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

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

> How could the following not be true, Martin: [...]
> 
> 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??

Finally I have said something obviously correct, in place of things probably
incorrect!  :)  (And I had a feeling as I wrote that I was ripping off
Luria, so thanks David for filling in that gap.)

But what I was trying to say, Mike, is that when speech disappears it is not
that it has turned into "mental speech." No, what has happened is that the
child has learned to control their body, their brain, to get tasks
accomplished without needing voluntary attention. Everyone seems to get
excited about 'internalization' because they interpret it as the creation of
'mental action,' which of course is *so* much more important than physical
action!

No! When the brain is able to take care of tasks that's great, in large part
because consciousness (and in that sense mind) can keep doing what it has
been doing, actively coping with the world. Mind, consciousness, is (as
leontiev insists) *in* the world. When I learn to ride a bicycle at first I
have to pay attention to what my feet are doing. With time my feet, with a
bit of help from my brain, are able to move the bike without my attention.
Does that mean I now have 'internal, mental control' of peddling? Of course
not. 

Yes, all new functional organization of behavior must involve changed brain
functioning. But why do we place so much emphasis on the reorganization in
which 'internalization' occurs?

I'll take the liberty of quoting at some length those guys Hood, McDermott
and Cole (1980), who said it very well:

<quote starts, after citing the famous 'general law':>
We agree, especially concerning the origins of functions, and in our
research have found corroborative evidence. But where our viewpoint
diverges and where our research indicates otherwise concerns the
thoroughness and inevitability of internalization. Here we understand
"internalized" to mean that the psychological function is independent of
special interactions with the socio-environmental surroune. It is ideally
expressed by such activities as remembering a list of words such as the
states
and capitals of the U.S. without aid of pencil, paper or any external
sources of
information. To Vygotsky, it is interaction between the ears, in which the
individual supplies both halves of the dialogue (Wertsch and Stone, 1978).
In our observations of children in various settings-schools, tests, and
clubs-we are constantly confronted with how little we need to postulate
internalization in order to describe the children's behavior. While
internalization may be a proper gloss on what people become more able to do
as they grow from infancy to adulthood, our data show that in interpersonal
situations most psychological functions remain to a large extent on the
interpersonal level. Parties to any social interaction are invariably
engaged in
organizing environments for sequencing psychological activities; complete
internalization is not necessary. People help arrange for constancy in
personality and intellectual skills by arranging environments which allow
for
and encourage the use of the particular personalities and skills they have
developed. To Vygotsky's statement that "All higher functions originate as
actual relations between human individuals" (p. 57) we would add that
under many different circumstances of everyday life, that is where they
remain.
People learn about themselves and about each other by the work they do
constructing environments for acting on the world. And this is how we must
come to know them as well.
To summarize so far, we are using two of Vygotsky's major contributions
and taking them a step further together: the dynamic and developmental view
of psychological process and the social embeddedness of higher psychological
functions are, we want to claim, crucial to understanding behavior at any
point in its history, not merely in its infancy.
<end of quote>

Hood, L., McDermott, R., & Cole, M. (1980). "Let's try to make it a good
day" - Some not so simple ways. Discourse Processes, 3, 155-168.



On 1/7/09 7:33 PM, "Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> 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??


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