Yes, I just tripped over Eugene's article again yesterday looking for
something else.
Jim Wertsch goes a different direction, preferring to distinguish
mastery and internalization -- he is thinking about Russians who mastered
the version of history they were fed in Soviet times, but disbelieving
(e.g., not internalizing) it.
Lets take the summary of the Galperin positions you provide:
the key feature of Gal'perin's analysis is
the idea that
there is a specifically human plane of action that "enables humans to
act with
symbolic substitutes of objects without those objects being physically
present."
And that this plane is what, for better or worse, is labeled by the
somewhat misleading
term "internal plane of action."
Now, doesn't work of abacus experts with a "mental abacus" (Hatano et al,
also summarized in a paper by me and Jan Derry on my website about tools
and intelligence) fit this defintion? An abacus expert, hands folded in
his/her lap (usually his I suspect in this case) can be given a set of
10 digit numbers, say, a dozen, and asked to add them as fast as the
experimenter can pronounce them. And the expert does so with no abacus
in site. Of course, the abacus expert is participating in a culturally
organized activity, although a somewhat odd one. But the actions of the
expert certainly appear to imply the ability to act with
symbolic substitutes of objects without those objects being physically
present."
mike
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