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

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

This is from: 
Luria, A.R. (1961) The role of speech in the regulation of normal and abnormal behavior. New York: Liveright.
 
ARL has a lengthy description of an experiment I remember doing as a child (my mother was doing psychology with a behaviorist supervisor). A light flashes, and you have to respond to the stimulus. 
 
In my mother's experiment, I had to drop a marble into a hole, and if I did it well enough I got M&Ms as a reward (that's the part I remember). But in ARL’s experiment, you have to squeeze a bulb (which makes a pen move on a moving sheet of paper). Disappointingly, he doesn't tell us what the reward was.
 
ARL has the child squeeze TWICE in response to ONE stimulus. That is not so easy for very young children; they tend to either go crazy, squeezing a lot, or else just squeeze once, or not do anything at all.
 
So ARL has the child do self-directed speech. When the light flashes, the child has to say "Go! Go!" and squeeze the bulb each time. This works extremely well, BUT only with older children.
 
71: "All attempts to make use of the regulatory role of the child’s own speech at the age of two to two-and-a-half ended in failure. The speech system of children at this age is still imperfect and to obtain even the simplest verbal reacitons to conditioned signals proved impossible: moreover such attempts impeded the organized motor reactions of the child. (..) Quite different results were obtained in children of three to four years, especially those whose speech had been thoroughly trained in kindergarten." 
 
Here, Luria says, the kids would shout "Go! Go!" while doing the task, which "interested them greatly; their verbal reactions were always strictly coordinated with the signals, the latent periods being much more stable than those in the motor reactions." 
 
On pp. 84-85, ARL has trained a child to squeeze the bulb TWICE using "Go! Go!" and asks himself if the child is simply responding to “Go!” as a signal or if the SIGNICATIVE aspect of the signal is important. 
 
In other words, suppose that instead of having the child say "Go!" TWICE, we have the child say "I shall press the bulb twice". The point is that the language is not directly connected to the action—it’s in the FUTURE tense, and there is a SINGLE utterance for TWO actions (or, if you prefer, SIX words for two actions); here, Luria, argues, the effectiveness of self-directed speech must be attributed to the SIGNIFYING function.
 
pp. 85-86: "It might seem that the alternation introduced by us into the experiment is insignificant. In reality, however, we have fundamentally changed the conditions of the experiment. While in the first variant the regulatory influence of the verbal reactoin could proceed form two isolated impulses ('Go!' 'Go!'), these two isolated impulses are now fully removed, and the regulatory influence can proceed only from the SIGNIFICATIVE side of the self-instruction, in other words, from the elective system of connections which was firmly established by these words in the course of the previous experiment. Moreover, in the new variant of the expermiment, the impulse side of the verbal self-instruction even comes into conflict with its signficative side: according to the latter, the child has to press the balloon twice, while the impulse side of the words 'I shall press twice!' contains only a single, protracted, ennervating signal.” 
 
Luria then discovers that three to four year olds will only press the bulb once (but more slowly). Conclusion (p. 92):
 
“(…A)t this early stage—at least in conditions of our laboratory experiments—this regulatory influence proceeds from the nonspecific impulse aspect of the child’s own speech rather than from its elective, significative aspect. And if by this time the nonspecific influence of speech of others is almost fully overcome in the child, it still persists with regard to the child’s own speech.”
 
On pp. 103-106 he describes using this experiment with people who suffer from Parkinsons. The idea is that in these patients the lower psychological processes have degraded, but it’s possible to use the higher ones to compensate. Sure enough, as reported in Vygotsky, Parkinsons patients who cannot actually walk can go up and down stairs, avoid stepping on chalk lines, and use their volitional control mechanisms to compensate. So Luria asks his patients to “wink and press” and finds that “more is less”, that is, more work is actually less error, and more difficulty is actually less inability, because the volitional functions are mobilized to compensate for the impaired nonvolitional ones.
 
Finally, on pp. 138-141 he tries the SAME experiment with "oligophrenic" patients (that is, severely mentally retarded" and discovers that these do not have the ability to self-regulate through speech because while their lower functions are fine they do not have linguistic abilities beyond the indicative and nominative functions; they cannot SIGNIFY!
 
I think THIS is the sense in which Vygotsky and Luria believed that higher psychological funtions GENERALIZED in a way that the lower ones did not. It wasn't that being good at, say, algebra, helped you do foreign languages; that was Thorndike's idea of generalization and Vygotsky more or less accepted that it didn't happen.
 
But they believed that the ability to sever language use from its signaling function, from its purely indicative function, and to give it a function that involved restructuring a subject-object relation as a subject-subject one, a signifying function--that was not only generalizeable, it was the common link between all the higher psychological functions.
 
There's a rather alarming article in the Vygotsky Reader by Leontiev on the development of voluntary attention where Leontiev really does take the position that ontogeny recapitulates sociocultural progress. This is very alarming, both because it is Haeckelian in its methodology and because it explicitly embraces the "primitive = child" idea of "advanced races" (Guess who?)
 
(
But if we accept that the underlying idea is not "literacy" or "western logic" but instead the signifying function, the ability to use language subject-to-subject and then subject-to-self and not simply as a tool for acting on objects, this whole hierarchy of races disappears. There are no peoples anywhere who do not use self-directed speech, at least not as far as I know. Jaynes actually argues that this is why shizophrenics have a particularly exalted status in the Bible, where they are known as prophets.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
 
Steve: You can find the article in the Vygotsky Reader, which is downloadable from Leiden University on more or less the same terms as the free Dewey. Check out the link near the bottom of Andy's Vygotsky page:
 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/
 
dk

--- On Wed, 1/7/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Wednesday, January 7, 2009, 4:33 PM

Derek and Martin--

We are trapped by our language and appear able to maintain the needed
double-sided, spiraling, approximation to reality we seek only within a very
right theoretical frame and well grounded examples. This is both the good
news and the bad news: words are NECESSARILY polysemic. There cannot be a
single word-thought relation because thought (all accept Derek's rapid
simulation version for this discussion) is is a dynamic temporal process
that cannot be reduced to a single, "instant" or solid unchanging
thing.

How could the following not be true, Martin: *My* alternative is, I would
argue, what Vygotsky meant: when I can speak silently to myself the
*physiology* of my brain has changed. This would be to say that the
functional brain systems
(as Leontiev calls them) responsible for vocalization become able to connect
*directly* to the functional systems responsible for action, without needing
any longer to pass through the articulatory and sensory apparatus of vocal
tract and ears.

That is, what would it mean if there was a new functional organization of
behavior and no change in the way that is accomplished by that part of the
inter.intra linked processes that are human life??


I just a copy of Luria's neurolinguistics for other reasons, but he most
probably has something interesting to say in this regard.
mike
On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 2:44 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> I forgot to say that the suggestion that we replace 'reflection'
with
> 'representation' was just what I was afraid to hear. This would
bring us
> right back to Kant and cognitivism. As Derek well knows, right?
>
> Martin
>
>
> On 1/7/09 4:18 PM, "Derek Melser" <derek.melser@gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> > Martin, you ask whether there is a more active-connoting synonym of
> > 'reflect'.
> What about 'represent'? Rorty's book, Philosophy and the
Mirror of
> > Nature,
> was about the representational theory of mind. The metaphor of
> > innerness, of
> people doing things inside their own heads, and the metaphor of
> > thoughts
> representing reality, are two different metaphors. But they go
> > together very
> well, as the longevity of traditional Western epistemology and
> > the
> funds-attracting power of modern cognitive science show.
>
>
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