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.