There is a bookstore in Paris which played a much more important
role in
my education than the university I nominally attended (from which
I never
graduated). The name of the bookstore is Joseph Gilbert.
This entirely defines the way I mentally pronounce your name: it is
pronounced the French way, stress on the last syllable, and the “-
bert”
rhymes with pear and ends in a Parisian growl; I can’t really
think the name
in any other way.
Now, this personal reaction is probably wrong, and more
importantly, it is
probably on this list entirely idiosyncratic; it is part of
“theme” rather
than “meaning”, of “sense” rather than “signification”, and
“smysl” rather
than “znachenie”. It is easy to trivialize it, and in fact
Paulhan does just
that when he remarks, in the paper “Qu’est-ce que la
signification des
mots?” which so influenced Vygotsky, that he has a friend whose
name reminds
him of scrambled eggs, but this cannot be said to be the
“meaning” of the
word.
What I want to argue is that acts of thinking, including the
teaching of
concepts to children, are precisely idiosyncratic in this nature;
the
“thinking” part of word meaning, the generalizing part, the
abstracting
part, is precisely theme, not meaning, sense rather than
signification, and
smysl rather than znachenie.
My professor (because after I dropped out of university my
education was
taken in hand by people like Henry Widdowson and not simply
bookstores like
Joseph Gilbert) would say it is pragmatic and not semantic
meaning, the part
of meanng that must be endless compared with the world and endlessly
renegotiated, and not the part you look up in dictionaries and
then forget.
And it is from billions of such pragmatic acts that semantic
meaning really
arises and is codified sometime in the eighteenth century: not
the other way
around, which is the way we experience it today.
It seems to me that two points emerge from this, and one belongs
to you
and the other to Professor Kotik-Friedgut. The first is that it’s
not simply
the case that kids are somehow “more concrete” or “more
inductive” than
adults. If anything, kids tend to be MORE abstract, because they
have small
vocabularies (e.g. the verb “like”) and this constantly pushes
them towards
metonymy, metaphor, and polysemy. However, they are more inclined
to notice
and remember what I called (in an off-list letter to Carol) the
SENSUOUS
aspects of communication, including the idiosyncratic elements of
pronunciation, facial expression, gesture, and contextual
reference. More on
this, with respect to the context-embeddedness of chimpanzees,
from Vygotsky
and Chapter Four of Thinking and Speech.
The second point is that the way in which sense is going to be
actually,
physically, sensually stored in the brain (as opposed to the
mind; I think
that one thing we HAVE to accept if we accept Luria’s idea of an
inter-cortical mind is that the mind and the brain are NOT the
mind/brain)
consists of connections which will vary wildly. It will be more
like the way
in which information is stored on a hard drive in a computer
before your run
the defragmenter than the models we’ve been working with, which
all assume
that the brain is something like a suitcase or a large company:
either first
in last out, or first in first out. I think I might go even
farther than
Professor Kotik-Friedgut (though of course I lack her cred on
this): I’m not
even sure that the right hemisphere is always implicated in all
individuals.
In the first section of Chapter Four in Thinking and Speech,
Vygotsky is
responding the work of Yerkes. Yerkes was a very nasty piece of
work; he was
involved in research which led to the Army learning proficiency
tests (which
determined the recruits who were most suitable for clearing
minefields),
racial IQ, and so on, and so it is with some unease we look at
his many
enthusiastic attempts to show that chimpanzees were capable of
“ideation”,
just like “negroes”.
Nevertheless, as Steve points out, Yerkes was the man to go to for
attempts to teach chimpanzees how to talk in those days (and for
some days
thereafter—von Glasersfeld and Savage-Rumbaugh, who eventually
cracked this
particular nut, named their first chimp language—Yerkish—after
him). We can
sum up this section, using Steve’s method, like so:
a) Vygotsky remarked that Yerkes attributes “ideation” to man by a
FUNCTIONAL ANALOGY between the apparently intelligent,
imaginative behavior
of apes (orangutans and chimpanzees) and similar behavior in man.
Both can
solve problems using simple tools and detours, ergo (reasons
Yerkes) both
can imagine solutions as workplans and carry them out. Vygotsky
criticized
this purely functional viewpoint, both because the analogy is
coarse and
because it is functionalist, but his method of criticism is to
adopt it and
then see where it leads.
b) This “ideation” is the NECESSARY AND SUFFICIENT criterion for
human-like speech, because the main purpose of speech is to imagine
solutions to problems as workplans and carry them out. Again,
Vygotsky
criticized this idea of a single genetic root for speech (and an
idealistic
one at that) but his method of criticism is to adopt it and then
see where
it leads.
c) If, Vygotsky says, an ALTERNATIVE explanation for the apparently
intelligent and imaginative behavior of the ape can be found,
that is, an
explanation which does NOT involve mental representations, then
the argument
put forward by Yerkes will entirely lose its single foundation,
which was
that ideation exists in the ape and ideation is necessary and
sufficient for
speech. If an alternative explanation for the apparently
intelligent and
imaginative behavior does not include ideation, then even if a)
and b) are
true (which is very doubtful) there may be no human like speech
in apes.
d) Alas, this alternative explanation DOES exist: it is in Kohler’s
observation that a good deal of the ape’s practical intelligence
is a purely
immediate, verbal intelligence, and it only operates when the
solution and
the problem are both present in the visual field. It's pretty
clear (at
least to me) how this might apply to teaching children: we are
dealing with
two very different systems when we talk about perceptual meaning
and when we
talk about semantic meaning, and the link between the two must be
first
formed outside the child and only later internalized.
Of course, the experimentum crucis remains to be done. The
experimentum
crucis is, as Vygotsky says, to teach the chimpanzee a form of
speech that
does not involve vocal imitation, but which does involve ideation.
Today, this experiment HAS been done, and the result turns out to be
rather more interesting than even Vygotsky expected: chimpanzees
DO acquire
speech, including quite complex grammar (e.g. “Take the orange
outside and
give it an injection with a syringe and then place it in the
potty.”)
But they do NOT do this in the wild, and they don’t even do it in
experiments dedicated to the direct teaching of language. They do
it when
they are raised in an “zone of proximal development” in proximity
with human
children.
Now, of course, one way to look at this result (Savage-Rumbaugh)
is to say
that it refutes what Vygotsky has claimed about ideation in the
ape. Apes do
have ideation, and the experimentum crucis shows this.
But there is another way to consider Savage-Rumbaugh’s result.
Vygotsky’s
main contention is not that the ape can never acquire speech
under any
conditions at all, and in fact he at several points suggests that
this might
indeed happen although it has not happened yet. Vygotsky’s MAIN
contention
is that there is a distinction between cultural and natural lines of
development.
The key result of the experimentum crucis, then, is this: human
language
is always and everywhere linked to human culture. But human
culture is not
necessarily confined to man.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
--- On Tue, 7/20/10, Bella Kotik-Friedgut <bella.kotik@gmail.com>
wrote:
From: Bella Kotik-Friedgut <bella.kotik@gmail.com>
Subject: Re: [xmca] The Genetic Belly Button and the Functional
Belly
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Tuesday, July 20, 2010, 5:29 AM
Just to remind of the role of the RH in speech perception and
production
(prosody) - so all our verbal communication is a result of
interhemispheric
cooperation.
Bella Kotik
On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 12:32 AM, Joseph Gilbert
<joeg4us@roadrunner.com
wrote:
Do we acknowledge that we are affected by the sounds of
the human
voice? Do the sounds of the phonemes cause reactions in our body-
mind? If
we
are, and if they do, then do our reactions to the sounds of our
voice
affect
our perceptions of the things to which we verbally refer? If so,
what is
the
nature of that effect? What say ye?
Joseph Gilbert
On Jul 19, 2010, at 2:23 PM, David Kellogg wrote:
We have a problem here in Korea. In order to teach children polite
language, which is what they need to communicate with adult
strangers,
teachers tend to use the polite register in class. That is,
instead of
saying:
T: What is this?
They tend to say things like:
T: Can you tell me what this is?
Now this is quite puzzling from a learner's point of view.
First of all,
it seems otious, almost fatuous, in its complexity (which is,
of course,
a
form of discourse complexity because it suggests a complex
discourse
sequence, where the questioner first ascertains whether the
hearer can
answer and then attempts to find the answer).
Secondly, the intonation, which is often the learner's best
clue as to
the
speaker's intention, is not the normal way in which we ask for
information
using a wh-question in English. Wh-questions normally come
DOWN, unless
we
are asking for old informatoin ("What did you say this was?").
Thirdly, the word order seems wrong and if the learner attempts to
dissect
the sentence into usable bits, it will produce wrong question
forms
("What
this is?"). As we say in Korean, the belly button of genetic
origins is
overpowering the belly of functional use.
Carol remarked that chimps seem to be unable to deal with
hypotaxis, and
of course we can easily imagine that chimps might be puzzled in
exactly
this
way without drawing any conclusions about the language learning
ability
of
the chimp as opposed to that of the (equally puzzled) Korean
child.
But her remark raises the interesting question of WHY, in English,
wh-questions are bi-functional in precisely this way: they
serve on the
one
hand to mark intra-mental relations by showing how discourse
sequences
collapse into grammatical ones:
T: Is this hat red?
S: Yes, it is.
T: Is it yours?
S: Yes.
T: So the had that is red is yours?
S: Yes, the hat that is red is mine.
(This is the very sentence that Chomsky used as evidence that
structural
dependency could not be learned!)
T: Can you tell me about this?
S: Yes.
T: What is it?
S: It's an apple.
T: So you can tell me what this is?
I think the answer to this question is easily found in
Tomasello, who
found it in Vygotsky. Every human function, including complex
grammar,
appears in the course of human development twice, the first
time as the
tragedy of complex discouse, and the second time as the comedy of
complex
grammar.
So, to let the cat out of the bag: hypotaxis is indeed more
"scientific"
than parataxis as a speech form, in much the same way that
"hextillion"
is
more scientific than "six". But this is merely because as a
thinking
form it
is reconstrues an IDENTICAL intellectual content in a more
intra-mental,
internally complex, and system-related form.
David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education
_______________________________________________
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
--
Sincerely yours Bella Kotik-Friedgut
_______________________________________________
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