Re: [xmca] More on Martin: Consciousness vs knowledge?

Let me see if I can OPERATIONALIZE this distinction between consciousness and knowledge. Because it seems to me that if consciousness is merely self-knowledge, the distinction is not very interesting (I guess I'm a boring person that way). On the other hand, if consciousness is VOLITIONAL knowledge, ENABLING knowledge, ENACTABLE knowledge, then I'm interested.
   
  As always, the key question for me is: what can you teach with it?One common problem in elementary English classes is articles. I think this is caused by a complete MISUNDERSTANDING of the structure of the problem. We first teach the distinction between countable and uncountable nouns. We then focus like a laser beam on the countables and teach the distinction between plural and singular. We then focus on the singular countables and teach that they require one of two articles in English, a definite one ("a") or an indefinite one ("the").
   
  All of this is quite Saussurean, which is another way of saying that it is closer to science fiction than science. You can easily see this by trying to use it to explain why we can say "Marriage is a market" but not "*A marriage is market". But even if it were all quite true, by focusing our rule in this way we have largely excluded the phenomena for which we need it. We have created an elegant system of knowledge quite disinfected of all practical work. And as a result we can't actually use it to choose which article we need in a pinch.
   
  The other day in class we were practicing with various puppets--I got this amazing four foot red dragon in the Seattle airport when I was on holiday and everybody wanted to be photographed with the dragon curled around their waist and over one shoulder. So I had them do something like this:
   
  T: I like dragons. (concept)
  This is a dragon. (example)
  The dragon's name is Yongwang! (name)
   
  And in my undergraduate class we often do this when we introduce the textbook characters:
   
  T: This is Minsu. (name)
  He is Mina's brother. Any other brothers? (concept)
  Yes, Tony's a brother too. (example) Tony is Julie's brother.
   
  From this we can see that actually "a" and "the" do NOT exist on the same plane; one is more specific and concrete and the other is more abstract and closer to the concept. One is much more like a NAME and the other is much more like a NUMBER. "The" is the name that nouns have when they don't have a name. "A" is the number we give to examples when they don't have a number. ("Marriage" is a concept, and we don't pluralize it because we need to be able to distinguish it from plural examples of marriage, but "a market" is an example, one of the many delightful phenomena of free exchange.)
   
  It seems to me that this way of structuring the problem is correct, if we mean by correct that it corresponds to praxis comprehended and not simply science fictionalized. So I think we need a threefold distinction between every day explanations which need to be systematized and hierarchized, scientific explanations which need to (and can) ascend to the concrete, and non-scientific explanations which need to be destroyed. I guess I think that's what LSV is really up to in "The Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology".
   
   I guess I think this is where the distinction between learning and development really comes from: in learning we need to add to knowledge, but in development we have to get rid of falsified forms which have now become a fetter to the increase of knowledge, consciousness and volition. I realize that this puts me very clearly on the teleological, historical, anti-relativist end of cultural historical psychology, and that's a pretty unfashionable spot at present. But I think there are concepts that you can do more stuff with and there are other concepts that you can only do very narrow things with and then there are other concepts that are so narrow as to be essentially false (such as the phonics rule "When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking", which if it were true would have to rhyme "does" with "doughs"). All this is quite independent of the word "primitive" with which it has somehow become confused: As Mike and Eugene Subbotsky point out, even
 scientists go to the theater. Saussure, on the other hand, was no more a savage than he was a scientist.
   
  David Kellogg
  Seoul National University of Education
   

       
---------------------------------
Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
Received on Sat Mar 8 23:41 PST 2008