Hi all
I happened to pick up a book at the annual booksales, that, published in
1998, seemed to me to provide an answer to a question posed on the XLCHC
once upon a time, when the Batesonian question about the blind woman and
her stick ;-) had been transformed into one about seeing-eye dogs.
Here's a minimum context:
>Date: Fri, 24 Mar 89 06:54:16 pst
>From: mcole who-is-at weber (Mike Cole)
>Subject: Gibson/Zaporozhets
>To: xlchc@ucsd.edu
>
> Alexander Zaporozhets, who worked on early preschool development inthe
>sociohistorical approach used to spend a lot of time with Gibson. We know
>too little of Zaporzhets' work, as Volodya Zinchenko keeps advsing us.
>
> OK, now, since we are discussing culture and mind and we have your
>interpretation of the seeing eye dog as "reading to" the blind person (who
>must be a reader, not a read-to-er), let me suggest the real, but
>impovrished sense in which "culture" structures what the dog "reads" to
>the blind person versus "a seeing person reads" to the blind person (I
>ignore here, for simplicity's sake, the actual situation of acquisition
>which is VERY interesting. Lets get that film.). The dog, while incapable
>of culture use/creation none-the-less, by virtue of the history of its
>species, come to live in interaction with us in environments which are
>themselves culturally organized. This is MORE than just the "recipes"
>procedural and declarative representations in our heads, or "member's
>knowledged." It is CONCRETIZED (literally, not metaphorically) in the
>streets across which a the person/dog system is moving: the geometrically
>regular streets and buildings, the flow of people, the multitude of rules
>signalled by "unrelated" environmental events (also culturally organized
>such as red or green lights flashing over traffic lanes at time intervals
>which are culturally constrained.....and so on). The dog must coordinate
>with that culturally organized environment, but only as external
>constraint. The dog is constrained by, but does not generate, the cultural
>understandings/ procedures which result in just those arrangements of
>buildings and so on.
>
>Thus, the dog "reads to the person" in a manner shaped by culture, but not
>shaped the same way as another person would do the shaping in coversation.
>That other person would be a culturer sharer/user/ maker in a way the dog
>cannot be. So that person would "read to" the blind person in a
>qualitatively different way than the dog... and still, the person has to
>be a reader, and would have to be even if the person were not blind. It
>just that in each succeeding case, the "reader-to-er" shares more and more
>culture/mind/experience with the person being read to. on reading doesn't
>go away, it is just that different kinds of constraints are made more
>accessible. The level of culture is more than a grain size, it is a kind
>of patterning that invfuses all grain sizes.
>mike
>Date: 3 April 1989, 15:10:01 EST
>From: PPSYHDF at UCCCVM1 (Hal Fishbein)
>Subject: MORE ON BLIND MEN AND DOGS
>To: XLCHC at UCSD
>
>At the risk of seeming dumb, has anybody talked to a blind person who both
>uses sticks and seeing eye dogs? The answer may be illuminating.
>Hal Fishbein
The book I picked up was *Planet of the Blind* by Stephen Kuusisto, and it
contains the following description:
"On the street we are a magnet for those who once knew a blind
person, or who have a blind family member, or know somebody who is going
blind. On Lexington Avenue in Manhattan a businessman asks me how to get
help for his wife who has been diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa. We're
at the curb waiting for the light when he notices how I check the time with
my braille watch by opening its hinged crystal and feeling the raised dots
on the face.
'That's such a beautiful thing!' he says. 'I've never seen anything
like it. I don't mean to intrude, but my wife is going blind, and I've been
trying to learn about ways of adjusting.'
'I'll tell you what,' I say. 'Let the dog concentrate on this
street crossing, and then I can talk.'
On the far side we discuss the correct mechanics for crossing the
street.
'I need to focus at crossings,' I tell him. 'I'm the one who makes
the decision about when to cross, not the dog. So I must listen carefully
to the traffic flow. When I think it is safe I command the dog to move
forward. At that point the dog evaluates the command by checking it against
what the cars are doing. The whole procedure demands our combined
attention.'
'You know, all these years, when I've seen a blind person with a
guide dog, I thought the dog was watching the street lights! I believed it
was the dog who ran the whole show. I never stopped to think of it as a
partnership!'"
What do YOU think?
Eva
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