Paul, are you aware of the critical (Marxist) psychologist Klaus
Holzkamp who, in true dialectical materialist manner, developed
psychological concepts out of the phylogenetic origins of humans--he
says everything else is a reification of folk psychology and its
dominant (hegemonic) but unfounded categories, or something to that
nature.
Michael
>1) The existence of languages in which the semantic core concept of AGENCY
>is not tied to the syntactic category of SUBJECT. It turns out that most of
>these languages are associated with groups who missed out on the
>agricultural revolution entirely (Australian aborigines) or had come to the
>western hemisphere before the AG revolution and perhaps didn't participate
>in its independent New World development -- this latter being a conjecture
>at present since I'm not sure which new world languages have this
>characteristic. .
>
>2) The transition to agriculture involved a fundamental change in the
>tool-mediated relationship between human groups and the natural environment.
>In the paleolithic, according to the archaeological record, humans didn't
>intervene in the natural processes that provide their means of living. They
>collected what "nature" provided. They were highly mobile, travelling with
>the seasons to areas where game was found or where specific plants were
>providing fruits suitable for human consumption. With the neolithic, the
>emergence of agriculture involves a process whereby humans actively
>intervene in the natural processes; ie, the long "history" of controlling
>nature to serve human needs begins.
>
>My conjecture is that the specific practical anchor that ties SUBJECT
>(grammatical) and AGENT (semantical) comes about as a result of this
>specific configuration of subject-tool-object where the subject is human
>group, the tools are all the practices for clearing land, planting,
>controlling competing plants and animals, irrigating (especially), and the
>object is nature as a productive force itself..
>
>The key change here (transition to agriculture) is that nature is no longer
>a provider, ie a subject that must be dealt with as any other subject, but a
>force that is subjected to human agency, a force that loses (gradually to be
>sure, like over the space of thousands of years--at least up until
>Aristotle) its qualities of AGENCY and becomes a simple FORCE not unlike
>gravity. This process also yields our specific historico-cultural notions
>of individual, subject, and agency.
>
>These are musings, eh?
>
>Paul H. Dillon
------------------------------------------------------ Wolff-Michael Roth Lansdowne Professor Applied Cognitive Science MacLaurin Building A548 Tel: (250) 721-7885 University of Victoria FAX: (250) 472-4616 Victoria, BC, V8W 3N4 Email: mroth@uvic.ca http://www.educ.uvic.ca/faculty/mroth/ ----------------------------------------------------
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