is evidence of language use in this function (i.e. non-linguistic
signs are used, in which the sign-vehicle is an object, and the
evidence for sign-use is that the activity context of the object
is one consistently appropriate to some other object, and already
in the child's repertoire: e.g. the stick as horse (being ridden,
talked to), the box as cat (moving/being moved as the cat had
across the mantle, being ventriloquized with 'meeow'); Eva's
examples like the toy feeding-bottle as real feeding-bottle, etc.
So both fantasy and 'reality' are, at this stage and later,
semiotically mediated. If we are to understand what
differentiates them, we must look instead to how the mediation
differs. My Batesonian meta-relation among activities view would
be quite like Ana's further citation of Bretherton /Hofstadter:
in propositional calculus there is really not much to choose
between 'reality' and 'fantasy', for the 'reality' is as purely
formal and only indirectly material as the 'fantasy'. But there
is a meta-mathematical argument (the basis of 'reductio') in
Hofstadter: a hypothetical proposition need not be 'true' to be
the premise of a derivation; one can argue about whole
hypothetical derivations. The hypothetical derivations are
'embedded' in my earlier terms in the first-order mathematics,
not of the propositional calculus itself (the rules of a valid
derivation), but of the activity of mathematical reasoning and
its meta-rules (about constructing such objects as hypothetical
derivations). It is the 'meta' relation between the hypothetical
or true propositions and the activity of mathematical
argumentation that gives the power of 'fantasy' to _reductio_ and
its kin.
It is also interesting to note that this works only when the
outer frame is a material activity and not another formal
propositional scheme. In fact, this is my interpretation of the
significance of Goedel's theorems of meta-mathematics (see
Postscript in _Textual Politics_): no formal system or theory can
contain itself in its own domain (i.e. can be meta to itself),
this is possible only by way of the material activities of
construing meta-like relations. It is real arguing theorists-at-
work, not formal theories, which represent the ultimate possible
goal of science. (_A fortiori_, BTW, language as a formal system
is _not_, contrary to frequent claims, its own meta-language in
this strong sense, though of course _language-use_ can be.)
JAY.
PS. Debi Goodman is quite right, I think, to see in the activity/
meta-activity relation the basis of what is called meta-
cognition, which would seem to me to be semiotic activity that is
oriented to (and so necessarily in the meta relation to) the
semiotic aspects (though not only these) of some of our own other
activity. It's tricky to sort out because while all activity
(past age ?) is semiotically mediated, or has a semiotic aspect
to it, some activity can be construed as doing more direct
semiotic work, and some of that gets called cognition. I like
Keith Sawyer's Schiller quote, but note that from my point of
view (and I think implicitly Keith's), it is not play as such
which provides the nexus, but play-in-a-frame, i.e. the moving in
and out of play, the relations we construe between play and not-
play.
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JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York.
BITNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC who-is-at CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU