But David, I am not by any means saying that language is not important,
nor that it is not embedded in cultural practices. But LSV - in Thought &
Language for example, but elsewhere too - was very critical of approaches
that reduced ontogenesis to a single function, such as language. And looking
at the work of Perret-Clemond, sent to me in an individual message, it seems
to me that what we find there at least is an analysis of discourse that does
well to include the adult, but then rather loses track of the child. There
are certainly forms of psychology, such as discursive psychology in the UK
and elsewhere, that are unwilling to consider more than language and propose
that all psychological phenomena are in fact discursive phenomena. I find
that an interesting approach, but it was not Vygotsky's, and I was asking in
my original message for a Vygotskian explanation of failure to conserve.
LSV seems very adamant that psychology, as he conceives it, is the study of
consciousness. That does not mean introspection, because for LSV Cs is our
relation to the world, and it is social first and individual only
subsequently. But nonetheless the Cs of a child is not something we can
observe directly, and (he says) we have to reconstruct it from its traces.
Many of those traces are in discourse, for sure. But LSV tells us that Cs is
always a dynamic system of psychological functions, of which language is
only one. I don't see the effort to reconstruct the child's perception and
thinking in a conservation task as a fruitless search for a "real"
capability if that means something independent of the child's embeddedness
in relations with others: LSV insisted that the "social situation" was a
crucial aspect.
Too many 'buts' in this message! But that's life
Martin
On Feb 26, 2010, at 11:18 PM, David H Kirshner wrote:
Martin said:
And then, most intriguing and puzzling of course, the fact that she
relaxes contentedly when her cracker is divided in two. What kind of
language game about 'fair' would one have to be playing to think it fair
when the other person has two crackers and one has only two halves?
It's difficult to say what kind of language game is being played. But
the burden of proof really is on the other side. Piaget posited stages as
delimiting CAPABILITIES, not just practices. Now imagine that little girl
from the videotape at the dinner table as her brother reaches over to divide
her cracker in two to make it "fair." Are you sure she "relaxes contentedly"
in this scenario? Or does she run to Mommy: "It's not fair...."
The claim that language matters in such tasks isn't tantamount to
"fall[ing] into the general tendency of many of those who adopt
unquestioningly the representational model of mind (i.e., that people know
the world through their mental representations), that the child has mental
representations from the outset. That in these tasks the child *sees* the
same things as the adult, and merely *talks* about them differently."
Rather it is positing that language use is embedded in social/cultural
practices. The very idea of looking for the "real" capability of the child
at a given stage of development is problematic, as different practices
entail different usages. Now people do develop as they grow older, but this
has as much to do with coordinating diverse practices as it does with any
basic changes in the "underlying" (i.e., organismic) capabilities.
David
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu]
On Behalf Of Martin Packer
Sent: Friday, February 26, 2010 3:05 PM
To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
Subject: Re: [xmca] conservation
David writes:
"Fair" and "not fair," as with "more," "less," and "same," are bound
into a variety of broad cultural practices that could be seen as
absorbing children's responses in these experiments..."
Of course, these experiments would be impossible without language and
the child's familiarity with a variety of cultural practices. The whole
set-up of being questioned by a strange adult is familiar to some children,
not to others. My main point was that I can't bring myself to accept that
what goes on in a conservation task is *solely* a consequence of the fact
that child and adult interpret the words differently or, for that matter,
that child and adult interpret the situation and its demands differently.
What is hard to convey, yet compelling, about the video I mentioned is
the quality of the non-verbal component. The child's excitement when the
crackers are brought out. Her expression of disappointment and puzzlement
when the experimenter distributes them unfairly. And then, most intriguing
and puzzling of course, the fact that she relaxes contentedly when her
cracker is divided in two. What kind of language game about 'fair' would one
have to be playing to think it fair when the other person has two crackers
and one has only two halves?
Mike, thanks for the pointers to relevant literature. I suppose I am
simply trying to resolve my own confusion, having taught one week LSV's
critique of Piaget's early concept of ecogentrism, then the next week taught
Piaget's explanation of failure to conserve. LSV rejected Piaget's proposal
(or assumption) that the child is animistic and syncretic in their
reasoning, and this because they are individualistic, verging on autistic,
and need to be socialized. He certainly didn't accept Piaget's view that the
world simply IS dualistic (thought versus matter, external versus internal,
object versus sign) and the child has to learn (be forced actually) to
accept this, to accommodate to the demands of this reality and give up
fanciful assimilation.
By the time of the conservation tasks Piaget's explanation of the limits
of cognition in early childhood was different. As I understand it, it was
that the forms of mental representation which the child is capable of at
this age are limited. They are static and centered: the child is able to
represent states of affairs but not their transformations, and will tend to
focus on one dimension or aspect of a multi-dimensional situation. Since the
child cannot form a mental representation of the pouring of liquid or the
flattening of clay they cannot think about these transformations. Because
they cannot think about the transformations their reasoning is dominated by
their perception (of states), and perception in these experiments is
misleading.
Egocentrism (as in the 3 mountain task, for example) is now just one
manifestation of these characteristics of representation, not the central
theoretical concept as it was in Piaget's earlier work. But in several ways
the moral is the same. The child must come to recognize the distinction
between appearance and reality. The child must come to appreciate that
another person has a distinct point of view. And in all this language plays
no constitutive role, it is simply the medium of expression of the child's
thought.
LSV of course was very critical of this last point, and those
contemporary researchers who have paid more attention to the linguistic
demands of the task are clearly onto something important. But it seems to me
that they fall into the general tendency of many of those who adopt
unquestioningly the representational model of mind (i.e., that people know
the world through their mental representations), that the child has mental
representations from the outset. That in these tasks the child *sees* the
same things as the adult, and merely *talks* about them differently. As Lara
says, that is considering only language without considering the relationship
between language and thought.
This is the age where LSV emphasizes that the child's perception has
been completely transformed by language. The child, he says, now perceives a
world of things with definite meanings, because language has broken the
world in ordered objects. "At the end of [infancy]," he writes, "the child
begins to experience, for the first time, a structurally- and
objectively-formed world," as "speech changes the structure of perception,"
to a kind of seeing, he suggests, that finds more in an object than what is
immediately given in the perceptual act. Thinking too is transformed at the
end of infancy, it is no longer completely perceptual but now also verbal;
it is a ""visual-practical restructuring of the perceived field."
The child now "sees more" in each object. I can only think that LSV's
explanation of failure to conserve would have started here. The child sees
each half of her cracker as more than it is. I don't mean she sees more
cracker, I mean that she sees, perhaps, a unit, a "one" and then a "two."
Only later will she become able to see that one unit may both be equal to
and different from another unit: that her "one cracker" is both equivalent
to and yet not equal to the adult's "one cracker." LSV suggests that at this
stage word and object are not yet differentiated: could it be that in
counting the child transforms the objects in front of her own eyes? Her
words have a direct impact on her perception. Later attention and memory
will direct and correct this new way of seeing. For the moment the child's
use of speech has brought a new order to her consciousness of the world. It
is not yet the order that adults have, but neither is it an inadequate
adaptation to a built-in dualism.
Martin
On Feb 26, 2010, at 10:32 AM, mike cole wrote:
Dear Columbian colleagues--- The literature on this topic goes way back
both
historically and ontogenetically.
At I noted earlier, some of the early work is summarized in LCHC (1983)
which is in the lchc publications at lchc.ucsd.edu. There is a book by
Micahel Siegal (1991) on this topic, and article by Rochel Gelman early
on, 1972. This same line of discussion generated the "its all there at
birth" literature by, among others, Baillargeon, Spelke, Wynn, et al.
for
conservation of number, causality, etc.
Other than Martin's initial question about LSV's view, in what context
to
what ends would you like to take this up?
Back on the weekend.
mike
On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <
jlarream@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:
Hi, all,
Martin's example is wonderful. But assuming that there's something
perceptual is a much less parsimonious hypothesis than exploring in
depth
the issue or word meaning or a conversational feature, for example.
Was the
question followed up by others? Often, in conservation tasks the
experimenter falls to the temptation to bring about "spectacular
effects"
and fails to test whether there are simpler ways to account for the
child's
answers. Sorry, but still skeptical.
Jorge
Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
Profesor Asociado y Director
Departamento de Psicología
Universidad de los Andes
On Feb 26, 2010, at 9:52 AM, Martin Packer wrote:
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
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
_______________________________________________
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca