If you will recall--I think JF was referring to previous threads as well--that we were discussing some of this under the 'Vienna Circle' threads (which I cite in this post -- scroll down). All this puts me to mind of Wittgenstein's interest in psychology, which was not simply a late development in his thinking. First, he was exposed to much this as part of an educational reform movement in Austria between the wars. Also he had an expressed but critical interest in Gestalt psychology (which you could put simplistically as a psychological spin-off the same lines of inquiry and research that led to the 'Husserlian turn' in philosophy).
Now I really must learn more about Stumpf's output in phonetics. I hadn't known about this until this week, which does go to show that although we seem to go around and around here on M-T, going around and around can led to a different direction out. CJ http://hhs.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/13/3/69 Phenomenological factors in Vygotsky’s mature psychology Paul S. Macdonald Murdoch University, Western Australia, pmcdo...@central.murdoch.edu.au This article examines some of the phenomenological features in Lev Vygotsky’s mature psychological theory, especially in Thinking and Speech and The Current Crisis in Psychology. It traces the complex literary and philosophical influences in 1920s Moscow on Vygotsky’s thought, through Gustav Shpet’s seminars on Husserl and the inner form of the word, Chelpanov’s seminars on phenomenology, Bakhtin’s theory of the production of inner speech, and the theoretical insights of the early Gestalt psychologists. It begins with an exposition of two central Husserlian schemas: part-whole theory and the thesis of the naïve standpoint, both of which Vygotsky was clearly familiar with. This is followed by an account of the reception of phenomenology in early Soviet Russia. The article’s central sections are concerned with a careful unpacking and critique of Vygotsky’s employment of Husserlian method and analysis in his later doctrine of the ‘inner plane of speech’, his use of part-whole theory, and his identification of Husserl’s position with an untenable version of idealism. The article closes with the contention that Vygotsky misrepresents the phenomenological analysis of meaning formation and appropriates basic Husserlian conceptual terms in his elaboration of the ‘inner form of the word’; but Vygotsky does so in such a way that he enriches our descriptive access to the individual development of humans’ dynamic use of language. Key Words: cognitive meaning • Edmund Husserl • part-whole theory • phenomenology http://www.mail-archive.com/marxism-thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu/msg04571.html http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/husserl2.htm (by the way, I have the book, but am citing an online source for list participants) small excerpt >>�61. Psychology in the tension between the (objectivistic-philosophical) idea of science and empirical procedure: the incompatibility of the two directions of psychological inquiry (the psychophysical and that of "psychology based on inner experience"). ALL SCIENTIFIC empirical inquiry has its original legitimacy and also its dignity. But considered by itself, not all such inquiry is science in that most original and indispensable sense whose first name was philosophy, and thus also in the sense of the new establishment of a philosophy or science since the Renaissance. Not all scientific empirical inquiry grew up as a partial function within such a science. Yet only when it does justice to this sense can it truly be called scientific. But we can speak of science as such only where, within the indestructible whole of universal philosophy, a branch of the universal task causes a particular science, unitary in itself, to grow up, in whose particular task, as a branch, the universal task works itself out in an originally vital grounding of the system. Not every empirical inquiry that can be pursued freely by itself is in this sense already a science, no matter how much practical utility it may have, no matter how much confirmed, methodical technique may reign in it. Now this applies to psychology insofar as, historically, in the constant drive to fulfil its determination as a philosophical, i.e., a genuine, science, it remains entangled in obscurities about its legitimate sense, finally succumbs to temptations to develop a rigorously methodical psychophysical - or better, a psychophysicist's empirical inquiry, and then thinks that it has fulfilled its sense as a science because of the confirmed reliability of its methods. By contrast to the specialists' psychology of the present, our concern - the philosopher's concern - is to move this "sense as a science" to the central point of interest - especially in relation to psychology as the "place of decisions" for a proper development of a philosophy in general - and to clarify its whole motivation and scope. In this direction of the original aim toward - as we say - "philosophical" scientific discipline, motifs of dissatisfaction arose again and again, setting in soon after the Cartesian beginnings. There were troublesome tensions between the [different] tasks which descended historically from Descartes: on the one hand, that of methodically treating souls in exactly the same way as bodies and as being connected with bodies as spatio-temporal realities, i.e., the task of investigating in a physicalistic way the whole life-world as "nature" in a broadened sense; and, on the other hand, the task of investigating souls in their being in-themselves and for-themselves by way of "inner experience" - the psychologist's primordial inner experience of the subjectivity of his own self - or else by way of the intentional mediation of likewise internally directed empathy (i.e., directed toward what is internal to other persons taken thematically ) . The two tasks seemed obviously connected in respect to both method and subject matter, and yet they refused to harmonise. Modern philosophy had prescribed to itself from the very beginning the dualism of substances and the parallelism of the methods of mos geometricus - or, one can also say, the methodical ideal of physicalism. Even though this became vague and faded as it was transmitted, and failed to attain even the serious beginnings of an explicit execution, it was still decisive for the basic conception of man as a psychophysical reality and for all the ways of putting psychology to work in order to bring about methodical knowledge of the psychic. From the start, then, the world was seen "naturalistically" as a world with two strata of real facts regulated by causal laws. Accordingly, souls too were seen as real annexes of their physical living bodies (these being conceived in terms of exact natural science); the souls, of course, have a different structure from the bodies; they are not res extensae, but they are still real in a sense similar to bodies, and because of this relatedness they must also be investigated in a similar sense in terms of "causal laws," i.e., through theories which are of the same sort in principle as those of physics, which is taken as a model and at the same time as an underlying foundation. << 2. http://www.marxists.org/archive/vygotsky/works/crisis/psycri11.htm >>What a trifle! Psychology wanted to be a natural science, but one that would deal with things of a very different nature from those natural science is dealing with. But doesn't the nature of the phenomena studied determine the character of the science? Are history, logic, geometry, and history of the theater really possible as natural sciences? And Chelpanov, who insists that psychology should be as empirical as physics, mineralogy etc., naturally does not join Pavlov but immediately starts to vociferate when the attempt is made to realize psychology as a genuine natural science. What is he hushing up in his comparison? He wants psychology to be a natural science about (1) phenomena which are completely different from physical phenomena, and (2) which are conceived in a way that is completely different from the way the objects of the natural sciences are investigated. One may ask what the natural sciences and psychology can have in common if the subject matter and the method of acquiring knowledge are different. And Vvedensky (1917, p. 3) says, after he has explained the meaning of the empirical character of psychology: "Therefore, contemporary psychology often characterizes itself as a natural science about mental phenomena or a natural history of mental phenomena." But this means that psychology wants to be a natural science about unnatural phenomena. It is connected with the natural sciences by a purely negative feature � the rejection of metaphysics � and not by a single positive one. James explained the matter brilliantly. Psychology is to be treated as a natural science � that was his main thesis. But no one did as much as James to prove that the mental is "not natural scientific." He explains that all the natural sciences accept some assumptions on faith � natural science proceeds from the materialistic assumption, in spite of the fact that further reflection leads to idealism. Psychology does the same � it accepts other assumptions. Consequently, it is similar to natural science only in that it uncritically accepts some assumptions; the assumptions themselves are contrary [see pp. 9 � 10 of Burkhardt, 1984]. According to Ribot, this tendency is the main trait of the psychology of the 19th century. Apart from this he mentions the attempts to give psychology its own principle and method (which it was denied by Comte) and to put it in the same relation to biology as biology occupies with respect to physics. But in fact the author acknowledges that what is called psychology consists of several categories of investigations which differ according to their goal and method. And when the authors, in spite of this, attempted to beget a system of psychology and included Pavlov and Bergson, they demonstrated that this task cannot be realized. And in his conclusion Dumas [1924, p. 1121] formulates that the unity of the 25 authors consisted in the rejection of ontological speculation. << _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
