RE: [xmca] conservation

["Michael Glassman" <MGlassman@ehe.osu.edu>]

Martin, David, Jorge, all

I'm not sure you can make a non-dualistic argument that children don't
develop conservation.  I think as far as you can go is that it really
doesn't matter because rather than focusing on structures inside of the
head we should be focusing on specific experiences in nature (I don't
think Vygotsky is making that experiment).

I seems to me the best way to understand Piaget's ideas on conservation
and heteronomous thinking in general I suppose is through Descartes
thought experiment about the candle.

You have a candle, you light it, you leave the room, you come back in
after the candle has burned out.  How do you know the candle you lit is
the same substance as the melted wax you see later?  Descartes says it
is because you understand through reason (logic I suppose) that the
substance of the candle is both extended and mutable.  I think at least
the end point of this thought experiment is the basis for the
conservation experiment.

What Descartes was saying was that this understanding of substance was a
phenomenon that existed in the human mind, based on pure reason.  When
Gelman and Baillegeron and others are making the argument that young
children don't necessarily develop this conservation they are making a
Cartesian argument - that we are born with this sense of pure reason
that allows us to organize the world.

Piaget, at least in the working of conservation, was following Kant, and
to a lesser extend Hegel, that experience is necessary to develop the
categories that allow you to organize the world.  That it can't be pure
reason at all, but demands both a certain quality and quantity of
experience.  I believe that Piaget's debate with Chomsky suggests that
he was more Hegelian in nature, that he believed we built these
organizing principles about the world directly from experience, rather
than being unlocked by experience.

I don't really know what argument you can make that children already
have conservation without following the more Cartesian formula.  In my
opinion Vygotsky was much, much closer to Piaget than to Gelman or the
other nativists.  I believe in Thinking and Speech he was describing at
some points the way in which our experience allows us to organize the
world inside of our heads, and these organization patterns are carried
in to different activities, that there is some level of generalization.
And I don't know, I do think he was discussing this in terms of
development, that is that early understanding of the world was based on
particular unconnected instances, but later understanding of the world
is based on shared concepts about how to interpret the universe.  It
always seemed to me this was what his discussion of complexes is all
about.  But while Piaget maybe a little closer to Kant, Vygotsky in my
opinion is much closer to Hegel and Marx, where experience has a much
greater impact on the development or our organizational structures.  But
these organizational structures are definitely inside of the head for
Vygotsky so there really is no way for him to escape dualism.

The only people I have read who have escaped dualism are James and Dewey
and maybe Mead.  But I would say they wouldn't make the argument that
children do or don't develop conservation - just that it is not really
that important to try and figure it out.  That is because each situation
is particular and when we try to impose generalizations it is just
something that we are making up.  We can't assume that the human is
carrying any generalized organizational structure about how to deal with
the universe inside of the head.


Michael

-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of Martin Packer
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 9:52 AM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] conservation

David, Mike, Jorge...

I do know Margaret Donaldson's book questioning the child's
understanding of the researcher's language in conservation and other
Piagetian tasks. And just recently Rod mentioned Valerie Walkerdine's
work showing how 'more' and 'less' are understood in terms of everyday
family practices.

But I show a brief video when I teach this topic in my undergraduate
classes; I think it may even have come with Mike's textbook, as an
instructor's resource. I watched it again yesterday. In one segment, the
adult places one graham cracker in front of the child and two in front
of herself, then asks, do you think that we shared those fairly? The
child looks mildly offended and says no, because you have two and I have
this. The adult then breaks the child's cracker into two pieces! She
asks, now is it fair? The child replies, with a big smile, yes, because
we both have two!

I can't convince myself that this is entirely a linguistic phenomenon,
though differences in word meaning may certainly play a role. There's
something perceptual too. At this time in his work, although Vygotsky
had died before any conservation tasks were performed, Piaget was still
arguing that the child needs to come to appreciate basic dualisms, such
as that between appearance and reality. Vygotsky, of course, argues
forcefully against this in Thought and Language. How would he have
extended the arguments he made about egocentric speech to lack of
conversation? Would he have suggested that changing word meaning
transforms the child's perception, so a cracker broken in half no longer
is perceived as two?

Martin
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