Re: [xmca] Re: microcosm/unit of analysis and xmca discourse

["Vera Steiner" <vygotsky@unm.edu>]

David,
Your last message provided a very clear analysis of the microcosm/unit
analysis.
Thanks, Vera
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
To: <mcole@weber.ucsd.edu>; "xmca" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 23, 2009 5:29 AM
Subject: Re: [xmca] Re: microcosm/unit of analysis and xmca discourse


On the subject of dress. Until I was forty years old, I didn't really know 
how to tie a necktie. When I got a job at a university, it became every 
important for me to learn, and I asked my father, who, being rather old 
fashioned, wore a necktie every single day of this teaching life.

My father was enough of a teacher to realize that this was a skill that had 
to be imparted through ACTION and not through WORD MEANING. So he tried to 
SHOW me. But he was also enough of a teacher to realize that tying a necktie 
requires a mirror-image reversal of perspective, and so he made the mistake 
of trying to show me how to tie a necktie on MY neck rather than just 
showing me how to tie a necktie on HIS neck.

He couldn't do it. This is a man who has tied quite literally thousands of 
neckties. But the skill of tying a necktie on your OWN neck does not seem to 
generalize to tying neckties on other people's necks. This is, of course, 
what Thorndike found when he looked at perceptually based skills like 
estimating line segments. He found that these skills (and also motor skills 
like tying knots) did not generalize.

But notice that SOME of my father's skills DID generalize. For instance, he 
knew that in order to teach somebody a motor skill you need to SHOW them and 
not TELL them. He also knew that it's better to take THEIR perspective in 
showing them than to take your OWN. These skills are NOT perceptually based. 
They are not motor based. They are higher level "skills" (I'm rather unsure 
whether we should continue to call them skills; it seems to me that 
"knowledge" might be more appropriate here.)

Of course, that's what Vygotsky told Thorndike. He said that the reason why 
the various skills on his tests wouldn't generalize was that they were all 
lower level psychological functions, which are embedded in separate motor 
routines. But that's NOT true of higher level psychological functions, all 
of which are mediated by word meanings. My father's teaching skills are now 
almost completely unconscious (because they have been automatized) but they 
were painstakingly built up through decades of three hour lectures and 
workshops and laboratory sessions.

Now, it seems to me that I understand what Nikolai was saying very well (and 
I understand Andy not at all!). Nikolai argued that a microcosm is different 
from a unit because a macrocosm is not reducible, without remainder, to many 
many "cosms" which are in turn reducible (again without remainder) to 
"microcosms". But a "unit of analysis" has to be reducible in this way.

This is essentially what Leontiev believes about "activity", which is 
reducible without remainder to "actions", in turn reducible without 
remainder to operational conditions. But of course it is absolutely NOT true 
of Vygotsky's real model, which is not Leontiev's "mediated action" but 
instead Marx's commodity. We cannot say that capitalist economic relations 
are reducible without remainder to commodities.

Some commodities are mostly exchange value and other commodities are mostly 
use value and they are not even reducible to each other. In the same way, 
some mediating artefacts are mostly symbols and others are mostly tools, and 
these are qualitatively different; by interacting, they produce a whole 
macrocosm which is not reducible to the some of its microcosmic parts.

Symbols are not reducible to tools, because they have an additional 
function, that of acting on the user's mind, which is not found in the tool. 
For that reason, we cannot say that a mind is reducible to nothing but 
tools, or for that matter to nothing but symbols. A mind is a macrocosm 
which cannot be reduced to the microcosms of word meanings.

Nikolai is quite right that the philosophical tradition of Goethe, the 
Gestalt and the "macrocosm" is one philosophical tradition, and the 
philosophical tradition of Democratus, the atom, and the analytical unit is 
another. But I do NOT think this means that Vygotsky was following one 
philosophical tradition in Chapter One of Thinking and Speech where he 
argues that the meaningful word is a unit of thinking and of speech (and of 
social interaction and communication) and a completely different one in 
Chapter Seven where he says that the meaningful word is a microcosm of 
consciousness.

I think it means that in Chapter One he is laying out what his analysis will 
accomplish, and in Chapter Seven he is summing up what it has accomplished. 
That is why he uses "unit" in the first chapter and "microcosm" in the last.







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