Re: [xmca] A Flock of Already Roasted Pigeons

[Dana Walker <Dana.Walker@unco.edu>]

Madeline,

How many students are in the Greeley Cohort? Last time I looked at URSA
there were only 3 students registered for 605, and Sasha said he's checking
the numbers to eliminate under-enrolled classes next week. Do you have an
email list of the Greeley cohort, so that I could email them to register?

Thanks,

Dana  


On 4/4/09 10:40 PM, "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com> wrote:

> 
> Mike--
> 
> Thanks to you and your freind Reindeer for the unicorn. It's a welcome
> addition to something that my former grad students and I were discussing over
> roasted pigeons, Shanghai pasta and a mean Australian Merlot.
> 
> I told our group about your etymological analysis and suggested that
> "scientific concepts" (that is, "научных понятий") really means "instructed
> concepts" or "taught concepts" in the same way that oбучeния really means
> something like "instructed learned". That's why Prout translates the term as
> "academic concepts"
> 
> Yongho pointed out that in Korean, and in Japanese, and in Chinese, the term
> we use for "spontaneous" as opposed to "nonspontaneous" concepts is really
> "naturally occurring" as opposed to "artificial". Obviously, we have to be
> careful not to confuse artificial concepts in the sense of instructed concepts
> with artificial concepts in the sense of the experimental ones of Chapter
> Five. But Vygotsky does say, at the beginning of Chapter Six, that there is a
> sense in which instructed concepts are artificial.
> 
> Now, Shushu says that science concepts are really just one kind of "instructed
> concept". Other kinds include ethical concepts (which are taught in Korea as
> opposed to natural morality children bring from home), aesthetic concepts (as
> opposed to naive realism), and of course the kind of sociological concepts
> which Vygotsky is REALLY talking about in Chapter Six (e.g. "proletarian" as
> opposed to "My daddy is a worker"), which most Western academics would
> probably NOT accept as scientific.
> 
> In Korea there is also a special, polite register of Korean that is used
> informal education and which needs formal instruction. And of course ALL
> foreign language word meanings, for reasons that Vygotsky makes very clear,
> are instructed concepts. The "analogy" between science concepts and foreign
> language concepts is not just an analogy; it's a pointer to a deepgoing
> psychic affinity.
> 
> This affinity is what Yongho is pointing to when he argues that spontaneous
> means "natural" rather than simply "random" or "aleatory" and that
> nonspontaneous means in some sense "artificial" or "designed" instead of
> purely "scientific". This is why Jay says that science concepts are really
> just distinguished by their position in a set of thematic relations (they "fit
> in" to a hierarchy as opposed to just "following on" from a given common
> graphic-visual purview).
> 
> Of course, as "fit in" and "follow on" suggest, it is partly a matter of a
> paradigmatic relationship between concepts instead of the concrete syntagmatic
> one of everyday life, the sort of thing LSV notes when he argues that the
> reason why similarity relations emerge conceptually before difference ones do
> is because they require a hierarchy, a structure of generalization, while
> differences can be noted perceptually.
> 
> So, I think this is how our group would mull over your questions, although of
> course if you were actually here we would be too busy being Korean and
> deferential and plying you with wine and kimch to give such direct answers.
> 
> MIKE: 1) LSV appears to believe that scientific concepts only arise in school,
> where school entails special forms of discourse and written language. Does
> that imply that people who have not attended school or acquired writing think
> only in everyday concepts?
> 
> SNUE: I think we would say NO, because science concepts are only ONE form of
> volitional, hierarchized, and paradigmatized concept. There are other kinds.
> People in courtrooms use volitional concepts, and so do practitioners of
> religious rites. Every painting is a volitional concept. Even people who have
> followed a programme of apprenticeship instead of formal instruction will be
> able to describe their knowledge in a fairly volitional way.
>  
> MIKE: 2) What is the relation between indicative/nominative/----->naming
> things that cannot exist and everyday/scientific distinction.
> 
> SNUE: I think we'd say that the connection is this. Concepts do not "exist" as
> objects, and yet scientific language in English tends to treat them as such.
> So because of the way our language works we need some way of naming things
> that do not exist.
> 
> Halliday points out that making the word "growth" out of the verb "grow" or
> "depth" out of the word "deep" is an instance of METAPHOR, a creation of a
> thing that never was and never can be, purely for the convenience of creating
> hierarchies and writings sentences that look a little like mathematical
> equations. (Eunsook and I did  something on this, actually:
> 
> 
> http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~content=a907046497~db=all~order=page
> 
> (as always pdfs available from the author on request!)
> 
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education (SNUE)
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
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