COGNITION, ACTIVITY, AND CONTENT:
A.N. LEONTIEV AND THE ENACTIVE ORIGIN
OF “IDEAL REFLECTIVE CONTENT”
According to Leontiev’s “activity approach,” the external world
is not something available to be “worked over” according to a
subject’s inner or “ideal” representations; at stake instead is
the emergence of an “idealized” objective world that relates to
a subject’s activity both internally and externally construed. In
keeping with a Marxian account of anthropogenesis, Leontiev
links the emergence of “ideality” with social activity itself,
incorporating it within the general movement between the
poles of ‘inner’ cognition and ‘external’ action. In this manner,
Leontiev both parallels and goes beyond Hutto and Myin’s recent
“enactivist” account of “content-involving” cognition, where
representational thought depends on socio-cultural scaffolding
and, as such, is uniquely human. What traditionally comes to
be called representational content is for Leontiev the result of
the transition from a primitive cognitive apparatus of “imageconsciousness” to a one which is mediated by social activity. For
the being endowed with “activity-consciousness,” mental content
is something apprehended by assimilating “the objective world
in its ideal form” [Leontiev, 1977, p. 189]. And the precondition
for such assimilation is the apprehension of meanings from their
origin in the social-material system of activity. The genesis of
content-involving cognition is thus coeval with the development
of socializing activity systems, replete with the external
representations of values and norms as described in enactivist
literature as publicly scaffolded symbol systems. Leontiev thus
offers an anti-internalist account of cognition commensurate
with Hutto and Myin but with the added dimension of a
developmental scale of analysis with which to explain the origin
of human-specific cognition.
Keywords: A.N. Leontiev, Marx, activity theory, cognition,
enactivism, mental content
https://iphras.ru/uplfile/root/biblio/epst/03_2018/106-121.pdf
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