Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Behaviourism

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

It would be helpful to clarify this wouldn't it, David.
In Vygotsky's speech, when he says:

"Classical reflexology ... reduces everything to a common 
denominator. And precisely because this principle is too 
all-embracing and universal it does not yield a direct 
scientific means for the study of its particular and 
individual forms."

I took this to be a damning criticism of reflexology, but 
maybe "reaction" is different from "reflex"?

On "Behaviourism," I have always taken this word in a very 
broad sense as including all those approaches which say that 
"consciousness" is not a legitimate object for science.

Vygotsky says: "Consciousness is only the reflex of 
reflexes" which he says have a "social origin". And he says 
this in the context of praising Wm James. But he goes on to 
*criticise* reflexology for *excluding* mental pheneomena 
from its investigations, i.e., he criticises reflexology for 
what I have always called behaviourism (though I may be 
eccentric in that use of the word).

So my reading he criciises reflexology and behaviourism, but 
to different readers he is both a reflexologist and a 
behaviourist. :) As he says: "Kings are not always royalists."

As Alice would say: "mysteriouser and mysteriouser."

Andy


David Kellogg wrote:
> eric--
>  
> On p. 31 of "Making of Mind", Luria writes of arriving in Moscow from Kazan in 1923:
>  
> "The situation in the institute when I arrived was peculiar indeed. All of the laboratories had been renamed to include the term 'reactions': there was a laboratory of visual reactions (perception), of mnemonic reactions (memory), of emotional reactions, and so forth. All this was meant to eliminate any traces of subjective psychology and to replace it with a kind of behaviorism." 
>  
> Luria clearly thinks that "reactology" really was a kind of relabelled behaviorism. So do I!
>  
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
>       
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Andy Blunden http://home.mira.net/~andy/ +61 3 9380 9435 
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Hegel's Logic with a Foreword by Andy Blunden:
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