Abstraction, Representation and Vygotsky on Scientific Concepts

1
Abstraction, Representation and Vygotsky on
Scientific Concepts

• Dr Jan Derry
• Institute of Education, University of London

2
Here is a problem

• A rope is tied around the Earths equator.
  Then a ten-meter-long piece is added to it and
  the rope is pulled evenly so that everywhere the
  distance between the Earths rope and the surface
  is the same? The question is Would this distance
  be sufficient for a cat to sneak under the rope?
  (Kozulin, 1998, Psychological Tools)

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Solution ?

• Imagine the additional length added in one place
  (a loop of about 5m high) and then being spread
  out to extend the full length of the rope,
  resulting in a minute gap too small for the cat
  to fit under.
• The use of scientific concepts of pi and radius,
  would have yielded the correct but counter
  intuitive answer of a 1.6m gap.

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Critique of the privileged status of abstract
rationality - Wertsch

• Inadequacies of a curriculum that fails to engage
  with the variety of ways that learners make
  meaning
• Decontextualised rationality - reason that
  extends beyond context and operates with a
  universal notion of truth
• Move towards the contextual, the situated and the
  practical and away from any notion of reason
  understood in universal terms presupposing a
  shared psychic unity of human kind.

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Vygotskys commitment to Enlightenment (Abstract)
Rationality

• Ambivalence in Vygotskys approach to meaning
  both emphasising locale and culture yet also a
  hard scientific realism and a hierarchical form
  of reason
• demands of rationality impose on philosophy a
  need to seek out abstract, general ideas and
  principles, by which particulars can be connected
  together (Toulmin, 1992 Cosmopolis)
• abstract axioms were in, concrete diversity was
  out (Wertsch citing Toulmin)

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Philosophical underpinnings of Vygotskys work

• Influence of Hegel and Spinoza provide a richer
  idea of rationality and epistemology than that
  contained in prevalent misrepresentations
• Hegel was the first thinker to appreciate the
  social character of knowledge and it is the
  proper characterisation of knowledge which is at
  stake here.

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Recognition of Hegels work

• The influence of Hegels Phenomenology on John
  McDowell and Robert Brandom has been crucial for
  rethinking problems that have arisen out of
  analytic philosophy including the relation of
  language to the world

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Failure of Schooling to Engage With the Variety
of Meaning-makers

• Privileging of decontextualised rationality
  (universal, abstract)
• Language meaning is viewed as a matter of
  referential relationships between signs and
  objects
• Wertsch

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Designative Approach Language Represents an
Independent Reality

• We could explain a sign or word having
  meaning by pointing to what it designates, in a
  broad sense, that is, what it can be used to
  refer to in the world, and what it can be used to
  say about that thing. we give the meaning of a
  sign or a word by pointing to the thing or
  relations that they can be used to talk about
• 
  (Taylor cited in Wertsch, J. 2000)

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Wertschs criticism of Vygotsky

• designative approach consistent with Vygotskys
  account of meaning in scientific concepts
• Assumption that language and meaning are
  basically concerned with referential
  relationships between signs and objects
• Assumption that the development of meaning is a
  matter of increasing generalisation and
  abstraction

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Vygotsky Concepts as generalisations?

• Takes issue with a conception which sees thought
  as occupying a representational or simple
  referential relation to the world
• Argues that the idea of general representations
  is inadequate to express what a concept is in
  thinking

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Vygotsky system of judgements

• According to our hypothesis, we must seek the
  psychological equivalent of the concept not in
  general representations, not in absolute
  perceptions and orthoscopic diagrams, not even in
  concrete verbal images that replace the general
  representations we must seek it in a system of
  judgements in which the concept is disclosed.
• (Vygotsky, 1998)

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Logical thought or richness and diversity?

• It is completely clear that if the process of
  generalizing is considered as a direct result of
  abstraction of traits, then we will inevitably
  come to the conclusion that thinking in concepts
  is removed from reality. Others have said that
  concepts arise in the process of castrating
  reality. Concrete, diverse phenomena must lose
  their traits one after the other in order that a
  concept might be formed. Actually what arises is
  a dry and empty abstraction in which the diverse,
  full-blooded reality is impoverished by logical
  thought.
• (Vygotsky, 1998)

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Vygotsky on concepts

• A real concept is an image of an objective thing
  in all its complexity. Only when we recognise the
  thing in all its connections and relations, only
  when this diversity is synthesised in a word, in
  an integral image through a multitude of
  determinations do we develop a concept. (
  includes not only the general, but also the
  individual and particular)

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Vygotsky on concepts

• In contrast to direct knowledge of an object, a
  concept is filled with definitions of the object
  it is the result of rational processing of our
  existence and it is mediated knowledge of the
  object. To think of some object with the help of
  a concept means to include the given object in a
  complex system of mediating connection and
  relations disclosed in determinations of the
  concept.

16
Sellars Critique of Traditional Empiricism (the
Myth of the Given)

• In characterising an episode or a state as
  that of knowing, we are not giving a description
  of that episode or state we are placing it in
  the space of reasons, of justifying and being
  able to justify what one says

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No Outer Boundary to the Conceptual

• Sellars here speaks of knowledge in particular,
  that is just to stress one application of the
  thought that a normative context is necessary for
  the idea of being in touch with the world at all,
  whether knowledgeably or not
• (McDowell, 1996, Mind and World)

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The Unboundedness of the Conceptual

• The relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on,
  in receptivityit is not that they are exercised
  on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity
• We should understandexperiential intake not as
  bare getting of an extra-conceptual given, but a
  kind of occurrence or state that already has
  conceptual content
• Thought can bear on empirical reality only
  because to be a thinker at all is to be at home
  in the space of reasons
• (McDowell, 1996, Mind and World)

19
Human Animals Acquire a Second Nature

• Human beingsare born mere animals, and they are
  transformed into thinkers and intentional agents
  in the course of coming to maturity
• Bildung in being initiated into a language, a
  human being is introduced to something that
  already embodies rational linkages between
  concepts constitutive of the layout of the space
  of reasons
  (McDowell)

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Normativity and Sociogenesis of Mind

• To be in touch with the world at all (as a human)
  assumes a normative context.
• If we want to comprehend our mental powers we
  must understand the nature of normativity
  (Bakhurst)
• Where a word is used in a seemingly
  non-conceptual way, where the user has no
  conscious awareness of the reasons involved, the
  reasons are still present.

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Brandom causes or reasons

• An alarm alerting us to a fire
• A child shouting fire
• responding differentially versus perceiving
  or knowing
• Making a report as a human being is not merely to
  respond differentially it involves inferring
  rather than merely referring, since even non
  inferential reports must be inferentially
  articulated

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Concepts and Reference - Brandom

• even noninferential reports must be
  inferentially articulated. Without that
  requirement we cannot tell the difference between
  noninferential reporters and automatic machinery
  such as thermostats and photocells, which also
  have reliable dispositions to respond
  differentially to stimuli.
• 
  R. Brandom, 2000

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Privileging Inference Over Reference - Brandom

• Approaches the contents of conceptually explicit
  propositions or principles from the direction of
  what is implicit in practices of using
  expressions and acquiring or deploying beliefs
• Understands conceptual objectivity in the context
  of a social practice account of the norms
  implicit in concept use.

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Brandom on concepts

• to have conceptual content is just for it a
  concept to play a role in the inferential game
  of making claims and giving and asking for
  reasons. To grasp or understand such a concept is
  to have practical mastery over the inferences it
  is involved into know, in the practical sense of
  being able to distinguish, what follows from the
  applicability of a concept, and what it follows
  from.
• (Brandom 1994)

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Brandom Vygotsky on Concepts

• In order to master any concept, one must master
  many concepts. Brandom, 2000
• We must seek the psychological equivalent of the
  concept not in general representationswe must
  seek it in the system of judgements in which the
  concept is disclosed. Vygotsky, 1998

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Meaning designative or inferential?

• In poor teaching practice words are understood
  solely to take their meaning from the things they
  represent, and it is assumed that it is through
  awareness of this connection that learning occurs
• The absence of an appreciation that there is an
  alternative to this approach to meaning (one
  which incorporates designation but only as
  secondary to the inferences that are the
  historical genesis of its meaning) can lead to a
  damaging relativism where the need to articulate
  the nature of knowledge is ignored.
• Derry, J. (forthcoming) Abstract Rationality in
  Education from Vygotsky to Brandom
• in Studies in Philosophy and Education