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Re: [xmca] William Frawley's "Vygotsky and Cognitive Science"



Dear PTL:
 
I read the book a few years ago and, like you, I've been looking for a chance to discuss it. In particular, I think it's a contribution that is very close to a key problem of Thinking and Speech, which is the relationship between the "complex-based" Vygotsky we find in Chapter Five and the more "concept oriented" one that we find in Chatper Six. Is it SIMPLY a matter of preschoolers versus school children? Or is the "complex based" Vygotsky in some important sense more socio-cognitivist and less socio-cultural? Anyway, let's get a good rumpus going and maybe we can get others to join in. Some, if not all of this, is certainly related to play. 
 
My remarks are about page 107, where Frawley is laying out "three prospects for unity" between Vygotskyan theory and computationalism. He starts by saying that any quick courtship is going to lead to a quick divorce. But then, top of the page, he's got this: "While cognitive science buys heavily into computationalism, there is nothing inherently noncomputational about Vygotsky's humanistic view of of language, culture, and the self. Metaconsciousness surely has its computational and coding limitations. Frame decisions and mental orientation might, in fact, be profitably studied as the computing of representations at the language-culture interface".
 
Now, I've got two big problems here:
 
a) Vygotsky's "humanistic" view of language culture and the self is, to me, a kind of comedy in the Aristotelian sense; it is a narrative about the rise of the self, and in particular about the rise of free will, even the victory of free will over the self itself. That's what makes it humanistic and not just cognitivist or socioculturalist. This DOES seem highly resistant to computationalism, for the very simple reason that computational approaches assume an ultimate downward reductionism; that's what makes them computational.
 
b) . A context is, as the name implies, something that comes out of the humanities and not out of the sciences; it's about texts, that is, the traces that discourses leave in human language.No computational theory that I know of, not even Marr's wonderful model of vision, really deals with the problem of context.
 
OK, then Frawley introduces the idea of "architecture" as "the codes and processes that constitute the form of inner mental life. This is exactly what Bakhtin means by architectonics--there is apparently a good Russian word for this, but when you translate it as "architectonics" you get something like the trace that architecture leaves in the mind, which is nt really satisfactory. 
 
Just as architectonics differs from building architecture, context is different from text. Context is not just the way in which nonlinguistic elements are realized in a text--if that were true, then there would be no way to tell context from co-text--essentially there would be nothing outside of context, not even text. 
 
Context is the actual situation of use that is realized in a text--it includes BOTH what Malinowski called "context of the situation" AND "context of the culture". It's realized in text but, like discourse, it is not itself text. That is because it too has free will; it is not finalizeable, it is always open ended. Now, if we have something that is INTRINSICALLY, and BY DEFINITION open ended and not finalizeable, is it really safe to call it computable?
 
Later on the in the page, Frawley becomes emergentist: "Whre representational context predetermines the processing of another representation, connectionist properties surface; where context does not so predetermine, behavior looks modular." I like the word "LOOKS" modular and the implication that at bottom it is not so, but I don't care much for the rest of this: in fact, I'm not really sure what it means. Why do connectionist properties surface? Can't representations of representations be deliberate and volitional, and proceed from the top down and not from the bottom up?
 
To me, the great contribution of Vygotsky is that he provides a "way out" of the homuncular problem WITHOUT emergentism and connectionism and the Dennett view of consciousness. That way is simple: there is a top down way in which consciousness is produced that is quite free of religion, and this to recognize that history, society, and culture are all forms of consciousness that are linked to as well as distinct from the cognitive form. So why do we need bottom up ways of explaining conciousness at all?
 
Frawley ends with:
 
"These architecture-context relationships speak directly to the connection between Vygotsky and cognitive science because, to repeat and modify the old saw  (that is, that mind exists IN culture, IN society--DK) inner mind occurs in the context of outer culture. But how so? Is inner mind IN culture the way sounds, for example are IN words or words are IN syntax?"
 
Gadzooks. Sounds are NOT in words at all, not in any sense of the word whatsoever. And words are not IN syntax; syntax and vocabulary are simply two ways of looking at exactly the same phenomenon, like weather and climate. So I think the answer here is no.
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 
 
--- On Sun, 1/24/10, p.lamplugh@lancaster.ac.uk <p.lamplugh@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:


From: p.lamplugh@lancaster.ac.uk <p.lamplugh@lancaster.ac.uk>
Subject: [xmca] William Frawley's "Vygotsky and Cognitive Science"
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Date: Sunday, January 24, 2010, 12:38 PM


  Dear XMCA community as a whole,
                                  I must ask as to whether or not, as a
first post in this community, if anybody
is able to provide any reasonable
back-reading to Frawley's work so
mentioned in the title? It would also be
of great pertinence to understand the
premises on which he mounts a critique
and advancement into this particular
realm. I've only flicked through this
work tentatively, which I hope will be
proved as my most frivolous waste of
time of the pat 2 years.   Opinions,
criticisms, appraisals, anything, these
are what i'm after, i'm thirsty for any
new information. The point to me is the
application of Vygotsky's proximal
zones, how these could be extended with
any rate of success through any means,
to educational praxis within any
cultural environment. I am also not
asking for anybody to read the
aforementioned book on my behalf, but I
would like to hear some creative output
from those whor contribute here,
especially on what to look out for in
this work.
    Thanks thricefold,
                     P.T.L.

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