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

Super helpful, Martin. thanks
I clearly now need to go back and understand what Piaget meant by a social
version of genetic epistemology!
more and more threads in the labyrinth; where is Ariadne when I need her!
mike

On Sun, Mar 9, 2008 at 12:11 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> Mike,
>
> I didn't mean that Cs is not social. It is *social,* but studying its
> development is not a matter of (a social version of) genetic epistemology,
> at least as Piaget defined that enterprise.
>
> On 3/9/08 1:45 PM, "Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >
> > Wow. Consciousness is only possible as co-knowledge (so-znanie) but its
> not
> > social? Who is the con-spirit-or, or what?
>
> And I can't resist rsponding to this... (below)
>
> > In a note where I was asking Martin's help on a closely related issue,
> he
> > referred to something he called (approximately), "simple stimulus
> > consciousness" which didn't interest him. But this simple
> > consciousness/knowledge that you see a rock in front of you does
> interest
> > me! (And I am clearly boring in THIS regard!). Why am I interested?
> Because
> > I believe that the mechanisms of this "simple" form of consciousness
> REQUIRE
> > imagination,
>
> I didn't mean to say that this simple Cs is uninteresting, but only that
> it
> develops into more complex forms: that Cs changes. What I would now like
> to
> try to add is that I think that V was working towards the view that
> concepts
> are in interaction, and so transform Cs. I say this to agree with your
> proposal that imagination is needed with even the simple forms of Cs.
>
> I can see (at least) two accounts of concepts in V's writing. In Crisis
> and
> in Educational Psychology he presents the first account. Later (in
> Pedology
> of the Adolescent for example) he rejects this account and substitutes a
> second.
>
> The first is that concepts are a form of abstraction, facilitated by
> naming.
> In Crisis, for example, he writes:
>
> ³Everything described as a fact is already a theory. These are the words
> of
> Goethe to which Munsterberg
> refers in arguing the need for a methodology. When we
> meet what is called a cow and say: ³This is a cow,² we
> add the act of thinking to the act of perception, bringing
> the given perception under a general concept. A child
> who first calls things by their names is making genuine
> discoveries. I do not see that this is a cow, for this
> cannot be seen. I see something big, black, moving,
> plowing, etc., and understand that this is a cow. And
> this act is an act of classification, of assigning a singular
> phenomenon to the class of similar phenomena, of
> systematizing the experience, etc. Thus, language itself
> contains the basis and possibilities for the scientific
> knowledge of a fact. The word is the germ of science
> and in this sense we can say that in the beginning of
> science was the word² (47)
>
> This idea that we "add" the act of thinking *to* the act of perception
> seems
> just like Kant, to me.
>
> The second account comes later. In the Pedology of the Adolescent he first
> rejects the view that concepts are abstract and mental (again citing
> Goethe,
> this time critically):
>
> ³Here we come close to establishing one of the central points that must be
> explained if we are to overcome the usual error relative to the break
> between form and content in the development of thinking. From formal
> logic,
> traditional psychology adopted the idea of the concept as an abstract
> mental
> construct extremely remote from all the wealth of concrete reality. From
> the
> point of view of formal logic, the development of concepts is subject to
> the
> basic law of inverse proportionality between the scope and content of a
> concept. The broader the scope of a concept, the narrower its content.
> This
> means that the greater the number of objects that the given concept can be
> applied to, the greater the circle of concrete things that it encompasses,
> the poorer its content, the emptier it proves to be. The process of
> forming
> concepts according to formal logic is extremely simple. The points of
> abstracting and generalizing are internally closely connected with each
> other from the point of view of one and the same process, but taken from
> different aspects. In the words of K. Bühler, what logic terms an
> abstraction and generalization is completely simple and understandable. A
> concept from which one of the traits is taken away becomes poorer in
> content, more abstract and augmented in scope, and becomes general."
>
> In its place he proposes that a concept is a process that penetrates
> deeply
> into the concrete character of reality, in a complex unity of judgment,
> apperception, interpretation, recognition, and we could add imagination,
> no?
>
> "The concept begins to be understood not as a thing, but as a process, not
> as an empty abstraction, but as a thorough and penetrating reflection of
> an
> object of reality in all its complexity and diversity, in connections and
> relations to all the rest of realityŠ. Thus, we see that for the
> psychologist, the concept is an aggregate of acts of judgment,
> apperception,
> interpretation, and recognition. The concept taken in action, in movement,
> in reality, does not lose unity, but reflects its true nature. According
> to
> our hypothesis, we must seek the psychological equivalent of the concept
> not
> in general representations, not in absolute perceptions and orthoscopic
> diagrams, not even in concrete verbal images that replace the general
> representations ­ we must seek it in a system of judgments in which the
> concept is disclosed² (54-55).
>
> So, to gloss this, conceptual thinking is a transformed consciousness in
> which multiple psychological functions work together.
>
> Martin
>
>
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Received on Sun Mar 9 12:20 PDT 2008