[xmca] activity and reification

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

Anna and Martin

Anna wrote

For kids, words do not partition the world in objects mainly, the way they
do for grownups. Not even nouns. For the little (and cute) ones, words
translate into routines - ways of doing things. One can see it with
particular clarity in math. To give just one basic example out of the
infinity of possibilities: Numbers begin their existence as procedures of
counting - something you can see when your repeated question "How many
cookies do I have here?" makes the child to repeat the counting rather than
prompting her to simply state the last word she has prfeviously uttered in
this process. It will take time till the reification/ objectification of
number words occurs. Just like "bottle" serves a baby as a trigger for the
routine of getting fed, so are the words such as "many", "more", etc. mere
prompts fos r counting. In this latter case, however, unlike in the former,
this procedure (counting) is a social game rather than anything that would
have any direct practical significance.
e difference is
Martin you described how thw terms "apple" and "pomme" [fruit of fruits] are
reifications of particular historical enactments which have lost their
historical grounding and must be re-discovered.

Anna or Martin

Do you see both what the child is developing as it turns an enactment into a
number and the adult developing the word pomme as equivalent processes of
enactments becoming reified?

Larry
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