Re: [xmca] signs and tools-for-thought: an analogy?

I don't know enough about physics except to be a great person to demonstrate
the
errors of naive physics folks who are asked to think about where a rock will
drop
from a moving airplane or the forces operating on a spring attached to a
wall and pulled
by an aging academic.

But vis a vis mediated human activity, my intuitive take on Vygotsky's ideas
is that human
thought, in so far as it incorporates the products of prior human actions,
has a unique structure
that gives rise to higher psychological functions, an emergent outcome in
which tool and non-tool
contributions are both essential and irreducible to "thought" and "tool."
This may be more Pierce than somebody else, or simply mike cole's
confusion.
mike

On 9/10/07, David Williamson Shaffer <dws@education.wisc.edu> wrote:
>
>
> Analogies are always dangerous, of course. (Wasn't it Kundera who said to
> be
> careful of metaphors, because a single metaphor can give birth to love?)
>
> In any event, in technical terms heat is not Brownian motion, but
> temperature is. This from wikipedia, for example:
>
> "The temperature of a system is defined as simply the average energy of
> microscopic motions of a single particle in the system per degree of
> freedom."
>
> (For those wondering, heat is the transfer of this energy from one body to
> another.)
>
> Tony is clearly more of a Peirce expert than I, but the idea of a
> toolforthought is to suggest that thinking is, as he suggests, a tool
> activity--where signs and physical objects are all tools, and therefore
> also
> thoughts, and thinking is an emergent property of the inter-activity of
> toolforthoughts. That is, as Katie and I suggest, toolforthoughts are the
> cognitive instantiation of Latour's mutually mediating mediators.
>
> Which also suggests at least part of why the idea is so unsettling. It is
> awkward to conceive of our own experience as the product of a kind of
> socio-cultural/intellectual Brownian motion.
>
> I hope perhaps Jay Lemke and others who are more versed in actually
> physics
> than I will weigh in too. Meanwhile, there is a little flash animation of
> Brownian motion for those who think visually at
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature
>
> David
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
> > On Behalf Of Tony Whitson
> > Sent: Sunday, September 09, 2007 10:25 PM
> > To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
> > Subject: [xmca] signs and tools-for-thought: an analogy?
> >
> > In an earlier post, I repeated Peirce's view that thought is
> > sign-activity, and asked, if signs are merely tools for thought, then
> what
> > do we take thought, itself, to be?
> >
> > Reflecting on that, it occurs to me that it might be helpful to suggest
> > this as an analogy:
> >
> > To say that signs are tools for thought, is rather like saying that
> > molecules are tools for heat.
> >
> > To think of thought AS sign activity, is it helpful, as a lame analogy,
> to
> > think of heat AS Brownian motion?
> >
> > Tony Whitson
> > UD School of Education
> > NEWARK DE 19716
> >
> > twhitson@udel.edu
> > _______________________________
> >
> > "those who fail to reread
> > are obliged to read the same story everywhere"
> > -- Roland Barthes, S/Z (1970)
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Received on Mon Sep 10 09:04 PDT 2007