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The grads consider the following problem:
In Section FIFTEEN, Vygotsky says that everyday words are generalized representations and not concepts. Can you find any examples in the data? This really only refers to the very last part of Section Fifteen:
5-15-7] 의사 개념은 어린이만의 독점적 성취는 아니다. 일상 생활에서 우리의 생각은 흔히 의사개념으로 일어난다.
5-15-8] 변증법적 논리의 관점에서 보면 우리 실생활의 살아있는 발화에서 발견되는 개념들은 진정한 의미에서의 개념이 아니다. 그들은 사실 사물의 일반적 표상들이다. 그러나 이러한 표상들이 복합체 또는 의사개념으로부터, 변증법적 의미에서, 개념으로의 이행적 단계라는 데에는 의심의 여지가 없다.
K-Dragon: So how is language development different for deaf children?
LSV: We saw that one way in which pseudoconcepts get formed is that the adult and the child talk about the same objects. The child notices that when the adult says "dog", the adult does not just mean the dogs that the child sees every day, but also dogs that he has never seen and even dogs the adult has never seen.
Koala: I think I understand. It reminds--for some reason--of the presentations we had on Tuesday night. There was one on process drama, by our classmates Yi Jihyeon?
LSV: Process drama? I have always been interested in drama. I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on Hamlet, you know.
Koala: Well, process drama is not like Hamlet. There are some kinds of language teaching that just focus on getting children to repeat texts they already know. There are other kinds of language teaching that focus on getting children to say things they have never heard before. If you like the former, you want the children to repeat texts without thinking to much. If you like the latter, you want the children to create their own texts.
LSV: That sounds interesting. Of course, they can't create them out of nothing. Even completely new sentences are built around old sentences, and of course the child builds his own meanings inside words that he or she finds in the environment.
Koala: Do deaf children do this too?
LSV: Yes, but the process is quite different. It's considerably more original--like a process drama, if you like. And in fact we see a very strong differentiation between object reference on the one hand, and meaning making on the other. We can actually SEE it!
Mirror: How can you SEE it?
LSV: Take a look at this.
http://www.lifeprint.com/asl101/pages-signs/w/white.htm
La Belle: I don't get it. What is he doing?
Ha-ha Smile: I think I get it. First, he makes a gesture for "White color" with his hand.
LSV: Yes. In Russian sign language you do this by pointing to a tooth.
Ha-ha Smile: That establishes the meaning. Then he "throws" the "whiteness" onto an object, namely his face. That means that he is white, or, by extension, that somebody is white.
LSV: Exactly. So there is one gesture that makes the meaning of "whiteness" and another that establishes the reference. Now, you can see that this way of making meaning leads to the creation of complexes. The deaf-mute goes around pointing at things, establishing their whiteness. But that creates a group of concrete objects, a complex.
K-Dragon: Oh, no! In Section Thirteen you seemed to suggest that children, schizophrenics and Amazon Indians think in the same way. Now, you are saying that DEAF people do it too.
LSV (sighing patiently): Actually, I'm saying that from the point of view of LOGIC, from the point of view of DIALECTICAL (that is, dialogic) logic, MOST of the concepts we use in everyday speech are not concepts. They are just general representations, based on everyday experience.
K-Dragon: OK, but you DID say that Amazon Indians think primitively, in complexes.
LSV: No, I didn't. Remember, I said that Amazon Indians ONLY think like this concerning matters that they don't understand well. But what I really said was that complexive thinking, in its mature form, represents a phenomenon that can be found in many different places: ontogenesis, pathogenesis, and even sociogenesis. When you say that they think in the same way, you are really making a direct association. I was making a logical comparison.
K-Dragon: OK. But you ARE saying that deaf people think complexively, aren't you?
LSV: I am talking about the deaf CHILDREN in our hospital at the University of Moscow. They develop quite differently from normal children; we learned that from Helen Keller, didn't we?
K-Dragon: Helen Keller was blind too.
LSV: I don't really think that blindness, deafness, or knowing one language instead of another are intrinsically different in any way. In all three situations you have an individual who is good at some things and not so good at others. The task of the teacher is really twofold: on the one hand, we have to help the learner to use what he or she is good at to make up for the things that he or she is not so good at.
K-Dragon: And on the other?
LSV: Well, on the other, we have to get other people to realize that there is no real, objective, difference between speaking sign language and speaking spoken English; there is only social discrimination against the former and social discrimination in favor of the latter. And we have to fight that!
K-Dragon: So deaf children are not really disabled?
LSV: Well, of course they are. Discrimination disables you. But so does being an English speaker in Korea, and so does being a Korean speaker in the USA. And in all three cases, there is a rather special course of language development.
Kitty: That's all very interesting. But I'm WAY behind on my homework. I need to know what all this has to do with my homework.
K-Dragon: Well, that depends on your data, of course. But I think that in almost all the data, you are going to find different kinds of COLLOCATIONS.
Kitty: What are collocations?
Cherry: Oh, that was one of the presentations on Tuesday. Collocations are words that "go together". You know, like "camping", "hiking", "swimming" all "go together" with an expression like "let's go...".
Kitty: So "camping", "hiking", and "swimming" are a kind of complex?
LSV: That depends. Does the child think of them as being examples of some abstract idea? Or does the child think of them as being words that go after a particular English sound? That's the whole question!
Kitty: And what's the ANSWER?
K-Dragon: Look at the data!
Sunny: Wait a minute. Before we go on to the next section, can you sum up this section for us?
LSV: Sure. I said last time that in addition to ontogenetic examples of complexive thinking there are sociogenetic examples. Remember?
Sunny: Let me see if I can get them straight. The ontogenetic examples are examples from child development. So when a child thinks that shellfish and jellyfish and starfish really are fish, that's an ontogenetic example of a complex built by the child inside the word that adults use for the concept of "fish".
LSV: Right. And you remember we saw sociogenetic examples too.
Ha-ha Smile: Yes. When the Bororo say that they are red parrots, they are referring to a kind of totemic family that includes birds and people. That's a complex too.
LSV: Yes, but actually a lot of everyday adult speech takes place at the complexive level. For example, fully grown adults sometimes find themselves referring to Africa as a "country" and not a continent. "Country" is really a kind of complex, and in fact most words we think of as concepts have some kind of complexive past.
Superman: You said that there were pathogenic examples too--examples from clinical psychiatry.
LSV: Right, and we previously saw the example of schizophrenics, who believe that they are Jesus Christ. But in this section we talked about the example of deaf and mute children. This is an unusually pure example of complexive thinking, at least in those cases where the child does not share a language with an adult.
Hongkong: I still don't get it. Surely you are not saying that sign language is always complexive?
LSV; Of course not. But when children use words they use the words they find in the environment, already TIED to specific objects. So a child who uses the word “dog” to may be thinking only of one beloved animal, and the parent may be thinking of all members of the canine genus, but when the family pet enters the room, both words refer to exactly the same visual purview. Now, that situation does NOT obtain when deaf children grow up with parents who do not speak their language, and so we find in the language of the deaf a kind of “natural experiment”.
Hongkong: You mean that instead of converging, the complex and the concept really grow apart?
LSV: Well, they are more obviously separate. A sign like pointing to a tooth can have different meanings (e.g. “white”, “stone-like” and “tooth”).
K-Dragon: But that is true of spoken language as well. "Tooth” can refer to the cutting edge of a saw, part of a comb, as well as the incisor of a human or an animal.
LSV: Sure. Even though adults can think of concepts, MOST of adult thinking is actually complexive. Generalization in thinking may appear at the conceptual level, but it is more common to find complexes. The concepts we use in everyday life are not really science concepts at all, but only general representations of things.
Handyman: So how do we "upgrade" the general representation of things to the conceptual level?
LSV: We've only looked at ONE genetic root of the process. There's another.
Mirror: Another one? What is it?
LSV: I'll tell you about it next time.
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