A few quotes from Thought and Language that focus on context:
Thought and Language
Word Meaning
http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/vygotsky3.html
"The first and basic one is the preponderance of the sense of a word over
its meaning - a distinction we owe to Paulhan. The sense of a word,
according to him, is the sum of all the psychological events aroused in our
consciousness by the word. It is a dynamic, fluid, complex whole, which has
several zones of unequal stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of
sense, the most stable and precise zone. A word acquires its sense from the
context in which it appears; in different contexts, it changes its sense.
Meaning remains stable throughout the changes of sense. The dictionary
meaning of a word is no more than a stone in the edifice of sense, no more
than a potentiality that finds diversified realisation in speech"
"The last words of the previously mentioned fable by Krylov, "The Dragonfly
and the Ant," are a good illustration of the difference between sense and
meaning. The words "Go and dance!" have a definite and constant meaning,
but in the context of the fable they acquire a much broader intellectual
and affective sense. They mean both "Enjoy yourself" and "Perish." This
enrichment of words by the sense they gain from the context is the
fundamental law of the dynamics of word meanings. A word in a context means
both more and less than the same word in isolation: more, because it
acquires new content; less, because its meaning is limited and narrowed by
the context. The sense of a word, says Paulhan, is a complex, mobile,
protean phenomenon; it changes in different minds and situations and is
almost unlimited. A word derives its sense from the sentence, which in turn
gets its sense from the paragraph, the paragraph from the book, the book
from all the works of the author"
In an Ed Psych. class I was in Vygotsky was described as a contextualist in
reference to the whole is greater than the sum of its parts from Gestalt
psychology. One reason for this IMHO is Vygotsky took a dialectical
approach and if one does not interpret him in that manner he can be reduced
to either a contextualist or universalist. As Daniels mentions in Russia
Vygotsky in used to validate both teacher dominated and interactive
approaches to education.
http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/daniels.html
I find Andy's paper very interesting in how he describes Vygotsky's
dialectical approach as part of a dialectical triad including Hegal ans
Marx.
http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/dialectics.html
An irony for me is that Vygotsky attempted to resolve tensions between
teacher directed-child innitiated, contextualist-universalist, but is often
used to validate one or the other of the oppositional poles.
Nate
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