Imitation and communication

Human cooperative communication emerged first in evolution (and emerges first in ontogeny) in the natural, spontaneous gestures of pointing and pantomiming. (Tomasello, 2008, p. 11)

Syntax/Semantics as a false dichotomy

The major opposition in language is thus not between formal syntax and semantics, but between a linguistic symbol and its communicative significance; signifier and signified, form and function, symbol and meaning. Within the signifier/form/symbol pole, we may then distinguish among different types of linguistic signs, for example, lexical, morphological, and phrasal. Within the signified/function/meaning pole, we may distinguish between semantic and pragmatic functions. But there are no linguistic structures that operate independent of meaning in the cognitive-functional account. (Tomasello, 1998, p. xi)

Imitation and development

…according to Vygotsky, imitation is the process through which socioculturally constructed forms of mediation are internalized… One of the earliest social scientist to propose imitation as a uniquely human form of development was James Mark Baldwin (1895/1915). For Baldwin, ‘imitation to the intelligent and earnest imitator is never slavish, never mere repetition; it is, on the contrary, a means for further ends, a method of absorbing what is present in others and of making it over in forms peculiar to one’s own genius’ (cited in Valsiner and van der Veer 2000: 153). Baldwin distinguished two forms of imitation, simple and persistent. Simple imitation is the best the individual can do and ‘does not include second attempts to improve the imitation’; thus the child continues to repeat the initial production without modification regardless of its similarity to the original model (ibid.). Persistent imitation, on the other hand, is intentional and goal-directed and entails cognitive activity; it is cyclic and reproductive in the sense that the individual continues to modify the reproduction in accordance with a mental image of the original (ibid.). Each reproductive cycle works on not on the original copy ‘but the previous imitation’ (ibid.). (Lantolf and Thorne, 2005, p. 166)

Cognitive and linguistic functions

Gal’perin (1992d) approaches the problem of language and thought from the standpoint of the problem of constructing speech in a foreign language. He introduces the notions of linguistic and cognitive consciousness. The latter is the product of cognition (a reflection) of things (through images) and it serves the purpose of guiding actions done with things. Sense organs and logical thinking serve as channels for this cognition. The basic characteristic of these images is veridicity, i.e., complete and clear reproduction of the features of objects in reflection. They are subject to a criterion of practice, i.e., ‘coordination between the actual results of a process and what was expected on the basis of the original ideas of things’. In contrast, linguistic consciousness is formed as a means for organising joint activity. Its purpose is not to accomplish a full reflection of reality but ‘[l]inguistic meanings are a reflection of the interests and conditions surrounding the communication of an idea (to other people)’ (p. 89).

Concepts before experience?

For Chomsky (1988, p.191), the word is given to us ready-made “every child learns it perfectly right away”. Chomsky argues that this can only mean that human nature gives us that concept for free. For Chomsky, we have the concepts even before we have the experience "we simply learn the label that goes with the preexisting concept” (ibid. p. 191). Vygotsky (1986) research on concept development precisely shows that this platonic view of language is problematic. Conceptual development is a long transformative process where biological maturation is qualitatively transformed into cultural development when it meets communication through artifacts, i.e. language. (Negueruela, 2003, p. 75)

Action and meaning

Let us imagine three groups of children. The first group of children, infants, are playing with their food: some of it goes in their mouths, but much of it does not. If one child makes a random gesture, for example throwing his or her hands in the air, no other child will notice. The second group of children, somewhat older but still pre-schoolers, are playing ‘House’, and one child pretends to serve the meal while the other, assuming the role of Daddy, pretends to eat it. In this situation, if one child makes a random gesture, the others will reproach that child with ‘not playing the game’. A third group of children, older still, is planning a school picnic. Instead of imaginary food, they are writing out a list of real food items followed by those who shall provide them. If a child in this group throws her or his hands up, it might be interpreted as a symbolic gesture of helplessness or perhaps unwillingness to bring anything but an empty stomach. We can see that for the first group of children action and meaning are not really differentiated, and actions are only what they seem to be. One may call this ‘play’ but one is hard put to call it a game. Nor is it easy to define concrete roles or abstract rules beyond the level of rote repetition or random variation. In the second group of children, meaning does appear as a separable component of action, but it is largely an imaginative extension of the actions that the children are making. Roles are now quite explicit, and there are even implicit rules that govern the kinds of motions that may be made and how they may be interpreted. The third group of children has decisively subordinated their actions to their meanings; they are now demonstrably engaged in a school activity, even though they probably think of it as preparation for play. This time, however, it is the rules about who shall bring what which are explicit, and the ‘roles’ of provider and consumer are only implicit. Contra Piaget, Vygotsky contends that it is neither the random gesture nor the subjective level of cognitive development that creates meaning in each social situation; on the contrary, it is the differing forms of social activity that imbue random gestures with meaning and eventually lead to cognitive development.

Kim and Kellog, 2007

Hidden build-up in second language acquisition

Because the transmitter is so focused on what he expects from acquirers (textual production in the target language) and disregards what is forbidden or undesirable (the muttering of a word in the acquirer's native tongue) and what actually takes place in the classroom, he or she seems not to pay attention to the actual inter-mental build-up taking place in collaborative activities.

Sentimiento y experiencia

"...los versos no son, como la gente cree, sentimientos (...), son experiencias".

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sämtliche Werke, Werkausgabe, t. 11, Frankfort del Meno, Insel Verlag, 1976, p. 724

Evil Chinese characters

Fu Sinian, one of the leaders of the May Fourth Movement (a movement that started in 1919 and sought to put an end to imperial China by means of culture reforms), called Chinese characters the "writing of ox-demons and snake-gods". Lu Xun, a renowed Chinese author in the 20th century, stated that, "if Chinese characters are not destroyed, then China will die".

 Based on "Survey of the Chinese Language Reform and the Anti-Illiteracy Movement in Communist China", Paul L.-M. Serruys. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1962.

Interview with Marx and the Vampire

In a grotesque Gothic film on vampires (Queen of the damned, 2002), vampires sucked prey's blood. But they operated as if they were in the marketplace. They just did not want to suck anyone's blood but had predilections and eventually prey acquired an exchange value. The crazy thing is that before sucking the blood from the prey's neck, including sucking the blood from fellow vampires, vampires ran through flashbacks in which the life of the prey and the images of prey's prey came to life before their eyes, so to speak. In other words, the fetish value of the prey was being revealed to them, which is quite extraordinary, since in the "normal" relationship predator-prey there is either (1) a relationship exclusively based on use-value (satisfaction of a need) or, on the contrary, (2) extreme fetishism: Dracula falls in love, but without having Dracula undressing his lover's past up to a point were love's magic or spell solves. Mina remains a sexual candy all the way through. Dracula falls in love because he idealises the object of his love.

Quite interesting. Imagine going to a shopping mall, entering into a shop, stopping to contemplate a pair of shoes and then falling in love with them, preparing to produce your wallet and suddenly having a flashback that reveals you all the human suffering of human labour invested in their manufacturing. Suppose you see children performing forced-labour, being slapped by their owners, half-blind women gluing the sole, bare scenes coming out of Slumdog millionaire, nightmares, etcetera.

The Enlightened vampire is now replaced by the post-modern vampire, one who is capable of seeing concrete and abstract labour.

Subject and Person

The highest aim of man is to be a person, and yet again the mere abstraction "person" is not held in high esteem. Person is essentially different from subject. Subject is only the possibility of personality. Any living thing at all is a subject, while a person is a subject which has its subjectivity as an object. As a person I exist for myself. Personality is the free being in pure self-concious isolation. I as a person am conscious of freedom. I can abstract myself from everything, since nothing is before me except pure personality. Notwithstanding all this I am as a particular person completely limited. I am of a certain age, height, in this space, and so on. Thus a person is at one and the same time so exalted and so lowly a thing. In him is the unity of infinite and finite, of limit and unlimited. The dignity of personality can sustain a contradiction, which neither contains nor could tolerate anything natural.

Hegel, The philosophy of right, addition to §35.

Violence

Violation of a contract through failure to carry out the agreement, or violation of the legal duties toward the family or the state, through action or neglect, is the first violence. It is an exercise of force, if I retain another's property, or neglect to do some duty. Force exercised by a teacher upon a pupil, or by any one against incivility and rudeness, seems to be the first act of violence, not caused by any previous display of force. But the merely natural will is of itself a violence to the universal idea of freedom; and against the inroads of the uncivilized will the idea of freedom ought to be protected and made good. Either there must be assumed within the family or state a moral and social atmosphere, against which a crude naturalness is an act of violence, or else there is at first everywhere present a natural condition or state of violence, over which the idea has the right of mastery.

Hegel, The philosophy of right, note to  §93.

Object formation and action

As we have progressed, we have established the fact that the fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of religious origin.
Emile Durkheim, "The elementary forms of religious life"

 Tina Ottman at 20:36 on 10 July
now is this good or bad or simply is?

Arturo Escandon

 Arturo Escandon at 12:44 on 12 July
I think it is what it is. It is impossible not to see the relationship between the concept and religion prior to the emergence of science. Look at the effort of the Young Hegelians, for instance.

Arturo Escandon
 Arturo Escandon at 12:45 on 12 July
Feuerbach's efforts to get rid of religious concepts.

Tina Ottman
 Tina Ottman at 13:57 on 12 July
True. What an experience it would be, to discover another world of thoughts untouched by the need for religion. But of course it would not be human. Anyway, a science fiction thought for the day.

Cristina Parra Jerez
 Cristina Parra Jerez at 06:01 on 13 July
substitute mystic for religious (in ED's quote) and stretch a bit =) and that will jive with evolutionary psych. But he probably meant religious and not mystic ...
And about that need for religion - would not call it a need (as in: there are no brain mechanisms that would detect insufficient levels of it, nor suboptimal functionng that can be ... Read moredirectly attributed to it) nor consider it an entirely bad thing, schizophrenic as it may be as Arturo says. It is predicated on consciousness, on the differentiation of the subject from the object, but that dissociation is also the basis for our social essence. Not sure compassion (emotional contagion) would lead to action without it. Maturana would probably say we do not need to act, or should not act, or are fooling ourselves by thinking we are acting, that it is all autopoesis constrained by the brain being embodied and the body being embedded, but that is NOT what gets you up to feed baby at 3 am when you've only had 2 hrs sleep in 2 weeks

Cristina Parra Jerez
 Cristina Parra Jerez at 06:07 on 13 July
human brains are wired to protect that weakest link in the reproductive chain: the care of newborn babies - everything else borne out of consciousness is a bonus, or a detrimental side-effect (for a deep ecologist like yours truly)

Cristina Parra Jerez
 Cristina Parra Jerez at 06:12 on 13 July
Arturo, seria interesante una comparacion directa entre la automaticidad de la maestria etica, con la idem del Superego

Cristina Parra Jerez
 Cristina Parra Jerez at 06:14 on 13 July
... seria muuuy interesante para la sicologia

Arturo Escandon
 Arturo Escandon at 09:01 on 13 July
I think Durkheim is referring to historically developed categories. Categories that come out of ritual. Ritual leads to philosophy, and this to philosophy of science, science, positivism... and now we are building upon positivist categories to deal with phenomenology and certainly phenomenology's ontology suffers as a consequence of inadequate ... Read morecategories. Said that, all language suffers from its historical contradictions. I do not think we have a 'religious gene'. So I agree, there is no need for religion. At the macro social level, perhaps there is no way out of religion and ritual because they help create shared identities.

Arturo Escandon
 Arturo Escandon at 10:34 on 13 July
Tienen mucha relación, porque se supone que el superego surge a partir del estado de falta de control (dependencia de los padres y por extensión, de la sociedad) y la maestría ética surge de la constatación del no-yo, de que en verdad no hay un yo, lo cual es, al principio, un estado de desolación y falta de control.

Arturo Escandon
 Arturo Escandon at 10:46 on 13 July
What makes the mother feed the baby at 3. The formation of will, the formation of an object (feed the baby), that is what is not clear at all in activity theory (i.e. Russian psychology). We can analyse the interface between object and subject (activity) but after the fact, after the emergence of desire, for instance. What part of will is brought ... Read moreby the brain's hard-wiring, what part is brought by social inculcation/division of labour? A female ape still feeds her baby even though there is no speech, yet sex iis the most primal form of division of labour...

Tina Ottman
Tina Ottman at 11:21 on 13 July
(just woke up, wow look at all this!). Did not mean to suggest 'religious gene' but historically there is no human society that has emerged intact without this apparent ontological impulse to explain de rerum naturis without resort to myth/religion/ritual. From where we stand now, knowing what we know (or understanding what we have yet to uncover ... Read morescientifically) the persistence of the impulse remains bizarre, does it not? Those shared social identities, social control reproduced through practices all predicated on categories /language founded on THAT impulse (not sure what semantic term Cristina would choose for this, but surely there is an explanation in autopoeisis for its generation) ...Anyway that is all I meant, I am constantly taken aback by the survival of the impulse, and the havoc and distortions that it wreaks in international relations. What was once intended to bring control and social bonding does not work at the macro level - the so-called 'international community' .

Arturo Escandon
 Arturo Escandon at 00:20 on 15 July
One thing is the impulse and another quite different how you deal with it. Because of the massive use of cultural tools, human activity is quite different to the activity of any other species. The impulse can be channelised in certain ways which can be quite apart from where the impulse came from (I am thinking even of sexual gratification). As ... Read moreGalperin points out somewhere, there is no longer 'instinct' in human action. Culture provides ways of objectivating which are not longer those of the 'immediate' animal reaction. And here is where I think evolutionary psychology mixes things up.

Arturo Escandon
 Arturo Escandon at 00:21 on 15 July
Also we need to check the "natural" in Marx. Obviously, Marx refers to some biological human base, but activity is not longer natural.

Arturo Escandon
 Arturo Escandon at 00:28 on 15 July
If the unconscious is ethical (with all its drives), like Lacan asserts, where does the Hobbesian chaos come from? Or is this notion an overrated metaphor? Perhaps you need to check the notion of 'custom' and 'right' in Hegel. It may give you some ideas about the "estado natural".

Arturo Escandon
 Arturo Escandon at 00:31 on 15 July
Galperin opposes 'organic' to 'biological' needs. 'Organic' needs are human. 'Biological' needs, animal (other than human so to speak).

Where is will in the general structure of activity?

...how to relate this general activity structure to such traditional psychic processes as perception, imagination, memory, thinking, feelings, and will. Can these be considered as components of the general structure of activity, along with problems and actions? Or should they be considered as independent kinds of activity?... In my opinion, it is not correct to consider traditional cognitive processes as different forms of activity. They are no more than specific components of a general activity structure that promote the realization of its other components. For example, perception and thinking help a person to single out and concretize the conditions in which a sensory or cognitive problem can be solved and to choose the methods of its solution. But the problem itself is the component of some integral activity, for exampley, play, art, or learning.

Davydod, The content and unsolved problems of activity theory, p. 45

Categories of thought

As we have progressed, we have established the fact that the fundamental categories of thought, and consequently of science, are of religious origin.

Emile Durkheim, "The elementary forms of religious life"

Cristianismo y esquizofrenia; budismo y maestría ética

Open publication - Free publishing - More zen

Activity as consciousness

Activity is dynamic not only in relation to the object but in relation to the subject as well. Hence Marx never reduces social experience to linear causal terms, for such a formulation would overlook the specific human-historical experience. This is also the meaning of Marx's famous saying that 'it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness'. 'Social being' includes by definition man's relation to the external world, and the worst that can be said about this much-quoted and little-understood sentence is that it is tautological. If 'social being' is purposive action, the shaping of external objects, this action implies a consciousness in reation to these external objects. In any case, Marx never said that 'being determines consciousness', but that 'social being determines consciousness': these are two entirely different statements.

(Avineri, 1968, pp. 75-76)

On social consciousness

If the ancient Romans had not the wide conception of humanity we have today it is not the result of an error due to the narrowness of their understanding, but simply that such ideas were incompatible with the nature of the Roman world... the changes produced in the structure of societies have made necessary the change in customs. The moral law, then is formed, transformed, and maintained in accordance with changing demands.

Durkheim, The division of labor in society, p. 33

Man's second nature

Pedagogy is the art of making men ethical. It looks upon man as natural, and points out the way in which he is to be born again. His first nature must be converted into a second spiritual nature, in such a manner that the spiritual becomes in him a habit.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, 151, addition.

Exegesis

As Dante explained in the Epistula XIII, given a verse such as in exitu Israel de Aegypto, "if we look at the letter it means the exodus of the sons of Israel from Egypt at the time of Moses; if we look to the allegory it means our redemption through Christ; if we look at the moral sense it means the conversion of the soul from the misery of sin to the state of grace; if we look at the mystical sense it means the departure of the sanctified spirit from the servitude of this corruption to the freedom of eternal glory."
(Eco, Semiotics and philosophy of language, p. 149)