The role of distancing in Werner and Kaplan’s account of symbol formation and beyond
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of distancing or polarization plays a central role in Werner and Kaplan’s account of symbol formation. It refers to the process of progressive differentiation and hierarchic integration of the four components constitutive of symbolic activity: addressor, addressee, symbolic vehicle and referent. Specifically, Werner and Kaplan suggest that distancing takes place between person and referent, between person and symbolic vehicle, between symbolic vehicle and referent and between addressor and addressee. We describe the theoretical context and different aspects of the distancing process. Furthermore, we argue that the distancing process identifies central prerequisites of symbolic activity that are largely ignored by contemporary developmental theories. We demonstrate the different aspects of the distancing process in several domains of symbolic development, including words, gestural development and pretend play. Finally, we compare Werner and Kaplan’s concept of distancing to ideas of distancing developed in recent developmental theories.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".