[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: [xmca] activity (was concepts)



Hi Andy, Anna et all,
It seems to me that what we are neglecting in our conversation is the concept of unification which is a dialectical process. For the novice speaker for whom nouns are easier to produce than verbs, early words stand for a phrase "Bottle" stands for "give me the bottle"where the speaker intends to benefit from an action.. Even at this simple level there is a unification of the object with the subject's intent, The reason why Vygotsky's unit of analysis is useful as a model rather than the specificity of word meaning is because of this quality of unification. If we thought of concepts as an extension of these cognitive acts rather than reducing them to objects, we would be more at ease with their use. I know that a solid object is the result of underlying Brownian motion, but I do not need to keep that in mind when I try to decide whether I can move it. Our concern for appropriating cognitivist approaches is so everpresent that it can inhibit our ability to use freely what we have learned and what we can add tothe thought activity of our "distant teachers."
Vera
----- Original Message ----- From: "Andy Blunden" <ablunden@mira.net>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 21, 2011 9:39 AM
Subject: Re: [xmca] activity (was concepts)


Good ol' Lev is never that unambiguous is he, though? Consider this:

   “This justifies the view that word meaning is an act of speech. In
   psychological terms, however, word meaning is nothing other than a
   generalization, that is, a /concept/. In essence, generalization and
   word meaning are synonyms. Any generalization – any formation of a
   concept – is unquestionably a specific and true act of thought. Thus
   word meaning is also a phenomenon of thinking” (Vygotsky Volume 1: 244).

Andy
Martin Packer wrote:
Eric,

No need to defer - like Anna, I appreciate disagreement! I doubt I'm the better scholar; perhaps the more obsessive. And my ability to understand Russian is entirely mediated by Google Translate!

Martin

On Apr 21, 2011, at 9:17 AM, ERIC.RAMBERG@spps.org wrote:


Martin:

I will have to defer to you as I believe you to be the greater scholar as well as better in translation ( as I alas know only english and pig latin)> However, instinctively I believe concept to be the dialectic that allows thinking and speech to merge and become what LSV refers to as higher psychological processes.

eric



From:   Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
To:     "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date:   04/20/2011 11:30 PM
Subject:        Re: [xmca] activity (was concepts)
Sent by:        xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu



On Apr 20, 2011, at 3:47 PM, Martin Packer wrote:


Eric,

I don't know, I think LSV makes it pretty clear that word-meaning is not
the concept. He criticizes Ach, who:

"identifies concept and word meaning, and thus precludes any possibility
of change and development in concepts" (T&S chapter 6, para 16).

Martin


Eric,

I apologise for my curt message earlier today. As it happens I had been sitting in a cafe for a couple of hours musing over this very issue, and when I returned home to read your message I couldn't resist a quick reply.

It seems to me that one way of thinking about what LSV does in T&S is that he defines what word-meaning [Значение] is by explaining successively what it is not. That does seem a bit dialectical, doesn't it? And one of the things that word-meaing is not is concept (ch 7). It is also not sound (preface and ch 1). Is it not objective reference (ch 2). And I think this clarifies some of the issues in reading the book. For example, when in chapter 5 LSV borrows Frege's & Husserl's distinction between 'sense' and 'reference,' Sinn and Bedeutung should translate as Смысле and Значение, but LSV has the *former* term as Значение. So Frege's distinction becomes 'meaning' and 'objective referent.' Why? Because LSV is using this distinction to make the point that the meaning is not the object the word refers to, which is a commonsense view and also that of several psychologists whose work he is critiquing.

In chapter 7, however, when LSV introduces Paulhan's distinction between 'sense' and 'signification' it is the *latter* term which he calls Значение, while the former is Смысле. Why? Because although LSV gives credit to Paulhan for introducing the distinction, he criticizes him for not solving the problem of the relationship between the two terms. And meaning, for LSV, is neither Paulhan's sense nor his signification.
Here is the paragraph in full:

Our research has been able to establish three fundamental characteristics which are linked amongst themselves and which constitute the originality of the semantic aspect of inner speech. The first fundamental characteristic is the predominance of the sense [смысла] of a word over its meaning [значением] in inner speech. Paulhan has rendered a great service to psychological analysis by introducing the difference between the sense of a word and its meaning. The sense of a word, as Paulhan has demonstrated, represents the ensemble of all of the psychological facts which appear in our consciousness thanks to a word. The sense of a word is in this way a dynamic, fluid, complex semantic formation which has several zones of different stability. The meaning is only one of the areas of sense that the word acquires in a given context, but it is the zone which is most stable, most unified, and most precise. As is well known, a word easily changes its sense in different contexts. The meaning, in contrast, is the immobile and immutable point which remains stable in diverse contexts. This change in sense in the word is what we have established as the fundamental fact in the semantic analysis of speech. The real meaning of a word is not constant. In one operation, the word has one meaning, and in another it takes on a different meaning. This dynamicity of meaning brings us to the problem of Paulhan, that is to say the relationship between meaning and sense. The word, taken by itself in the dictionary, has only one meaning. But this meaning is nothing other than the potential which is realized in living language; this meaning is only the foundation stone of sense. LSV's word meaning is not signification because it is not a fixed, dictionary definition. But it is not Paulhan's sense either. Sense is an important phenomenon, especially for understanding inner speech and its relation to thought on the one hand and social speech on the other. But it is not word-meaning. For one thing, LSV points out that Paulhan shows that sense can actually be detached from the word.

So here too the emphasis is on what word-meaning is not. Not sense, not sound, not referent, not concept.
Martin



__________________________________________
_____
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


__________________________________________
_____
xmca mailing list
xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca




--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*Andy Blunden*
Joint Editor MCA:
http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=g932564744
Home Page: http://home.mira.net/~andy/
Book: http://www.brill.nl/default.aspx?partid=227&pid=34857
MIA: http://www.marxists.org

__________________________________________
_____
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