[xmca] Universalism, Relativism, and Developmentalism

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Dear Carol:
 
I don't think what I said was illogical, just historical. History appears to contradict itself not infrequently. But the mere fact that something appears completely impossible on paper does remarkably little to prevent it from actually occuring. And even less to render it comprehensible.
 
For example, one might, with some exaggeration, divide the last five hundred years of English language teaching into three very rough two hundred year periods:
 
a) a first, very basic, transactional-interpersonal period which mostly dealt with cross-channel trade and the influx of Huguenot refuges, lasting from roughly the invention of printed language learning materials by William Caxton around 1480 to the death of Comenius in 1670. 
 
b) a second, much more textually based period which dealt with the creation of an English canon as a secular equivalent to the Greek and Latin classics, lasting from roughly the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis the XIVth in 1685 until the birth of the Reform Movement around 1870 with the work of Sweet and later Palmer, West, and Hornby. 
 
c) the current period, which has seen the rise of a more meaning-based method, first in the rather predictable forms of structuralism-behaviorism (which although it had different names in the US and the UK had much the same audiolingual-oral-situational content) and then in the more unpredictable form of "communicative methodology" (which although it has the same name in the US and the UK has completely different and in some ways completely opposite content, because the Yanks kept structuralism and ditched behaviorism while the Brits kept behaviorism and ditched structuralism).
 
Now, the reason I raise all this ancient history is not simply to deny that we are at the beginning of a new epoch (although I DO deny it, as I deny that the Communicative Method represented anywhere a complete break with structuralism-behaviorism). I raise it to point out that there are moments of this ancient history which are:
 
1) Universal. That is, the same kinds of questions keep coming up again and again, viz. How do we know, when we translate, that children understand the English word and not the translation? How do we "present" and "practice" something like meaning, as opposed to mere sound? Do we learn grammar the subconsciously, unconscioiusly, or deliberately and volitionally? etc.
 
2) Relativistic. That is, there are very different answers to all of these questions, and not one of them appears to be always right at any given time. Children sometimes understand and retain the English word and sometimes forget it instantly and only retain the translation or retain the English word but go on using the mother tongue concept as its meaning. There appear to be very different kinds of meaning, some of which are repeatable and others of which are not, and this is not in any direct way relatable to their learnability, contrary to what we might suppose. Some grammar is subconscious, some of it is unconscious, and a very great deal of it is, like murder and other crimes, completely premeditated. 

3) Developmental. That is, some aspects of language teaching appear to change cumulatively, and others merely proliferate, producing variation without any obvious progress. There is no real sense, that I can see, in which English teaching today is "better" than the teaching of Latin or Greek in Comenius's time (and there is also no real sense in which English is more of a "global" language than Latin or Greek or French was). But there is certainly a very real sense in which our understanding of how language works (for example, what kinds of meaning there are, and what kinds of grammar there are) has managed to sum up the past, complexify our present understanding, and go forward to new applications of that richer understanding.
 
It's really not the case, as I once thought, that teaching practice just produces variations without any real evolution, while educational research produces the very opposite, by "theory culling". Theory and practice seem much more mutually interpenetrated, so that there are theories which proliferate without any real refinement or even differentiation (I think the theory of "comprehensible input" is a good example of this) and there are practices which are very clearly and demonstrably more efficient than others (e.g. the keyword method of vocabulary learning, or the practice of teaching grammar by using examples before rules). 
 
But it really is the case, I now think, that in English teaching (and I suspect also in cultural psychology, or cultural historical activity theory, or socioculturalism, or phylo-socio-onto-microgenetic epistomology) that there are some areas of what we do where universalism is the underlying basis, others where relativism is an observeable fact, and still others where progress is not only possible but palpable. Do I contradict myself? Well then, I contradict myself; I am large, and like any other language-using animal, I contain worlds. 
 
Sorry, I meant "words".
 
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education 
 

--- On Tue, 7/13/10, Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com> wrote:


From: Carol Macdonald <carolmacdon@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Missing Part
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, July 13, 2010, 6:34 AM


Eric

What does this mean?  Am I dense or is there a word missing:

but I have turned the corner and *believe we are who were
and wherever you go there you are. *

I loved D's illogicality:
*
But it's also why there can be, at one and the same moment, universalism
("We're all the same"), relativism ("We're all different, but equal") and
developmentalism ("We're all different, and the differences matter") at
one and the same time.*

But, for me relativism is a farce--e.g. the witchdoctor having the same
power as a nuclear physicist? USAID and DFiD don't believe this, and neither
do I.

And on what grounds do we see Shweder as having Mike's stature? (David)  My
students hated him (Shweder, by the way, they thought he was a sellout, too
close to mainstream psychology.)

Carol

PS Sorry for spoiling the line of argument: I have missed a part.

On 13 July 2010 15:15, <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:

> How very idealistic of you David.  I don't share in your optimistic view
> of bringing about a kumbaya utopia.  This veil of tears we share has been
> shared by our ancestors and shall continue to be shared in all its
> brilliance and hair covered moles.
>
> At one time I did possibly believe that humans were developing
> phylogenetically but I have turned the corner and believe we are who were
> and wherever you go there you are.  It is what it is or as the WWII vets
> say  "comme ci comme ca"
>
> eric
>
>
>
> From:   David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> To:     Culture ActivityeXtended Mind <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date:   07/12/2010 06:53 PM
> Subject:        Re: [xmca] The Missing Part
> Sent by:        xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
>
>
>
>
>
> eric:
>
> No, as usual, you have my point pretty much exactly, only without the
> silly flourishes I sometimes add. Remember, though, that Mike's magnum
> opus was entitled "A Once and Future Discipline" .
>
> Mike says this was an accident; Bradd Shore dibsed the title he really
> wanted, ("Culture in Mind") so he went and stole this one from Mallory
> ("The Once and Future King", i.e. Arthur).
>
> It's not as catchy, but "The Once and Future Discipline" is a better title
> than "Culture in Mind" for three reasons:
>
> a) it suggests, correctly, that the key cross cultural insights are not
> actually Mike's, but date from a much earlier period, when ethnography was
> actually a pretty dirty business. (This is not just true of ethnography,
> by the way, Yerkes, who provides a fair amount of the monkey business in
> Chapter Four of Thinking and Speech, was involved in army "intelligence"
> research dedicated to finding which soldiers were dumb enough to be used
> to clear minefields, and his interest in teaching apes to talk is partly
> motivated by his theories that some of us are more closely related to apes
> than others.)
>
> b) it suggests, correctly, that in order to use this stuff we need to
> think a little more about where it came from in the light of where we want
> to go with it, to purge it of its geographical, social and cultural
> specificity and to harness it for a future where insights made in one
> corner of the globe become the common property of all its corners and all
> the bits in between as well.
>
> c) it suggests that cultural psych is transdisciplinary rather than
> interdisiciplinary, that it's a discipline in the process of transcending
> its historical self rather than one which is merely exchanging ambassadors
> with bordering disciplines. That is actually what accounts for its
> temporary eclipse, and it is equally what will account for its future
> resurgence.
>
> Shweder, for example, from whom I stole the idea of universalism vs.
> relativism vs. developmentalism, is still embroiled in a controversy about
> whether anthropologists in Afghanistan can and should collaborate with the
> US Army in the occupation of remote provinces. Shweder's position is that
> they can and should, because their presence will help troops understand
> local customs (e.g. the custom of "Loving Thursdays" whereby village
> elders undertake the sexual initiation of young boys).
>
> Whatever you may think of Shweder's view, it certainly corroborates the
> idea that cultural psychology (of which Shweder is probably the leading
> advocate after Mike himself) has feet of clay, that it has not yet
> entirely freed itself from its roots as an adjunct of imperialist
> occupation, and that we have a ways to go before we can really say it has
> something to offer every human being it purports to study.
>
> Take English as a global language (PLEASE! Take it away before it hurts
> somebody!). English even in its benign forms is a lousy language for world
> communication precisely because it is a perfect language for world
> domination, a perfect exclusive language for the global community of
> airport hopping rich folks.
>
> English is a nightmare choice for a world language. It is phonologically
> bizarre, grammatically opaque, and pragmatically obscurantist. It has a
> dark past, rooted in a dominance born of genocide and slavery. But it also
> has a certain promise, a certain future, a certain freedom which we see
> whenever we teach it in a country like Korea, and we see that the more we
> teach it, the less English it becomes.
>
> I think these problems with English are roughly the same problems that
> cultural psychology had in Vygotsky's time. Bleuler, who was Piaget's
> teacher and certainly knew Levy-Bruhl's work extremely well, broke with
> both Piaget and Levy-Bruhl precisely over the theorized from of these
> problems, the developmental issue of whether "autistic" thinking was
> developmentally primary, ontogenetically or sociogenetically.
>
> Bleuler, and Vygotsky too, turned the Europocentric view right
> upside-down; they believed tha autism, far from being developmentally
> atavistic, required a certain stage of development to achieve: you had to
> be able to remember first and only then could you really think about your
> wishes, dreams, desires. They also believed that thinking "irrealisically"
> about wishes and desires led in a fairly direct way to more
> realistic hopes and plans.
>
> For that very reason it was wrong to consider "autism" as an
> underdeveloped stage; autism, or as he liked to call it, "irrealism" was
> simply that part of human thinking that was genuinely relativistic, where
> neither an adult nor a man "at the pinnacle of civilization" (Bleuler is
> certainly being ironic here since he is writing at the outset of World War
> One) may claim superiority. There may be other areas where one form of
> thinking includes, subsumes, and sublates earlier forms (e.g. mathematics
> and science generally) but in the humanities we find variation without
> development, at least without development in the sense of the emergence of
> superior forms which asymmetrically include earlier ones.
>
> That Vygotsky took this on board is very clear from his writings on
> creativity and imagination. That Vygotsky went even further than Bleuler
> is clear from his argument that irrealist thinking and realist thinking do
> not turn in parallel, like the wheels of a desk, only in response to the
> external environment, but have an internal connection, an axle, or rather
> a differential, which allow them to influence each other, so that in
> science too we shall find variation without development and in art and the
> humanities some genuine, common, universally valuable (because universally
> shareable) developments alongside the dazzling and dizzying variations
> which for the most part are hard to share.
>
> Nevertheless I think Vygotsky shares Bleuler's basic insight,which we see
> here in the chapter which begins with the Missing Part. By putting the
> "autistic" function at the beginning of development, and by lumping
> selfishness, stupidity, schizophrenia, and perfectly normal cultural
> variation into a single syncretic heap, Freud, Levy-Bruhl and Blondel are
> behaving more like idealist savages than intellectual scientists.
>
> So it goes. From Bleuler to Vygotsky, and from Vygotsky to Mike, and from
> Mike to me, and then from me to you, with each of us forgetting something
> and each of us adding on at every step of the way. This is why Vygotsky
> comes up with the confusing image of a chain that has a "central" link.
> But it's also why there can be, at one and the same moment, universalism
> ("We're all the same"), relativism ("We're all different, but equal") and
> developmentalism ("We're all different, and the differences matter") at
> one and the same time.
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
> --- On Mon, 7/12/10, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org> wrote:
>
>
> From: ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org <ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org>
> Subject: Re: [xmca] The Missing Part
> To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date: Monday, July 12, 2010, 6:24 AM
>
>
> David:
>
> This indeed is an important passage in understanding LSV's developmental
> theories.  But I believe cross-cultural research speerheaded by Cole and
> others has discounted 'primitive' cultures as being less developed in
> thought and practice when compared to 'western' culture.  Or am I
> misunderstanding your point?
>
> eric
>
>
>
> From:   David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>
> To:     xmca <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
> Date:   07/12/2010 02:38 AM
> Subject:        [xmca] The Missing Part
> Sent by:        xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
>
>
>
> This is the beginning of Chapter Two of Thinking and Speech that was not
> translated into English. I posted it once several years ago, and Anton
> thought it didn't add very much.
>
> I think it does: it structures the whole chapter, because it makes it
> clear that Freud, Levy-Bruhl, and Blondel share a common idealist basis as
>
> well as a common canonical stature.
>
> &Lt;Мы полагаем, . говорит он, . что настанет день, когда мысль ребенка по
>
> отношению к мысли нормального цивилизованного взрослого будет помещена в
> ту же плоскость, в какой находится &Lt;примитивное мышление&Gt;,
> охарактеризованное Леви-Брюлем, или аутистическая и символическая мысль,
> описанная Фрейдом и его учениками, или &Lt;болезненное сознание&Gt;, если
> только это понятие, введенное Блонделем, не сольется в один прекрасный
> день с предыдущим понятием&Gt; (1, с.408).1 Действительно, появление его
> первых работ по историческому значению
> этого факта для дальнейшего развития психологической мысли должно быть по
> справедливости сопоставлено и сравнено с датами выхода в свет &Lt;Les
> fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures&Gt; Леви-Брюля, &Lt;Т
> олкования сновидений&Gt; Фрейда или &Lt;La conscience morbide&Gt;
> Блонделя.
> Больше того, между этими явлениями в различнейших областях научной
> психологии есть не только внешнее сходство, определяемое уровнем их
> исторического значения, но глубокое, кровное, внутреннее родство . связь
> по самой сути заключенных и воплощенных в них философских и
> психологических тенденций. Недаром сам Пиаже в огромной мере опирался в
> своих исследованиях и построениях на эти три
> работы и на их авторов.
>
>
> “It is therefore our belief", says (Piaget), "that the day will come when
> child thought will be placed on the same level in relation to adult,
> normal, and civilized thought as ‘primitive mentality’, as defined by
> Lévy-Bruhl, as autistic and symbolical thought as described by Freud and
> his disciples and as ‘morbid consciousness,’ assuming that this last
> concept, which we owe to M. Ch. Blondel, is not simply fused with the
> former.” (p. 201-202). In reality, the appearance of this first works, in
> regard to the historic importance as a fact for future reference in the
> development of psychological thought must be on the compared with the
> appearance of “Les fonctions mentales dans les societes inferieures” of
> Levi- Bruhl, Freud’s “The interpretation of dreams’, or Blondel’s “La
> conscience morbide”. It is not simply that between these phenomena in the
> development of the field of scientific psychology there is a formal
> resemblance, determined by their level of historic importance, but that
> there is a deep, internal kinship, a connection in essence which is
> visible in their philosophical and psychological tendencies. Not without
> reason does Piaget himself base in enormous measure his own studies and
> constructions on these three works and on their authors.
>
> Last night I was re-reading Bleuler's criticisms of Freud in "Autistic
> Thinking" and I also came upon these words, which Vygotsky quotes
> approvingly.
>
> "Examining the more grown-up child, I also do not much observe that he
> would prefer the imaginary apple to the real. The imbecile and the savage
> are alike practitioners of Realpolitik and the latter, (exactly like us,
> who stand at the apex of cognitive ability) makes his autistic stupidities
>
> only in such cases when reason and experience prove insufficient: in his
> ideas about the universe, about the phenomena of nature, in his
> understanding of diseases and other blows of destiny, in adopting measures
>
> to shield himself from them, and in other relationships which are too
> complex for him.”
>
> It seems to me that here and elsewhere in this chapter Bleuler is arguing
> for, and Vygotsky is agreeing with, a position that is simultaneously
> universalist, relativist, and developmentalist. It is universalist in the
> sense that it argues for a universal human autistic response to areas of
> experience of which we are ignorant. It is relativist in the sense that it
>
> argues for the independence of an "autistic" response from rationality and
>
> an autonomous art and autonomous humanities based on that independence
> that is in no way subordinate to rationality. It is developmentalist in
> the sense that it argues for an autistic response which develops out of a
> narrow, immediately realistic (perception based?) reality function rather
> than vice versa (as in Freud, Janet, and Levy-Bruhl).
>
> David Kellogg
> Seoul National University of Education
>
>
>
>
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