Re: [xmca] Affect Is Not (all of) Emotion

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Larry--
 
A long, and characteristically thoughtful, reply. As I was reading and appreciating it, it occurred to me that both of us tend to CAPITALIZE a lot (rather as Victorians would underline in their letters) but also that both of us tend to substitute VERTICAL complexity (that is, length) for HORIZONTAL complexity (that is, long sentences).
 
I think that one of the decontextualizeable, transportable, generalizeable skills of a teacher is the ability to turn vertical complexity into horizontal complexity and vice versa. For example:
 
T: Who wins?
Ss: ...
T: Well, who has more points? Yeongsuk or Minkyeong?
Ss: Minkyeong.
Ss: Yeongsuk.
T: How many points, Yeongsuk?
S: 11.
T: Minkyeong? How many?
S: 7. No...9.
T: 9?
S: Ung. (Yeah)
T: So who has more points? Yeongsuk or Minkyeong?
S: Yeongsuk.
T: So who wins?
S: Yeongsuk.
T: Right. The student who has the most points wins the game.
 
I suggested to Carol that normal children are able to reconstrue the last, horizontally complex sentence as "summing up" or generalizing all of the previous sentences in some way, as meaning the same thing, and I don't think there is anything IN PRINCIPLE to prevent a chimp from doing the same, which means that a chimpanzee would be able to understand, at least as a concept for others, pseudoconceptually, a complex sentence with an embedded relative clause.
 
Now, of course the vertical complexity is "more" interpersonal and "less" ideational, and the horizontal complexity is "more" ideational and "less" interpersonal. But they both refer to the same things, experientially, so it seems to me that one can be construed as the other, and it doesn't really make sense to put in hard and fast distinctions here. What makes sense to me is to see the interpersonal/ideational vertical complexity and the ideational/interpersonal horizontal complexity as two "moments" of the same process. 
 
Some comments on your comments!

You say: 
 
"You also mention that humans tend to define thinking in a way that privleges
the ability to think in a manner DETACHED from the visual field  by the
IDEATIONAL functions of language AS OPPOSED TO THE INTERPERSONAL ONES."
 
I say:
 
Yes, opposed. But in the middle of the Korean flag, we see that opposed often means something like mutually defining, and that it's impossible to cut the whole without including some of each part.

You say:
 
"For Vygotsky, this ideational manner of thinking is NOT SIMPLY RATIONAL but
includes emotions."
 
 
I say:
 
Well, for Vygotsky, emotion is rational, and social emotion is supremely so.  
 
 
You say:
 
:David, if we are privileging "self-regulative" models of volitional control
which are DETACHED from the visual field as our models of thinking, then I
wonder if this is our Western bias which has emerged within a
particular HISTORICAL context."
 
No, I'm with Vygotsky on this, and as I see it with Vygotsky the crucial divide is not East and West but language and non-language. Yes, literacy's part of that, but only because it makes it possible for us to talk to dead people.
 
 David Kellogg
Seoul National University of Education




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