PhiloNotebook

Biocultural Niche

Part One: The Social Origins of Language

summary

The Social Origins of Language (extended excerpts)

summary

In many cases it is behavioural change that comes first, subsequently determing genetic change.

language’s evolutionary emergence would have required profound social and political change, [and] more trusting, stable relationships

. . . in the case of many nonhuman primates, dominance asserted through violence or threat is the internal principle of social organization . . .

. . . primate-style dominance is periodically overthrown and then restored, only to be overthrown and restored again and again

Language consitutes a ‘biocultural niche’, embedded within the entire human semiosphere—everything in human culture, material and non-material, that is symbolic in nature.

. . . the cultural technologies of reading and writing seem to have extended human memory, enabled abstract chains of reasoning, and guided new ways of scanning visual items, thus making human[s] even more cognitively plastic.

Language . . . is a quasi-artefactual biocultural niche, and the capacity to acquire and use it involves the evolution and replication of a phenogenotypic biocultural complex.

intersubjectivity and shared intentionality . . . Whiten and Erdal (2012) emphasize the socio-cognitive complex of cooperation, egalitarianism, and mindreading alongside language and cultural transmission in the evolution of humans as successful hunter-gatherers.

All languages are socially constructed technologies for the instruction of imagination, but the actual dynamics of exploration and stabilization in each and every language could be as variable as their communities, their histories, their particular communicative needs, their collective capacities, and the private experiential worlds of their speakers.

‘conventional knowledge sits in a kind of “middle ground” between objective and subjective knowledge about the world . . . it is neither strictly objective, nor subjective—it is ‘intersubjective’

Only given social forces of counter-dominance—where individuals with allies can resist being dominated—and reverse-dominance—where the collective dominates any would-be dominant individual—is language likely to emerge.

brief excerpts

Daniel Dor and Eva Jablonka, “Why we need to move from gene-culture co-evolution to culturally driven co-evolution"

. . . language facilitates social interaction in four ways, all of which are crucial for collaborative exploration: “Language dramatically extends the possibility-space for interaction, facilitates the profiling and navigation of joint attentional scenes, enables the sharing of situation models and action plans, and mediates the cultural shaping of interactive minds. . . . 26

Chris Sinha, "Niche construction and semiosis: biocultural and social dynamics"

It is increasingly recognized, in theories of distributed cognition, that human cognitive processes extend ‘beyond the skin’, involving intersubjectively shared mental states and cultural-cognitive technologies. This presents a conceptual problem not only for psychology, with its traditional individualist assumptions, but also for biology, which assumes by default that the organism as a behavioral and morphological individual is identical to the organism as bearer of genetic material. 44-5

Daniel Dor, "The instruction of imagination: language and its evolution as a communication technology"

Current discourse on human experiencing tends to ignore the privacy of experience for a very good theoretical reason: much of the discourse has emerged as a counter-reaction to the solipsistic view of human experiences based on Cartesian philosophy, and has thus systematically highlighted the intersubjective nature of human experiencing—the primacy of the interpersonal over the intrapersonal. p. 108

In order to understand language, then, I suggest that we have to abandon both the Kantian dictum, the foundational presupposition of the cognitive sciences, that all human experiences comply with a universal interpretive scheme, and the neo-Kantian conviction, the foundational presupposition of most of the social sciences, that the members of every culture and sub-culture experience the world in the same ways. We have to begin with the acknowledgement that each human individual lives in a private, experienctial world which is different from that of the others, and is inaccessible to them. p. 109

Emily Wyman, "Language and Collective Fiction"

However, a curious type of speech act know as ‘performative’ neither describes nor brings about change in the world, but creates altogether new institutional states of affairs, or ‘institutional facts’, within it. (171)

As succinctly put by Kalish and Sabbagh, ‘conventional knowledge sits in a kind of “middle ground” between objective and subjective knowledge about the world . . . it is neither strictly objective, nor subjective—it is ‘intersubjective’. (173)

. . . the categories that humans recruit in making sense of the world are, in general, not restricted to the traditional ontological dichotomy of objective vs. subjective. They also include categories of fact that may be termed ‘ontologially intersubjective’, in that they exist in virtue of group consensus. Indeed, it may be precisely because such facts elude objective and subjective categorization that we recognize their intersubjective foundations, and with no reduction in their normative force. As Plotkin incisively observes, it is simply that for many human affairs, ‘the law is grounded in the group’. (181)

More generally, that humans use language and symbolic action to coordinate their private imaginings into shared, public fictions that have normative force is profoundly revealing with regard to our social evolution. In addition to sophisticated behavioural coordination strategies (shared with many other species of the animal kingdom) humans have, in addition, evolved modes of coordinating cognitively. The ability to jointly imagine and subscribe to a set of fictional statuses that we subsequently use to guide our interactions in normative terms is qualitatelvely different from anything observed outside our own species. Indeed, the whole framework of collective intentionality, in which we share attention to aspects of the environment, share goals and plans for collaborating together, and subscribe to shared fictions that then further govern our interactions, indicates an evolutionary environment in which the threats of competition and social exploitation became outweighted by the necessities of cooperation and trust. (183)

It was until about 1750 . . .

from Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantiative Information, 2nd edition (Graphics Press, 2001)

The use of abstract, non-representational pictures to show numbers is a surprisingly recent invention, perhaps because of the divesity of skills required--the visual-artistic, empirical-statistical, and mathematical. It was not until 1750-1800 that statistical graphics--length and area to show quantity, time-series, scatterplots, and multivariate displays--were invented, long after such triumphs of mathematical ingenuity as logarithms, Cartesian coordinates, the calculus, and the basics of probability theory. . . .

Modern data graphics can do much more than simply substitute for small statisstical tables. At their best, graphics are instruments for reosoning about quantitative information. Often the most effective way to describe, explore, and summarize a set of numbers--even a very large set--is to look at pictures of those numbers.

Pieter Claesz, Still-life with Candle Date: 1627

extended excerpts

1627/1750 1936/2014

Ken Richardson, Genes, Brains, and Human Potential: the Science and Ideology of Intelligence (Columbia, 2917)

Adelheid von Saldern, The Challenge of Modernity: German Social and Cultural Studies, 1890-1960 (U. of Michigan, 2022)

Kirsty E Graham 1,*, Catherine Hobaiter 1,* Editor: Frans B M de Waal2,"Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures" PLoS Biol. 2023 Jan 24

Part Two: Tables

Analyzing Power Relations: Five Frameworks

Deleuze & Guattari:	Three regimes (primitive, despotic, capitalist)
Vincent/McMahon:	Left vs. Right: (topologies of the two-party system)
Piaget/Vygotsky/Luria:	Cognitive modalities (topologies of the two-party system)
Michael Mann:	Four networks of power
P. Friedlander:	Five genetic ontologies (topologies of the two-party system)

Table 7.1 from A mind so Rare (p. 260)

Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture

Each stage continues to occupy its cultural niche today, so that fully modern societies have

all four stages simultaneously present.

Stage	Species/Period	Novel Forms	Manifest Change	Governance
EPISODIC	Primate	Episodic event perceptions	Self-awareness and event sensitivity	Episodic and reactive
MIMETIC (first transition)	Early homids, peaking in H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya	Action metaphor	Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation	Mimetic style and archetypes
MYTHIC (second transition)	Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present	Language, symbolic representation	Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought	Mythic framework of governance
THEORETIC (third transition)	Modern culture	External symbolic universe	Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage	Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention

from Merlin Donald, "The mind considered from a historical perspective: human cognitive phylogenesis and the possibility of continuing cognitive evolution." In D. Johnson & C. Ermeling (Eds.) The Future of the Cognitive Revolution (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 360-61

Mimetic representations are evident in human children before they acquire language competence. . . . They continue to be important in adults, taking the form of highly variable social customs, athletic skills, and group expressive patterns (such as mass demonstrations of aggression or rejection).

Kirsty E Graham 1,*, Catherine Hobaiter 1,* Editor: Frans B M de Waal2, "Towards a great ape dictionary: Inexperienced humans understand common nonhuman ape gestures" PLoS Biol. 2023 Jan 24

Table 0. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
(Five Principles of the Production of Practices)

Genetic Ontology	Sources (Full page here)
Primate Dominance and Deference	SOOL, Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . .
Paleolithic Dynamic Egalitarianism	SOOL, Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . .
Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense Despotic regime; Racism; Nationalism; Fascism	Nietzsche, Freud, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Eley, Stone, Knox . . .
Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance) Progressive Narcisism; Individuation; Progressivism, Socialism, Communism the UAW and the Keynesian Elite	Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Berman, Alcorn . . .
Nihilism & the Last Man Regressive Narcissism and the Culture of Consumption; Repressive Desublimation; Disindividuation; Neoliberalism	Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . .

genetic ontology	representative texts
Primate (Patrimonialism)	Allan Mazur, Biosociology of Dominance and Deference (Rowman & Littlefield, 2005); Christopher Boesch, Wild Cultures: A Comparison Between Chimpanzee and Human Cultures (Cambridge University Press, 2012); The Evolution of Primate Societies, John C. Mitani, Josep Call, Peter M. Kappeler, Ryne A. Palombit, and Joan Silk, eds. (University of Chicago Press, 2012); "Collective Violence: Comparison Between Youths and Chimpanzees," by Richard W. Wrangham (Department of Antroropology, Peabody Museum, Harvard University) and Michael L. Wilson (Department of Ecology and Behavior, University of Minnesota, and Gombe Stream Research Centre, the Jane Goodall Institute, Tanzania) in Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1036: 233–256 (2004); Franz de Waal, Chimpanzee Politics Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, Patrimonial Power in the Modern World (Sage, 2011); Getty, Practicing Stalinism ()
Paleolithic	Andrew Whiten and David Erdal, "The human socio-cognitive niche and its evolutionary origins," Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B (2012) 367, 2119–2129; Philip G. Chase, The Emergence of Culture. The Evolution of a Uniquely Human Way of Life (Springer, 2006); Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus, The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (Harvard, 2012)
Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense (despotic regime) Fascism	Nietzsche, Spinoza, Freud, Klein. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: the Making of Modern America, 1877-1920 (2009); Joseph E. Lowndes, From the New Deal to the New Right : race and the southern origins of modern conservatism (2008), Carter, Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (2004); Aristotle Kallis, Genocide and Fascism: the Eliminationist Drive in Fascist Europe (Routledge, 2009); Simon Clarke, Social Theory, Psychoanalysis and Racism (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) Julia Adams and Mounira M. Charrad, Patrimonial Power in the Modern World (Sage, 2011) FOX News
Progressive Narcissism; Bildung; the Will to Power	Nietzsche, Hegel, Vygotsky. Michael Eldridge, "The German Bildung Tradition"; Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Narcissism and the Literary Libido: Rhetoric, Text, and Subjectivity (New York University Press, 1994); Franco Moretti, The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture (Verso, 2000); Stephen Rumph, Mozart and Enlightenment Semiotics (University of California Press, 2012); Harold Mah, Enlightenment Phantasies: Cultural Identity in France and Germany, 1750-1914; S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2008); Steve Fraser, Labor Will Rule; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings; Zelnick, Dewey, Lenin, Vygotsky, Bronfenbrenner; Journey toward justice : Juliette Hampton Morgan and the Montgomery bus boycott; Novels. Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road; Jhumpa Lahiri, The Lowland (2013) UAW Interviews. Saul Wellman; Joe Adams; Edmund Kord; Norman Bully; Larry Jones; Cliff Williams; Ziggy Mize; Murray Body exec comm. minutes
Nihilism; Regressive Narcissism and the culture of consumption; repressive desublimation; the last man	Nietzsche. Steve Hal, Simon Winlow and Craig Ancrum, Criminal Identities and Consumer Culture: crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism (Willan Publishing, 2008); Bülent Diken, Nihilism (Routledge, 2009); Bernard Reginster, The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism (Harvard, 2006); Robin Usher, Ian Bryant and Rennie Johnston, Adult Education and the Postmodern Challenge (Routledge, 1997); Republic of Outsiders: the power of amateurs, dreamers, and rebels; The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food NYT Eli Zaretsky, Secrets of the Soul: a Social and cultural history of psychoanalysis (Vintage, 2004); Alain Ehrenberg, The Wariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010) Novels. Michel Houellebecq: The Map and the Territory (2010), The Possibility of an Island (2005), The Elementary Particles (1998), and Platform (2001); Richard Powers, Generosity: an Enhancement (2009); Choire Sicha, Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City (2013); Vernon God Little CNN & MSNBC; Facebook, Twitter . . .

Part Three: Mind

Thinking in the Twenty-first Century (Transcendental Empiricism)

from Imanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787)

Thoughts without intuitions are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.

from Eckart Förster, The Twenty-Five Years of Philosophy: a Systematic Reconstruction (Harvard, 2012)

. . . concepts have their basis in functions, by which Kant understands “the unity of the act of bringing various representations under one common representaton.” (A68). A concept is a rule for combining certain representations (and thus also a principle for excluding certain others). Thus the represesntations ’white’, ‘grainy’, ‘saline’ are combined and ordered in the concept ‘salt, while the representations ‘colorless’, ‘liquid’, ‘tasteless’ (say) are not. In this way a concept is a rule allowing me to unite certain representations and to bring them under a higher representation, i.e. the concept. (pp. 22-3)

Cognition does not consist merely in the collecting of phenomena; rather we strive to forge conceptual links between them and to grasp the laws of nature that are valid for specific classes of objects as cases of yet more general laws, whereby we are guided by the ideal of a unified explanation of nature. (p. 38)

To make concepts out of representations one must be able to compare, to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essential and universal conditions for the generation of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the branches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree. (p. 250)

from Levi R. Bryant, Difference and Givenness: Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Immanence (Northwestern University Press, 2008)

. . . . so long as philosophy assumes that thought has a natural affinity with the true . . . a specific form of objectivity (natural common sense), and bases itself on the model of recognition, thought cannot help but become unconsciously trapped in its own implicit presuppositions which are culturally, historically, and socially contingent. . . . Deleuze thus begins with a critique of the transcendental subject as a structure consisting of invariant categories. (17)

from Philip G. Chase, The Emergence of Culture. The Evolution of a Uniquely Human Way of Life (Springer, 2006)* pp. 1-2

Human behavior and ape behavior, like that of all mammals, is guided in part by ideas, concepts, beliefs, etc. that are learned in a social context from other individuals of the same species. Among humans, however, some of these are not just learned socially but are also created socially, through the interactions of multiple individuals. . . . Culture cannot be understood at the level of the individual alone. Knowing the motivations and mental constructs of the individuals invlved may be necessary to understand cultural creations or cultural changes, but it is not sufficient. It is also necessary to analyze the interactions of those involved. In this sense, human culture is an emergent phenomenon in a way that nonhuman "culture" is not. As Mihata (1997:36) put it,

what we describe most often as culture is an emergent pattern existing on a separate level of organization and abstraction from the individuals, organizations, beliefs, practices or cultural objects that constitute it. Culture emerges from the simultaneous interaction of subunits creating meaning (individuals, organizations, etc.)

This emergent property of human culture has important implications. It makes the nature of human social life different in fundamental ways from that of all other species (in spite of the continuities that also exist). It makes it possible for groups of humans to coordinate their behavior in ways that are impossible for nonhumans. It changes the relationship of the individual to the social group. Because culture provides motivations for the behavior of the individual, it gives the group a means of controlling the individual that is absent among other primates. Among all living humans, culture provides a (uniquely human) mental or intellectual context for almost everything the individual thinks or does.

from from Merlin Donald, A Mind So Rare: the Evolution of Human Consciousness (W.W. Norton, 2001), pp. 301-2

. . . modern culture contains within it a trace of each of our previous stages of cognitive evolution. It still rests on the same old primate brain capacity for episodic or event knowledge. But it has three additional, uniquely human layers: a mimetic layer, an oral-linguistic layer, and an external-symbolic layer. The minds of individuals reflect these three ways of representing reality. 262

Something about our mentality changed in the past few millenia, something that made us able to construct such exotic things as symphonies, philosophies, oil refineries, nuclear weapons, and robots. Do such achievements have implications for theories of consciousness? Many would deny that they do. They would claim that the parameters of mind were surely fixed long ago, when we emerged as a species, and that culture can add nothing to an equation written deeply into the human genome.

But that common belief does not stand up to scrutiny. The human mind has been drastically changed by culture. In modern culture, enculturation has become an even more formative influence on mental development than it was in the past. This may be a direct reflection of brain plasticity, rather than genetic change, but that does not in any way diminish the importance of the change from a purely cognitive standpoint. The human mind is so plastic in the way it carries out its cognitive business, individually and in groups, that the core configuration of skills that defines a mind actually varies significantly as a function of different kinds of culture. This is especially true of the most conscious domains of mind, such as those involved in formal thinking and representation.

Let me be very clear about what I mean here. I am not speaking of trivial cultural changes, such as variations in custom or language use. These are by far the most common and have no proven cognitive impact. The most important of these is literacy. Literacy skills change the functional organization of the brain and deeply influence how individuals and communities of literate individuals perform cognitive work. Mass literacy has triggered two kinds of major cogitive reorganizations, one in individuals and the other in groups.

To become fully literate, the individual must acquire a host of neural demons that are completely absent from anyone who lacks literacy training. This involves massive restructuring. There is no equivalent in the preliterate mind to the circuits that hold the complex neural components of a reading vocabulary or the elaborate procedural habits of formal thinking. These are unnatural. They have to be hammered in by decades of intensive schooling, which changes the functional uses of certain brain circuits and rewire the functional architecture of thought. This process can be very extensive. Consider the impact of twenty or more years of schooling on the brain of someone who has acquired full symbolic literacy in several different technical, mathematical, scientific, and musical fields. These skills encumber neural resources on a vast scale and change how the person's mind carries out its work.

Table 7.1 from A mind so Rare (p. 260)

Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture

Each stage continues to occupy its cultural niche today, so that fully modern societies have

all four stages simultaneously present.

Stage	Species/Period	Novel Forms	Manifest Change	Governance
EPISODIC	Primate	Episodic event perceptions	Self-awareness and event sensitivity	Episodic and reactive
MIMETIC (first transition)	Early homids, peaking in H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya	Action metaphor	Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation	Mimetic style and archetypes
MYTHIC (second transition)	Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present	Language, symbolic representation	Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought	Mythic framework of governance
THEORETIC (third transition)	Modern culture	External symbolic universe	Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage	Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention

from Jerome Kagan, On Being Human: Why Mind Matters (Yale, 2016)

Humans are the only species that operates in two realities. The one we share with animals consists of representations of the salient features of objects, movements, places, smells, sound, tastes, and feelings. Taste is salient for humans; flying for birds. These representations, which I call schemata, are the foundations of the images that humans generate when they try to recreate an event in the mind.

The second reality, unique to humans, consists of words, only some of which describe the reality that schemata represent. . . .

Human languages contain three broad categories. One set of words is uses to evaluate a person, object, event, intention or feeling as good, pleasant or appropriate, as opposed to bad, unpleasant, or inappropriate. The second category consists of names for observable objects, events, or their physical features. Most of these words are linked to a schema. . . .

The third category contains names for abstract ideas, such as knowledge, truth, resiliency, justice, number, and time, that do not possess a particular set of physical features. pp. 1-3

from Jerome Kagan, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development (Basic Books, 2013)

A number of abstract psychological concepts remain popular because they satisfy the need for consistency among the investigator's semantic networks. The networks for the concepts of positive emotion and negative emotion are an example . . . . The problems trailing attempts to preserve semantic consistency are clearest for concepts related to the antonyms good and bad. Many popular terms for human qualities belong to semantic networks that have good and bad as nodes. p. 271

from T. Wilson Hayes, "The Peaceful Apocalypse: Familism and Literacy in Sixteenth-Century England." The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 131-143 (13 pages)

. . . they believed that by reading they could learn how to save their own souls. p. 132

transformation of consciousness with the spread of alphabet literacy; Ong ref; p. 137

an internal transformation epitomized by the acquisition of literacy p. 141

In the sixteenth century literacy became a sign of independence. Unlike inherited wealth or class, the acquisition of literacy showed that one had the self-discipline to master an intellectual skill and enabled one to absorb "new conceptions of the behavior appropirate for self-possessing individuals." p. 142

Like the Lollards before them, Familists did not advocate separation from the dominant church and, as Champlin Burrage and David Loades have pointed out, should not be referred to as a sect at all. By encouraging the apocalyptic transformation of consciousness that literacy provokes, Familists showed ordinary people how they might transform both themselves and the world around them. This was a key factor in the advancement of popular literacy and, as a result, of popular political awareness. 143

from S.A. Smith, Revolution and the People in Russia and China: A Comparative History (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2008)

We have seen that for 'conscous' workers in Russia and, to a lesser extent, in China, reading was an activity that was central to self-fashioning, constitutive of what it meant to be a cultured and autonomous individual. By contrast, the relation of the newly literate and semi-literate readers of the lower urban classes to new forms of commercially produced mass literature, produced with an eye to entertainment rather than education, was far less earnest. . . . p. 100

Indeed, without denying the real potental for tension between individual autonomy and class-based collectivism, we may conclude that genuine forms of collectivism and cooperative action are possible only where class solidarity is grounded in autonomous individuals capable of demanding the recognition due to them as thinking, feeling persons. Without that, new forms of group coercion based on weak individuality are likely to be the result . . . 110

from Philip Roth unbound: interview transcript (Daily Beast, October 30, 2009)

Tina Brown: You said in an interview that you don’t think novels are going to be read 25 years from now. Were you being provocative or do you believe that to be true?

Philip Roth: I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people—maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range. . . . To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. . . I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities.

Alcorn and Wellman interview

x
x
x
x

jouissance (see also Alcorn)

from Lionel Bailly, Lacan: a Beginner’s Guide (Oneworld, 2009)

The human child needs no training, or even teaching: human beings acquire language by simply 'crossing the bar' in the relationship between signifier and signified; and once the bar is crossed, the human psyche is in the entrance hall of the Symbolic realm, with all its vast possibilities. (46)

The associations between signifiers and their high mobility allow for the immeasurable complexity of human psychological functioning, both conscious and unconscious. (47)

The signified concepts are already present in the child’s mind, and it is the exercise of these concepts, via the vocalization, that produces pleasure in the game. In this case, jouissance is derived from the functioning of the psychological apparatus . . . . This process of symbolization is the means by which drives may be enjoyed in a sublimated form: ‘Sublimation is nonetheless satisfaction of the drives, without repression.’ [Sahlins] (120)

There is just as much, if not greater jouissance in the functioning of the mind than in the functioning of any other bodily part. The ability to cross the bar of metaphor, to operate in the symbolic realm—to conceptualize, to analyze, and to rationalise—are all libidinal functions, which entail enjoyment of the mere functioning of the intellect. (124)

ALCORN

from Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University, 2007)

Discourse is not a synonym for language. Discourse does not refer to lingusitic or signifying systems, grammars, speech acts, or conversations. To think of discourse as mere spoken or written words forming descriptive statements is to enact the mistake of representationalist thinking. Discourse is not what is said; it is that which constrains and enables that which can be said. Discursive practices define what counts as meaningful statements. Statements are not the mere utterances of the originating consciousness of a unified subject; rather, statements and subjects emerge from a field of possibilities. This field of possibilities is not static or singular but rather is a dynamic and contingent multiplicity. 146-7

. . . the primary ontological units are not 'things' but phenomena--dynamic topological / reconfigurings / entanglements / relationalities / (re)articulations of the world. And the primary semantic units are not 'words' but material-discursive practices through which (ontic and semantic) boundaries are constituted. This dynamic is agency.

from Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005), p. 75

In Die fröliche Wissenschaft (1882) Nietzsche proposes that language enables us to “produce” things, to shape our conception of reality: “This has given me the greatest trouble and still does: to realize that what things are called is incomparably more important than what they are . . . it is sufficient to create new names and estimations and probabilities in order to create, in the long run, new ‘things’” (GS 58).

For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard as reality, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality through the development of general terms and concepts, which let us realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts and construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.

from F. Nietzsche, On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense (1873)

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

from Christian J. Emden, Nietzsche on Language, Consciousness, and the Body (University of Illinois Press, 2005)

For Nietzsche, language lets us grasp, order, and judge what we regard as reality, and it also gives us the means to reflect on this reality through the development of general terms and concepts, which let us realize similarities and relations among things and see contexts and construct coherent systems of belief about this reality. Our experience and knowledge of reality . . . is therefore embedded in a network of concepts delineating what we perceive as our environment.

from David R. Olsen, "History of Writing, History of Rationality," in Eurasia at the Dawn of History (Cambridge, 2016)

Quotes Ong: "Without writing, the literate mind would not and could not think as it does. . . . More than any other single invention, writing has transformed human consciousness." (48)

from David R. Olsen, The Mind on Paper: Reading, Consciousness, and Rationality (Cambridge, 2016)

to understand the cognitive implications of literacy it is also necessary to see writing not only as a tool for solving problems but rather as a generalized means or medium for repesentation and communication that give rise to those unique forms of human competence we in modern society define as intelligence and rationality.

from "Nietzsche's Antisociology: Subjectified Culture and the End of History", Robert J. Antonio. American Journal of Sociology Vol. 101, No. 1 (July, 1995)

In Nietzsche's view, language produces "a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. . . . Man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates. . . . He really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreme knowledge of things" (Nietzsche 1986[BGE], p. 16).

Treating words as mirrors of reality provides a comforting illusion of "certainty." This tendency obscures the social bases of language, reifies social conventions, and weakens capacities to imagine and create alternative conditions. Linguistic "abbreviations" cement obligatory social ties where "mutual agreement" about "feelings" is absent and the tendency to "let go" must be stemmed. Nietzsche held that language serves social selection of the herd, keeping experiences, desires, impulses, and actions of weak persons within boundaries, inscribing strong individuals as collective enemies, and redirecting ressentiment into regimentation. Accordingly, cultural rationalization makes this process of liquidating particularity more effective and universal (Nietzsche 1966 [BGE], pp. 100-102, 216-17; 1968b [WP], pp. 357-58, 380).

Since Nietzsche was himself a master writer, his polemics about words per se are hyperbolic." The real target is Socratic culture's exceptionally abstract languages, rampant conceptual reifications, and impoverished aesthetic sensibilities. Nietzsche believed that the obsession with rational representation makes the body an inert target of disciplinary control. Adoration of concepts, theory, and reason makes the abstract signifier the ultimate object of knowledge. Purely formal concepts are treated as the "highest," "real," and "true" things, while sense experience is relegated to the degraded status of "appearance." Platonic ideas, Christian soul, Kantian things-in-themselves, and Newtonian atoms and time are all foundational reifications that "dehistoricize" the corporeal world and erect illusions of firm "grounds" for those who cannot face life without God and tradition or bear the weight of its conflictive choices and its "great dice game" (Nietzsche 1974 [GS], pp. 287-90; 1968b [WP], p. 549; 1968b, pp. 35-37).

Destroying Socratic culture's "objective" foundations (i.e., God and Truth), the latest phase of cultural rationalization greatly amplifies feelings of uncertainty. The consequent desperate searching and clinging produces frenetic reification; fanatical new prejudices, religions, and politics appear alongside the most sterile intellectual formalisms. Mass culture's hastily formulated languages blur all difference and ambiguity (e.g., parties "transform their principles into great alfresco stupidities"). The proliferation of abstract signifiers, arising from diverse locations and detached from any sense of stable referents, contribute to increasingly mechanical, diffuse, and mindless regimentation. In this fashion, Nietzsche severed the links that modern theorists saw between rational- ization and enhanced communication, social integration, and legitimate authority (Nietzsche 1983 [Untimely], p. 215; 1986 [Human, All Too Human], pp. 161-62; 1966, pp. 216-17; 1968b, pp. 357-58, 380-81)

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from Juan Carlos Gomez, Apes, Monkees, Children and the Growth of Mind (Harvard University Press, 2004)

But is there any evidence that nonhuman primates may experience something akin to a cultural shaping of their minds in the way Vygotsky implied for human children? . . . . More recently, Tomasello (1999) has emphasized the "socialization of attention" and cognition in general as the explanation for higher achievements (by human standards) of human-reared apes. Although the two approaches emphasize very different factors, in fact from a Vygotskian perspective they are complimentary. Vygotsky's view was that adult mediation was optimally achieved through the use of signs and symbols, especially speech and language. In his view, higher cognitive processes--the processes that differentiate humans from other apes--could only be created through this sociocultural mediation. The possibility that, at a reduced scale, the mind of an ape can be upgraded by giving him, on the one hand, a regime of socally controlled attention and interactive experiences with humans, and on the other, a new, more explicit form of representing the world, would confer dramatic support to the Vygotskian notion that higher cognition can be created through cultural processes of develoment that change the nature of cognitive ontogeny. (pp. 262-3)

from Marshall Sahlins, Hierarchy, Equality, and the Sublimation of Anarchy: The Western Illusion of human nature. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, delivered at The University of Michigan, November 4, 2005

Human culture, it needs be considered, is much older than human nature: culture has been in existence for two million years or more, ten or fifteen times longer than the modern human species, homo sapiens. Respectable biological opinion has come around to seeing the human brain as a social organ, evolving in the Pleistocene under the “pressure” of maintaining a relatively extended, complex, and solidary set of social relationships. This is to say that culture, which is the condition of the possibility of this successful social organization, thereby conditioned the possibilities of the human organism, body and soul. The “pressure” was to become a cultural animal, or, more precisely, to culturalize our animality. For two million years, we have evolved biologically under cultural selection. Not that we are or were “blank slates,” lacking any inherent biological imperatives, only that what was uniquely selected for in the genus homo was the ability to realize these imperatives in the untold different ways that archaeology, history, and anthropology have demonstrated. Biology became a determined determinant, inasmuch as its necessities were mediated and organized symbolically.

What is most pertinent to the relations between physis and nomos is not (for example) that all cultures have sex but that all sex has culture. sexual drives are variously expressed and repressed according to local determinations of appropriate partners, occasions, times, places, and bodily practices. We sublimate our generic sexuality in all kinds of ways—including its transcendence in favor of the higher values of celibacy, which also proves that in symbolic regimes there are more compelling ways of achieving immortality than the inscrutable mystique of the “selfish gene.”

As it is for sex, so for other inherent needs, drives, or dispositions: nutritional, aggressive, egoistic, sociable, compassionate—whatever they are, they come under symbolic definition and thus cultural order. In the occurrence, aggression or domination may take the behavioral form of, say, the new Yorker’s response to “Have a nice day”—“don’t tell me what to do!” We war on the playing fields of Eton, give battle with swear words and insults, dominate with gifts that cannot be reciprocated, or write scathing book reviews of academic adversaries. Eskimos say gifts make slaves, as whips make dogs. But to think that, or to think our proverbial opposite, that gifts make friends—a saying that like the Eskimos’ goes against the grain of the prevailing economy—requires that we are born with “watery souls,” waiting to manifest our humanity for better or worse in the meaningful experiences of a particular way of life.

Part Three: Education and Development

Artificial Intelligence and Education

Ceci (at the right) and Immordino and Damasio (below) enable a decisive critique of so-called artifical intellgience when applied to education. The Nihilism complex of which the iphone/internet is an element (Marx, 1844) . . .

1. the populist discussion of artificial intelligence (MSNBC, CNN, Fox News and the even more anti-intellectual social media) proceeds unhindered by knowledge of the relevant bodies of knowledge regarding . . . intelligence. The term is used as a shibbolth, one of many, in the acting out of the disintegration of Reason.

from Mary Helen Immordino-Yang and Antonio R. Damasio, “We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education,” in Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience (W. W. Norton & Company, 2015)

. . . learning is dynamic, social, and context dependent because emotions are, and emotions form a critical piece of how, what, when, and why people think, remember, and learn. (p. 17)

In general, cognition and emotion are regarded as two interrelated aspects of human functioning. (p. 36)

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Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development, expanded edition (Harvard University Press, 1996)

The possibility that there exists a more restless relationship between intelligence and context, in which thinking changes both its nature and its course as one moves from one situation to another, is enough to cause shudders in some research quarters. It represents a move toward a psychology of situations . . . xvi

The term intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. . . however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors will be shown to be independent of IQ, g, or general intelligence . . . cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when referring to intelligent behavior. 22

The literature that we reviewed demonstrates that it is not sufficient for one to be biologically endowed with a cognitive potential and even to be exposed to appropriate opportunities for its crystallization: One also must be motivated to benefit from this exposure. Performance is influenced by learning, refinement, shaping, etc., and the role of motivation cannot be ignored in such matters. Extrinsic motivators (such as the value that one attaches to attaining success on a task), as well as intrinsic motivators (inculcated through various parenting styles, such as fostering autonomy, valuing schooling, and adopting a modern world view . . ) are equally important in shaping cognitive outcomes. 116

. . . it would appear that no theory is capable of handling the diversity of findings reviewed earlier, unless it consists of the three prongs of biology, environment, and motivation. An important feature of the bio-ecological framework has been to suggest mechanisms by which these three factors combine to produce contextually tied performances . . . 192

In closing, it is time to ask about the nature of the resources responsible for intellectual growth. Past research on the influence of the environment has ducked this question, preferring instead to contrast global SES differences on IQ, surmising that some aspects subsumed under the SES rubric must be causative but never specifying what they might be. In a recent article Uri Bronfenbrenner and I proposed specific mechanisms of organism-environment interaction, called proximal processes, through which genetic potentials for intelligence are actualized. We described research evidence from a variety of sources demonstrating that proximal processes operate in a variety of settings throughout the life-course (beginning in the family and continuing in child-care settings, peer groups, schools, and work places), and account for more of the variation in intellectual outcome than the environmental contexts (e.g., family structure, SES, culture) in which these proximal processes take place. Proximal processes refer to sustained interactions between a developing organism and the persons, symbols, and activities in its immediate environment. To be effective, these processes must become progressively more complex and interactive over time. 244-5

Wellman: Motivation
Lock

from Yrjö Engeström, "Activity theory and individual and socal transformation," in Reijo Miettinen, and Raija-Leena Punamaki, Perspectives on Activity Theory (Cambridge, 1999)

Any conceptual framework that postulates a predetermined sequence of stages of sociohistorical development will easily entail suspicious notions of what is "primitive" and what is advanced, what is backward and what is good. Such notions reduce the rich diversity of sociocultural forms of life to a one-dimensional scale. This problem was already evident in Luria's classic studies in Central Asia (Luria, 1976), carefully and sympathetically criticized by Cole and Griffin (1980; see also Cole, 1988).

It is surely appropriate to avoid imposing rigid, one-dimensional sequences on social reality. But especially among Anglo-Saxon rresearchers adhering to the ideas of Vygotsky, the standard alternative seems to be to avoid history altogether. Differences in cognition across cultures, social groups, and domains of practice are thus commonly explained without seriously analyzing the historical development that has led to those differences. The underlying relativistic notion is that we should not make value judgements concerning whose cognition is better or more advanced--that all kinds of thinking and practice are equally valuable. Although this liberal stance may be a comfortable basis for academic discourse, it ignores the reality that in all domains of societal practice value judgements and decisions have to be made everyday. People have to decide where they want to go, which way is up. If behavioral and social sciences want to avoid that issue, they will be unable to work out useful yet theoretically ambitious intellectual tools for practitioners making those crucial decisions.

The less obvious reason for the neglect of history has to do with the . . . underdevelopment of models of the structure of an activity system. Historical analysis must be focused on units of manageable size. If the unit is the individual or the individually constructed situation, history is reduced to ontogeny or biography. If the unit is the culture of the society, history becomes very general or endlessly complex. If a collective activity system is taken as the unit, history may become manageable, and yet it steps beyond the confines of individual biography.

Marc S. Tucker, ed., Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Eduction Built on the World's Leading Systems (Harvard Education Press, 2011)

The idea of grade by grade testing has no takers in the top performing countries. 176

Whereas these countries have placed a high value in their national policies on the mastery of complex skills and problem solving at a high level, the United States has in recent years emphasized mastery of basic skills at the expense of mastery of more advanced skills. 176

The United States is now about to get the least-capable candidates applying to our education schools when we need the best. 181

Taken together--highly qualified college educated women and minorities abandoning teaching as a career, the drop in admission standards following the baby boom, and the decision by many capable students to avoid teaching because of the widespread teacher layoffs--we can see the danger ahead for the United States. All we need to do to acquire a very poor teaching force is to do nothing. . . We canot afford to continue bottom-fishing for prospective teachers while the best performing countries are cream skimming. 182

At a meeting of representatives from countries involved in designing tests and research studies, "One of the Americans made a pitch for including a background question in the research instrument that would have asked how many teachers of mathematics and science in each country were teaching subjects they had not been prepared to teach. There was an expression of astonishment from the representatives of all the countries, except those from the United States. It simply was not done. Teachers were not permitted to teach outside their subject. There was no need to ask this question . . . Evidently, among all the industrialized countries, only the United States allows its teachers to teach subjects they have not been highly trained in. 186

The typical clinical experience of American candidate teachers is usually of poor quality, too brief, unconnected to the rest of their instructional program, and provided by classroom teachers who cannot, on the whole, reasonably be called "master teachers". Once graduated from teachers colleges and hired by their first school district, American teachers are typically put in a sink-or-swim situation with little or no support from experienced teachers or supervisors and often in the most demading classsroom situations. Once again, the contrast with the experience of their Shanghai and Finnish colleagues could not be more stark. 188

The prevailing view in the United States is that our teachers need not come from the more able strata of the college educated population. We behave as if we believe that only a few weeks of training is needed to do what they have to do, a sure sign that we do not believe teaching is a profession at all. If they do get more training, it can certainly be done in very low-status institutions; and if they do not get much training, it's no big deal. If there is a shortage of teachers, we quickly waive the very low standards we insist on in boom times. We congratulate ourselves on offering $10,000 signing bonuses to teachers when we worry about the qualifications of the ones we are getting, and then wonder why we cannot attract a better quality of candidate or simply more candidates. We do little or nothing about starting salaries that will not permit a young teacher to support a small family in the style to which college graduates are accustomed in this country. . . . We talk a lot about getting rid of the worst teachers--as if that was our biggest problem--but not at all about doing what is necessary to get better ones, thus acomplishing little but the destruction of teacher morale. And we do all of this while talking a lot about teacher quality. 190-91

It turns out that neither the researhers whose work is reported on in this book nor the analysts of the OECD PISA data have found any evidence that any country that leads the world's education performance league tables has gotten there by implementing any of the major agenda items that dominate the education reform agenda in the United States, with the exception of the Common Core Standards.

We include in this list the use of market mechanisms such as charter schools and vouchers, the identification and support education entrepreneurs to disrupt the system, and the use of student performance data on standarized tests to identify teachers and principals who are then rewarded on that basis for the value they added to a student's education or who are punished because they fail to do so. 209

Many countries worry that using standardized test data as a major basis for evaluating and rewarding teachers will create perverse incentive of many kinds, and they worry that there is much in student performance that is important that standardized tests are unlikely to capture and that great student performance is the result of the work of many adults working in collaboration rather than individal teachers working alone. 209

It has taken from thirty to one hundred years to build the national and provincial education systems on which these recommendations are based. None was built in one or two decades. If the United States is to catch up, it will have to get started soon, and it will have to work very hard at it for a long time. 214

See also this critical review of Surpassing Shanghai by Bruce J. Biddle University of Missouri

from Passi Sahlberg, "A Model Lesson: Finland Shows Us What Equal Opportunity Looks Like," American Educator, Vol. 36, No. 1, Spring 2012.

Michael Fullan, a Canadian educational change scholar, speaks about “drivers of change,” such as education policy or strategy levers, which have the best chances of driving intended change in education systems. “In the rush to move forward,” writes Fullan, “leaders, especially from countries that have not been progressing, tend to choose the wrong drivers.” “Wrong drivers” include accountability (vs. professionalism), individual teacher quality (vs. collegiality), technology (vs. pedagogy), and fragmented strategies (vs. systems thinking). The Finnish experience shows that a consistent focus on equity and shared responsibility—not choice and competition—can lead to an education system where all children learn better than they did before.

Understanding Finnish educational success needs to include an awareness of sociocultural, political, and economic factors. Indeed, there is more to the picture than meets the eye. An external OECD expert review team that visited Finland observed that “it is hard to imagine how Finland’s educational success could be achieved or maintained without reference to the nation’s broader and commonly accepted system of distinctive social values that more individualistic and inequitable societies may find it difficult to accept.” Another visiting OECD team confirmed that the Finnish approaches to equitable schooling rely on multiple and reinforcing forms of intervention with support that teachers can get from others, including special education teachers and classroom assistants. Furthermore, Finland has shown that educational change should be systematic and coherent, in contrast with the current haphazard intervention efforts of many other countries.

The conclusion was that “developing the capacities of schools is much more important than testing the hell out of students, and that some nonschool policies associated with the welfare state are also necessary.” Scores of news articles on Finnish education have concluded that trust, teacher professionalism, and taking care of those with special needs are the factors that distinguish Finnish schools from most others.

Importing a specific aspect of Finland’s education system, whether it is curricula, teacher training, special education, or school leadership, is probably of little value to those aiming to improve their own education systems. The Finnish welfare system guarantees all children the safety, health, nutrition, and moral support that they need to learn well in school. One lesson from Finland is, therefore, that successful change and good educational performance often require improvements in social, employment, and economic sectors. As described by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman, separate elements of a complex system rarely function adequately in isolation from their original system in a new environment.

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from James R. Flynn, What is Intelligence? Beyond the Flynn Effect (Cambridge Univesity Press, 2009):

Our ancestors in 1900 were not mentally retarded. Their intelligence ws anchored in everyday reality. We differ from them in that we can use abstractions and logic and the hypothetical to attack the formal problems that arise when science liberates thought from concrete situations. Since 1950 we have become more ingenious in going beyond previously learned rules to solve problems on the spot. pp. 10-11

The scientific ethos, with its vocabulary, taxonomies, and detachment of logic and the hypothetical from concrete referents, has begun to permeate the minds of post-industrial peoples. This has paved the way for mass education on the university level and the emergence of an intellectual cadre without whom our present civilization would be inconceivable. 29

Science altered our lives and then liberated our minds from the concrete. This history has not been written because, as children of our own time, we do not perceive the gulf that separates us from our distant [circa 1900] ancestors: the difference between their world and the world seen through scientific spectacles. . . . As use of logic and the hypothetical moved beyond the concrete, people developed new habits of mind. They became practiced at solving problems with abstract or visual content and more innovative at administrative tasks." 172-174

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The steeper gradients between rich and poor may produce surprising social effects
unless we do something about the rich getting richer.

from William Calvin, A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond (Oxford University Press, 2004). See Calvin's Webpage

It is just in the last 1 percent of that up-from-the-apes period that human creativity and technological capabilities have really blossomed. It's been called "The Mind's Big Bang." In our usual expansive sense of "mind," the history of the mind is surprisingly brief, certainly when compared with the long increase in brain size and the halting march of toolmaking. xiv

. . . there are emergent properties lurking in anything that produces a steep gradient. . . I can imagine softwiring emergents in the brain intensively engaging in structured stuff at earlier ages. The steeper gradients between rich and poor may produce surprising social effects unless we do something about the rich getting richer. 177-8

"Yet once our education has the techniques to incorporate what is being learned about brain plasticity and inborn individual differences, we are likely to produce many more adults of unusual abilities, able to juggle twice as many concepts at once, able to follow a longer chain of reasoning, able to shore up the lower floors of their mental house of cards to allow fragile new levels to be tried out, metaphors and beyond--the survival of the stable but on a higher level yet again." 183

"Such education, perhaps more than any of the imagined genetic changes, could make for a very different adult population. We would still look the same coming out of the womb, would still have the same genetics, but adults could be substantially different. A lot of the elements of human intelligence are things like that, while they also have a genetic basis, are malleable; we ought to be able to educate for superior performance."
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"But at the high end, what might pump us up even higher? If our conscisness is a house of cards, perhaps there are techniques, equivalent to bending the cards, that will allow us to spend more time at the more abstract levels. Can we shore up our mental edifices to build much taller "buildings" or discover the right mental "steel?""

Emergents are hard to predict, and they are not all beneficial . . . " (pp. 177-78) (p. 186)

“there is considerable evidence that formal operational thought is contextually bound”

from Anthony Orton, Learning Mathematics: Issues, Theory, and Classroom Practice (Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004)

Nevertheless, the terminology 'concrete operations', 'formal operations', is still apparently found to be useful by those reporting on empirical research, and by many who write about child development and curriculum reform. p.68

from Jeremy E. C. Genovese, "Piaget, Pedagogy, and Evolutionary Psychology" (Evolutionary Psychology, Volume 1, 2003)

Tamburrini (1982) pointed out that “there is considerable evidence that formal operational thought is contextually bound” (p. 319). This is no small concession; the very point of formal operations is that they go beyond context and content. The failure of adolescents and adults to reason in the ways predicted by Piaget is a serious problem for both the theory and practice of education, for it is precisely the formal reasoning skills that are necessary for mastering academic subjects such as math and science beyond the elementary level. p. 130

Biologically primary abilities are acquired universally and children typically have high motivation to perform the tasks involving them. In contrast, biologically secondary abilities are culturally determined, and often tedious repetition and external motivation are necessary for their mastery. From this perspective it is understandable that many children have difficulty with reading and higher mathematics (p. 63). p. 131

from Yrjö Engeström and Reijo Miettinen, "Activity theory and individual and social transformation," in Reijo Miettinen, and Raija-Leena Punamaki, Perspectives on Activity Theory (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 25-6:

Differences in cognition across cultures, social groups, and domains of practice are thus commonly explained without seriously analyzing the historical development that has led to those differences. The underlying relativistic notion is that we should not make value judgements concerning whose cognition is better or more advanced--that all kinds of thinking and practice are equally valuable. Although this liberal stance may be a comfortable basis for academic discourse, it ignores the reality that in all domains of societal practice value judgements and decisions have to be made everyday.

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I wish to emphasize particularly the ability of cultural evolution to transform the developmental niche.

The excerpt below is from John Dupré, "Causality and Human Nature in the Social Sciences," in Processes of Life: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Oxford, 2012). It is one of the best summaries of what could be called the Progressive view of human psycho-cognitive development (Dewey, Vygotsky, Lunacharsky, Krupskaya):

It is . . . clear that recognition of the variety of factors involved in development makes possible a diversity of individual outcomes within even quite narrowly defined populations. (285)

. . . the human mind . . . involves a new level of capacity to transform the world beyond the organism. (291)

If I simply act in pursuit of whatever passing whim is uppermost at the moment I exhibit no more causal power than any other animal. If I choose to build a bridge, write a book, or cook dinner, and subordinate my choice of actions to this decision, I exercise to a greater or lesser degree a distinctively human ability to shape the world. In the social realm, the ability to confrom to principle, above all moral principle, is the kind of regimentation of behaviour that constitutes a uniquely human achievement. (291)

. . . it is the fitting of action into some kind of systematic pattern that distinguishes the truly free agent from one who merely has the ability to respond to the whim of the moment; and . . . [what emerges is] the ontological picture of the human agent as an entity enabled to pursue complex goals or engage in patterns of action over time by the acquisition of a uniquely rich range of capabilities. (293)

I wish to emphasize particularly the ability of cultural evolution to transform the developmental niche. And here, at least in contemporary developed countries, it seems clear that humans have learned in quite recent times to construct a remarkably novel environment for the development of their young. . . . [T]hese prodigious changes to the human environment, concretizations of our rapidly evolving culture, profoundly affect the developmental resources available to growing humans. For that reason their introduction should be seen as representing major evolutionary change. (284)

Source. "How Other Nations Pay for Childcare. The U.S. is an Outlier" (New York Times, October 6, 2021)

from Sophia Rosenfeld, A Revolution in Language: the Problem of Signs in Late Eighteenth-Century France (Stanford, 2001), pp. 150-51

As the Abbé Grégoire warned his fellow deputies, 'this inevitable poverty of language, which confuses the mind, will mutilate all your addresses and decrees.' In a political system built upon a series of mental abstractions, popular linguistic confusion, according to this reasoning, was and would continue to be one of the principal sources of political and civil discord.

How did these well-placed intellectuals know that many ordinary people failed to comprehend the language of the Revolution? For the Abbé Grégoire, it was a matter of common sense. Like the savages of late eitheenth-century travel literature, peasants--the often illiterate speakers of foreign idioms, dialects, and ungrammatical French--were widely thought to have great difficulty generalizing their ideas or forming clear conceptions of abstract, nonmaterial terms. Indeed, Voltaire's conclusion that 'more than half of the habital world is still populated by two-footed animals who live in a horrible condtion approximating the state of nature. . . barely enjoying the gift of speech' retained its force. Consequently, even when the population in question was the vast rural citizenry of France, its ability to understand the key debates and decrees of the Revolution was assumed to be extremely limited. As the Abbé Sernin bluntly states before the Convention, 'Artisans and people in the countryside, although elevated by the law to a new level of Liberty and destined to fill the most important positions in the State, these men are, for the most part, still deaf and mute' when it came to any public functions that they might be called upon to play.

. . . reports . . . often contained ominous tales of public incomprehension of the formal language of France's laws and constitution. A correspondent from the department of Seine-et-Oise, for example, wrote to express his fear that the young children he regularly heard reciting the Declaration of the Rights of Man from memory did not actually understand what they were saying: "I am sadly convinced by questions which I have posed to the oldest among them that they understand the significance of none of the words used in it. I have reproached their fathers in a fraternal way for not bothering to explain these words to their children. They have replied that they do not understand any more than their children and that they themselves need someone to explain these words to them as well." Similarly, a schoolmaster from Fourny wrote to La Feuille villageoise to say that every Sunday he read this journal aloud to the local peasants and answered, to the best of his abilities, their frequent questions about vocabulary that they did not comprehend. But, he complained, he was afraid that he was spoiling the journal's lessons and deceiving his disciples, because "I often encounter words that I know only a little or badly." Unfortunately, the words that the schoolmaster failed to grasp ranged from "democracy" and "coalition" to "analysis" and "metaphor."

Nicholas Kristof, "McDonald’s Workers in Denmark Pity Us," New York Times, May 8, 2020

Think of it this way. Workers at McDonald’s outlets all over the world tend to be at the lower end of the labor force, say the 20th percentile. But Danish workers at the 20th percentile are high school graduates who are literate and numerate.

In contrast, after half a century of underinvestment in the United States, many 20th-percentile American workers haven’t graduated from high school, can’t read well, aren’t very numerate, struggle with drugs or alcohol, or have impairments that reduce productivity.

from Philip Roth unbound: interview transcript (Daily Beast, October 30, 2009)

from Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (HarperCollins, 2018),

Human beings were never born to read. The acqusition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. . . . The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply and well changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought. pp. 1-2

Every national and international index of how well US children are doing in reading indicates that, despite all the nation’s wealth, they are failing in droves and performing considerably behind children in both Western and Eastern countries. We cannot ignore what this portends for our children or for our country.

only one-third of twenty-first century American children now read with sufficient understanding and speed at the exact age when their future learning depends on it. The fourth grade represents a Maginot line between learning to read and learning to use reading to think and learn.

More disturbing altogether, close to half of our children who are African-American or Latino do not read in grade four at even a “basic” reading level, much less a proficient one. This means that they do not decode well enough to understand what they are reading, which will impact almost everything they are supposed to learn from then on, includiing math and other subjects. I refer to this period as the “vanishing hole in American education” because if children do not learn to read fluently before this time is over, for all educational purposes, they disappear. pp. 151-2

Common Core Standards for Mathematics: The Real Issues HuffPost EDWARD FRENKEL AND HUNG-HSI WU

Here we will discuss three critical issues that have to be addressed for the CCSSM to succeed: math textbooks, assessment, and teachers' preparation.

Before the CCSSM were adopted, we already had a de facto national curriculum in math because the same collection of textbooks was (and still is) widely used across the country. The deficiencies of this de facto national curriculum of "Textbook School Mathematics" are staggering. The CCSSM were developed precisely to eliminate those deficiencies, but for CCSSM to come to life we must have new textbooks written in accordance with CCSSM. So far, this has not happened and, unfortunately, the system is set up in such a way that the private companies writing textbooks have more incentive to preserve the existing status quo maximizing their market share than to get their math right. The big elephant in the room is that as of today, less than a year before the CCSSM are to be fully implemented, we still have no viable textbooks to use for teaching mathematics according to CCSSM!

The situation is further aggravated by the rush to implement CCSSM in student assessment. A case in point is the recent fiasco in New York State, which does not yet have a solid program for teaching CCSSM, but decided to test students according to CCSSM anyway. The result: students failed miserably. One of the teachers wrote to us about her regrets that "the kids were not taught Common Core" and that it was "tragic" how low their scores were. How could it be otherwise? Why are we testing students on material they haven't been taught? Of course, it is much easier and more fun, in lieu of writing good CCSSM textbooks, to make up CCSSM tests and then pat each other on the back and wave a big banner: "We have implemented Common Core -- Mission accomplished." But no one benefits from this. Are we competing to create a Potemkin village, or do we actually care about the welfare of the next generation? What happened in New York State will happen next year across the country if we don't get our act together.

The current situation with the CCSSM puts math teachers in a precarious and unenviable position. They are being asked to implement a CCSSM-based curriculum that requires content knowledge that they, through no fault of their own, do not possess. The education establishment -- including institutions of higher learning -- is seemingly uninterested in teaching teachers this much-needed content knowledge. This is a critical moment when educators and mathematicians must rise to the occasion and work together to give teachers the means to acquire this knowledge.

Teacher slams scripted Common Core lessons that must be taught ‘word for word’ Wash Post

BBC News, "How China is winning the school race"

"In the late 1990s we moved to all-graduate [teachers]. If we want to have high achievement, subject expertise is very important for secondary schools," said Catherine KK Chan, deputy secretary for education in the Hong Kong government.

Hong Kong, like Singapore, now recruits teachers from the top 30% of the graduate cohort. By contrast, according to the OECD, the US recruits from the bottom third.

The “China winning the school race” headlines are misleading

Republicans Should Love 'Common Core', WSJ Opinion By EDWARD FRENKEL AND HUNG-HSI WU

Mathematical education in the U.S. is in deep crisis. The World Economic Forum ranks the quality of math and science education in the U.S. a dismal 48th. This is one of the reasons the 2010 report "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" by the National Academies warned that America's ability to compete effectively with other nations is fading. The crisis is caused by the way math is currently taught in schools. Today, most students are forced to learn mathematics through textbooks that are often incomprehensible and irrelevant. These textbooks, which are widely adopted across the states, create mediocre de facto national standards—and, worst of all, alienate students from the material. The Core Standards address these issues head-on and finally offer hope for a better math education.

Gornick
Lock
Wellman
Jacob
Alcorn

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Jerome Bruner on Piaget and Vygotsky

Jerome Bruner, "Celebrating divergence: Piaget and Vygotsky" Human Development 40.2 (Mar/Apr 1997): 63-73.

Piaget was principally (though not entirely) preoccupied with the ontogenesis of causal explanation and its logical and empirical justification. This was even the focus of his masterful studies of moral development, a topic that does not ordinarily lend itself to such an approach. Vygotsky, on the other hand, was principally (though not entirely) concerned with the ontogenesis of interpretation and understanding. Piaget devised methods of inquiry and a theory appropriate to analyzing how children explain and how they justify their explanations - and did it brilliantly. The price he paid, of course, was the usual price one pays for ignoring context, transactional dynamics, background knowledge, and cultural variation. To grasp how somebody interprets or understands something, which was Vygotsky's concern, requires that we take into account their cultural and linguistic background and the context in which they find themselves both `in the small', in the sense of a particular communicative situation, and `in the large' of a patterned cultural system. Vygotsky's emphasis, accordingly, was on situated meanings and on situated meaning-making, which inevitably generates a cultural-historical approach. The two approaches, in consequence, diverged increasingly as they matured perhaps, some would say, to a stage of incommensurability.

I think, and I hope you agree, that we are enormously fortunate to have had two such rich theoretical accounts as an inheritance from our mentors, even if they prove to be incommensurate. Just as depth perception requires a disparity between two views of a scene, so in the human sciences the same may be true: depth demands disparity. So I conclude this excursion into the thought of these two great developmental psychologists with a salute to their profound difference. To have had either of them as a guide would have been a gift. To have had them both is stronger stuff, and even though it may at times seem overwhelming, we are the better for it.

Part Four: Measures of Cognitive Performativity

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Table 7.1 from A mind so Rare (p. 260)

Successive layers in the evolution of human cognition and culture

Each stage continues to occupy its cultural niche today, so that fully modern societies have

all four stages simultaneously present.

Stage	Species/Period	Novel Forms	Manifest Change	Governance
EPISODIC	Primate	Episodic event perceptions	Self-awareness and event sensitivity	Episodic and reactive
MIMETIC (first transition)	Early homids, peaking in H. erectus 2M-0.4 Mya	Action metaphor	Skill, gesture, mime, and imitation	Mimetic style and archetypes
MYTHIC (second transition)	Sapient humans, peaking in H. sapiens sapiens 0.5-present	Language, symbolic representation	Oral traditions, mimetic ritual,narrative thought	Mythic framework of governance
THEORETIC (third transition)	Modern culture	External symbolic universe	Formalisms, large-scale theoretic artifiacts, massive external storage	Institutionalized paradigmatic thought and invention

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development
from The Development of Children by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole (Sixth Edition, 2009)

Age	Stage	Description
Birth to 2	Sensorimotor	Infants' achievements consist largely of coordinating their sensory perceptions and simple motor behaviors. As they move through the six substages of this period, infants come to recognize the existence of a world outside themselves and begin to interact with it in deliberate ways.
2 to 6	Preoperational²	Young children can represent reality to themselves through the use of symbols, including mental images, words, and gestures. Still, children often fail to distinguish their point of view from that of others, become easily captured by surface appearances, and are often confused about causal relations.
6 to 12	Concrete operational³	As they enter middle childhood, children become capable of mental operations, internalized actions that fit into a logical system. Operational thinking allows children to mentally combine, separate, order and transform objects and actions. Such operations are considered concrete because they are carried out in the presence of the objects and events being thought about.
12 to 19	Formal operational⁴	In adolescence, the developing person acquires the ability to think systematically about all logical relationswithin a problem. Adolescents display keen interest in abstract ideas and in the process of thinking itself.

Piaget's Stages of Cognitive Development: notes

1. from The Development of Children by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole (Sixth Edition, 2009)

2. from "Woodward book: Trump says he knew coronavirus was ‘deadly’ and worse than the flu while intentionally misleading Americans, Washington Post 9-9-20

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

3 and 4. Kraus (on planning and organization vs. spontaneity); and Murray Body spring division minutes (concrete operational vs. formal operational thinking); Paul Silver on cognitive gap between unskilled and semi-skilled

4. from "Jim Mattis’s reading list offers a jarring contrast to Trump’s lack of intellectual curiosity," James Hohmann, Washington Post, 9- 4-19

“If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate, and you will be incompetent, because your personal experiences alone aren’t broad enough to sustain you,” Jim Mattis writes in his new memoir, which came out yesterday. “Any commander who claims he is ‘too busy to read’ is going to fill body bags with his troops as he learns the hard way.”

Joe Dunford, chmn J chfs, covers up the facts (july 20, 2017), schmoozes Andrea Mitchell -- re. Warren Commission Report

Table 0. The Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein: Five Genetic Ontologies
(Five Principles of the Production of Practices)

Genetic Ontology	Sources (Full page here)
Primate Dominance and Deference	Mazur, deWaal, Wrangham . . .
Paleolithic Dynamic Egalitarianism	Whiten, Descola, Chase, Price . . .
Ressentiment & the Mechanisms of Defense Despotic regime; Racism; Nationalism; Fascism	Nietzsche, Deleuze & Guattari, Clarke, Paxton, Knox . . .
Bildung & the Will to Power (Jouissance) Progressive Narcisism; Individuation; Progressivism, Socialism, Communism the UAW and the Keynesian Elite	Hegel, Nietzsche, Vygotsky, Piaget, Alcorn . . .
Nihilism & the Last Man Regressive Narcissism and the Culture of Consumption; Repressive Desublimation; Disindividuation; Neoliberalism	Nietzsche, Hall, Ehrenberg, Stiegler, Illouz, Marcuse . . .

Cognitive Modalities: a summary of sources

Psychometrics ("Q"): Flynn, Nisbett, Ceci; Hernstein and Murray

•IQ tests
•PISA
•MEAP

Evolutionary: Donald, Mind: cognitive evolution Table 7.1 p. 260

•episodic (primate)
•mimetic (homo erectus, h. sapients)
•oral-mythic (h. sapiens sapiens)
•theoretic (required by modern capitalism*)
•post-theoretic (Foucault, Sellars, Deleuze)

Developmental: Piaget et. al.

•pre-operational
•concrete operrational
•formal operational
•post-formal thought (Commons)

Psychoanalytic: Freud-Klein: mechanisms of defense

•projection
•displacement
•reaction formation
•denial
•identification

Cultural-historical: Vygotsky, Luria, Ong, Bruner, Flynn, Tomasello. The Social Origins of Language (Oxford, 2014)

• zone of proximal development
• joint intentionality
• intersubjectivity
• niche construction

Cognitive-linguistic Cardinality
(orders of magnitude/index of cognitive complexity)
the Quantum Heterogeneity of Dasein in the context of Merlin Donald,
A Mind so Rare, Table 7.1, p. 260 (Apologies to George Cantor)

ℵ_i index of cognitive complexity (Ceci)

i = 4 Internet and the Extended Mind

i = 3 Foucault (Kant Hegel Nietzsche)

i = 2 Formal operational

i = 1 Concrete operational

i = 0 Oral-mythic/pre-operational

i = -1 Mimetic/gestural (Homo erectus)

i = -2 Primate semiosis

The Development of Children (Sixth Edition) by Cynthia Lightfoot, Michael Cole, and Sheila R. Cole

Development Through the Lifespan, Laura E. Berk

Jerome Kagan, The Human Spark: The Science of Human Development 2013

Piaget, Genetic Epistemology

Stephen J. Ceci, On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development (Harvard, 1996), p. 22

The term intelligence is often used synonymously with "IQ", "g", or "general intelligence", especially in some of the psychometric literature. . . however, the ability to engage in cognitively complex behaviors will be shown to be independent of IQ, g, or general intelligence . . . cognitive complexity will be seen to be the more general of the two notions and the one most theoretically important to keep in mind when referring to intelligent behavior.22

The Two-Party System's Greatest Achievement,
or:
The Wonderful World of Globalization

** Parents Don’t Understand How Far Behind Their Kids Are in School (New York Times, May 11, 2023).

NYT 9-16 and 9-19 A Huge Cause of Parental Stress (The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment.)

The Commonwealth Fund, Mirror, Mirror 2024: A Portrait of the Failing U.S. Health System
u

Study the interactive graph that accompanies this article (a screenshot of the graph is at the right). Chilling evidence of an unfolding catastrophe that nevertheless remains invisible.

Image below is repeated for emphasis.

The two-party discursive field has been shaped decisively by the Slave Power. Today's Republican Party is the latest mutation of the Slave Power. (moment in the unfolding of . . . ); Aufhebung(?)

NCES School Lookup

George W. Bush Tried to Suppress Publication of PISA Data (2006)

re. the 2006 results: from How Pisa became the world's most important exam, BBC.com, 26 November 2013 (emphasis added):

Among the starkest revelations has been the decline of the US school system. This former education superpower has been caught up and left behind by many other countries, particularly in Asia.

This was distasteful medicine and Mr. Schleicher says that the U.S. administration was deeply unhappy with the 2006 results and was trying to apply pressure on the OECD.

The U.S. politician who intervened to defend the importance of publishing the results was Ted Kennedy, says Mr. Schleicher. Kennedy, who had chaired the senate committee on education, had become very supportive of the Pisa project.

"It was Senator Kennedy who saved my life at the OECD," he says.

21 Developed Nations & 4 East Asian City-States (SHMC)

note 1. " . . . several limitations in the data used in non-response-bias analyses submitted
by Hong Kong (China) and the United States." see"inexplicable anomalies"

"Inexplicable Anomolies": "Trump" Falsifies 2018 PISA Data

FOOTNOTE 1. from PISA 2018 Results (Volume I):What Students Know and Can Do

footnote 1. Data did not meet the PISA technical standards but were accepted as laregly comparable (see Annexes A2 and A4)

Annex A 2

In PISA 2018, five countries and economies – Hong Kong (China) (69 %), Latvia (82 %), New Zealand (83 %), the United Kingdom (73 %) and the United States (65 %) – did not meet the 85 % threshold, but met the 65 % threshold, amongst schools initially selected to take part in the PISA assessment. Upon replacement, Hong Kong (China) (79 %), the United Kingdom (87 %) and the United States (76 %) still failed to reach an acceptable participation rate.

Annex A 4

Despite the overall high quality of data, a few countries’ data failed to meet critical standards or presented inexplicable anomalies, such that the Adjudication Group recommends a special treatment of these data in databases and/or reporting.

While the adjudication group did not consider the violation of response-rate standards by Hong Kong (China) and the United States (see Annex A2) as major adjudication issues, they noted several limitations in the data used in non-response-bias analyses submitted by Hong Kong (China) and the United States. In consideration of the lower response rates, compared to other countries, the data for Hong Kong (China) and the United States are reported with an annotation.

PISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2018:18 Anglo-European Nations

see"inexplicable anomalies"
Problems with the U. S. Data:
Political (2006) and "Technical" (2018)

An Unimaginable Catastrophe

PISA Math Scores, 2003 to 2015