Date: Fri, 19 Jan 2001 19:42:31 -0600 To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com From: Maureen Anderson <maureen at uchicago.edu>
Hey Chuck,
>God Maureen, this was eons ago.
Then this one's only decades late. (Sorry -- my seven-year-old computer finally died this week. But after days of consumer angst I'm now typing, in fetishistic awe, on a sleek new G3 Powerbook.)
>But no, I think I either was not clear enough and you mis-understood.
Yes I was misunderstanding you. Your complaint included something (forget exactly) about approaching materiality as a mere content rather than a dialectical force, and I read too much into your use of dialectic. You're apparently less interested in how organisms and their physical milieux interact than in exploring the independent role of physical reality. ("But it is space, the external form of physical reality independent of any mental construct that is the ground of these symmetries," etc.)
>
>>From a long ago reading of Piaget, I remember he developed the idea
>that cognition was developmental and proceeded through stages. These
>stages could be demonstrated through a series of tests to show that
>children understood and could manipulate certain mathematical
>concepts. These concepts did not proceed from simple to complex, but
>rather from very abstract toward the very concrete,
>
>Well, regardless of whether this is accepted or not, it gave me the
>idea that Piaget had missed something fundamental.
>
>He was fascinated by Group Theory and was convinced that children
>formed their spatial reasoning through a series of group concepts, or
>symmetries of space. Piaget's mistake was to believe that these
>concepts were somehow innate to the internal dynamics of mental
>development, and something like Chomsky believed these to be innately
>given to cognition. Piaget's mistake is assume the symmetries were an
>aspect of mind and perception.
Yes Piaget's stuff has interesting tensions. He did recognize something afoot that was more complex than just innate dynamics of mental development. Because he saw that mental development and "significance" were themselves formed of the basis of embodied history, concrete physical activity and so forth. His question was How do children start from nothing but sensorimotor intelligence (where they have nothing but their activity, only recognizing other objects in terms of their own activity), and end up with a conception of themselves as an object among other objects, subject among other subjects? He was clear it somehow involved cognitive structures emerging from repeated patterns, or "circular reactions," of the sensorimotor activity.
So on the one hand, children enact their world by their own activity. But otoh Piaget was also a hardcore objectivist as well, so he also assumed a pregiven logical endpoint for that enactment. (Hmmm maybe parallels tensions within the Marxian tradition: ot1h, "people create their own, concrete history, though not as they expect," but otoh, the persistent shadow of Hegelian telos...)
There are some cognitive scientists and even more biologists who take that idea of circular enactment further than Piaget wanted to venture. Where the very notion of what an ("outside") environment is is inseparable from what organisms are and do. It has to do with notions of structural coupling, or as Lewontin puts it in one of his titles, "the organism as both subject and object of evolution."
So in that sense, the stuff Leo was talking about on a sociocultural level -- people conceive of and enact nature in different ways in different times and places -- parallels a more general process that applies to all organisms and milieux.
It's an understanding of evolution that modifies classical neo-Darwinism in key ways -- especially its ideas of natural selection -- and tries to see beyond the eternal nature/nurture, inherited/acquired, nature/nurture schtick.
> That
>plants don't need to perform all this fancy genetic and chemical work,
>because the regularity of the environment already provides the
>structure, within which the plant lives. The plant doesn't have to do
>all the work (have organs of perception, genes to react, etc), because
>the work is already done.
But that regular environment is itself product of particular histories of interaction.
Maybe the well-known case of bees and their ability to see ultraviolet reflection is emblematic of the broader enactivist process: rather than chicken-egg answers to which came first, the physical world (in this case, ultraviolet reflectance of certain plants) or the bee's "internal" representation of it (which their ultraviolet-sensitive vision allows them to register), the two in fact co-evolved. The ultraviolet reflectance patterns of flowers, and the sensorimotor capacities of bees came into being in relation to the other, through a history of structural coupling.
More generally, regular "laws of nature" operate in a framework created by our activity. We don't see ultraviolet reflections from flowers, but bees do. Bats sense things at night that a nighthawk can't, and so on.
> What I was alluding to is the idea that we need to
>find either a genetic or evolutionary explanation for ever aspect of a
>biological system in order to be satisfied that we have completely
>characterized that system. What I suspect, is that we will be forever
>frustrated with this approach, because it leaves out the rest of the
>world and its history, that is the concrete or material context within
>which genetics and evolution exists.
Except within the most general of material constraints, this concrete material history sounds less like a matter of a priori givens than about broadly co-evolutionary histories. Maybe your beef's more with neo-Darwinian ideas of evolution and genetic selection. (Just a guess.)
>PS. I realize this hardly clears things up.
Likewise.
Maureen