Thinking With Cultural Tools

1. Thinking With Cultural Tools HDP133 Lecture 14February 22, 2010

2. Reading Rogoff Ch 7 • Invokes LS Vygotsky’s “cultural-historical” theory that individual cognitive skills derive from engagement in sociocultural activities (practices). • Culture does not affect cognition uniformly, but depending upon domain of activity and the proceses that competences requires. • Implication: “stage of development” at least partly activity-specific. • Examples of plausible experiments: • Piagetian conservation experiments depend upon materials and procedures • Serpell getting kids to represent bikes in different media.

3. More Familiarity Effects • Greenfield and Childs use understanding of kin terms to show development of complex thought. • Does your brother have a brother? • Little kids deny it, see only from ego p.o.v • Older kids understand that their two brothers have a brother (still external to them) • Still older kids realize that they are their sibling’s sibling • Rate of this progression is not affected by whether or not they go to school, while conservation of liquid performance is, depending upon procedures.

4. Schooling Effects. • At same time, repeated finding is that schooling has big influences on wide range of cognitive performances as assessed in psych tests. Why? • More than superficial answer to this question requires that we back way up and investigate the general impact of culture and cultural tools on the way we think. We have to study not only the development of the child, but the history of the forms of activity that became “standard schooling. • What were the first tools for thinking, how/why did schools arise and what sort of special tools do they import into the process of enculturation?

5. Recall Basic Definitions of Culture • Kroeber and Kluckhon: …patterns … of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts…. Traditional ideas and their attached values.. Both products of action and conditions for future actions • Hutchins: an adaptive process that takes place inside and outside the minds of people. It is the process in which everyday cultural practices are enacted • Williams: a noun of process, the process of tending of something, basically crops or animals • ALL ASSUME TOOL USE IS CENTRAL TO HUMAN NATURE

6. Cultural Tools and Thinking • In what sense is culture a “tool”? • In what sense are tools cultural? • The position that the evidence of hominization, basic definitions of culture, and the thought experiment expressed in Geertz’s idea a human that grew up outside of culture would be a monstrosity lead to a clear conclusion: • Cultural tools (or culture as tools) are a biological necessity for human thought.

7. Basic Mediational Triangle Language/Culture World/ Persons Person

8. Mediation & Indirectnes/Tools • Language: is the words, their pronounciation, and the methods of combining them understood by a community. • Language is a form of communication that mediates human activity. • Communication: The process of placing things in common between people. These “things” are referred to as meanings. • This “cultural form of behavior” there from the start of homo sapiens sapiens

9. Directionality of Language as a Tool of Thought • Language, as a mediator/tool, is fundamentally bi-directional. • Language is both cause and effect. 1. It acts “outward” as an instrument/tool to influence others. 2. It acts “inward” as an instrument of self control and, at the same, as a consequence of social influence. • As all tools, language is both material and mental

10. Basic Properties of Tools Culture can be viewed as one giant ensemble of artifacts,an umbrella term for tools. Within that “tool kit,” possible to distinguish different kinds of tools Vygotsky: “ Psychological tools are artificial formations. By their nature they are social and not organic or individual devices. They are directed toward the mastery of mental processes, one’s own or someone else’s – just as technical tools are directed toward the mastery of processes of nature.” Norman. “Cognitive artifacts” those artificial devices that maintain, display, or operate upon information in order to serve a representational function and that affect human cognitive performance

11. Sapir-Whorf Idea of Language as Part of Cultural toolkit • Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached... We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir 1958 [1929], p. 69)

12. Whorf’s Formulation • We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees. (Whorf 1940, pp. 213-14; • Whether from Sapir or Whorf, or Modern Anthropology, the fact that language is a key part of the cultural toolkit for thinking is broadly accepted.

13. What if no number vocabulary? • Societies with at most a few count words, e.g.“one, two, many” (Pirahã –Brazil). • Absence of cultural practices where number is used. • display elementary arithmetic abilities for small arrays, their performance quickly deteriorates with larger numbers. • Pirahã children who learn Portuguese number words (and cultural practices) do not display the same limitations as their parents. • With change in cultural historical change in practices, change in manifested abilities.

14. Cultural Comparison: farmingfarming plus marketing (Ivory Coast) • Compare children in neighboring rural groups none of whom have been to school. • Children in both groups displayed knowledge of relative quantity, a skeletal principle. • children from the subsistence farming group displayed far weaker counting skills and calculation skills • In second study, if children attended school, no cultural differences

15. From X-cultural to historical: Memory and Money: Mediation as the Root of all Evil? The word money, comes from Moneta, a name by which the Roman queen of the gods, Juno, was known... Moneta was a translation of the Greek Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory and mother of the Muses, each of whom presided over one of the nine arts and sciences. Moneta in turn was clearly derived from the Latin verb moneo, whose first meaning is 'to remind, put in mind of, bring to one's recollection'... . There seems little doubt that, for the Romans at least, money in the form of coinage was an nstrument of collective memory that needed divine protection, like the arts.“ (Hart, p. 256-57)

16. Earliest Origins of Money/Memory

17. Inscribed (Memory/Money) Tokens

18. What Historical Circumstances Led to Use of Money/Memory? • Origins of agriculture • Primitive forms of accumulation • Need to engage in trade, but not carry all your goods on your back. • These led to the tokens. • They act as a record of exchanges, a memory for transactions

19. From Tokens to Writing • What led from tokens, to envelopes, to clay tablets? • New forms of technology (bronze and iron ages) • New kinds of economy (canals, large armies • New social forms, hierarchy, kings, and a middle class. • Now “memory could not longer work in the primitive fashion to tokens. • And now a new social institution arose, schools.

20. Packaged Memory/Money

21. Memory/Money Writing

22. Earliest Print: Money!

23. Schools in Ancient Middle East

24. What about Science? • Here the tool for thought was the finding of invariances. • Here science and religion are mixed– the shaman can “tell the future”

25. Tools for Finding Invariance: Stonehenge as Calandar

26. Tools for Finding Invariance:Stonehenge as Calandar

27. Re-representing The Calandar

28. The Sun Dagger

29. The Sun Dagger- Up Close

30. Evolution of Relation of Writing to Spoken Language • Writing itself undergoes changes AFTER the invention of cuneiform. • Pictograms • Ideograms • Syllabary • Alphabets

31. Evolution is not Linear • The line of change leading to the alphabet is only one thread in the tangled history of literacy. Not a simple question of “represent oral language or represent things/ideas.” • Even Summerian system mixed; some sounds. • Chinese ideographs also included codes for sound. • Under some conditions combinations of ideographs can be especially powerful

32. Crisis=Danger + Opportunity

33. Pictograms

34. Ideograms

35. Syllabary: Sound “chunks”

36. Alphabet- Phonemes • Phoneme- The smallest phonetic unit in a language that is capable of conveying a distinction in meaning, as the m of mat and the b of bat in English • Phonemes cannot be spoken in isolation. So the alphabet does not represent a communicable unit of language(!) • This contributes to difficulty of learning to read

37. Contrasting Properties of Different Ways of Representing Language

38. If Writing Represents Speech, What effects does it have? • First, keep in mind that it depends on what writing/reading are used for and how they enter organization of social life. That said…. • New ways of bridging time and space (+) • Lacks tonal cues of human voice and physical cues of human expressions and context of speech(-) • Can promote accumulation of knowledge (+) • Has often (or always) been associated with social inequality (-)

39. Plato’s View of the Writing as a Media Effect (The Pheadrus) • “this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. … you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

40. Does Writing Really Reduce Memory? • Plate, potato, axe, pants, bowl, onion, hoe, t-shirt, pot, banana, knife, scarf, cup, orange, file, shoes, pan, coconut, hammer, hat • Orange, hammer, plate, hat, banana, scarf, hoe, t-shirt, coconut, knife, pot, onion, hat, cup, potato, shoes, file, pants, orange, axe

41. What Role Does Literacy Have in How You Remember Such Lists?

42. Same Words, Different Context • A chief announces that he is ready to have his daughter marry the person who brings the best gifts for her. One man brings her food, one brings her clothing, one brings her utensils, one brings her tools. Which man should get the girl? What items did each suitor bring? • Items are perfectly clustered, but recall level is low because people recall on the items brought by the person who they think should get the girl (!).

43. Role of “Literacy” in How to Classify (Leaves in Liberia) Experimental Condition Tree-Vine Rule S-T* Rule S-T Random Liberians 1.1 7.3 9.0 American. 8.9 9.8 9.0 *S-T= Sumo- Togba, two common names

44. Logic: Syllogistic Reasoning • All the girls in Mexico City are beautiful • I saw a girl in Mexico City. • Was this girl beautiful or not? • How do people reason? Do they depend upon their personal knowledge or upon the logic in what is said (called “theoretic” knowledge)?

45. Reasoning From Premises Depending Upon Age and Education

46. Representing Language: Writing a la Vygotsky • Written speech"forces the child to act more intellectually." • “Even the most minimal level of development of written language requires a high degree of abstraction. Written speech lacks intonation and expression. It lacks all the aspects of speech that are reflected in sound. Written speech is speech in thought, in representations. It lacks the most basic feature of oral speech; it lacks material sound (p. 202).

47. Written speech continued • Written language requires children to do voluntarily, with effort, what they did unconsciously and effortlessly as younger children. The social world and mediation become central acquisition of written language because that world is the source of motives for writing that might potentially have the right mediational qualities to promote acquisition. [Written speech] is speech without an interlocutor... speech monologue. It is a conversation with a white sheet of paper, with an imagined or conceptualized interlocutor (p. 202-203).New form of mediation.

48. So, Does Literacy Change the Way We Think?- In General? • Research which builds on indigenous practices shows that under the right conditions (often difficult to tease out) indigenous people performed like, or out-performed the Euro-American counterparts. (See prior lectures) • At the same time, when the search for such indigenous tasks failed, and overall, people who had attended school performed like Euro-Americans even when task not modified • Is it literacy, or is it education? What makes the difference?

49. Literacy Without Schooling • Vai Writing System Learned Informally • Used for restricted set of purposes • The “effects” of literacy found to depend upon the functions. Each must be tested for in appropriate way • When test of effect tied closely to structure of practice/function, effects found • Example: Letter writing and reading

50. Literacy Effects: Take Home Lessons • “Writing” involves some form of inscription. In modern world, inscription of oral language. • Because of material form, literacy involves potential reorganization of human activity in time and space. • In so far as literacy is internalized (learned to point of automaticity) we may mediate our thinking through literate forms, not oral forms. • However, extent to which literacy changes how thought is mediated depends upon nature and range of functions it fulfills for us.