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Re: Fwd: Fwd: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation



Picking up on what Boris says, my reading of Lenin and Soviet writers' use of "reflection" is not in the sense of a thought-object being an image of the matter-object, but rather that the objective world, including the activity of the organism, imprints itself on the organism through a material process of interaction between bodies, as in photography, fingerprints, scratches and so on, *as well as* the concious reconstruction of the world in concepts. This does not lead to an idea of these traces totalising into a thought image. I think David made a correct point here. One can be a philosophical dualist or monist whether you use a theory of reflection or not.

Ilyenkov, for example, distinguishes between reflection in the ascent from abstract to concrete and reflection in descent from concrete to abstract, thought being a process which involves both.

Ilyenkov on Lenin's Marxism:
http://marx.org/archive/ilyenkov/works/positive/positiv2.htm



Andy

Mike Cole wrote:
Translation of note from Boris:

Hi Mike,

"Otrazhenie" and "reflexia" -- in the work of Leontiev and generally in the
tradition of Soviet
psych-- are completely different concepts. I well understand that for
translators this causes no less difficulty that similar cases such as
pridment, object, subject. Otrazhenie usually is understoo as a
philosophical category including not only psychological but also physical
phenomena (otrazhenie in a mirror, traces in the sand, photograhy, etc.).
    Reflexia is understood as self observation (introspection) of one's
psychic processes (sensation, feeling, images, thoughts, reasoning, etc).
LSV and many other authors (inlcuding
Piaget) considered, the reflexia arises in adolesence.
Its difficult for me to know how to translate otrazhenie in the work of ANL
and LSV, in the work of ANL and often in the work of LSV it does not mean
reflexia. Moreover reflexia has nothing to do with the term, reflex.

Thanks for the input, Boris.

Привет, Майкл,

"Отражение" и "рефлексия" - в работах Леонтьева и вообще в традиции
советской психологии - это совершенно разные понятия. Я хорошо понимаю, что
для переводчиков это создает не меньшие трудности, как и в другом похожем
случае (предмет, объект, субъект).
Отражение обычно понимается как философская категория, включающая не только
психические, но и физические явления (отражение в зеркале, следы на песке,
фотографирование и т.д.).
Рефлексия же понимается как самонаблюдение (интроспекция) своих психических
процессов (ощущений, чувств, образов, мыслей, умозаключений и т.д.).
Выготский и многие другие авторы (в том числе Пиаже) считали, что
рефлексия возникает у подростков.
Мне трудно сказать, как переводить слово "отражение", но, очевидно, что в
работах Леонтьева и отчасти Выготского это слово не совпадает по значению со
словом "рефлексия". В свою очередь, рефлексия ничего общего не имеет с
рефлексом.

Best regards, Boris Meshcheryakov

--- *Пн, 5.1.09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>* пишет:

От: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Тема: Fwd: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation
Кому: "Boris Meshcheryakov" <borlogic@yahoo.com>
Дата: Понедельник, 5 январь 2009, 3:59

Boris, can you help here?
mike


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
Date: Sun, Jan 4, 2009 at 4:01 PM
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>


At the end of last year several of us were trying to figure out whether
'reflection' is a good term to translate the way Vygotsky and leontiev wrote
about 'mental' activity. Michael Roth pointed out that the German word that
Marx used was Widerspiegeln rather than Reflektion (see below). I don't
think anyone identified the Russian word that was used. I still haven't
found time to trace the word in Vygotsky's texts, English and Russian. But
an article by Charles Tolman suggests that the Russian term was
'otrazhenie.'  Online translators don't like this word: can any Russian
speakers suggest how it might be translated?

Reflection (German: Widerspiegelung; Russian: otrazhenie)

Tolman, C.W. (1988). The basic vocabulary of Activity Theory. Activity
Theory, 1, 14-20.

Martin

On 10/25/08 12:40 PM, "Wolff-Michael Roth" <mroth@uvic.ca> wrote:

Hi Martin,

Marx does indeed use the term "widerspiegeln" in the sentence you cite.

Das Gehirn der
Privatproduzenten spiegelt diesen doppelten gesellschaftlichen
Charakter ihrer Privatarbeiten nur wider in den Formen, welche im
praktischen Verkehr, im Produktenaustausch erscheinen - den
gesellschaftlich
nützlichen Charakter ihrer Privatarbeiten also in
der Form, daß das Arbeitsprodukt nützlich sein muß, und zwar für
andre - den gesellschaftlichen Charakter der Gleichheit der
verschiedenartigen
Arbeiten in der Form des gemeinsamen Wertcharakters
dieser materiell verschiednen Dinge, der Arbeitsprodukte.


But the Duden, the reference work of German language says that there
are 2 different senses. One is reflection as in a mirror, the other
one that something brings to expression. In this context, I do not
see Marx draw on the mirror idea.

For those who have trouble, perhaps the analogy with mathematical
functions. In German, what a mathematical function does is
"abbilden," which is, provide a projection of, or reflection, or
whatever. You have the word Bild, image, picture in the verb. But
when you look at functions, only y = f(x) = x, or -x gives you what
you would get in the mirror analogy. You get very different things
when you use different functions, log functions, etc. Then the
relationship between the points on a line no longer is the same in
the "image", that is, the target domain.

We sometimes see the word "refraction" in the works of Russian
psychologists, which may be better than reflection. It allows you to
think of looking at the world through a kaleidoscope, and you get all
sorts of things, none of which look like "the real thing."

Michael





On 25-Oct-08, at 9:01 AM, Martin Packer wrote:

Michael,

Here's one example from Marx, and several from Leontiev, if we can
get into
the Russian too.

"The twofold social character of the labour of the individual appears to
him, when *reflected* in his brain, only under those forms which are
impressed upon that labour in every-day practice by the exchange of
products." Marx, Capital, Chapter 1, section 4.

" Activity is a non-additive unit of the corporeal, material life of the
material subject. In the narrower sense, i.e., on the psychological
plane,
it is a unit of life, mediated by mental *reflection*, by an *image,*
whose
real function is to orientate the subject in the objective world."
Leontiev,
Activity & Consciousness.

" The circular nature of the processes effecting the interaction of the
organism with the environment has been generally acknowledged. But
the main
thing is not this circular structure as such, but the fact that the
mental
*reflection* of the objective world is not directly generated by the
external influences themselves, but by the processes through which the
subject comes into practical contact with the objective world, and which
therefore necessarily obey its independent properties, connections, and
relations." ibid

" Thus, individual consciousness as a specifically human form of the
subjective *reflection* of objective reality may be understood only
as the
product of those relations and mediacies that arise in the course of the
establishment and development of society." ibid

Martin
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