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Re: [xmca] Operations
Michael, your comment, "the knowing is in the act and in the act's
relationship to response" indicates a balance between act and response. I
question if the centrality of "response" may be more primary than the
initial act?
Manfred's notion of "expressive signs" may be interpreted as emphasizing
"response" as the way we come to "know".
Larry
On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 8:10 PM, Glassman, Michael <glassman.13@osu.edu>wrote:
> Hi Andy,
>
> I think it is perhaps a jump to say that knowledge of the world, or
> knowing, comes from a mental image. To act with purpose we first must think
> about what we want to do or where we want to go, and then do it. It seems
> to me this places the individual as the point of origination for activity.
> I think, at this point, I would say two things about this. The first is
> that we can never know what images exist in the individual "mind" to begin
> with. This is especially true of the infant, the child without speech. So
> to conjecture about the infant's individual mind one way or the other seems
> a difficult proposition. But perhaps more important, do you want to place
> knowing in the action that a human takes, or place it in the mind as a
> "motivation" for action (I think, therefore I am?). The knowing is in the
> act, and in the act's relationship to response. I always thought the
> strongest part of Piaget's ideas was his notion of sensori-motor. The
> movements of infants, or even neonates, are driven by the pleasure it
> affords them. The body, the senses recognize the pleasure and reach out
> for me, and more pleasure is given in response. It is the start of our
> life long "project" or projection. Maybe it is not pleasure, but it is
> something, and it is something the children is reaching out for, and an
> image of what it is is not really needed, it seems to me, to establish an
> aim, the knowing is in our senses.
>
> Michael
> ________________________________________
> From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu [xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu] on behalf
> of Andy Blunden [ablunden@mira.net]
> Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 9:28 PM
> To: eXtended Mind, Culture, Activity
> Subject: [xmca] Operations
>
> Michael, here is what Manfred said in his message:
>
> "A young infant has not already established a goal-driven level of
> actions. In the first weeks one can observe the acquisition of first
> operations and of first expectations what should happen. But these
> expectations are not yet represented as a mental image about the
> desired future states. This is the product of the acquisition of a
> sign system which enables the person to evoke and imagine a future
> state in the here and now and to start to strive for it. And for
> this starting point, not only to imagine different future states,
> but also to select one of them and to start to strive for it,
> emotional processes come into play that color one of the imagined
> future state e.g. in a state worth striving for and that mobilize
> the executive power to start striving for it. However, the ability
> to form such notions of goals and to transform them into actions is
> not something that occurs automatically. It emerges in a long-drawn
> ontogenetic learning process in which the attainment of goals
> through actions is tried, tested, and increasingly optimized."
>
> I make no claim to be a psychologist, Michael, but it always seemed to
> me that ascribing a knowledge of the world to neonates would be a hard
> position to sustain. We have to find some other way of understanding the
> behaviour of neonates and infants other than presuming that they form a
> goal and then take appropriate premeditated action to realise that goal.
>
> An "operation" is a form of behaviour which has the potential to be
> transformed into an action, that is, for the subject to become
> consciously aware of the behaviour and subject it to conscious control.
> So at first I think we have to say that the neonate smiles, moves its
> hands around, pouts, squeezes, etc, etc., without first forming the idea
> "I think I will smile at this woman, and she might give me some more
> food" or any such thing. But after the relevant stimuli have been
> repeatedly accompanied by the various kinds of responses which adult
> carers provide to the child and the successful satisfaction of the
> stimuli, the child might begin to associate the behaviour with an
> object, accomodate its behaviour to the social world around them, and
> what began as an operation may be transformed into an action. Otherwise,
> I think we are imply a hell of a lot about innate knowledge!
>
> Andy
>
> Glassman, Michael wrote:
> > .... But I also I think disagree with Andy to some extent. Do infants
> simply engage in operations? Is that possible? Isn't there an action tied
> to every operation, or else why is the infant doing it. I think infants
> definitely do react to stimuli (feedback I think can be define through
> information processing but it can also perhaps be defined through social
> cognitive theory which is more behavior oriented). But when they react
> don't they have an aim of some type? It might be very rudimentary but it
> is an aim and the child is developing operations to meet those aims (it
> also seems to me that there are much fuzzier boundaries between operations
> and actions at this point).
>
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