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

["Mike Cole" <lchcmike@gmail.com>]

McDermott and Hood/Holtzman kept bad company, but we appear to have some
convergence here with Kellog and Packer.
mike

PS-- With proviso that a serious look into the self control/language-thought
development lit using Luria's methods described by David (the rewards were
almost certainly verbal approval or lack thereof) is needed. I would also
draw your attention to the close relationship of the methods used here and
the "combined motor method" used by Luria in the 1920's and published in the
Nature of Human Conflicts, itself a very interesting book.

On Wed, Jan 7, 2009 at 6:57 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

> > 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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