http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/psycri01.html
"A psychology which is called upon to confirm the truth of its thinking in
practice, which attempts not so much to explain the mind but to understand
and master it, gives the practical disciplines a fundamentally different
place in the whole structure of the science than the former psychology did.
There practice was the colony of theory, dependent in all its aspects on
the metropolis. Theory was in no way dependent on practice. Practice was
the conclusion, the application, an excursion beyond the boundaries of
science, an operation which lay outside science and came after science,
which began after the scientific operation was considered completed.
Success or failure had practically no effect on the fate of the theory. Now
the situation is the opposite. Practice pervades the deepest foundations of
the scientific operation and reforms it from beginning to end. Practice
sets the tasks and serves as the supreme judge of theory, as its truth
criterion. It dictates how to construct the concepts and how to formulate
the laws."
If practice predominates it seems to call into question broad universal
theoretical laws. I found the above quote consistant with Newman and
Holzman's argument of the role of practice in Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary
Scientist. While at times in the Historical Crisis in Psychology he does
appear to be referring to applied psychology as in "defectology" at other
times as in the above quote it resonates at least for me a contextualist
approach.
Also in his text on "Child Psychology" he reviews Busemann which looked at
age, sex, and social environment. If my memory serves me correctly the
research was criticized for not being diverse enough as in city and rural
children were not looked at seperately. In regard to class Vygotsky
argued;
"the working class adolescent is not simply arrested at an earlier stage of
development in comparison to the bourgeois adolescent, but is an adolecent
with a different type of personality development, with a different
structure and dynamics of self consciousness"
He argued on a very similar line on his text on "Defectology" in reference
to children with disabilities. He mentioned something to the extent that
just as a child from different historical epochs can not be judged against
each other so the same for a blind child, they are qualititively different
developments.
In both these situations Vygotsky saw universalities as having its limit.
He critisized Piaget on class grounds and argued for the importance of
research in other cultures and class backgrounds. Especially in respect to
defectolgy he felt development was contingent on the sign systems available
to the child. It seems the above quote on class was following a similar
approach in which development was contingent on ones social environment.
Also as Yarochevsky argues Vygotsky saw development being studied on two
planes; the plane of transformation which can be seen as universalistic to
a certain extent, and that development with its own zig zags, stages, and
dramatic effects which I see as contextualist. I tend to interpret
Vygotsky in a similar way which makes it difficult to pin him as either a
universalist or contextualist. He saw some general rules as in concept
development, but even in that generalizability he saw development as an
individual endeaver that was contingent on a sociocultural context.
Also El'konin which was merely an elaboration of the dialectical
developmental approach that Vygotsky outlined in Child Psychology the
sphere of affect (world of people) seems to point toward a contextualist
approach to development.
In respect to contextualism, Dewey and Pragmatism come to mind and I
definately see connection between Vygotsky and Dewey's theories which has
been mentioned before. I do think its difficult to pin him down as a
universalist or contextualist. On one hand he created stages of concept
development, child development, periods, crisis etc, but then he would
negate them by his comments on adolesence and children with disabilities.
I think he saw universal laws as being subordinated to a cultural context.
Nate
Nate Schmolze
http://www.geocities.com/~nschmolze/
schmolze who-is-at students.wisc.edu
People with great passions, people who accomplish great deeds,
People who possess strong feelings even people with great minds
and a strong personality, rarely come out of good little boys and girls
L.S. Vygotsky