Re: garbled history

From: Keith Sawyer (ksawyer@artsci.wustl.edu)
Date: Sat Apr 20 2002 - 10:35:10 PDT


“ ‘Society’ and ‘individuals’ do not denote separable phenomena” (Cooley, 1902, pp. 1-2).

The "Emergence in Psychology" article currently posted on XMCA's site has some historical information exploring connections between Vygotsky and pragmatism.  On pages 7-8, I discuss how emergence thinkers influenced both Mead and Dewey in the 1920s, with specific quotations from them crediting the British emergentist philosophers working in the early and mid 1920s.  Both were also heavily influenced by James, Cooley, Bergson, and Whitehead--each of whom drew on emergentist elements in their theories--and we know that Vygotsky was familiar with James and Bergson at least. 

On page 13, I argue that many of the ideas that we associate with Vygotsky were widely discussed and shared among thinkers in the early decades of the 20th century; not only the American pragmatists but also French and German scholars.  (I agree with King Beach that Valsiner has done excellent scholarship exploring these connections.)

One of the first articles that I know of that pointed out connections between Vygotsky and the pragmatists is: John-Steiner, V., & Tatter, P. (1983). An interactionist model of language development. In B. Bain (Ed.), The sociogenesis of language and human conduct (pp. 79-97). New York: Plenum Press.  It is an excellent article.  (Mike Cole wrote the foreword to this book.)

I also agree with King that the fact that we are noticing these connections is an interesting fact of intellectual history in itself.  I myself discovered the pragmatists first; when I then read Vygotsky, I remember thinking that I didn't see much that was different.  I feel that the pragmatists provide a more useful, more elaborated set of writings to ground socioculturalism.

R. Keith Sawyer

http://www.keithsawyer.com/
Assistant Professor
Department of Education
Washington University
Campus Box 1183
St. Louis, MO  63130
314-935-8724



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