Re: [xmca] Re: Reading Mike's cultural psychology

[David Kellogg <vaughndogblack@yahoo.com>]

Huw:
 
I just got back from a Saturday seminar on Chapter Two of Vygotsky's "History of the Development of the Higher Psychological Functions". Like Mike's book, it's a frustrating piece of writing in some ways: Vygotsky tells you that he is going to produce a small working model of a higher psychological function, which will create the very basis for their experimental replication that the traditional Stimulus-Response experiment has failed to provide. 
 
He then tells you that it is based on a real but rudimentary function. That although it is today eking out a miserable existence in a world it no longer understands, it once played a heroic role in leading the whole of humanity out of the bestiality of an animal existence into the semi-bestiality of a capitalist one. 
 
After sixty highly opaque pages, he tells you exactly what he has in mind: Buridan's ass, an imaginary donkey surrounded by bales of hay, unable to decide which to eat first, and therefore starving to death. (This is then the basis for three real monographs of rudientary functions: casting lots, tying knots and counting on your fingers, or auguries, mnemonics and tokens for manipulating concepts.)
 
Why a gedankenexperiment (actually, Buridan's donkey was really a rhetorical ploy by angry Aristotelians against Jean Buridan, one of the world's first strict behaviorsts and as such a denier of free will)? Why not a real experiment?
 
Oh, Vygotsky explains that too: In a logical account, you move the main purpose of your object of analysis to the beginning of your account of it, but at the beginning of a truly developmental chronological account, that purpose is nowhere to be seen. 
 
Such a logical account (where the unit is analyzed first) is always contained in a chronological account but it is also hidden, because "chronos" stands in front of it and obscures it, with all the messy things that humans fill their time with. 
 
And of all of that is really standing in front of my real defense of the imaginary character. In English language teaching studies here in Korea, we found that contrary to the usual dogma of "real life" talk about "you and me", talk of imaginary characters in the classroom almost always produces language that is consistently more uninhibited, and linguistically more complex. 
 
We also found that children are much more able to reason morally and ethically when they are talking about hypothetical moral dilemmas then when they are confronted with (fabricated) "real" ones (e.g. classroom turn taking). And that even preschoolers are much more likely to use the ethical meaning of "good" when they are in the third person point of view then when they are exercising the second or first one.
 
Why should this be? Oh, the linguistics of it is easy to explain: in all the languages I know, first and second person is more iconic, more indexical, more context-embedded and thus less sophisticated symbolically (compare "Look here!" with "I would like him to look at me.")  
 
The developmental aspect is less transparent. In language teaching we have committed a hundred year mistake, quite similar to (yea, predicated upon) the mistakes of structuralist linguistics: we have assumed that the pure purpose of language is social communication and that the derived purpose of self-communication is somehow always a derivative of this, the way written language is supposedly a derivative of spoken.
 
But suppose self-communication were, developmentally, the central goal of language use (as it is in a Korean classroom)? Yea, suppose the child's own self is an imaginary character?Then, as Brecht says, the reality of the theatre lies precisely in its unreality, about which it behooves us to be perfectly and completely frank. To children one must always tell the absolute truth about lies.  
 
David Kellogg
Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

--- On Fri, 4/6/12, mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com> wrote:


From: mike cole <lchcmike@gmail.com>
Subject: [xmca] Re: Reading Mike's cultural psychology
To: "Huw Lloyd" <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com>
Cc: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: Friday, April 6, 2012, 9:02 PM


Sound like excellent questions. Wonder what the answers are!?
mike

On Fri, Apr 6, 2012 at 8:23 PM, Huw Lloyd <huw.softdesigns@gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been reading through Mike's cultural psychology book.
>
> There's plenty of good material arranged in a way a found helpful.
>
> Three points I'd be interested in hearing elaboration and, or,
> confirmation on are:
>
> 1.  The logical typing of the implicit unit of analysis employed (on p.
> 233 Vai literacy types and filter method as practice types) for the
> cross-cultural research where by:
>
> a) The 'unit instance' (data) is not logically comparable to any other
> data other than data from the same context.
>
> b) A filter method of approximate testing that the context has not
> changed, or that the context is being approximated to the fidelity aimed
> for.
>
> c) This filter as a recursive means of qualification around the integrity
> of the data.
>
>
> 2.  The idea of Lurias method for discovering hidden processes applied to
> a very rich activity, with the smoothness of the (implicit, perhaps unknown
> to the subjects) base process.
>
> a)  Finding a suitable base process becomes the initial search which
> mediates the hidden processes sought.
>
> b) Demonstrating an effective base process would seem to come after trying
> out various base processes (i.e. revealing symptoms in useful ways).
>
>
> 3. The use of fictional characters in the 5th dimension.
>
> a) The pretense of communicating with and heeding a fiction/fantasy seems,
> to me, to be, potentially, a longer term impediment (both to scaling the
> activity to different kinds of knowledge and the longitudinal involvement
> of maturing children).  To what degree is the wizard necessary?  Why
> wouldn't an equally playful/friendly environment be set up around say a
> historically real figurehead?
>
> b) To what degree are the fictions of the wizard a political statement to
> the adults/parents of fitting their own fantasies of idyllic fairy
> childhoods or is the means of signposting the activities as not needing
> adult interference, "this is our world thank you, don't interfere"?
>
> c) As I understand it, urban contemporary children want to get involved in
> the world of adults, which they're often denied access to.  Setting up
> environments that are child friendly, accessible and pliable for the
> children is part of this, though I wonder if sugaring up the central theme
> as a fantasy figure goes against this.
>
>
>
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