Blogging Chapter Five: Section Thirteen

[kellogg]

Hongkong, Superman, J-Kitty, and Chokey didn't come to the thesis presentations on Tuesday night, so they are busy looking up the theses on the snueenglish 논문 업로드용 폴더  in order to fill out the table at the end of the Week 8 Agenda for their presentation to class next week. The other grads, Mirror, J La Belle, Ha-ha Smile, Handyman, Red Cherry, J-Monkey, and Koala are already finishing Chapter Five and working on the third problem of the midterm:

"In Section THIRTEEN, Vygotsky notes that “complexive” thinking often results in strange juxtapositions of concrete images, because a single object can belong to many different complexes. Can you find any evidence of that in THIS data or your own?"

Koala: I liked the examples you gave in the last section. The little boy who used the word "vau-vau" for a china doll and a dog, and his grandparents picture, and horsie, a clock and so on.

LSV: Well, that wasn't my example. It was Idelberger's. Werner uses it too.

Mirror: I liked the "qua" example about the duck, the lake, the coin, and the eagle.

LSV: That wasn't my example either. It was Darwin's. He was talking about his grandson.

J-Monkey: But you pointed out that both syncretisms and complexes are not stable. They are always changing.

LSV: That's right. The child can't use his own made-up words. The child has to repeat--and use--the words that other people are using. Even "qua" probably comes from "quack". So the words start to change.

J-Monkey: First syncretisms become complexive, like when my child stops thinking about "school" as something she will do for money when she gets to be nine or ten and starts thinking about school as a real building. But the real building contains many kinds of complex.

LSV: Sure! There's the associative complex of the child's book bag, the collection complex of classroom objects, the chain complexes of the child's playground games, and the diffuse complexes of the child's friendships. So of course they overlap, and they even develop into each other. In the blocks experiment, we're just showing the different forms of complexive organization in their complete, mature forms.

La Belle: That's what drives me crazy about this book. We just don't get enough examples. We never see any actual data. At least last night during the thesis presentations we had some actual data.

LSV: Well, let me give you some really interesting examples from totemism, something we find all over the world. There is a tribe of people in Brazil called the Bororo. There is also a kind of red parrot called an arara. Now, the Bororo say that they are really arraras.

Ha-ha Smile: We Koreans say the same thing. We are descended from a bear, you know. And sometimes when we die we turn into animals too.

LSV: This is different. The Bororo don't say they are descended from the araras, or that they will die and turn into araras. They say that they ARE, actually, araras. 

Handyman: But they don't look like parrots. So it can't be a visually based way of thinking. It must be a concept.

LSV: Well, they do wear parrot feathers. But I think that if you ask them they will tell you that there are really two kinds of arara, ones that look like parrots and others that look like humans, just as there are two kinds of humans, ones that look like men and otheres that look like women.

Handyman: Is it a concept?

LSV: Not quite. With a concept you really have to distinguish between the ABSTRACT category and the concrete group of objects. I think in the minds of the Bororo there is only a single concrete grouping that includes both parrots and people.

J-Monkey: My daughter thinks like that sometimes. For her school is just this complexive thing that includes both teachers and students. She thinks that she will get money when she goes to school, because I do!

Red Cherry: Wait a minute. Are you saying that Bororos think like children? Isn't that what Piaget and Freud said about primitive people, except for when they are talking about hunting, farming and manufacture? And didn't you point out that for primitive people, hunting, farming and manufacture are their whole lives?

LSV: Not their whole lives. There is also the unseen world of man's relationship to nature. And that is what has taken a complexive form here. Of course, our anthropologist friends tend to focus on these areas of complexive thinking for the same reason that Piaget focuses on the child's syncretism; it is what sets them apart from us.

Handyman: So complexive thinking is a sociogenetic stage as well as an ontogenetic one?

LSV: I think it's a logical stage. So we can see it in sociogenesis and also in ontogenesis. We can even see it in pathogenesis.

Koala: Pathogenesis? You mean parthogenesis?

LSV: No, I mean disease. When people lose their minds, it's a little like watching development IN REVERSE. The more developed mental forms disappear and leave genetically older mental forms exposed.

Sunny: So what happens?

LSV: Well, according to Storch, schizophrenics think almost entirely in concrete images. So when a schizophrenic says, for example, that he is Jesus Christ, he means that he and the historical Jesus Christ belong to a single family, the way that the Bororo and the parrot belong to a family. 

Handyman: What about microgenesis? That's what we have to do for our homework.  

J-Monkey: There was a really good example in the presentations last night. One of my classmates was using a book that went like this:

"If you take give a pig a pancake, she'll want some of your favorite maple syrup.

If you give her some of your favorite maple syrup, she'll get sticky.

If she gets sticky, she'll want a bath.

If she takes a bath, she'll want a rubber duck."

LSV: Oh, that's a chain complex. Quite a pure one, really! "Brown Bear, Red Bird, Yellow Duck" and so on.

J-Monkey: Yes, and there was a similar one about "When you take a mouse to school". But the interesting thing is that when the child actually WRITES about the story, the child cannot reproduce the grammar of the chain.

LSV: Really? So what does the kid write? 

J-Monkey: A narrative. Let me see if I can find it. Here it is:

"A mouse went to school with a boy. The mouse messed up in the school. But it is very cute. They were very happy together. I think this story is very exciting and fun."

That's NOT a chain, is it?

LSV: Well, it is at first. Look at the setting: "school" and then "the school"

J-Monkey: And the characters, too! "A mouse" becomes "the mouse" and then "it" and then "they". So there are chains.

LSV: Yes, but there's a kind of diffusion too: "going to school" becomes "messing up" and then "cuteness" and then "happiness, excitement, and fun". The child starts with a concrete action and then ends with a kind of general good feeling.

J-Monkey: So it's all "preconceptual complexive thinking"? There are no concepts at all?

LSV: I think there's a kind of potential concept. Look at the way the child handles TIME and especially TENSE.

J-Monkey: His tenses are terrible.

LSV: No, I think there's a rule. The child uses PAST tense to describe ACTIONS ("went to school", "messed up") and PRESENT tense to describe QUALITIES ("is very cute", "is very exciting and fun"). So, past tense with action verbs and present tense with adjectives. There are two potential concepts there: the verb on the one hand and the adjective on the other.

J-Monkey: But what about "They were very happy together"?

LSV: Right.  Maybe the child uses PAST tense when he is INSIDE the story: "A mouse went to school" "The mouse messed up". But sometimes the child stands outside the story and kind of reviews it: "It is very cute", and "I think this story is very exciting". I think there is some kind of potential concept there too.  And finally there is the typical structure of any story: Situation-Characters-Problem-Eval‎uation-Solution-Coda!

Koala: We did that in class. But we called it "Where/when" and "Who" and "What are they doing/thinking/saying?"

Mirror: I guess I don't understand the concept of concept. You say that "verb" is a concept and "narrative" is a concept and "time" is a concept and even "inside the story" and "outside the story" is a concept. So everything is a concept?

LSV: Not at all! I think it would be truer to say that for the young child NOTHING is a concept. But everything is a POTENTIAL concept. What the child has to do is to generalize and abstract, and then to put it into some kind of system, so there are superconcepts and subconcepts, generalizations, examples and unique individuals. What the child knows is a world of unique individuals. What the adult knows is that these individuals are really just examples of generalizations.

Chokey: I didn't get a chance to do the reading. Can you sum it up for me?

LSV: I'll try. In this section, I'm trying to give some NON-ontogenetic examples of complexive thinking. I'm trying to show that it's not just a phenomenon of child development.

K-Dragon: But aren't you just creating a complex yourself, by throwing togeether primitives, schizophrenics, and children?

LSV: I'm trying to create a whole new concept. I want to isolate a very specific trait of some thinking and give some instances, some cases, some examples of it from very different fields.

K-Dragon: The fields are anthropology and medicine. But what is the common specific trait?

LSV: The common trait is the apparent inability to discriminate between an ideal grouping and a real set of concrete examples that we saw in the Sakharov tests. 

Sunny: OK, so Levy-Bruhl cites observations from Brazil by von den Steinen to the effect that the northern Brazilian people, the Bororo, insist that they are araras, a kind of red parrot.

Kitty: And Storch reports similarly illogical beliefs in psychotics (e.g. the belief that one is Jesus Christ or the devil, or hearing voices that require one to perform a murder as a sacrifice of some kind). 

LSV: Right. Now, I'm a little skeptical about these claims of “participation”. First of all, the anthropologists have really ignored the social FUNCTION of the ideas. Detachment from function lends the form of “primitive” thinking a spurious mystique; the psychological strangeness is largely caused by the lack of context.

Handyman: So we need to look at the context?

LSV: Exactly. If we learn that the Bororo have a “totem” system for representing clans that can consist of both animals and people (similar to the organization of the boy scouts or the military with their mascots) then the Bororo statement makes perfect sense: the clan is simply a concrete social grouping including both human and nonhuman members.

Superman: But it does seem like a very different context from our own.

LSV: It SEEMS that way. But anthropologists ignore ideas which are SIMILAR to our own. When we examine these ideas that are similar to our own, we discover, once again, complexive thinking, just like we find in our children--and in our selves. 

Ha-ha Smile: OK, but what about schizophrenics? How are they similar to healthy children?

LSV: In child thinking, it is quite common for one object to belong to two different complexes; for example, a mother can belong to both her husband’s family and to that of her parents. In the same way, a schizophrenic can be both himself and Jesus Christ.

J La Belle: So the Bororo do not assume an identity between parrots and people!

LSV: Right. Membership in a complex does not imply any single shared trait; a person or thing that belongs to a complex does so with all of its individual features and without subordinating any one feature or privileging another feature as essential. Members of the same complex do not necessarily share any trait in common beyond belonging to the same complex.

K Dragon: So we are all the same!

LSV: An anthropologist once said that there are three ways to look at the world. First, we are all the same. Second, we are all different, and it doesn't matter. And third, that we are all different and it matters, because some of us are better than others.

K-Dragon: Which do you believe?

LSV: I believe in development. So I believe that there are differences, and they matter. But...I also believe that EVERYBODY develops, and in fact we all develop together.