Dear Paula, Jay, Michael, Andy and Larry,
These lines have become a bit entangled and so here I shall attempt
to speak
of several ideas but still linked in to our primary abduction-pseudo
concept
discussion.
1) Hierarchy pseudo concepts. I after a little help from my friend:)
(Jaakko
Virkkunen, thankyou)It is not possible to put pseudo concepts on a
highest
level. IF we go into Valsiner's Comparative study of human cultural
development and look at Chap 1 (under google studies) we can see where
perhaps the confusion came in. JV states that 'if we look carefully
into
psychology's theoretical domain, we might see regression of initially
constructed concepts into a pseudo-concept...' concepts ( I presume
he is
referring to scientific) regress then pseudo-concepts must be lower.
He then
refers to the works of Smedslund pseudo - empiricism and that they
refer to
empirical investigations in psychology that are devoted to the study
of
issues that are necessarily true such as all Catholic popes are not
married.
Here I can only presume that the process of whatever thinking has
arrived at
a stage of a conclusion that attains social consensus. It is taken
as fact.
My argument to this line of reasoning is that pseudo concepts contain
abductive reasoning and the realm of initial creativity but that
abduction
(Paavola) are multi composited and sourced. Please see Paavola's
article
that was attached.
Some pseudo-concepts may through generalization never go to higher
levels of
thinking as the verification is of a very spontaneous nature due to
the
persons motivation to justify, environment in the expanded sense of
the
term. However if they are to lead to discovery that will then be a
source
for development they will need to go through deductive logic and
experimentation (inductive) and then perhaps another moment of
abductive as
the new problems/contradictions arise. But this second stage will
not be the
same as the primary as it has a stronger scientific scientific base.
At all
times this process is an ongoing dialectic, historical dialogue. I
should
give you an example here but you will have to wait for my article :)
2) De differentiation: there is a serious problem here and I cannot
understand as Jay did not either how the level of where one can no
longer
speak of something can be reduced to over generalization or fossilized
knowledge. This is as well a complex phenomenon that has been over
simplified in this chapter. Not to mention all the other problems
that Jay
highlighted
3)Abductive thinking is said to be weaker only in its form of logic
but not
in its value as in the process of logic. Peirce had two periods of
work on
abduction and as Paavola states they are not mutually exclusive but
part of
the process or given to diverse situations and circumstances.
4) Piaget/Valsiner and Vygtosky. This would take quite a bit of
answering
but the basic problem is that Vygotsky had a more holistic view
based on
phylogentic, cultural historical, ontogenetic and microgenetic
development
and so perhaps hard to get closer to when this is not the case... I
do think
that Valsiner has very good thoughts and leave a lot to be done when
working
on individual-and object as containing a dualism
All said and done I would like to thank you all for this discussion
as it
sorted out the question for me. I shall now look at Davydov,
Leontiev, and
other articles of Paavola and Hakkarainen.
Denise
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-
bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Paula M Towsey
Sent: 13 August 2010 15:47
To: 'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'
Subject: RE: [xmca] Refugees and Conception
Dear Denise
I've been trying to track down Valsiner's "Levels of semiotic
mediation", as
mentioned to you in his email, to get an idea of how and why he views
pseudoconcepts as being at "Level 4". I have so far only managed to
come up
with the excerpts attached here - apologies for the size. (Being at
distance from one's place of learning, and at the antipodes too, makes
accessing texts a long-winded affair: Valsiner's 2007 book isn't
available
on Googlebooks preview and the ILL takes forever...)
And as I started to read these excerpts, though, your latest post
arrived,
and my immediate reaction was to send the excerpts to you now
a) because I wasn't sure if you'd read/seen this element of
Valsiner's work
or not and it seems pretty interesting to me, and
b) because of the questions you ask about the CL and thinking modes
and the
whole question of pseudoconcepts.
I am excited about the possibility of this bringing together the
real life
experiences of your CL and Valsiner's work and the whole question of
the
differences between pseudoconcepts, everyday concepts, and
systematised/academic/scientific concepts - in fact, conceptual
modes in a
variety of cultural situations, as Mike draws attention to (and asks
about)
in the video.
Are you familiar with this aspect of Valsiner's work or not? Do you
think
it may be relevant? Please do let me know - and thank you for these
amazing
threads.
Regards
Paula
_________________________________
Paula M Towsey
PhD Candidate: Universiteit Leiden
Faculty of Social Sciences
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-
bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of Denise Newnham
Sent: 13 August 2010 12:31
To: 'eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity'
Subject: RE: [xmca] Refugees and Conception
Dear Mike,
Two things to situate and I reply for the wider network as well: The
Change
laboratory methodology (Engestrom, 1987) was called for by a group of
specialized teachers and a voluntary NGO group called Suisses
Immigres (N+
10). They had designed a project called Accompagnateur Mere-Enfant
(Mother-
child facilitator).These were the subjects of the Change laboratory
and the
activity was the project. There were (at the time of the CL) 10
voluntary
facilitators who were mostly retired teachers or retired persons.
These
people worked in a dyad with a mother and a child. The triad worked
on "how
to do homework with a child". The facilitator was there to help the
mother
to take over the role of guiding her child in homework tasks. After
several
months problems began to surface within the meetings between the two
groups.
The designers of the project or project holders decided to run a CL
under my
guidance on this group of people so there were two going on at the
same
time.The one on the project itself and the other on the
facilitators. The
hidden agenda of this project was to "get the mothers out of their
homes" as
a form of integration. Mothers were the targets as they are, in the
host
population as well, the people that are largely at home in order to
help
with the task of children's homework. Children come home for an hour
and a
half at midday in this region until the age of 15. It is presumed
that the
refugee mothers do not get out of their homes.
The difficulty that I had is similar to what you mention. The
situation of
the refugee mothers. No prior investigation was done into what they
really
live and how they think. There were many value laden judgments going
on and
were translated into paternalistic attitudes towards the mothers and
families at large by the facilitators.
The CL is over and micro shifts were achieved. However the
perceptions of
the foreign mothers was difficult to overcome. And now this is where
I have
a gap in the explanation of possible reasons as to why. Obviously at
the
time I would not have been able to run these tests and actually the
idea did
not enter my mind then. What I did do was begin with a group of
mothers (who
volunteered) to work through what integration meant to them and in
their
everyday problems what could be found as solutions in order to break
the
vicious circle in which they lived. The socio-political environment
for
these people is much the same as you described from the book The
spirit
catches you...No they are not entirely isolated this is impossible
but their
minds are still very much in the past.
Three of the mothers would reason in the same way as the person
encountered
by Luria. However they are not lacking in reasoning as the groups
within the
project would say. They were simple reasoning in another manner.
There way
of thinking reflected their socio-cultural environment of origin.
That is
why I would like to have had an article where you expose this
possibility.
Many thanks to you all
Denise
-----Original Message-----
From: Denise Newnham [mailto:dsnewnham@bluewin.ch]
Sent: 13 August 2010 10:13
To: 'Denise Newnham'
Subject: FW: [xmca] Refugees and Conception
-----Original Message-----
From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [mailto:xmca-
bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] On
Behalf Of mike cole
Sent: 13 August 2010 00:43
To: eXtended Mind, Culture,Activity
Subject: [xmca] Refugees and Conception
I am responding here to Denise's note about her work with refugee
women. I
have started a new thread because her message came trailing a mile of
previous messages (we need to find some way to not include every
previous
message with a new one; its a special burden when we get very long
threads
and the archive has all the prior messages in a thread anyway).
Denise wrote (in part):
I (one of my hats) work with refugee mothers and the concept of
"foreign
mothers" for the local population. I ran a CL [Change Laboratory]
with a
group that is working on integrating refugee mothers so that their
children
can perform better at school. The subjects of this CL had relatively
little
or no knowledge of what happens in foreign mothers lives or world on
a daily
basis. This I attempted to introduce through mirror data and models
etc.
What remains as a question is to me is if these persons minds where
constructed within their environment and they are relatively
isolated within
their new environment what kind of mind is there? The question that
you put
forward at the end of the video is of great interest to me and an
important
argument for involuntary displaced adults.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Your note raises dozens of questions for me, Denise.
First of all, I would love to read a description of your Change Lab
experiments. The first question your note brings up is "who
initiated the
intervention?" A central principle of the Development Work Research
Change
Lab methodology, as I understand it, is that focal participants are
the ones
to decide what is a problem in their lives (at work in the work that
I have
read). Are the moms the one's who are concerned about their kids'
performance in school?
Or is this some govt agency's concern?
If it is the mom's concern, what is revealed about the history and
current
state of their problems as they see them in the mirror?
What sort of intermediate solutions do they come up with?
Is it difficult for them to use the theoretical model?
I think that just starting with data generated by the conversations
that are
meant to be evoked by the mirror part of the methodology would
reveal a lot
about how these women think about the world. Anyway, I would start
there
(and for sure would give them Vygotsky blocks to find out how their
minds
work!).
I understand what you mean, in common sense terms, by saying that
they lead
isolated lives here. But it is not literally true, is it? From the
little i
know about domestic refugee situations, the world around them
impinges on
them from every side. For example, in the book *The Spirit Catches
You and
You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the
Collision of Two
Cultures *by Anne Fadiman, the Hmong people who are her subject
matter could
easily be said to live in isolation from the life around them in the
Central
Valley of California, but it is an odd sort of isolation as they
struggle to
reconcile the two worlds they have experienced. And its odd for
those around
them who seek to be helpful. And many around them are actively
seeking to
isolate them even as they seek to isolate themselves from "those alien
creatures."At present I am working in an African American community
which
is, so to speak, isolated in a housing project in southeast san
diego. After
a few years of involvement with these folks, the main thing i have
learned
is that there is so much I do not understand that I am constantly
suspending
judgment and seeking deeper understanding by engaging with them in
activities that they think are good for their kids, all the time
trying to
understand the discrepancies from my expectations/values, the
choices they
make, their selective appropriation of the advice that rains down on
them,
and so on.
I am really interested in the problem you raise, but I almost
certainly have
little to contribute with so little knowledge of the particulars.
Tell us more!
mike
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