Japan's national catholicism

What can the interpretation of a text tell us about the society in which the process of interpretation takes place? That's seems to be the basic idea behind Heidegger's hermeneutic circle. What the hermeneutic circle can tell us of a society in which the original text is hidden from its members as it is the case with Japanese society?

Weber's comparison of the Protestant and Catholic faiths starts with the problem of interpreting "the text", the Bible, in this case. In the former, the text is interpreted directly by the members of the cult. In the latter, the text is mediated through the interpretation of the Church, especially through its Catechism. Thus, Weber correlates Protestant hermeneutics to a strong sense of entrepreneurship and pro-action condensed in the Protestant ethics; whereas Catholic hermeneutics has its correlate in a patriarchal situation where the member of the cult adopts a passive attitude towards the organisation of labour. Everything is received. Furthermore, everything is received in piecemeal fashion. There cannot be insightful appreciation of theoretical cohesiveness. The recipients of the readings cannot but have faith in the interpretation they are been given because the interpretation is fragmented.

These two ways of being have enormous implications in the concept of citizenship and organisation of civil society.

So let us take a quick look at Japan, where the school system systematically hides the original text. There is a complete lack of access to the manuscript, to the original work throughout the school experience. Pupils rarely face the original novel, work of History or essay. There is an abundance of cathechism and a lack of personal research and understanding. Texts are interpreted in textbooks in similar fashion to the interpretation of the Bible done by the Catholic Church in 18th and 19th Century Europe. A professor in a Japanese university told me once that it took a serious effort trying to bridge students' ability to read from the simple reading of second or third-hand interpretations to the ability to read a text in its original form.

If we look at the phenomenon from a Bernsteinian perspective, we can see that in the case where the original text is hidden, the possibilities for the recontextualisation of knowledge --a routine operation carried out by what Bernstein calls the pedagogic device-- are wider. However, in a society where the reading of the original text is virtue, the possibilities for recontextualisation are narrower. In the former case, the power lies with the mediational organisation (intrinsic power). In the latter, the power still lies with the mediational organisation but some power remains in the ideas offered in the original text (extrinsic power). The only way to check the mediators and their intentions is by having access to the original text. In a society where the original text is kept outside the public domain, it is impossible to check the accuracy and object of the mediation. You have to trust the mediation is sound. You ought to have faith in the authorities.

Social consciousness in Japan

A Japanese writer tells a story about her being racially profiled by the police for being tall and having dark skin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/opinion/08iht-edkumiko.html

She believes there is no word in Japanese for "racial profiling". Two days ago I spent 10 minutes explaining the term "affirmative action". One of the missions of the Japanese education system seems to be to avoid such terms. I remember the Ministry of Education skimming an English textbook lesson based on gender issues in the film "The whale rider" so as not having students discussing the gender issues contained in the film. What kind of consciousness does have a Japanese person who can read western newspapers and engage in civil rights issues?

universal, particular, and singular

The decision to follow the lonely precedent provided by H. S. Macran, who translated the three "moments" of the Concept (Allgemeine, Besondere, Einzelne) as "universal, particular, and singular... p. xix

Inestability of thought and word

The general line of reasoning Vygotsky employed in this respect grew out of his critique of theorists who assumed that the relationship between word and thought remains constant. In contrast to this, he began with the assumption that signs first emerge in social and individual action without their users' full understanding of their meaning or functional role. What then follows is a process of coming to understand the meaning and functional significance of the sign forms that one has been using all along. In an important sense human use signs before understaning what they are doing, or demonstrate' performance before competence,' as Courtney Cazden (1981) succinctly and elegantly put it.

Wertsch, 2007, p. 186.

Why it takes longer to produce discourse under an elaborated code

An elaborated code will arise wherever the culture or subculture emphasizes the 'I' over the 'we'...Meanings which are discrete and local to the speaker must be cut so that they are intelligible to the listener, and this pressure forces upon the speaker to select both among syntactic alternatives and encourages differentiation of vocabulary.

Bernstein, 1971, p. 170.

Códigos elaborado y restringido y su relación con lo abstracto y lo concreto

...acerca de un par de cuestiones que mencioné en la charla en el CSIC: (a) sobre la diferencia del lexical probing entre conceptos cotidianos y conceptos científicos, referido a la charla de T. B. y en el simposio sobre (b) la cuestión de las emociones y el reconocimiento léxico, en la charla de G., en un estudio de Bernstein de 1962, llamado 'Linguistic codes, hesitation phenomena and intelligence', Bernstein prueba que en un sistema elaborado (por ejemplo el de cierto campo semántico de una disciplina en particular, supongamos teología, historia o física cuántica) "the speech system requires more complex planning than in the case of a restricted code" (por ejemplo, el que está relacionado con los conceptos cotidianos: casa, cuchara, tenedor, juguetes, ángel de la guarda). En otras palabras, si uno debe producir actos de habla en un código elaborado y no se está citando a sí mismo, tiende a dudar (hesitate) más que si uno está produciendo actos de habla en un código restringido. Mi conjetura es que no sólo habrá más duda al hablar sino al reconocer el léxico también, especialmente si el léxico va empotrado en un enunciado concreto.

Ahora bien, la distinción abstracto-concreto sigue pareciéndome poco apropiada por cuanto lo importante no es cuán abstracto o concreto un término es sino si éste ha sido aprendido en un código restringido o en uno elaborado o si el léxico es producido o no según tal o cual código. Yo puedo decir (a) "ayer le recé a mi ángel de la guarda en el dormitorio porque me dio miedo la oscuridad", lo cual es muy de código restringido, y puedo decir (b) "El primer Concilio Vaticano confirmó que los ángeles son mensajeros de Dios, sin referirse específica ni necesariamente a su origen", ejemplo de código elaborado. Bernstein probó que los hablantes tardan más tiempo en producir un enunciado tipo (b) que uno tipo (a). Es el ángel de (a) tan abstracto como los ángeles de (b), pues sí. Pero ese no es el punto. De partida, un enunciado del tipo (b) puede requerir una estructura sintáctica más compleja, más alejada del habla coloquial, que quizá sea más difícil de reconocer.

En el código restringido, el contexto es ampliamente compartido por los hablantes. En el código elaborado, el contexto no es tan claro. De hecho, un enunciado es mucho más impredecible sintácticamente, según lo prueba Bernstein. Por último está el factor de confounding. Si hago un probing con "ángel", me puedo ir al ángel de la guarda, al ángel caído o a Ángel, que es el nombre de mi padre. En cambio si pongo "iridio", que es un término concreto, pero que no se usa en el lenguaje coloquial sino que suele ser parte de un código elaborado, no tengo muchas opciones. Puedo decir que mi cama está hecha de iridio, pero no tiene mucho sentido. Iridio es un término concreto, pero que no va a ser parte de un enunciado regido por un código restringido. A grandes rasgos y con algunas excepciones, unas palabras remiten a la infancia, otras a la juventud, sobre todo escolar, otras a la edad madura, universitaria y profesional, por ejemplo. Todas etapas en que aprendimos a hablar, escribir, escuchar y escribir de manera distinta.

Contradiction in L2 instruction

As far as language development is concerned, second or foreign language development is viewed as a metalinguistic process, not unlike the development of scientific concepts—which is sustained on the development of everyday concepts—, since the semantic system of the native language mediates the acquisition of concepts in the second language. What needs to be internalised is the psychological structure of the target language, that is, as Gal’perin (1992d) asserts, the ‘circumstances of speech’ (pp. 82-83). Thus, second or foreign language instruction presents a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, it relies on the acquirer’s native language (and presumably on highly coded methods of instruction) but, on the other hand, in order to bring the psychological structure of the utterance in the foreign language as close as possible to that which operates in the native language, acquirers are required to create links between linguistic functions in the mother and target language within recognisable communicative contexts. Those contexts, for the most part, are socio-communicative and rely, for their transmission, upon naturalistic instructional methods. Instruction in those context demands the communication readiness observed in operationalised functions. In consequence, instruction has to provide for pedagogical moves that go from meaning to sense within a contextual naturalistic platform set from sense to meaning. The weak and strong versions in communicative language teaching (CLT) reflect this dialectical contradiction.