Wygotski is (partly) wrong, Piaget is (partly) wrong. Do you agree to that statement, Obe?
They are neither right or wrong. They are only trying to define a a conceptual schema, while it is a relation they are seeking. A relation which as of yet is beyond definition. I have just come upon a book i had stored in my garage for years, and recently i had a visitor, to whom i wanted give away some of my books. Came upon Piaget's ' The Child's Conception of Time' I have started a re read, for i have no recollection of any of it, yet i am sure to find some very keen insight and relevance there. The whole thing can be distilled from the last part of his conclusion, :
'Operations in psychological time would therefore seem to be mainly of a qualitative kind. Does this mean that there is no such thing as quantitative inner time? Bergson borrowed most of his imagery from music and, whenever this master of introspection wished to show that creative duration involved irreducibly intuitive and anti-rational factors, he did so in terms of melody, rhythm and symphony. But what else is music then an inner type of mathematics? Long before Pythagoras discovered the numerical ratios which determine the principal musical intervals, ancient shepherds, singing their songs or playing an air on their pipes, busily constructed musical scales and realized,without being able to put it into so many words, that a minimum equals two crotchets and a crotchet equals two quavers. Musical rhythm is, in fact, the most intuitive of all time measurements and is most certainly not imposed from outside. ....... .....
All this points to the common nature of temporal operations in all spheres, and to the close relationship between psychological and physical time..........'
Holderlin says, speech, as distinct from mere noise, can only exist, 'wenn die Stille kehrt.' For him, homecoming to internal roots implicates the 'intricate equilibrium between utterance and the unsaid'.
The Umnachtung,m or mental derangement, to which Holderlin succumbed. -or took upon himself (Sterner, On Difficulty) - the aetological classifications being in such a case wholly naive (childlike), is relevant, no doubt. But, in what way?'
For Wygotsky, speech is not an interiorization of extemporaneous thought, for him it is a process, 'where, words die, as they bring forth thought. It is thinking in pure meanings. "It is a dynamic , shifting, unstable thing, fluttering between word and thought.'
I retract my earlier argument with Zinnat, and withdraw from the purely positivist approach of no thought without words, since the changes which are inherent between usages are shared by both psychologists. But then, what is the nature of a wordless thought? Is it the many shades of grey between the the literal and figurative, between the qualitative and quantitative? Are these the mere products of immediate exposures to phonemes instantly connected and abandoned to phenomena? this may be it.
Are humans already machines to begin with?
I take a child and program his or her brain, from an early age, through preschool to college. I am the teacher and professor. I can fill this child’s head full of truth or lies. Does anybody care? Does the child have a defense? Or won’t the child take to my programming without doubt? What if I am most trusted and the position of highest authority? What if the child is loyal to my truth, or my lies? What if I program a computer? What’s the difference between programming a human, using human language, and programming a computer, using computer language? Is human language any different than computer language? It’s all electrons, isn’t it? What is the nature of information?
How should children be programmed?
How should computers be programmed?
What’s the difference, if any?
Aren’t humans already machines to begin with?
Both Wygotski and Piaget claim to speak about something that nobody knows what it actually is: psychology (see also here).
All hypothesis are delusive to a certain extent, they are intuitive encapsulations of gross unrealized substratum of knowledge. They elude clarification , and co-exist with fleeting illusions, of prescribed artistic illustrations, before they can be subjected to mathematical, physical and semantic tests. The psyche, is a term often use to describe some thing, event, occurrence, a hypothetical construct, that has no existence apart from the need to bridge the void created by the very act of invention, creation, and definition. It is the creative force, which knows, but needs to unveil the intricate subterranean chambers of it's constitution. It is not a persona, it is an urge.
Of course: human language and computer language are different.
Incorrect, computer hardware converts electronic impulses into computer language, nearly exactly, or completely exactly, to how the human brain also converts perception into sense data, through the bio electrical impulses of the human brain.
The brain acts as a CPU.
Not only that, both, the human mind and the computer function on similar schema, of dia-logue. Pairs of yes/no schema tied together in intricate accept/reject flows, where the flow chosen is the most situationally appropriate , most probable both qualitatively and quantitatively.
There maybe thousands or even tens of thousands of possible flows from which to choose from, on a changing matrix of possibility .
That’s no argument that these two languages are the same. 
Please notice that I’m not saying that this two languages have no common ground(s), but I am saying that they are just not the same.
That’s right, and (not only therefore) they are wrong.
Hi, Arminius, opposites are not right or wrong, they are simply opposites. they may synch. And i am sure on some level they do. We are just not there, yet.
Hi, Obe, opposites are indeed “simply opposites”, but each of them can be wrong anyway.
i would like to leave it at that, but the problem with Your last statement here, is that currently, the above cited 2 views are the leading contenders for the ‘right’ approach. So, although they may be right/wrong as any theoretical viewpoint, so far they both have workable constructs, and leading child psychologists are using them in working with children. Psychology today is one of multi phasic approach where it is not a question of the right or wrong approach, rather, it is trying differing approaches and see which merits the best result
Obe,
You can say that i am Kantian. Though, i should rather say that i agree with him at many issues about the methosdology of the mind. To me, he is the height of pure intellectual (non-religious) phiolosphy as far as the philosophy of the mind is concerned. No intellectual and convention philosopher has cross that limit.
As i see it, this is how the ontology goes-
[b]First of all, there is some a priori capacity exist in the mind to sense and feel, whether he know, expreienced or thought about anything ever or not. This comes embeded with the mind at the time of birth. Not only humans, but every living entity use to born with this, though the quantum of the capacity differs in each case.
As this capacity enables us to sense and feel, and as circumstances use to change all the time, thus this capacity of the mind gets more and new feelings all the time. And, it start discerning and comapring between those, after a limit it starts emulating too. This is thinking[/b].
[b]When this manifested thinking needs to be communicated to the others, we invent some mutually agreed audiable sounds for our different thoughts. That is word or language.
So, language comes later. it is not the base. The base is our feeling capacity and that is precisely the language of our’s or anybody living creature’s mind.
We do not think in the terms of language or words. That is not even possible. Our invented languages used to be decoded by the mind into feeling for being understood. But, all this happens so instantly, we do not realize it generally[/b].
Thinking is nothing but the complex form of feeling. And, in the same way, language is the complex form of thinking and its translation into audio for communication.
Had there was a single human in the world, no verbal language would be invented. But, that does not mean that lone person would not be able to think either.
with love,
sanjay
He was an amateur.
The “language of the mind” is that of emulation. The mind emulates sensory responses in order to predict future situations, much as in a dream. The results of the emulation become the next stimulators (as though they were real experiences) that also send waves of emulated sensory events. It is a process of both parallel and serial processing of self-invoked, “artificial”, emulation more commonly known as “imagination”.
In AI, it is recursive neural networking.
Sanjay,
The first view places emphasis on the idea, the second the phenomena. The meaning theory associated with the first, view predisposes meaning with a view that change in meaning implicates very little difference on the understanding of the child. This is Piaget.
The other view emphasizes learning as considering changes in the ideas surrounding meaning, as pivotal. Here the primordial ideas are not entirely discounted, but are minimized, thereby shifting the emphasis.
Whether there are primordial, precognitive thoughts in either scenario, becomes not totally irrelevant, but mostly a hypothetical question.
In a sense, he was amatrue because he was not tranied for what he attempted. But, that does not mitigate his position. He still achieved that no other conventional philosopher could.
Secondly, You are not deducting the process completely.
How can a mind can even emulate ever if it does not has the capacity to feel/sense/understand that emulation, in the first place? And, why should mind even bother about emulation? It must have sensed something first, then would have desired emulation.
Why are you leaving that first stage?
Emulation is not the only capacity that mind has. Emulation is the combine effort of feel and will, which are the two different chatacters of the mind and both come embeded. Emulation cannot happen in the absense or either. Pure feeling cannot manifest emulation unless the feeling entity does not has the desire to emulate.
with love,
sanjay
I think the reason epistemology has-regressed to Sassure, is because it is both: a figurative and literal modus operandi of returning to the sources of symbol-sign formation. The existential reduction of bracketing meaning has proven ineffective , especially in the Continent, and pre cognitive literacy may re-enact in this way, the very earliest way symbols evolved. But thought in this cave picture age, is tantamount to thinking visually. Can visual presentation and re-presentation be interpreted as ‘thought’? If not, then there is no way that a break free continuity between pictures and signs can be established. There may at one time have been such, but if so, meaning has been degraded to the point where we have to return to it.
Emulation does not either escape criticism, nor sensation or will.
Emulation is the ONLY thinking that a mind does. The initial sensations and resultant verbiage use constitute the premise concepts and final actions involved. Everything between is entirely emulation.
That is why people learn more quickly through experience than reading or lectures and why symbols and sounds emulate their associated concepts.
Emulation of experience is mimicking not thinking, unless the use of the word think can be re-defined to include wider parameters. First, the meaning of thought has to be signified. What then is thought? Most will whip out Webster and 'look it up'. But James, the tension between referentiality and use has already been seen as variable and controversially , as of yet indefinite. So that does not work. What does?
Original ideas and their associative counterparts can not be emulated because there are none. That’s the point. There may be, but they are visual re-presentations. There is a break there, and no gap-less continuum can be demonstrated, where it can safely be said-‘that’s where it began’