Abstract
In Chap. 1, I show how classical psychological theorizing is ontologically based on the primacy of material and ideal things. The material things are located in Cartesian space, which is treated as the substrate for the relationship between material and geometrical bodies. Ideal things, on the other hand, are non-spatial and ephemeral. In cognitive psychology, this eventually has led to the question about how thought and mind are grounded and how concepts (theory, ideals) come to be related to the material world – the symbol grounding problem in the cognitive sciences. Interpreters of cultural psychology do not operate differently, so that the thing (object) becomes a Trojan horse by means of which Cartesian thinking enters and comes to dominate even those theories said to be about “(practical) activity.” This includes (rightly or wrongly) the theory that Vygotsky developed and also the one by his student A. N. Leont’ev, which today goes under the name of cultural-historical activity theory. As shown in Fig. 2.6 below, a mediational triangle –whether in Vygotsky’s original form or that build on the Helsinki interpretation of Leont’ev’s work – epitomizes the thinking in terms of objects; and the relations in those triangles also are things. Sign-things and tool-things come to stand between a person-thing and another person-thing or a material object-thing; or a tool stands between subject and object, a subject stands between division of labor and the object of activity. All these are things with external relation-things that are such so that other things can come to stand between and thereby mediate them.
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Notes
- 1.
A recent analysis shows that the idea of mediators that stand between people or between people and objects is extraordinarily expanded and becomes a central concept in the Helsinki approach to activity theory (Spinuzzi 2019).
- 2.
Whitehead uses the concepts life-thread and family of events. The notions line of flight [ligne de fuite] and bundle of lines [paquet de lignes] are used by Deleuze and Guattari (1980), which Ingold (2011), who also uses the term lifeline , takes up in his anthropological studies. The notion family of durations appears in Mead (1938).
- 3.
Readers familiar with the popularizations of quantum theory and especially with the discussion of (Erwin) Schrödinger’s cat know that the theory is contained in equations in which the cat is both alive and dead. It is only upon looking into the box that one or the other state is realized. Similarly, it is only by taking the position of one or the other participant in an exchange that one of the two values comes to be realized.
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Roth, WM. (2019). Events Before Anything. In: Transactional Psychology of Education. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04242-4_2
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