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W.-M. Roth, Transactional Psychology of Education, Cultural Psychology of Education 9, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04242-4_6
concern for meaning in current scholarship is especially remarkable in the face of the fact that during the last 2 years of his life, Vygotsky – recognizing in his earlier work the over-intellectualization of learning and development and the inherent Cartesianism – was turning away from meaning as a theoretical concept in favor of sense. He was convinced that sense – rather than practical action itself – determined the dynamics of practical action. The shift to sense also leads to a reconceptualiza- tion of language, which, as a material form of consciousness as a whole, is “incon- ceivable outside a common field of purpose and sense, a real–ideal field of con-sent and sympathy” (Mikhailov 2001, 26, underscore added). This common field – which indeed includes the actors as constitutive events – brings into the accented visible both real and ideal things in a jointly inhabited and sensed world. It is a field constituted by all the events of the whole of nature that make the current duration (Whitehead 1919), wound up together like the fibers, strands, threads, knots and so on in the analogy presented in Chap. 2. Because this field is made of events, which make sense as events, any figure|ground configuration also makes sense. Consider the chalkboard contents at the end of a meeting of research scientists that they have apparently treated as making sense (Fig. 6.1). What is it that allows the different graphs and other inscriptions on the chalkboard to make sense? What are the fea- tures of sense that Vygotsky might have deemed as providing more theoretical leverage than meaning?
The move from meaning to sense is theoretically important because it is a start- ing point for overcoming the over-intellectualization of the psyche characterizing Vygotsky’s earlier work. There are intimations that his theory of word meaning failed as the unit of analysis because its intellectualist bias – as he was recognizing near the end of his life. Shifting to sense opened the door to theorizing the connec- tion between body and sense: the body of sense, that which allows talk, actions, and things in the world to make sense, is indistinguishable from the sense of the body.
The body is alive and, therefore, has to be theorized in terms of evental categories.
Fig. 6.1 Chalkboard contents at the halfway mark of a two-hour laboratory meeting. (The image was assembled from different screen prints of the video; chalkboard traces have been emphasized to improve visibility)
This includes both the sense of having/being a body and the senses that the body has. Because sense is based on the sense(s), there is a unity/identity of the sensual and the suprasensual (intellectual). This is especially so in the transactional approach, where all phenomena are theorized in evental categories.
Common ground and intersubjectivity frequently are made out to be a problem.
But by its very nature, the material world is a common ground to the human senses that can be indexed by all participants to a setting; and, as can be inferred from the event-based approach outlined in Chap. 2, each individual’s animate body also is material body for another animate body. Together, these two conditions constitute the inherently objective and intersubjective nature of the material and social world- as- event. Every percipient and every representation presupposes another’s perception and presentation; the generalized other thus is always perceived and present without involving any (social) construction. Any difference between how two people per- ceive or appreciate an object is inherently understood when we take them to be event families among other events in the duration of which they are also part. Thus, the recognition of anger in the behavior of others implies the perception of our own anger-associated behavior through the eyes of others (Husserl 1973). Living under the same conditions in the same communal life, members of the same social group or society supposes, presupposes, and imposes a number of perceptions, ideas, impressions, or habits that are in common or converge in some way. But different people do not have the same ideas. Such differences exist against a common ground, relative to the familiarity with a common world that they inhabit together and that is common to all because of the common sense. Living in social and material world always already in common constitutes the basis for individuality to arise.
The purpose of this chapter is to exemplify the theoretical move from meaning to sense that Vygotsky was trying to make but never completed. Not only do we want to move from meaning to sense but also do we want accomplishing it in the context of a transactional theory so that this move makes sense. I draw on the data from an advanced laboratory in experimental biology, which was undergoing a conceptual change in the course of the work from which the episode was culled (Roth 2014b).
In particular, as a result of this work the scientists came to understand the graphs they were producing (e.g. Fig. 6.1) in a radically new way. The first of the following sections shows that graphs make sense to scientists who produce them because these are integral aspect of the totality of their work-related, sensible field that con- stitutes a contextural ground. This field, which is common to the members of the research team and in which they are integral part functions as an indexical common ground against which particular actions, statements, and communicative body movements make sense. The second section then shows that when something one participant says or accomplishes does not make sense to another participant, there tends to be a lack of common ground that the meeting itself engages in work to reestablish it. The third section deals with aspects of the indexicality of all expres- sions, which is but one aspect of the problem of the common ground that makes for the common and therefore unarticulated assumptions implied in the appearance of sense. Two important issues are discussed: the movement from meaning to sense
and the pervasiveness of indexicality. The chapter concludes with a discussion of sense as the solution to the psychophysical (body–mind) problem.