Date: Tue, 23 Jan 1996
From: Jorge F. Larreamendy-Joerns (larream@pitt.edu)
Subject: Review Chapter 6: Addison Stone

xmca fellows,

Below is the review of Addison Stone's chapter in "Contexts for Learning". The chapter is entitled "What is missing in the metaphor of scaffolding?".

Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns
University of Pittsburgh

Stone, A. (1993). "What is missing in the metaphor of scaffolding?"
In E. Forman, N. Minick, & C. A. Stone (Eds.), Context for Learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children's development (pp. 169-183)
New York: Oxford University Press.

Addison Stone's chapter constitutes an authentic critique, in the German sense, of the metaphor of scaffolding introduced 20 years ago by Wood, Bruner, and Ross (1976) to describe "the process by which an adult assists a child to carry out a task beyond the child's capability as an individual agent" (Stone, 1993, p. 169). Analyses of adult-child interactions during problem solving show that an adult may assist a child by recruiting the child's interest, reducing the degrees of freedom involved in the task maintaining the child's orientation toward the relevant goals, highlighting critical task features, controlling frustration, and demonstrating idealized solution pathways. Stone points out that this functional description of the scaffolding process is, in a way, synonymous with the adult-child interaction implied in Vygotsky's concept of the "zone of proximal development".

Its heuristic value notwithstanding, the metaphor of scaffolding leaves unspecified the discursive or otherwise semiotic mechanisms whereby the transfer of responsibility from the adult to the child takes place over the course of assisted performance. To fill this explanatory gap, Stone redefines scaffolding from a semiotic perspective, and recurs to psycholinguistics and discourse analysis in search of mechanisms that may explicate how children go about appropriating meaning in the context of adult-child interactions. One such mechanism, according to Stone, is prolepsis, a traditional rhetorical figure reintroduced by Rommetveit (1974) into the field of psycholinguistics. An utterance is said to be proleptic when it sets forth, in the form of a presupposition, information yet not shared by the participants of a communicative exchange. Thus, when the speaker provides an utterance which presupposes information not shared by the listener, the listener is challenged to reconstruct such information on his/he r own, thus engaging in an active search after meaning. Stone provides this simple, though provocative, example of prolepsis. The example describes a dialogue between a tourist and a guard in an art museum:

Tourist: Where is the Impressionist collection?
Guard: [Pointing to a display case in the distance] Down the hallway just beyond the kitchenware.
Tourist: I beg your pardon.
Guard: Just beyond the Oriental pottery.

Stone argues that the guard's first utterance is proleptic in the sense that it conveys an implicit opinion about Oriental pottery, which is not shared by the tourist, who is then forced to seek clarification. Stone claims that something similar occurs in adult-child interactions where the adult may set forth her perspective of the situation, thus challenging the child to reconstruct a meaning that was provided only implicitly. In this way, the adult remains a step ahead of the child and, as Vygotsky would say, sets the conditions for "good learning", i.e., that "which is in advance of development" (1978, p. 89).

Stone highlights the similarities between the concept of prolepsis and Grice's (1989) notion of conversational implicature, pointing out nevertheless that in prolepsis, unlike in conversational implicatures, the shared information between the interlocuto rs is not enough to allow the implicature to go through (hence the need for further dialogue).

Proleptic utterances possess a sort of "inconclusiveness" that ultimately constitute the reason why a given conversation remains alive. Since the speaker's view is presupposed on the basis of yet unprovided information, the listener has to reconstruct itby himself, hopefully with the assistance of the speaker. In that sense, the sequence of questions and answers that follow a proleptic utterance constitute a crucial aspect of the process of assistance triggered by the proleptic utterance in the first pl ace. In reading Stone's chapter, one has the feeling that the most important rationale behind the attempt to link scaffolding with a discursive mechanism such as prolepsis is that "proleptic exchanges" stress the idea that a shared context is not always just a conversational given (as a shortsighted reading of Grice would suggest), but rather the result of a proactive search after meaning.

Stone also argues that this perspective on scaffolding as semiotic interaction needs to be complemented with a careful examination of issues such as the influence of a child's linguistic development on the success of conversational exchanges, and the int erpersonal and even institutional dimensions of scaffolding. Stone concludes by stressing the subtle nature of scaffolding, and the need to understand the "semiotic devices" that mediate adult-child interactions and the dependency of scaffolding upon interpersonal factors (e.g., trust between interlocutors, symmetry and asymmetry of interaction, goal-embeddedness).

Several points can be made concerning Stone"s chapter. First, it is commendable his attempt to go beyond what I would call a functional description of adult-child interactions, of which the metaphor of scaffolding is an oft-cited example. By turning his attention to semiotic mechanisms instead, Stone follows directly the steps of Vygotsky, for whom language was primarily a tool to achieve socially shared goals (e.g., problem solving). This attempt to inform sociocultural theory with domains such as disco urse analysis, rhetoric, and semiotics is, in my opinion, one of the most promising fronts of psychological research. In that sense, prolepsis constitutes only one of numerous alternatives.

However, the analysis of scaffolding in proleptic terms is not without difficulties. For one, the distinction between prolepsis and simple failed conversational implicatures is a slippery one. It seems to me that a useful criterion is intentionality: proleptic utterances are generated intentionally (to amuse or simply to challenge the listener, as in the dialogue between the tourist and the museum guard). In contrast, failed conversational implicatures most often occur when the speaker fails to assess appropriately the listener's knowledge base. This distinction is crucial because it allow us to differentiate scaffolding through prolepsis from a dialogue in which the adult (e.g., teacher) makes unwarranted assumptions about what the listener can or cannot infer or reconstruct.

A second issue relates to the likelihood of finding "genuine" proleptic utterances in actual adult-child interactions. Stone himself points out that proleptic utterances during adult-child interactions may not be "so provocative as the museum example" ( Stone, 1993, p. 172). Again, in examining actual scaffolding episodes, a clearer distinction between prolepsis and failed implicatures would be desirable. As a matter of fact, Ellice Forman and I have conducted discourse analysis of classroom interactions over the past three years, and a rather steady finding is that the students, rather than the teacher, are the ones who generate more frequently utterances that, according to Stone's perspective, would be considered proleptic. Presumably, they do so not because they want the teacher to reconstruct their implicit assumptions, but because they misunderstand some of the conversational rules that apply in the classroom, particularly those related to the degree of explicitness that is expectable from a student (when he/she is providing, say, an explanation). In short, proleptic utterances can be deemed a mechanism to challenge the listener so as to foster learning, or a result of the students' lack of familiarity with the conversational rules that apply in the context of instructional dialogues. Once again, it all depends on how we define prolepsis relative to intentionality, and what is the focus of our analysis: the adult or the child.

Either way, Stone succeeds in showing that there is nothing simple about scaffolding. Once adult-child interactions are seen through the lens of discourse analysis or from a perspective where interpersonal factors are seriously taken into account, the apparent simplicity of the functions initially identified by Wood, Bruner, and Ross disappears. In this sense, the semiotic analysis of scaffolding mirrors the semiotic analysis of the IRE sequence.

References
Grice, H. P. (1989). Studies in the ways of words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rommetveit, R. (1974). On message structure: A framework for the study of language and communication. New York: Wiley.

Vygotsky, L. S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wood, D., Bruner, J. S., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 17, 89-100.

Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996
From: Judy Diamondstone (diamonju@rci.rutgers.edu)
Subject: Review Chapter 6: Addison Stone

I meant to send the following to XMCA but back-channeled to Jorge by mistake...:
I would like to respond to Jorge's review of Stone's chapter in _Contexts for learning_. I found it very helpful in thinking through some exchanges on the list Peter Smargorinsky set up for attendees of the Vygotsky conference. [SKIP THIS MESSAGE IF YOU ARE ON THAT LIST - IT'S VIRTUALLY THE SAME] In the end, I found reason to question Jorge's critique of prolepsis (as explained by Stone in the chapter under review) in terms of what is intended or not by the speaker. For me, to assume that proleptic utterances are intended really limits the usefulness of the term.

The author of the chapter under review (Stone) offers this definition: >>An utterance is said to be
>>proleptic when it sets forth, in the form of a presupposition,
>>information yet not shared by the participants of a communicative
>>exchange. Thus, when the speaker provides an utterance which presupposes
>>information not shared by the listener, the listener is challenged to
>>reconstruct such information on his/he r own, thus engaging in an active
>>search after meaning.

Prolepsis here refers to the nature of the utterance that requires a _listener_ to "search after meaning"; it suggests that the proleptic utterance requires intentionality on the part of the _listener_.

It is common in processes of successful socialization/acculturation for the more experienced member to treat the contributions of less experienced members as legitimate contributions - as if they were more informed by the relevant context or social practice than they really are. In a response to the review posted on another list, Paul Prior mentions caregivers' attributing meaning to children's babbling and other examples (perhaps the whole response deserves re-posting here) - the one I really like is:

"When students use technical terms of the discipline in their papers, professors may draw on richer intertextual networks and read into and respond to those terms as though they bear more meanning (and more disciplinarity) than the students possess..."

In Paul's example, the students may well be deliberate in their use of terminology, while the professor may or may not _intend_ to read more meaning into the terms than the students "had in mind" when they used them. Intentionality, though, is not what makes the socialization process successful. What makes the process work is the treating of relative newcomers as though they were full "(or fuller)" participants. What accounts for that way of treating newcomers is what Paul referred to as "more diffuse phenomena."

The author of the review (Jorge), on the other hand, wants to distinguish scaffolding "from a dialogue in which the adult... makes unwarranted assumptions about what the listener can or cannot do..." and as an exception to a speaker's _intended_ prolepsis, refers to students' frequent use of conversational "rules" (strategies?)that do not conform to classroom/teacher expectations :

>>Ellice Forman and I have conducted discourse analysis of
>>classroom interactions over the past three years, and a rather steady
>>finding is that the students, rather than the teacher, are the ones who
>>generate more frequently utterances that, according to StoneÕs
>>perspective, would be considered proleptic.

In both these examples, the contributions of the novice are at issue, and in the first example, it's the teacher's imperfections as a _listener_ that may get in the way of the student's learning.

Thinking this through informally, it's as if it's up to the listener, who is the more experienced member of a community of practice, to look for and attend to signs in the (less experienced) speaker's utterances of a difference in orientation, and to respond to such signs of difference as if they were fully legitimate contributions to the making of meaning within the given community of practice -- because they _are_ legitimate, although warranted by some other meaning-making system than that presupposed by the expert. The more experienced member is "forced" to take the perspective of the relative novice.

This is not to deny the importance of the inverse process - where the novice is "forced" to take up the expert perspective, in order to make sense of what is said.

There's more to say here, but that's all for now from me.

Judy Diamondstone
diamonju@rci.rutgers.edu
Rutgers University
Eternity is in love with the productions of time. -- Wm. Blake

Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996
From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Subject: Re: threads

Hello Peter-- Nice to learn of a list I probably ought to be on-- or one that ought to merge with xmca. As you know, I am one of those odd people who think that Vygotsky-Luria, and Leontiev really did constitute a troika, at least enough so that in succeeding generations, people like me would be seduced into thinking that their ideas were mutually complementary (and of course, incomplete).

I have written some in various places about prolepsis. People might also find interesting the Griffin and Cole article in Rogoff and Wertsch's book on the zone of proximal development (1984 I think) where we discuss the shortcomings of the scaffolding metaphor.

There is this about prolepsis for those who think of it as being benign: it can easily be interpreted as the abstraction embodied in the phrase, "the dead hand of the past."

mike cole

Date: Wed, 24 Jan 1996
From: Jorge F. Larreamendy-Joerns (larream@pitt.edu)
Subject: On prolepsis and its fates

Judy,

I just read your comments on some of my ideas concerning the distinction between prolepsis and conversational implicatures, and I think that you hit right on target. Basically, I believe that there are two ways in which we can conceptualize prolepsis. First, we can look at it as a way to refer to the process by which meanings are implied or presupposed AS IF they were previously shared, when indeed they are not. This, as Judy aptly indicates, has the effect (when everything goes right) of legitimizing the listener as a member of a given community, even before he/she actually develops the relevant capabilities. The example of the caregivers attributing meaning to children's babbling is very appropriate. AT this level, prolepsis constitutes a mechanism of enculturation by "anticipation". There is a long tradition in Continental philosophy, that dates back to Hegel's passage on the Master and the Slave (in the Phenomenology of the Spirit), according to which identity, for example, originates through a process that mirrors prolepsis. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, for instance, claims that identity, defined as a place in a symbolic order or family genealogy, is attributed through discourse to infants (by means of cultural rituals such as baptism and the forth) even before they forge by themselves they place in a society or family structure. In this sense, the meaning of prolepsis is close to one of the definitions that is provided in the American Heritage Dictionary: "The anachronistic representation of something as existing before its proper or historical time" (I have personal reserves concerning the word anachronistic, though).

Now, if we explore how prolepsis works at a more minute discursive level, for instance examining how it might work in a classroom situation, things get a little bit fuzzy. If a teacher, for example, produces a proleptic utterance, several things can happen, depending on whether the students can actually follow the presuppositions that are taken for granted. The utterance can be provocative to students so that they unpack the meaning by drawing the necessary inferences (something that depends greatly on their knowledge base and other supporting means). In this case, the prolepsis can be said, from an instructional perspective, well-crafted. On the other hand, the utterance can go well beyond the cognitive and, generally, semiotic means of the students, in which case what was meant to be an "initiation" becomes what I called in my review a failed conversational implicature (NB: Actually, Stone classifies prolepsis into the family of conversational implicatures). This occurs quite frequently and is just one fate of misunderstandings in communication. From the teacher's perspective, the use of prolepsis is in that sense a delicate operation in which he/she ought to take the novice's perspective into consideration. It is is this sense that I invoked the notion of intentionality, which I admit may be more problematic than any thing else.

On the other hand, in my review, I pointed out the "inverse process". That is, how prolepsis are used by novices when they presuppose information that is not presupposed by the relative expert (for reasons that span from mere ignorance to instructional strategies, as when a teacher "refuses" to go along with the implicitness of students' explanations). In this case, the distinction, purely operational or empirical if you want, between prolepsis and failed implicatures is critical. This may not be exactly the right distinction, I admit. However, it points to the problem of differentiating times when the speaker (i.e., the one who produces the proleptic utterance) is "in control" of the rhetorical strategies being used, from times when, again, unwarranted assumptions are made about what the listener can reconstruct or is willing to reconstruct by himself.

I have the feeling that a productive analysis of the contribution of prolepsis to development or learning ought to be rooted in a serious consideration of how it works in actual discourse. Otherwise, Stone's proposal about unpacking the semiotic mechanisms by which scaffolding takes place could be reduced to the adoption of yet another very global, though very suggestive, metaphor. This time, prolepsis.

Well, I stop here hoping that my argument was not too proleptic!

Jorge F. Larreamendy-Joerns
University of Pittsburgh
E-mail: larream@pitt.edu

Date: Thu, 25 Jan 96
From: Jay Lemke (JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Subject: prolepsis

Some of the phenomena mentioned in the current 'prolepsis' discussion are very familiar ones in my own data on discussions in secondary school science classrooms.

The case I mainly discuss in _Talking Science_ (esp. Chap 2) is the very common one where the intertextual interpretive frames, particularly the semantic links among concepts, are quite different for teacher and student and only the analyst is in a position to model how the misunderstandings are generated.

If prolepsis represents a presupposition which does not make (a particular kind of) sense to others because they don't share the larger conceptual framework that gives it that sense for the speaker, then it is not always, or perhaps generally, true that listeners realize that this is what is happening and so seek to understand the speaker's frame of reference.

What seems more often to happen -- and this is perfectly symmetrical between Ts and Ss in many cases -- is that each side finds the other's remarks perfectly meaningful in the listener's own frame of reference. But the meanings are not the same. Granted that detailed situated meanings may never be exactly the same for interlocutors (my personal view), the differences in these cases are quite enormous, even directly contrasting or contradictory, and easily characterized when enough data is available.

Power and experience/authority differences tend to lead to common situations where: (1) Ss assume what Ts say is correct, but Ss interpretation in the S-frame of what Ts say is very different from T's interpretation in the T-frame (or from almost anybody's interpretation in these frames); (2) Ts assume that what Ss say is wrong, because in the T-frame it would be wrong, whereas in the S-frame it is more often correct -- which is not to say correct according the the S's theory, but correct according to the T's theory, just stated in non-canonical ways.

These cases begin to show the complexity of the possibilities. Students can say 'correct' things and be heard as saying wrong ones. Teachers can say 'correct' things and be heard as saying something altogether different. Yet another possible case was recently mentioned (Judy citing from the other list) where S says something wrong, that sounds right to T because it's interpreted in the T-frame.

Stone's and Jorge's case would be the one in which a T-utterance does not make sufficient sense of any sort in the S-frame (as opposed to making a different sense), and S seeks to adjust frame so it will make sense. Here there is another problematic assumption: Ss (and many of us) often do not change our frame in these cases, we just add a new frame, labeled as the one to make sense of an Other (and perhaps consciously a model of their frame, but again not necessarily). Such a frame may or may not agree with the Other's own frame, and it certainly doesn't have to supersede one of our own. Maybe expanding our frame repertory, and our sense of which ones to use when, is progress, but it's a bit different from most 'conceptual change' or 'conceptual development' models, which are replacive, or at least assume a single frame. There are many kinds of data to suggest that in a heteroglossic world people can operate (perhaps questionable) models of Others' viewpoints, without making them their own viewpoint.

Some teachers do effectively use something like prolepsis as a deliberate strategy (called I think 'Creating Mysteries', in _Talking Science_): they are enigmatic or mysterious, or say things that are literally nonsense, which signals to students that the obvious interpretation is wrong, or at least that there is an unobvious interpretation which needs to be looked for. Carried too far, this strategy not only can confuse students, worse, it demeans their own frames (as science generally demeans folk-theory and common-sense). But with a light touch, it often works (maybe less reliably with working-class students, those who lack self-confidence, or those who are disinclined to speculation).

As a _unconscious_ strategy (cf. the intentionality issue), prolepsis is almost a necessary feature of 'expert-novice' discourse. It is the preferred stylistic mode of modern science fiction, for instance, in which the reader is expected to build up a model of the different reality of the story-world. (Many readers are quite impatient with this approach, and would be more so if they were not just out for an interesting 'ride'.) I think we need to take a more symmetrical view of learning through dialogue. If teachers were as concerned with figuring out student frames as we expect students to be in figuring out ours, we might not only understand their views better, but better understand the problem of modeling an alien frame.

JAY LEMKE
City University of New York
BITNET: JLLBC@CUNYVM
INTERNET: JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

Date: Thu, 25 Jan 1996
From: Timothy Koschmann (tkoschmann@siumedtr.siumed.edu)
Subject: Re: prolepsis

>I think we need to take a more symmetrical view of learning through
>dialogue. If teachers were as concerned with figuring out student
>frames as we expect students to be in figuring out ours, we might
>not only understand their views better, but better understand the
>problem of modeling an alien frame. JAY.

I endorse your closing thought that proleptic interactions should be a two-way street. To take this a step further, however, I wonder how this discussion of prolepsis might apply to more collaborative forms of discourse in which none of the participants serve as the teacher/master/expert. An example of such a conversation would be the transcripts provided in Jeremy Roschelle's 1992 article in JLS ("Learning by Collaboration: Convergent Conceptual Change") which involved two students involved in a joint task to understand the behavior of a ballistics simulation.

These conversations are proleptic in different way: the individual utterances are ambiguous and incomplete, but presuppose that some form of meaning will emerge in time. Instead of one party expecting the others to accomodate, all parties participate in the construction of a shared understanding. I would suspect that this more democratic version form of prolepsis contributes to learning just as commonly as the scaffolding version (at least outside of formal instructional settings). Certainly this discussion group is proleptic in that way.

---Tim

Date: Thu, 25 Jan 96
From: Jay Lemke (JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Subject: Re: prolepsis

Tim's case is a useful extension of the general issues here, I think.

I take it from his description that in the group analyzing, discussing, making sense of the ballistics phenomenon, _no one_ yet has an adequate frame for talking about the phenomenon, and a collective frame is being built, is emerging. This is quite different from cases where one or more frames are in use and seem adequate to the users. But it is still subject to the question of just in what sense the emerging frame is 'collective'. Can we be sure it is really the same frame for all participants at the 'end'? What sorts of residual differences may remain? How can we know this? What sort of definition of the frames is needed to answer such questions? At the least, I would want to have a fairly complete semantic-connectivity model for the terms in use as used by each participant (the 'thematic pattens' or formations of _Talking Science_ and my later work), and an extension of this to include the possibly different ways the semantics/thematics might be applied to the 'same' instance of the phenomenon.

Sometimes, I think, we mistake the process of inter-articulation among different frames for the process of building a shared frame. I want to know how much of each of these is taking place in a particular data set.

JAY.

Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996
From: spinast@HUGSE1.HARVARD.EDU
Subject: Prolepsis

All of the recent exchanges about prolepsis have been quite stimulating. I find myself wondering if there has been any work looking at the degree of prolepsis in relation to gender, teaching styles, ethnicity, subject matter, academic achievement... you get the idea. The seeds of one hypothesis go something like this: If prolepsis increases achievement and if the use of authentic arts-based curriculum (Spina, 1995-96) enhances prolepsis, then we've got another good argument for supporting the arts in education :-)

I have ethnographic and quantitative data from two other studies with similar cohorts conducted in 3rd grade science and art classes that I'd love to look at in such light (and that would lend itself to this very nicely, I think) if I ever get the time with the other work I'm involved in.... As you can see, I don'tt have this completely thought out yet, so please indulge my use of this forum as a quest for scaffolding. This discussion has reawakened my interest in the many facets of prolepsis, so I thought I'd take a chancer, and take advantage of the expertise of the mca list members:

The inspiration for this proposed project, in part, is the following quote. The way I see it, it relates to Stone, Rommetveit, and others on prolepsis but goes on to add another dimension that goes beyond mere awareness of audience to provoking them as prolepsis does...

"At the very heart of the scholar's or artist's thought, even the one most absorbed in his search, who seems most confined to his own sphere and face to face with what is most "self" and most personal there is present some strange anticipation of the external reactions to be provoked by the work now in the making . . . The effect of this presence can always be assumed, without fear of error; but it may be combined so subtly with other factors of the work, sometimes so well disguised, that it is almost impossible to isolate it." (Paul Valery in Ghiselin, 1952).

Compare:
Prolepsis is a mechanism that explains how "communication becomes a bridge spanning two personsU knowledge in that one must construct the message of the other." (Reid & Stone, 1991) It attempts to highlight, verbally or Nonverbally, the communicational dynamics that assist children in adopting new perspectives on the objects and events in their environment.

Bernstein pointed out that in reflex theory the objects of the external world are considered signals for reactions that are arbitrarily connected with them as stimuli. And his idea of anticipation of future actions " emerging from the fact that 'scripts' of movements seem to be prepared in advance " has echoes in Rommetveit's notion of prolepsis as elaborated on by Grice and Stone . . .

Rommetveit (1974) writes that the process of prolepsis actively engages the listener in meaning-making. He argues (1974) that intersubjectivity is advanced in proleptic situations. What people observe about their experiences are "subjective phenomena resulting from selective abstraction of empirical information" (Reid & Stone, 1991). These observations then must be made sense of. This is done by making inferences about how objects and events are related, by inferring what is not observable, by going beyond the concrete data.

Speakers speak "as if their assumptions (context) are shared by their listeners, and only later, as the interaction unfolds, do they provide sufficient specification to allow the listeners to infer the intended meaning." (Reid & Stone 1993 p.12) A question, for example, has an assumed premise (Why are you sad? assumes you are sad)

Creation of meaning, active knowledge construction is more effective. This process is part of what drives appropriation. Would it not follow, then , that a teacher who uses this notion of anticipating the not-yet-actual might have higher achieving students? What would the implication of this be for Jorge and Forman's work that found students use more proleptic statements than teachers?

>> Ellice Forman and I have conducted discourse analysis of
>>classroom interactions over the past three years, and a rather steady
>>finding is that the students, rather than the teacher, are the ones who
>>generate more frequently utterances that, according to Stone's
>>perspective, would be considered proleptic.

Another knot:
Prolepsis, according to Stone, is similar to Grice's (1989) concept of conversational implicature, consisting of those implications conveyed "contextually" rather than "logically" during speaking. (doesn't contextual conveyance also involve a form of logic? this could lead us into another "abductive, deductive, inductive" argument - but I think Gary may have his hands full right now ;-) Grice (1989) points out that, on the assumption that maxims are generally obeyed, apparent violations of them serve to convey additional meaning that is not evident in the utterance. Prolepsis can be seen as a special type of conversational implicature in which the necessary context is specified after the utterance. So maybe what I'm really looking at is conversational implicature and not prolepsis If there is no additional specification of context, is it prolepsis? Jorge wrote in his response to Judy that the differences at the classroom level become fuzzy - I agree. But does prolepsis have to be obscure?

Perhaps we need to struggle with this more? Yet, it is still this same or similar element of anticipation that characterizes prolepsis, thus it precedes (and possibly prepares for) internalization. Perhaps this role - prolepsis as catalyst - needs further exploration? And if this is so -- wouldn't "prolepsis" also effect semiosis - wouldn't it "ppersuade us," in a way, to interpret a sign in a certain way? After all, our expectations often color what we "hear" or "see." I know -- that's another topic -- just can't resist all of these intriguing tangents.)

Okay - let's try to get back on track here for one more thought... With the learning process viewed as a dynamic, interpretive exchange, the novice must be willing to take on the assumptions of the expert (Vygotsky) suggesting that role relations (including sex roles) are central to the communication process (Chodorow, 1978 in Gilligan, Ward & Taylor, 1988). Sex-role identity mediates between cognitive functioning and social interaction (Nash, 1979, in Wilkinson and Marrett, 1985). So, might it not be a factor in prolepsis (type, frequency, etc.)?

If you've hung in this far, thanks -- and I do hope you didn't find this too meandering ...

stephanie urso spina
spinast@hugse1.harvard.edu

Date: Fri, 26 Jan 96
From: psmagorinsky@uoknor.edu
Subject: Re: Prolepsis

At 12:40 AM 1/26/96 -0500, you wrote:
>All of the recent exchanges about prolepsis have been quite
>stimulating. I find myself wondering if there has been any
>work looking at the degree of prolepsis in relation to gender,

stephanie: I recently read this from Mike Cole's chapter, "Context, modularity, and the cultural constitution of development" in Winegar and Valsiner's Children's development within social context, Vol. 2 (1992, Erlbaum):

Of crucial importance to understanding the contribution of culture in constituting development is the fact that the parents' projection of their children's future becomes a fundamentally important cultural constraint organizing the child's life experiences in the present. This process is called *prolepsis*, from the Greek term meaning the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished. As copious research has demonstrated, even adults totally ignorant of the real gender of a newborn will treat it quite differently depending on it symbolic/cultural gender. Adults literally create different material forms of interaction based on conceptions of the world provided by their cultural experience and expectations. For example, they bounce "boy" infants (those wearing blue diapers) and attribute "manly" virtues to them whereas they treat "girl" infants (those wearing pink diapers) in a gentle manner (Rubin, Provezano, & Luria, 1974). (p. 21 in Cole) if it starts in the cradle......

I'm going to cross-post this to the Vygotsky list, which means it'll get posted back to xmca--please excuse the redundancy.

Peter Smagorinsky
University of Oklahoma
College of Education
Department of Instructional Leadership and Academic Curriculum
820 Van Vleet Oval
Norman, OK 73019-0260

Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996
From: SPINAST@HUGSE1.HARVARD.EDU
Subject: prolepsis

Sorry, Peter, I inadvertently sent a message meant for the list to your address. Here it is for the list this time...

Peter - Thanks for the reference. I inexplicably overlooked it. Placing an order for the book today. Yet, although it's another issue, I'm still troubled by the gender differences you mentioned. There's alot implied in this type of behavior about inequality, power relations, etc.

You wrote:
>All of the recent exchanges about prolepsis have been quite >stimulating. I find myself wondering if there has been any
>work looking at the degree of prolepsis in relation to gender,

stephanie: I recently read this from Mike Cole's chapter, "Context, modularity, and the cultural constitution of development" in Winegar and Valsiner's Children's development within social context, Vol. 2 (1992, Erlbaum):

Of crucial importance to understanding the contribution of culture in constituting development is the fact that the parents' projection of their children's future becomes a fundamentally important cultural constraint organizing the child's life experiences in the present. This process is called *prolepsis*, from the Greek term meaning the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished. As copious research has demonstrated, even adults totally ignorant of the real gender of a newborn will treat it quite differently depending on it symbolic/cultural gender. Adults literally create different material forms of interaction based on conceptions of the world provided by their cultural experience and expectations. For example, they bounce "boy" infants (those wearing blue diapers) and attribute "manly" virtues to them whereas they treat "girl" infants (those wearing pink diapers) in a gentle manner (Rubin, Provezano, & Luria, 1974). (p. 21 in Cole) if it starts in the cradle......
Endquote
(Note: first paragraph is Peter quoting from my message)

What I was wondering about in my posting was if the use of prolepsis, in speech or otherwise, is more frequent in either males or females.

and a question to Mike Cole: Was there also a comparison to the way infants were treated if both (unidentified) girls and boys were all wearing white diapers? Did women and men reinforce cultural expectations equally?

And why is our usage still predominantly men and women, boys and girls, etc. Why aren't more of us (in general - not meant as a question specific to list members) comfortable with either male before female or female before male? If we could get past that we might get past the second term being considered inferior to the first, as Derrida pointed out.

stephanie urso spina

Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996
From: Mike Cole (mcole@weber.ucsd.edu)
Subject: Re: prolepsis

Hello Stephanie-- Yes, there is ample data to show that newborns are treated according to adult conceptions of gender, not their personal characteristics.

To anyone intersted, a fuller treatment of the way that prolepsis works is contained in a review article on "culture and development" in the Bornstein and Lamb (1992?) Advanced Textbook in Child Development.

mike

Date: Sat, 27 Jan 1996
From: Eugene Matusov (ematusov@cats.ucsc.edu)
Subject: Re: prolepsis

Hello everybody--

I think that Tim and Jay provide fresh turn in discussion on prolepsis by shifting the focus from considering transmission of information from a teacher to student (function I of communication, according to Lotman, 1988) to development of new meanings (function II). It seems to me that the notion of prolepsis is to individual-focused that reduces the communication process to ping-pong exchange of what one partner thinks about his thinking (and so on). The degree of uncertainty raises dramatically in focusing on individual's turn or understanding.

I think in order to capture meaning emergence in communication, we should construct a unit of analysis that is more than individual's understanding of what is going on in joint activity. Jim Wertsch proposes a mediated action for such unit of analysis. I am entertaining the notion of coordination of participants' contribution. Whatever it is most useful it should transcend an individual.

Jay raises legitimate questions that if the unit of analysis of communication is not individual than it might become a somewhat privileges (and potentially undemocratic) position. He asks,
>But it is still subject to the question of just in what sense the
>emerging frame is 'collective'. Can we be sure it is really the same
>frame for all participants at the 'end'? What sorts of residual
>differences may remain? How can we know this? What sort of definition
>of the frames is needed to answer such questions?

I think it should be not a privileged position but a position of an observer who tries to describe a pattern of communication and not "the true picture of what is going on." For example, if Vygotsky described that a middle class European mother treats her baby "AS IF" the baby fully understands her, it does not mean that the Vygotsky's description is "the true one" and "out there." Definitely the mother would disagree with Vygotsky as a participant of the communication having specific goals in mind and comfort perceived. Moreover, Vygotsky's description can be a real danger for the specific middle class communication if the mother starts believing Vygotsky and becomes doubtful in her baby reciprocity and understanding. On the other hand, Vygotsky's description "AS IF" is an observant model (i.e., a "theory-in-use" using Argys and Schon's term) of his observation of the communication. The mother's participant model (i.e., an "espoused theory") is "BABY UNDERSTANDS AND GUIDES ME." It is impossible for the mother to remain participant as she is and agree with Vygotsky's model "AS IF."

The mother is correct for the purpose of her own activity (i.e., of communication with her baby, socializing the baby in middle-class interactional style, having fun, and so on). Vygotsky is correct for the purpose of his own activity (i.e., of observing the communication, presenting his finding to the academic community, developing a sociohistorical theory, and so on). What unites both Vygotsky and the mother is that they produce models (i.e., semiotic mediations) of the same phenomenal process of mother-child communication. However, this uniting phenomenal process is a "boundary object" using the term of Lee Star -- there are common boundaries and different contents.

But still who is right: does the baby really understands her mother in the communication? Whose model of communication is more correct? Again the answer to this question depends on the context (and background activity) of the question. If Vygotsky would invite the mother to watch a videotaped observation of her communication with the baby, I guess he might convince the mother that he is right and the model "AS IF" is the true model of the communication. But if mother give her baby in Vygotsky's hands and let him to play with the baby, I guess he would play with the baby in the middle-class European way in accord with the mother's model "BABY UNDERSTANDS AND GUIDES ME." In this case, the mother is correct and her model is the true model of the communication.

We should probably accept that in some cases two dramatically different models of the phenomenon are both right without a tempting attempt to build a compromising third model. The circumstances for the two truths are different: participation in activity vs. observation of the activity. Each activity has its own reliability and verifiability power and criteria. It seems that we can only jump from one to the other even when we are participant observants. I know that this sounds a bit like the quantum physics, like Heisenberg's uncertainty principle but so it be.

Finishing on a humorous note, I'd summarize in the following way: Jay asks how an individual research can describe supra-individual (Mike's term) phenomena -- I'd answer -- simply by jumping from one activity to another.

Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz

Date: Sun, 28 Jan 1996
From: dykstrad@varney.idbsu.edu
Subject: Re: prolepsis

A short digression:

Eugene Matusov mentions:
>...considering transmission of information from a
>teacher to student (function I of communication, according to Lotman, 1988)

I haven't the reference for Lotman, but I'm wondering, can we "transmit information from teacher to student?" What does "information" mean here? What do we mean by "transmission?"

I am particularly confused when "development of new meanings" is "function II" of communication. (What is "new" meaning? New to the student, new to human culture...) I guess my problem is that I'm having a hard time thinking about communication without involving meaning making, hence what is "information" without concern for meaning making. So, how can there be the specific "function I" and how does one conceive of this particular "function II" differently if one allows that the stated function I exists?

I think that I agree with Eugene's message otherwise.

Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr.
Professor of Physics
Boise State University

Date: Tue, 30 Jan 96
From: Jay Lemke (JLLBC@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU)
Subject: units and frames

Eugene raises some important questions and interesting suggestions regarding our analysis of 'proleptic' communication.

I generally agree with him that our unit of analysis needs to be both interpersonal and activity-specific, and hence so will our model of a communicative activity be.

My analysis in a previous posting, based on earlier work in this area, used a model in which there were different 'frames' or productive and interpretive thematic-semantic formations (patterns, expected regularities) hypothesized for student and teacher. It should be noted though that the basic notion of a thematic formation, or frame (which is not my usual term, just convenient here), is an _intertextual_ one: patterns that recur from text to text, and not specifically tied to individuals as units of analysis.

As Eugene notes, the analyst constructs the model of the frame(s) or patterns in use. If we have dialogue data, we will find that some elements of the frame(s) seem to be shared (up to a point, at some level of abstraction, not necessarily in any absolute sense), and some elements seem to be in use in T's discourse, or S's, only. It is usually not possible in practice to fully model any of the following: the patterns of the T-S dialogue; the separate utterances of T; those of S. This is because generally the patterns also depend on other, unheard texts (intertexts), such as: yesterday's lesson, a paragraph in the textbook, what a friend told me, etc. The methods of analysis that I use often reveal the existence of a gap, but not how to fill it (though good guesses can often be made and later confirmed).

In practice, with this kind of data, it often does make sense to model the interpersonal phenomenon, the T-S dialogue as a whole. Especially in cases where there is a lot of overlap in frames, or where, as in IRF triadic dialogue patterns, a complete semantic unit is jointly constructed by T and S (but not completely constructed by either's utterances alone). Note that this can include proleptic phenomena, or not, and that it can also produce an illusory sense of agreement that would _not_ be confirmed by comparing extended T- and S-monologues on the same topic.

It also happen however that the same 'slot' in the semantic pattern is filled by two thematically inequivalent elements, and these must be indexed by speaker in order to model the data in detail. It is precisely this kind of data that _does_ motivate 'individuals' as units of analysis. But it remains, as Eugene notes, still activity-specific. There is no necessity that the 'same' speaker will use the same patterns in a different activity. If s/he does, this is part of our grounds for defining a notion of social person across activities. Often, s/he does not. We need to recognize in general that the trans-activity grounds for individuals as units of analysis may not be the same as the intra-activity grounds. We need to set aside our cultural ideology's insistence that individuals are universal, 'real' units, if we are to understand the role of our constructed units at various points in our modeling efforts. (This is more or less the theme of chap 5 in _Textual Politics_).

Epistemologically, too, I agree with Eugene's proposal. These matters fit very well with the quantum 'complementarity' principle of Bohr's interpretation of Heisenberg's _Unbestimmtheitsprinzip_, as I discussed on Bohr's own home grounds in my Denmark paper a few months ago. The existence, identity, and characteristics of units in interaction are always functions of the specific conditions of the interaction- situation. There are no universal descriptions valid across all conditions, at least not ones specific enough to be mapped onto observations. As always, our ingenuity can fashion abstract representations to cover all cases, but then we cannot know how to 'raise' these to the level of the 'concrete' specifics of given situations without putting in additional, situation- specific information, 'by-hand', which is not given by the general theory. All generalizations are really of this kind; the quantum case simply represents an extreme that forces us to give up the traditional hand-waving (and ideological certainties) that obscured the problem.

JAY LEMKE.
City University of New York

Date: Wed, 31 Jan 1996
From: Eugene Matusov (ematusov@cats.ucsc.edu)
Subject: Re: prolepsis

Hello everybody--

Dewey wrote on 1/28/96,
>Eugene Matusov mentions:
>>...considering transmission of information from a
>>teacher to student (function I of communication, according to Lotman, 1988)
>
>I haven't the reference for Lotman, but I'm wondering, can we "transmit
>information from teacher to student?" What does "information" mean here?
>What do we mean by "transmission?"
>
>I am particularly confused when "development of new meanings" is "function
>II" of communication. (What is "new" meaning? New to the student, new to
>human culture...) I guess my problem is that I'm having a hard time
>thinking about communication without involving meaning making, hence what
>is "information" without concern for meaning making. So, how can there be
>the specific "function I" and how does one conceive of this particular
>"function II" differently if one allows that the stated function I exists?

Let me respond to that. I think there is no such a phenomenon as pure transmission of information. However, there is an aspect of communication that emphasizes more on the interpretation of intentions of others rather than other aspects of the communication (e.g.., development of new ideas or transformation of one's perception). There is also the ideology of information transmission which declares that in the communication information, as a stable easily verifiable entity, is transmitted. I personally think that information is a process rather than entity that has both material and ideal aspects.

As to Lotman's approach, I think he pointed exactly at two ABSTRACT aspects (or functions in his terms) of communication (or text in his terms which includes communication in his definition),
>the first function [of text -- EM.] is fulfilled best when codes of the speaker and
>the listener most completely coincide and consequently, when the text has the
>maximum degree of univocality (Lotman, 1988, p. 34).

>The second function of text is to generate new meanings. In this respect a text
>ceases to be a passive link in conveying some constant information between input
>(sender) and output (receiver). Whereas in the first case a difference between the
>message at the input and that at the output of an information circuit can occur
>only as a result of a defect in the communications channel, and is to be attributed
>to the technical imperfections of this system, in the second case such a difference
>is the very essence of text's function as a "thinking device." What from the first
>standpoint is a defect, from the second is a norm, and vice versa. (pp. 36-37)

If you put the two functions together, it becomes clear that meaning is neither "transmitted" or "created" (or "constructed") but transformed (in this sense, I share Dewey's frustration with the terminology that I used in the previous message). However, in some cases, the misnomers can be a useful approximation if a researcher foregrounds one aspect and keeps the other as the background.

Still in our culture, the first aspect of transmission of information (or transmission of knowledge) is privileged and overemphasized. Just recently I read beautifully written book by David Olson (1995), "The world on paper." It is a very smart book, I really recommend to read it. But I wish David wrote a second volume because the book nicely explores the first function of the text but did not address the second function. David's assumption is that the main function of text (he talks about written texts) is to convey message from the author to the reader. He argues that because written texts have a lack of markers of author's intentionality (i.e., markers of how the author wanted that his/her words would be taken by the reader), it has taken long historical process of development of a reading paradigm of how text should be read to get the author's message.

It is interesting and symptomatic that in his historical essay and analysis, David emphasizes the progressivity of development of scientific reading and writing and regressivity of mysticism and mystical reading and writing. It is symptomatic because ideology (but not necessarily practice) of natural science has emphasized communication as exchange of messages (function I of text, according to Lotman), while ideology (but again not necessarily practice) of mysticism has emphasized communication as transformation of personality and spiritual development (function II of text).

It is also symptomatic that David started his book as a pluralist arguing that all cultures are mature but finished up privileging decontextualization over situated action. Describing models of navigation used with or without decontextualized mediated actions (the former involved such tools of decontextualization as geographical maps and globes, compass, instruments for finding ship's longitude and latitude; the latter includes Micronesian, Viking, Inuit ways of navigation within the navigating situation), he comes to the conclusion that the latter "serves only as a mnemonic for the already known;" while the former can serve "as a theoretical model for thinking about unknown" (p. 216). By saying that repeats Vygotsky's similar claim privileging decontextualization and function I of text,

>[A]n Australian child who has never been beyond the boundaries of his village
>amazes the cultural European with his ability to orient himself in a country where
>he has never been. However, a European school child, who has completed just
>one class in geography, can assimilate more than any adult primitive man can ever
>assimilate in his entire lifetime.
>[A]long with the superior development of innate or natural memory [italic by the >authors], which seems to engrave external impressions with photographic
>accuracy, primitive memory also stands out for the qualitative uniqueness of its
>functions." (Vygotsky & Luria, 1993, p. 96)

Dewey asked me about function II. When function II is privileged, reading text becomes a risky journey where a reader expects dramatic transformation of him/herself at the end of the reading. It does not much important what the author says as what changes in perception of the reader whole person it causes. Using Kuhn's terminology, reading based on function II is about paradigm shift in the reader rather than on getting some knowledge about something. Read Calos Castaneda's books to feel the power of function II. The reading is confusing and the reader's confusion and destabilization is one of the primary author's goals without which transformation of whole person in the reader can not be possible. However, the author does not control reader's experience, s/he just creates possibilities for reader's transformation in for of dangerous adventures and encounters. The final point of the journey is unknown even for the author and consider to be multiple. Author's messages are deceptive (which is nothing to do with manipulation or lie). Interpretation of these messages is important not to get what was intended to transmit but to change the reader's device of interpretation itself.

Recently, attention to function II starts growing in social sciences because, I think, of a new focus on institutional change and people's development in institutional contexts.

In sum, I agree with Lotman that both function I, text as message, and function II, text as journey, should be considered in a unit of analysis that embraces both aspects. I think that decontextualization should not be privileged and neither situated action.

Eugene Matusov
UC Santa Cruz

References:
Castaneda, C. (1974). Tales of power. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Kuhn, T. S. (1970). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Lotman, Yu. (1988). Text within text. Soviet psychology, 26, 32-51.

Olson, D. R. (1994) The world on paper: The conceptual and cognitive implications of writing and reading. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Vygotsky, L., & Luria, A. (1993). Studies on the history of behavior: Ape, primitive, and child.

V. I. Golod & J. E. Knox (Eds. and Trns.). London: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.