Hi Peter,
I am glad to see you join in the discussion,
since I know you've done interesting research on
inner speech.
I am certainly willing to grant that patterns of
social interaction will become patterns of
self-regulation and thereby parts of patterns of
individual thinking. It also makes sense to me,
and in my opinion LSV clearly states the view,
that the higher psychological processes are
cultural processes. I think he goes so far as to
say that reasoning is cultural.
But, importantly, that is not the same as saying
that reasoning *varies* across cultures. We
*all* live in culture, and one can say that
reasoning is cultural and still maintain that
reasoning is universal. Are we willing to take
another step, and suggest that in specific
cultures the ways that people reason will be
different, because the specific conventions of
each culture are involved? That is a big step to
take, because the rules of logic, to pick what
is usually taken to be one component of
reasoning, are usually considered to hold
regardless of local conventions.
One way to take this step, of course, is to say
that people in cultures reason in different ways
but then to add an evaluative dimension. Those
people in that culture reason differently from
the way we do, but that is because their
reasoning is less adequate than ours. They are
more childlike, more primitive. *This* move has
often been made, and I can find many passages in
LSV's texts where he seems to be saying
basically this. That's not a move I find
interesting or appealing, and it's not what I am
proposing.
On the contrary, it seems to me that much of
LSV's writing can be read as pointing to the
conclusion that *standards* of rationality will
vary from one culture another. But I don't think
he followed his own pointers, and, as I've said
above, it is a pretty radical conclusion to come
to.
Martin
On Jun 27, 2012, at 9:33 AM, Peter Feigenbaum wrote:
Martin--
If you grant that interpersonal speech
communication is essentially a cultural
invention, and that private and inner
speech--as derivatives of interpersonal speech
communication--are also cultural inventions,
then Vygotsky's assertions about inner speech
as a tool that adults use voluntarily to
conduct and direct such crucial psychological
activities as analyzing, reflecting,
conceptualizing, regulating, monitoring,
simulating, rehearsing (actually, some of these
activities were not specifically asserted by
Vygotsky, but instead have been discovered in
experiments with private speech) would imply
that these "higher mental processes" are
themselves cultural products. Even if the
*contents* of inner speech thinking happen to
bear no discernible cultural imprint, the
process of production nonetheless does.
Of course, you may not agree that
interpersonal speech communication is a
cultural invention. But if you do go along with
the idea that every speech community follows
(albeit implicitly) their own particular
conventions or customs for: assigning specific
speech sounds to specific meanings (i.e.,
inventing words); organizing words into
sequences (i.e., inventing grammar--Chomsky's
claims not withstanding); and sequencing
utterances in conversation according to rules
of appropriateness (i.e., inventing rules that
regulate "what kinds of things to say, in what
message forms, to what kinds of people, in what
kinds of situations", according to the
cross-cultural work of E. O. Frake), then
reasoning based on the use of speech must be
cultural as well.
My guess is that you are looking for evidence
that cultures reason differently. While there
may be evidence for such a claim, I only want
to point out that the tools for reasoning are
themselves manufactured by human culture.
Peter
Peter Feigenbaum, Ph.D.
Associate Director of Institutional Research
Fordham University
Thebaud Hall-202
Bronx, NY 10458
Phone: (718) 817-2243
Fax: (718) 817-3203
e-mail: pfeigenbaum@fordham.edu
From: Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>
To: "eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity" <xmca@weber.ucsd.edu>
Date: 06/26/2012 05:06 PM
Subject: [xmca] Culture & Rationality
Sent by: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu
Thank you for the suggestions that people have
made about evidence that supports the claim
that culture is constitutive of psychological
functions. Keep sending them in, please! Now I
want to introduce a new, but related, thread. A
few days ago I gave Peter a hard time because
he wrote that "higher mental processes are
those specific to a culture, and thus those
that embody cultural concepts so that they
guide activity."
I responded that I don't think that LSV ever
wrote this - his view seems to me to have been
that it is scientific concepts that make
possible the higher psychological functions
(through at time he seems to suggest the
opposite).
My questions now are these:
1. Am I wrong? Did LSV suggest that higher
mental processes are specific to a culture and
based on cultural concepts?
2. If LSV didn't suggest this, who has? Not counting Peter! :)
3. Do we have empirical evidence to support
such a suggestion? It seems to me to boil down,
or add up, to the claim that human rationality,
human reasoning, varies culturally. (Except who
knows what rationality is? - it turns out that
the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy does
not have an entry for Rationality; apparently
they are still making up their minds.)
that's all, folks
Martin
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