Piaget/Vygotsky

nate (schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu)
Thu, 30 Apr 1998 14:54:15 -0500

The discussion reminded me of a link on Piatet/Vygotsky I have
on my Vygotsky web page. It was written by Cole and Wertsch.
It seems to discuss the very issues of this thread.
Nate

Beyond the Individual-Social Antimony in Discussions of Piaget
and Vygotsky
Michael Cole, University of California, San Diego
James V. Wertsch, Washington University, St. Louis

Ever since the publication of the first translation of
Vygotsky's Thought and Language (reborn as Thinking and Speech
25 years later) there has been an ongoing debate about the
relationship between the ideas of Vygotsky and Piaget. In the
brief space available, we have no interest in arguing the
virtues of one man's ideas over the other. Instead, we will
suggest that by and large commentators on the differences
between these two thinkers have placed too narrow an emphasis on
their ideas about the primacy of individual psychogenesis versus
sociogenesis of mind while neglecting what we believe is a
cardinal difference between them: their views concerning the
importance of culture, in particular, the role of mediation of
action through artifacts, on the development of mind.
Standard discussions of the difference between Vygotsky and
Piaget place a crucial difference in the proximal locus of
cognitive development. According to the canonical story, for
Piaget, individual children construct knowledge through their
actions on the world: to understand is to invent. By contrast,
the Vygotskian claim is said to be that understanding is social
in origin.

There are (at least) two difficulties with this story. First of
all, in principle, Piaget did not deny the co-equal role of the
social world in the construction of knowledge. It is possible to
find plenty of places where he says that both individual and
social are important.

There are no more such things as societies qua beings than there
are isolated individuals. There are only relations .... and the
combinations formed by them, always incomplete, cannot be taken
as permanent substances (Piaget, 1932, p. 360).

.. there is no longer any need to choose between the primacy of
the social or that of the intellect: collective intellect is the
social equilibrium resulting from the interplay of the
operations that enter into all cooperation (Piaget, 1970, p.
114)
Second, Vygotsky, contrary to another stereotype, insisted on
the centrality of the active construction of knowledge. This
insistence is reflected in passages such as the following,
which, ironically, Vygotsky wrote as part of a review and
critique of Piaget's account of egocentric speech:

Activity and practice: these are the new concepts that have
allowed us to consider the function of egocentric speech from a
new perspective, to consider it in its completeness ... But we
have seen that where the child's egocentric speech is linked to
his practical activity, where it is linked to his thinking,
things really do operate on his mind and influence it. By the
word things, we mean reality. However, what we have in mind is
not reality as it is passively reflected in perception or
abstractly cognized. We mean reality as it is encountered in
practice (1987, pp. 78-79).

Vygotsky's strong assumptions about the active individual are
reflected in his focus on practices such as speaking and
thinking and are the focus of an extended treatment in Zinchenko
(1985). One reaction to the realization of this complementarity
of active individual and active environment is to make co-
constructionism the basis of theorizing: there is both an active
child and an active environment (Valsiner, 1993; Wozniak, 1993).
We certainly subscribe to that. However, what gets left out of
such discussions, and the element we want to emphasize, is the
essential presence of a third factor in the process of co-
construction: the accumulated products of prior generations,
culture, the medium within which the two active parties to
development interact.

The Primacy of Cultural Mediation
Cultural-historical psychology as formulated by scholars
representing many national traditions begins from the assumption
that there is an intimate connection between the special
environment that human beings inhabit and the fundamental,
distinguishing, qualities of human psychological processes. The
special quality of the human environment is that it is suffused
with the achievements of prior generations in reified (and to
this extent materialized) form. This notion can be traced back
to at least Hegel and Marx (1845/1947) and is found in the
writings of cultural-historical psychologists from many national
traditions (Dewey, 1938; Durkheim, 1912; Leontiev, 1932; Luria,
1928; Stern, 1916/1990); Vygotsky, 1929). For example, John
Dewey wrote that:

... we live from birth to death in a world of persons and things
which is in large measure what it is because of what has been
done and transmitted from previous human activities. When this
fact is ignored, experience is treated as if it were something
which goes on exclusively inside an individual's body and mind.
It ought not to be necessary to say that experience does not
occur in a vacuum. There are sources outside an individual which
give rise to experience (Dewey, 1938/1963, p. 39).
In their early writing on this subject, the Russian
cultural-historical psychologists coupled a focus on the
cultural medium with the assumption that the special mental
quality of human beings is their need and ability to mediate
their actions through artifacts and to arrange for the
rediscovery and appropriation of these forms of mediation by
subsequent generations. This view was always present in
Vygotsky's writings, but it became increasingly important and
well formulated in the last decade of his life (Minick, 1987).
Indeed, in the year before his death he went so far as to write
that the central fact about our psychology is the fact of
mediation (1982, p. 166).
Language was the form of mediation that preoccupied Vygotsky
above all others, but when speaking of signs, or psychological
tools, he had a more extensive set of mediational means in mind,
a set that included 'various systems for counting; mnemonic
techniques; algebraic symbol systems; works of art; writing;
schemes, diagrams, maps, and mechanical drawings; all sorts of
conventional signs, and so on' (1981, p. 137).

In this view, then, the development of mind is the interweaving
of biological development of the human body and the
appropriation of the cultural/ideal/material heritage which
exists in the present to coordinate people with each other and
the physical world (See Cole, 1996; Wertsch, 1991; for further
discussion). Higher mental functions are, by definition,
culturally mediated; they involve not a 'direct' action on the
world, but an indirect action, one that takes a bit of material
matter used previously and incorporates it as an aspect of
action. In so far as that matter has itself been shaped by prior
human practice (e.g., it is an artifact), current action
benefits from the mental work that produced the particular form
of that matter.

When one adopts this position, several implications come along
with it. First, artifacts are recognized as transforming mental
functioning in fundamental ways. In Vygotsky's view:
The inclusion of a tool in the process of behavior (a)
introduces several new functions connected with the use of the
given tool and with its control; (b) abolishes and makes
unnecessary several natural processes, whose work is
accomplished by the tool; and alters the course and individual
features (the intensity, duration, sequence, etc.) of all the
mental processes that enter into the composition of the
instrumental act, replacing some functions with others (i.e., it
re-creates and reorganizes the whole structure of behavior just
as a technical tool re-creates the whole structure of labor
operations) (1981, pp.139-140). In such a view artifacts clearly
do not serve simply to facilitate mental processes that would
otherwise exist. Instead, they fundamentally shape and transform
them.

A second implication of this general position is that all
psychological functions begin, and to a large extent remain,
culturally, historically, and institutionally situated and
context specific. This follows from the fact that the artifacts
which enter into human psychological functions are themselves
culturally, historically, and institutionally situated. In a
sense, then, there is no way not to be socioculturally situated
when carrying out an action. Conversely there is no tool that is
adequate to all tasks, and there is no universally appropriate
form of cultural mediation. Even language, the 'tool of tools'
is no exception to this rule. There are times, our grandparents
told us, when silence is golden and there are times we all know
when words fail us.

A third implication of making cultural mediation central to mind
and mental development is that the meaning of an action and of a
context are not specifiable independent of each other. Taking
'action in context' as the unit of psychological analysis
requires a relational interpretation of mind; objects and
contexts arise together as part of a single bio-social-cultural
process of development.

Fourth is the implication that mind is no longer to be located
entirely inside the head; higher psychological functions are
transactions that include the biological individual, the
cultural mediational artifacts, and the culturally structured
social and natural environments of which persons are a part.1

Gregory Bateson (1972) highlighted this aspect of culturally
mediated action as involving cycles of transformations between
'inside' and 'outside.' 'Obviously,' Bateson wrote, 'there are
lots of message pathways outside the skin, and these and the
messages which they carry must be included as a part of the
mental system whenever they are relevant.' (p. 458). He then
proposed the following thought experiment:

Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap.
Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the hand of the
stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the
stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick (p. 459)?
In short, because what we call mind works through artifacts it
cannot be unconditionally bounded by the head nor even by the
body, but must be seen as distributed in the artifacts which are
woven together and which weave together individual human actions
in concert with and as a part of the permeable, changing, events
of life.

The earlier quote from Vygotsky on the inclusion of a tool in
the process of behavior entails a similar view. Specifically, he
was arguing that by incorporating new artifacts into our action
we transform the distribution of what is done within and beyond
the skin. Hence the process might be 'one that abolishes and
makes unnecessary several natural processes, whose work is
accomplished by the tool' (p.139).

Social Origins
With these considerations as background, we can now return to
the question of social origins and the relation of Vygotsky's
approach to Piaget's in the hopes of clarifying somewhat the
issues involved. For Vygotsky, like Piaget, the relationship
between the individual and the social is necessarily relational.
However, by placing cultural mediation at the center of adult
cognition and the process of cognitive development, social
origins take on a special importance in Vygotsky's theories that
is less symmetrical than Piaget's notion of social equilibration
as 'resulting from the interplay of the operations that enter
into all cooperation'. For Vygotsky and cultural-historical
theorists more generally, the social world does have primacy
over the individual in a very special sense. Society is the
bearer of the cultural heritage without which the development of
mind is impossible. When parents and other members of the
community create what Sara Harkness and Charles Super (1986)
have aptly referred to as a developmental niche for the
newcomer, the nature of that niche (including the forms of
social relationships it requires and affords) embody not only
the adult's cultural past but presuppositions about the child's
future as well. The niche is simultaneously a socio-physical
location, a cultural medium, and an interpretive frame. Children
in human developmental niches are both natural and cultural
entities at the start of post-natal development.

Newborns are, of course, ignorant of the meanings of the
artifacts they encounter and the ways in which those artifacts
(including words of the language as well as diapers, mobiles,
and pacifiers) are to be incorporated into action. At birth the
cultural past is, literally, thrust upon them.

This is not to say that the process of becoming socialized can
be reduced to simple learning or that there is no room for
active construction in it. It is to say, however, that social
processes give rise to individual processes and that both are
essentially mediated by artifacts. Vygotsky explicated the first
of these two claims in his general genetic law of cultural
development according to which interpersonal/inter-mental
processes are the precursors and necessary condition for the
emergence of individual/intra-mental (psychological) processes.

In Vygotsky's view, processes on both the inter-mental and the
intra-mental planes are necessarily mediated by cultural
artifacts. His comment that word meaning is 'both [speech and
thinking] at one and the same time; it is a unit of verbal
thinking' (1987, p.47) is quite telling in this connection. It
is because the same basic mediational means is used on the
social and individual planes that transition from the former to
the latter, as well as vice versa, are possible. In fact the
very boundary between social and individual, a boundary that has
defined much of our thinking in psychology, comes into question
in Vygotsky's writings. Just as the mind does not stop with the
skin in his view, the relationship between individual and social
environment is much more dynamic than the overly simple division
we so often tacitly assume. Of course this is not to say that
useful boundaries cannot be drawn as we pursue our inquiry but
it is to question some of the implicit assumptions we usually
make about where mind located and what its nature is. This same
set of considerations explains why the idea of a zone of
proximal development plays such a central role in Vygotsky's
account of development. In Vygotsky's now familiar account, this
zone is defined as the distance between the level of actual
development and the more advanced level of potential development
that comes into existence in interaction between more and less
capable participants. An essential aspect of this interaction is
that less capable participants can participate in forms of
interaction that are beyond their competence when acting alone.
(This is a point emphasized by Cazden (1981) when she wrote of
performance before competence in referring to mechanisms of
language and cognitive development).

Of course tutees operate within constraints provided in part by
the more capable participants, but an essential aspect of this
process is that they must be able to use words and other
artifacts in ways that extend beyond their current understanding
of them, thereby coordinating with possible future forms of
action. If we ask what makes such intermental functioning
possible, we must certainly speak about issues such as context,
the existing level of intramental functioning, and so forth.
However, there is an essential sense in which intermental
functioning and the benefits it offers a tutee in the zone of
proximal development would not be available if one could not
perform, or at least participate in performances, that go beyond
one's current level of competence. In this sense, social
interaction is not a direct, transparent, or unmediated process.
Instead, it takes place in an artifact-saturated medium,
including language, and this is a point that Vygotsky took into
account in a thoroughgoing manner.

Mind is distributed
It is interesting to note that Vygotsky's argument on these
issues bears a striking similarity to the recent movement in
cognitive science associated with the notion of distributed
cognition and situated learning (Bechtel, 1993; Clark, in press;
Cole & Engestrom, 1993; Hutchins, 1995; Lave & Wenger, 1991; et
passim). Central to this line of thought is the effort to create
an external symbol system approach that 'moves formal symbols
... out of the head and locate them in the environment of the
system'. Clark (in press) has argued for a position which
recognizes the need to give 'more attention, and credit, to the
many ways in which networks can learn to exploit external
environmental structures so as to simplify and transform the
nature of internal processing' (p.16). Related arguments have
been put forth by Rumelhart, Smolensky, and Hinton (1986); Clark
(1989); Dennett (1991) and Hutchins (1995). In short, Vygotsky's
position on the centrality of artifacts, including external
artifacts, in human mental processes is one that has great
resonance in contemporary cognitive science as well as the human
sciences more broadly.

There is little doubt in our view that there is still much to be
learned from both Piaget and Vygotsky, and in many cases the
strengths of one theorist complement the weakness of the other.
However, we believe that discussions of these two figures'
accounts of mind and its boundaries are not well served by
overly rehearsed debates about the primacy of the individual or
the social. Instead, we have argued that the more interesting
contrast between them concerns the role of cultural artifacts in
constituting the two poles of the individual-social antimony.
For Vygotsky, such artifacts play a central role in elaborating
an account of what and where mind is. In pursuing this line of
inquiry, he focused on a set of issues and phenomena that do not
appear to have any clear counterpart in Piaget9s thinking, and
consequently may be more appropriately characterized as being
different, rather than directly in conflict with those at the
center of Piaget9s project.

References
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approach to man's understanding of himself. New York:
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Bechtel, W. (1993) The case for connectionism. Philosophical
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Cazden, C. (1981) Performance before competence: Assistance to
child discourse in the zone of proximal development. Quarterly
Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 3,
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Clark, A. (in press) The world, the flesh, and the artificial
neural network. Draft of chapter for 2nd Edition of PDP volumes.

Cole, M. (1996) Culture in mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
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Cole, M., & Engestrom, Y. (1993) A cultural-historical approach
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cognitions: Psychological and educational considerations. New
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Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT
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Wertsch, J.V. (1991) Voices of the mind: A sociocultural
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Wozniak, R.H. (1993) Co-constructive metatheory for psychology:
Implications for an analysis of families as specific social
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Zinchenko, V.P. (1985) Vygotsky's ideas about units of analysis
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1 In this anti-atomistic stance, we are always subject to what
Charles Taylor (1985) has called outside interference. Or, put
more positively in Vygotskian terms, a specific characteristic
of human thought is the ability and need to control oneself from
the outside (Luria, 1979).

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