More and more fascinating. Thanks Ana! Time once again to return once again,
and hope
that I understand matters a little better this time around.
mike
On 2/2/07, Griswold, Olga <ogriswol@humnet.ucla.edu> wrote:
>
> Ana,
>
> Thanks. Ignore my previous message with the request for the picture. I
> just got it.
>
> Olga
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Ana Marjanovic-Shane
> Sent: Fri 2/2/2007 11:21 AM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: Re: [xmca] Translation Problem?
>
> I am sending the picture that is missing below as an attachment.
> Ana
>
> Ana Marjanovic-Shane wrote:
> > David,
> > You may be right in noticing that Vygotsky's use of the terms
> > longitude and latitude is different from standard geographic one.
> > Longitude is thought in geography as a distance (east or west) between
> > any meridian and the Prime Meridian. And therefore is on the
> > "horizontal" co-ordinate. While latitude is a location in terms of
> > degrees of North or South from the Equator, and therefore is on the
> > "vertical" coordinate.
> > In my translation of Vygotsky to Serbo-Croatian, Vygotsky uses these
> > words in the same way as in your translation --and opposite from the
> > geographic usage.
> > What he called Longitude (Dolgota (Rus.)/Duzhina (Srb.)) described
> > points along a Meridian (i.e. different latitudes on the same
> > longitudinal degree).
> > And what he called Latitude (Shirota (Rus.)/Shirina(Srb.)) was the
> > east-west dimension, a place of a Meridian in relationship to other
> > Meridians (and usually called longitude).
> > In other words between the two coordinates he imagined the "vertical"
> > (South-North) one to be the "longitude" and the "horizontal"
> > (East-West) one to be the "latitude". I drew a little picture long
> > time ago on the margin of my copy. It looked something like this (if
> > the picture does not follow here, it will probably be in an attachment):
> > Globe
> >
> > I imagined the concrete, sensual graphic quality of the concepts to be
> > on the "South Pole" and the abstract, general to be on the "North Pole".
> > What for me was important was an understanding that no individual has
> > all the concepts (around the globe) on the same degree of
> > generalization/abstraction (Vygotsky's longitude), and that at any
> > point of time in a person's life the state of all of the concepts
> > could be represented with a jagged graph line around the globe.
> > Elina, Why do you think that here Vygotsky did not follow the Hegelian
> > understanding of abstract and concrete?
> >
> > Ana
> >
> >
> > Peter Moxhay wrote:
> >> David,
> >>
> >> Checking my copy of the Russian collected works (Vol. 2, pp.
> >> 273-274), it looks like the translation is correct: longitude for
> >> "dolgota" and latitude for "shirota."
> >>
> >> Peter
> >>
> >>
> >>>>> vaughndogblack@yahoo.com 02/01/07 4:22 PM >>>
> >>>>>
> >> In Chapter Six of "Thinking and Speech" (in Volume One of the
> >> Collected Works), Vygotsky is discussing how scientific concepts,
> >> unlike spontaneous ones, emerge swaddled in a dense network of
> >> related concepts. He uses a kind of Cartesian grid, only he imagines
> >> it in three dimensions, as global coordinates instead.
> >> One set of coordinates gives the location of the concept in
> >> terms of what we might call "object/meaning" or "meaning/object":
> >> that is, is the concept identical with a concrete object or action
> >> (say, "my goldfish", or "I kicked the ball") or is it almost pure
> >> generalization (e.g. numbers, where the concept is only very remotely
> >> linked to the concrete action of counting)
> >> The other set of coordinates gives the location of the concept in
> >> terms of other concepts at the same level of generality (that is, the
> >> same proportion of "object/meaning"). The problem is, which set
> >> of coordinates is which? Here's how the passage appears in the
> >> Collected Works:
> >> "Imagine that all concepts are distributed at certain longitudes
> >> (does he mean latitudes?) like the points of the earth's surface
> >> between the North and South poles. Concepts are distributed between
> >> poles ranging from an immediate, sensual, graphic grasping of the
> >> object to the ultimate generalization (i.e., the most abstract
> >> concept). The longitude (he must mean the latitudinal location) of a
> >> concept designates the place it occupies between the poles of
> >> extremely graphic and extremely abstract thought about an object.
> >> Concepts would then be differentiated in longitudinal (that is,
> >> latitudinal) terms depending on the degree to which the unity of
> >> concrete and abstract is represented in each concept. Imagine further
> >> that the globe symbolizes for us all reality which is represented in
> >> concepts. We can then use the concept's latitude (that is, longitude)
> >> to designate the place it occupies among other concepts of the same
> >> longitude (that is, latitude), concepts that correspond
> >> to other points of reality just as the geographical latitude
> >> designates a point on the earth's surface in the degrees of the
> >> earth's parallels." (226-227)
> >> I THINK I understand what he's trying to do. Unlike the
> >> Cartesian grid, he wants to have two distinct poles at which
> >> variation is not really possible: one of them (which we'll call the
> >> North Pole) is really the spontaneous concept, which is pretty much
> >> sui generis; the child does not have other concepts at the same level
> >> of generality as "wood" or "water" that occupy exactly that
> >> conceptual space. At the other pole (we'll call it the South Pole) we
> >> have the purely scientific or mathematical concept; the number of
> >> names of any particular number is infinite, but they all have exactly
> >> the same abstract meaning. In between we find concepts that are very
> >> much in between, that is, the conceptual space they occupy is
> >> slightly different from neighboring concepts which are hyponyms or
> >> hypernyms and thus vary on the North-South axis, but also different
> >> from analogous concepts which are at the same level of abstraction
> >> but which cover different conceptual spaces. That is why there
> >> are only two poles in this system.
> >> The problem is that the passage only makes sense to me when I
> >> substitute latitude for longitude and vice versa. At first I thought
> >> that it was my usual inability to keep "left" and "right" from
> >> getting mixed up. Then I thought maybe LSV was using "longitude" to
> >> mean "position on a line of longitude" (that is, latitude). I checked
> >> the Vakar and Hanfmann translation (1962) and they simply use
> >> "coordinate grid", which unfortunately doesn't allow poles. I also
> >> looked in a German translation from 1964, but it has the same text as
> >> the Minick translation. Can anybody clear this up? What does the
> >> Kozulin translation say?
> >> David Kellogg
> >> Seoul National University of Education
> >>
> >>
> >> ---------------------------------
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> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
>
> --
> //
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> /Ana Marjanovic-Shane, Ph.D./
> /151 W. Tulpehocken St./
>
> /Philadelphia//, PA 19144///
>
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>
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