Re: [xmca] A Flock of Already Roasted Pigeons

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Mike--I'm forwarding your messages to the others concerned. Actually, Yongho and Shushu are both ex-SNUE (undergrad and grad school) and now work as teachers. Yongho's doing a Ph.D. (and Shushu appears to be doing sporadic research in salsa dancing) and we only meet once a week. But here's what I think.

1, the socio-institutionally arranged-for concept. Right NOW we are making sense of Chapter Six in Thinking and Speech, so I think that the idea of "instructed" concepts is more specific (hence probably more useful) than the alternative you propose (which I think expands Yongho's "artificial concepts"). But of course this isn't true in the contexts you suggest and it's not even true in other chapters of T&S (e.g. Chapter Four).

So I think we are not at all hostile to the move you propose. In fact, we've been noticing all the long that Vygotsky does an awful lot of the same thing, laying VIOLENT hands on terms taken from other people (e.g. "syncretism" from Piaget, "complexes" and "pseudoconcepts" from the Sterns, and "potential concepts" from the Buhlers) and hollowing them out like a gourd in order to place the brilliant candle of his own thinking inside.

So we get "subject-dominated" for syncretic, "object-dominated" for complexes, and "abstraction" for potential concepts, just to take the examples from Chapter Five. But of course the operation he performs on spontaneous concepts (everyday concepts) and nonspontaneous ones (science, instructed, socioculturally arranged for concepts) in Chapter Six is in every respect the same.

2. Grammatical reification, or the creation of concepts in the image of objects by language. I think you overestimate the degree to which this is universal even in English. Halliday denies that it is an aspect of English before the sixteenth century; he points to its utter absence in the scientific writing of Chaucer. I note that your own coinage, "social-institutionally arranged for concept" is something of a move in the other direction. 

Of course, Russian, German, French and Standard Average European languages generally practice grammatical reification to a very high degree, and Halliday makes the point that they all start to do so at roughly the same time (around the sixteenth century). Galileo is to Italian almost exactly what Newton is to English.

But academic language in Chinese, probably the oldest institutionally arranged for register on earth which is still used, does not emphasize nouns at all; if anything what is stressed is the stative verb (which corresponds roughly to the copula plus adjective construction in English). Note that even Vygotsky, whose scientific thinking is not exactly Russian OR German OR French, abandons the "noun-like" concept in Chapter Six, where his model of the concept is not one of Sakharov's blocks or even a group of them but rather the abstract relation represented by "because" and "although". 

These relations are not necessarily linked to any particular semantic or grammatical form. We can say:

I'm ugly. But I'm gentle. (relator realized as conjunct)
I'm ugly, but I'm gentle. (circumstance realized as conjunction)
Although my appearance may displease, I am gentle (process realized by verb and subject)
Although my ugliness may disgust, I am gentle. (quality realized as a noun)
When the shock of my ugliness passes, you will see that I am gentle (entity + modifier realized as noun and prepositional phrase).

In English these forms are not, to borrow your term, socially-institutionally equal: there is a distinct sense in which the later terms are more formal and more adult.

Why does any of this matter? Well, I think it matters because we are finally offering a STRUCTURAL and not simply a FUNCTIONAL model for development. In Standard Average European languages it is a double move: the child first has to RECONSTRUE complex discourse as complex grammar. Then the child reconstrues complex grammar as complex morphology, creating scientific concepts.

So why are scientific concepts always words with complex morphology? I think one reason is that they tend to be FOREIGN in derivation; they tend to be words borrowed from phrases in foreign languages. This helps us make them strange, transform them into "objects" of contemplation and hierachization. Which brings me to...

3. The unicorn. Shushu has pointed out that the Sakharov blocks test is NOT made of artificial concepts at all but of two everyday concepts (height and diameter) which are artificially combined. In this sense it's very similar to what happens when we try to teach foreign language concepts by relabelling various native language meanings. The unicorn and the wizard are both examples of synthesizing two everyday concepts into a new non-existent one.

But as with Shushu's foreign language example (and as "synthesis" implies) the result is rather greater than the sum of the parts: a unicorn is rather more than a horse with a cow's horn stuck in its forehead. Very often the use of foreign language terms as scientific concepts (because ALL languages really DO have THAT in common) has the same effect: making the familiar strange really does make it something more than familiar.

David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education



--- On Sun, 4/5/09, Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Mike Cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] A Flock of Already Roasted Pigeons
> To: "David Kellogg" <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> Cc: "Culture ActivityeXtended Mind" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Sunday, April 5, 2009, 8:46 AM
> Hello SNUE 
> 
> I am sympathetic to the conceptual moves you are promoting
> in the note below, but as so often happens, especially when
> is an autodidact in such matters, as I am certainly, in the
> ideas of LSV and language, answers keep begeting questions.
> 
> 
> So here are a couple of more.
> 
> 1. Can we move beyond "instructed" concepts to
> "social-institutionally arranged for concepts?" I
> ask because it seems to me that the broader
> category (not sure how broad it is and intuit that it needs
> delimiting), ought to cover cases such as those illustrated
> by the work of Ed Hutchins
> 
> on Trobriand discourse, Max Gluckman on law in traditional
> African societies, and other such cases. Easy access to the
> Trobriand example
> is at http://lchc.ucsd.edu/Histarch/fe79v1n2.PDF
> 
> 
> 2. I am puzzling over the senses in which it is true that
> "Concepts do not "exist" as objects, and yet
> scientific language in English tends to treat them as
> such."  Not so in Russian? English does seems real
> good at entification and turning processes into things, but
> I am again intuiting, with very limited
> 
> knowledge of a few other languages, that it is not unique
> in this respect.
> 
> 3. And then there is the case of a unicorn. There are a lot
> of aspects of that poem that I find intriguing. Just one is
> that if I ask a class of, say,
> 
> 300 undergraduates if they have every encountered a
> unicorn, at first no one will to admit to having seen one.
> Then I ask them to vote on the following
> question by raising their hands: "If you had to guess,
> would you consider a unicorn good or bad." 99.99% raise
> vote for good. Hmmmm, they know if its good or bad, but have
> never encountered one. And, after some discussion they get
> around to acknowledging that many have in fact encountered,
> in some materialized, "objectified" form, a
> unicorn. 
> 
> 
> I am among this naive majority. 
> 
> Ditto with respect to Wizards, very important entities in
> my life and not as non-existent concepts.
> 
> I know there are lots of different questions in these
> ruminations and now I have to turn to the serious business
> of pretending to be an educator (another
> 
> concept with very difficulty to pin down objects!), it
> being Sunday, when I get to work "on my own."
> Efforts at enlightenment, including reprints,
> warmly accepted!
> 
> mike
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 9:40 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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