Re: [xmca] Vygotsky and Saussure

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

I'm going to use the silence as an opportunity to reflect on my own  
message - Reading what I wrote about Marx's method again in the  
context of the discussion here it occurs to me that Marx, like  
Vygotsky, was writing about the changing character of word-meaning.  
I'd not thought about Capital in quite that way before. On the other  
hand, LSV doesn't, to my knowledge, draw a distinction between  
children's analytic concepts and their dialectical concepts. Has  
anyone out there worked on this? (Paula?)

I'm currently reading the literature on young children's categories  
(folkbiology, folkpsychology), and much of this research seems to  
assume exactly the equivalence of adult and child word-meaning that  
LSV called into question, so the topic is important. For example, the  
researcher names for the child a picture of an animal, and then asks a  
question (Does X have a heart?) to which the child can reply only yes  
or no. The characteristics of the child's 'categories' are inferred on  
the basis of an assumed equivalence of word-meaning.

Martin
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