Wertsch: ’Voices of the Mind’ Kap 1-2
Kap 1
Understand the relationship between metal processes and cultural, historical and
institutional settings
Kritikk mot at trad psyk ikke vil si noe om dette forholdet.
Wertsch sin tilnærming nær sosial psyk- Wilhelm Wundt (en av den morderne
psykologiens fedre- tysk med Hegel inspirasjon)
Central question: what counts as an appropriate description or explanation?
Why Action?
A fundamental assumption is that what is to be described is human action – theories of
action.
Habermas/Popper ‗three world theory‘….different accounts of action arises from quite
different sets of assumptions about what is to be described and explained.
Why Mediated Action?
Teleological action = goal directed. Not a separation between ends and means- because
human action typically employs mediational means
Why Voice?/Voices?- dialogicality, more than one voice and hetrogenity- why one rather
than another are used
To understand human mental action one must understand devises used to mediate such
actions. Certain aspect of human mental functioning is tied to communicative processes-
Voice reminds us that we borrow the voices of others in our communicative acts. Last,
human communicative functioning give rise to individual developmet.
Why Mind?
Connect psychological and socio-cultural settings
Kap 2: Vygotsky
Situatedness er Implisit komperativ
3 tema i Vygotskys arbeid: 1. utviklings analyser/psykologi 2. påstanden om at høyere
mentale funksjoner hos individet har sitt opphav i sosial interaksjon 3. at menneskelig
handling - både sosial handling og mental handling – er mediert av verktøy og tegn.
1. utviklings analyser/psykologi
Fokus på å studere prosess og ikke prod- prosess forteller oss om den mentale utviklings
bestanddeler.
Phylogenesis- Darwin (Köhlers sjimanse studier) and Engels. Köhler: slutninger gjennom
bruk av verktøy (problemløsning: få tak i banan), Marx,
Levy-Bruhl: Lucien Lévy-Bruhl (1857—1939) was a French philosopher,
sociologist, and ethnographer, whose primary field of study involved primitive
mentality.
Bruhl was the first anthropologist to address how people think. In his work How
Natives Think (1910), Bruhl speculated on what he believed were the two basic
mindsets of mankind: Primitive and Western. The Primitive mind cannot
differentiate the supernatural from reality. It uses "mystical participation" to
manipulate the world. Bruhl thought the primitive mind didn't address
contradictions. On the contrary, the Western mind used speculation and logic.
Bruhl believed that eventually the Primitive mind would be replaced by the
Western mind.
Evans Pritchard criticized Bruhl. He argued that Primitive man can address
contradictions, but just does so differently.
Cole has proposed that a form of Lamarckian, as opposed to Darvian apply in the genetic
domain of sociocultural history:
heritability of acquired characteristics, the once widely accepted idea that an
organism can acquire characteristics during its lifetime and pass them on to its
offspring.
It proposed that individual efforts during the lifetime of the organisms were the
main mechanism driving species to adaptation, as they supposedly would acquire
adaptative changes and pass them on to offspring. After publication of Charles
Darwin's theory of natural selection, the importance of individual efforts in the
generation of adaptation was considerably diminished. Later, Mendelian genetics
supplanted the notion of inheritance of acquired traits, eventually leading to the
development of the modern evolutionary synthesis, and the general abandonment
of the Lamarckian theory of evolution in biology. In a wider context, Lamarckism
is of use when examining the evolution of cultures.
2. påstanden om at høyere mentale funksjoner hos individet har sitt opphav i sosial
interaksjon
Internalisering- higher and lower mental functioning
Piere Janet- se The Social Mind (Valsiner & van der Veer)
Mediering
Eksempler:
Forbidden color test- children managing to use color cards as an external memory aid
Key board on computers/ Bateson‘s blind man
The use of categories to classify the world- normal etc..
Piaget- inner speech. Piaget: saw inner speech as a symptom for egosentricity while Vyg
saw inner speech as a way of self-regulation
Vyg and Saphir Whorf hypotesis= language influences thought. Difference: Vyg holds
the notion of word meaning as the important unit of analysis
Biological Determinism and Epistemology in Linguistics: Some Considerations on the
"Chomskyan Revolution"
Peter Jones
―Vygotsky stressed the centrality of the study of language and its development to
the explanation of the unique properties of the human psyche, and to a scientific
understanding of human society as a specific form of material organisation.
Shaped in the whole life history of the community as an instrument of
communicative mediation of practical activity and a form of generalising thought
-"the social means of thought" (1962: 5 1) - language interpenetrates with the
"natural" psychological and biological processes present in the new-born child
leading to the formation of "verbal thought" which "is not an innate, natural form
of behaviour but is determined by a historical-cultural process" (ibid).
One can even accept with Kant and Chomsky that the data of experience are
somehow organized prior to their representation to the subject" (Bakhurst, 1991:
196), while yet rejecting the possibility of innate ideas or Chomskyan biological
programming. The work of llyenkov (eg 1977a,b), as Bakhurst (op.cit) shows,
provides an elegant materialist solution to the problem in showing that "what
lends the object of experience structure is not the mind of the individual subjects,
but the forms of the activity of the community" (ibid: 197).The Kantian categories
and concepts, Chomskyan innate ideas, are not, then, essentially properties of the
subject, seen as the contemplating individual, but are "the forms of self-
consciousness of social beings (understood as the historically developing
'ensembles of social relations')" which have to be "assimilated by the individual
from without (and confronting him from the very beginning as 'external' schemas
[patterns] of the movement of culture, independent of his consciousness and will"
(ibid: 197). Thus, the individual human being comes to interpret the data of
experience - one could even say to "filter it" - through the framework of
meanings, categories and norms of the surrounding culture assimilated through
joint action. This framework indeed transcends experience because it represents a
distillation and summation of the historical experience of the community itself.
But for that very reason, because it is not some arbitrary mental scheme imposed
adventitiously on the data of sense, it allows the child to relate to the world and to
others in a real, tried and tested, meaningful and purposive way. It is this system
of social life, and not raw grey matter, which provides the basic socio-cultural and
practical "rules" within which the child's creative imagination can take shape and
work. Furthermore, the productive activity responsible for the human
environment, if we accept the premisses of historical materialism, determines the
social structure of the producing community itself. No biologically fixed
conceptual scheme could allow us to operate and survive in such an environment.
Thus, neither human thought, nor activity guided by thought, nor the social
relations through which activity is effected could have a biologically determined
character. In short, a human way of life would not be possible if the content and
categories of thinking were genetically inherited.‖
Hva kan vi diskutere her?
Ulike innramminger mot det sosiokultrurelle og doktorandenes egne
forskningsinteresser- beskrivelsesnivå og forklaringsnivå- hvor er dere?
Nivåer og hvor vi retter eget forskningsfokus
Microgenesis
Phylogenesis- individents utvikling
Ontogenesis – a cultural line of development involves mastery of the mediational
means provided by culture
Sociogenesis- artens utvikling
Sosiokultureløl teori og vitenskapsteori og intellektuelle røtter/hva Vyg bygger bå