Related to my last post here are some
excerpts from Mark Edwards' “The
depth of the exteriors, part 2”:
“Piaget's view of development is that
of the internal maturation of individually located organising
structures [mental schema].”
“Vygotsky recognised the
developmental depth of the exteriors in a way that Piaget did not.”
“Vygotsky gained from Baldwin...the
emergence of self out of the social dynamics, and the sociogenic
origin of cognitive processes.”
“For Vygotsky, 'the social dimension
of consciousness is primary in time and in fact. The individual
dimension of consciousness is derivative and secondary' (Vygotsky,
1979, p.30).”
“Instead of beginning with the
assumption that mental functioning occurs within the individual it
begins with the concept that mental processes occur primarily between
people in their verbal and communicative behaviour and that these
processes are only secondarily appropriated by individuals. As Cole
puts it, Vygotsky assumes that mind is 'distributed' throughout a
collective rather within separated individuals.”
“While the central fact of the
Wilberian version of Integral Psychology is the human experience for
Vygotsky it is the communicative mediational event. As Vygotsky says,
'The central fact of our psychology is the fact of mediation,'
(Vygotsky 1982 p. 166). Wilber looks at a stone axe and sees the
material result of interior human consciousness. A Vygotskian looks
at a stone axe and sees something that can change human cultural
identity.”
“Both the Piagetian and the Vedantic
schools share an assumption that development occurs individually and
within the interior before it appears anywhere else. Vygotsky has
shown us that this is simply not a full explanation of the facts.”
“Vygotsky via Hegel and Marx asserts
that there is an intimate connection between the human habitats and
the defining qualities of human psychological processes. Social
environments are suffused with the achievements of prior generations
in powerful forms. Vygotsky brought together the cultural means with
the idea that people mediate their actions and those of all following
generations through artefacts.”
“Mediation is a active process....
When a new cultural tool, or artefact, is introduced into this active
process all aspects of the system are inevitable transformed. In this
view mediational means such as language and technical tools do not
simply facilitate forms of action that would otherwise occur. They
are transformers of holistic activity including the actor and their
consciousness.”
“Vygotsky viewed cognitive
developments as a result of a dialectical process. Learning occurs
through shared problem solving experiences with significant others.
There is a mentoring or apprenticeship interaction whereby
doing/knowing is transferred from on to the other in an intensely
social communicative process. It is the internalisation of this
dialogical process that creates interior structures.”
Here are some related excerpts from Bryant's article "On the reality and construction of hyperobjects with reference to class":*
ReplyDelete“Class, as an entity in its own right, comes to function as a statistical sorting machine...like a gravitational or attractive field for those persons or human bodies that find themselves within its orbit.... The output these machines produce are the manner in which human beings are formed at the affective, cognitive, and even the physiological level” (88-9).
“In Understanding Media Marshall McLuhan famously argues that the essence of media consists in being an extension of man.... Crucial to these extensions is that they also transform modes of affectivity, cognition, and social relations.... Along these lines, Latour will argue that nonhuman objects should be treated as full-blown actors in associations or assemblages” (94 – 6).
* http://speculations.squarespace.com/storage/Bryant_Reality%20and%20Construction%20of%20Hyperobjects_v2.pdf
I found the following Vygotsky quote on Bogost's blog dated 9/16/10,* from Mind in Society:
ReplyDelete"A special feature of human perception—which arises at a very young age—is the perception of real objects. This is something for which there is no analogy in animal perception. By this term I mean that I do not see the world simply in color and shape but also as a world with sense and meaning. I do not merely see something round and black with two hands; I see a clock and I can distinguish one hand from the other. Some brain-injured patients say, when they see a clock, that they are seeing something round and white with two thin steel strips, but they do not know that it is a clock; such people have lost their real relationship with objects. These observations suggest that all human perception consists of categorized rather than isolated perceptions."
* http://www.bogost.com/blog/vygotsky_on_real_objects.shtml
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ReplyDeleteAlso recall the following form Philosophy in the Flesh:
ReplyDelete“Living systems must categorize. Since we are neural beings our categories are formed through our embodiment. What that means is the categories we form are part of our experience. They are the structures that differentiate aspects of our experience into discernible kinds. Categorization is thus not a purely intellectual matter, occurring after the fact of experience. Rather the formation and use of categories is the stuff of experience…. We cannot, as some meditative traditions suggest, get ‘beyond’ our categories and have a purely uncategorized and unconceptualized experience. Neural beings cannot do that” (19).
According to this even animal perception is so categorized. Vygotsky though differentiates human perception, since the animal doesn't further categorize perception as humans do via symbolic enculturation, which begins very early on and changes our biologically inherent perceptual categories.