[xmca] Vygotsky's claims

[Andy Blunden <ablunden@mira.net>]

Mike, my reading of it is this: Vygotsky poses a question: "What is the relation between thought and word?"
Then he provides an answer: "The relation between thinking and speaking is an action: namely, word meaning.

The relation between thinking and speaking is an enquiry into the intellect, ie., symbolic activity. It seems to me that many CHAT writers have interpreted "meaning" not as something which inheres in a word, but an action, ie., a basic unit of activity, viz., using a word. In my own Hegelian interpretation of Vygotsky and Activity Theory I connect everything up on the idea that action = "" = particular.

I think this is something general. You don't start off with the mediating element. That has to be discovered. You start off with the problem which can be cast in the form: "What mediates between A and B?" Your answer may be C, i.e., "A->C->B." There are other possible solutions to the same question, e.g. "A->D->B."

Does that make any sense?

Andy

mike cole wrote:

Thank you, Martin, brilliant as you are doomed to be.

I turned from your note, picked up Thinking and Speech, and read the
preface. That in itself is worth a good deal of discussion. But, just this,
to begin with. I think its relevant to the issue of Vygotsky's ideas about
the relationship of mediation and activity.

Look at what you get if you complete the following phrase as a "stem" that
needs to be completed. Vygotsky writes.

All our work is focused on a single basic problem, on the genetic analysis
of thought and word.........

American contextualist completion of the sentence..... Of course, we
constantly have to keep in mind that the meaning of words depends upon the
context.

A Russian cultural-historical theorist completion of the sentence...... Of
course, we constantly have to keep in mind that words are constituitive of
human activity.

In the 5 claims LSV makes for the accomplishments of the book in the
preface, not a single one refers to context/activity.

Yet later in the text (earlier in his life?), he makes explicit reference to
the importance of practical activity.

Who among us is it who has Barthes reminding us that failing to re-read is
failing to learn from experience, or some such aposite thought. Sure
benefited from that bit of re-reading!


mike

On Fri, Feb 11, 2011 at 4:57 PM, Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu> wrote:

  

On Feb 10, 2011, at 9:04 PM, David Kellogg wrote:

    

more than mildly brilliant.
      

Thank you, David. I generally shoot for bitterly brilliant, and usually hit
mildly stupid.

I don't disagree with much of what you say about Piaget. I suspect he knew
of LSV's critique before the 1960s, and I suspect he didn't pay much
attention. Anyone who received 80 honorary degrees in his lifetime didn't
need to pay much attention to criticism. Did he develop? I think he was
*always* a genetic epistemologist; I am not sure he ever saw himself as a
psychologist, so in that sense no. He was interested, it seems to me, in how
a biological organism (a baby) becomes a logical organism (a scientist), one
who has certain and necessary knowledge. In that respect he was thoroughly
Kantian, though he felt Kant had gone 'too far' (as he put it, if I recall)
in assuming that the categories of the transcendental ego were innate. Even
his interest in morality clearly had Kantian roots. He was more an empirical
philosopher  than a psychologist; not that that's a bad thing to be. The
same might be said of LSV, but his philosophical starting point was very
different.

And I agree that, as you suggest, it is very important to recognize the
importance LSV attributed to practical activity. It runs through the length
of Thought & Language - from the preface where he says that it is the book's
practical task that unifies its parts - and of course in Crisis he insisted
that practical concerns would drive the new, general psychology.

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