I was in the process of writing something longer on levels of analysis (in
which I was going to say something about Marx's conception of how levels of
analysis are both determined by the nature of the studied phenomenon and
determine how it is understood) when Eugene's email arrived and was moved to
change metaphorical pens and reply to this. Why is it 'either' / 'or'?
Vygotsky's position, as I understand it and as he himself maintained , was
fundamentalIy a dialectical one in which dichotomies such as mind-body,
subject-object are understood by their contradictory and mediated
relationship within larger totalities. I have recently read Vygotsky's
'Crisis' and, while he does speak of the nature of the subject matter
imposing itself on e.g. the structure of a discipline, it doesn't make sense
of the rest of the article to see this as being in a direct, deterministic
way. Why then would he be so insistent on the need for a correct scientific
method (which one might paraphrase as 'specific nature of academic
practice')?
On 'positivistic thought' (and leaving Hegel to one side), I think that
these days people talking about scientific method / knowledge and taking a
realist position are often wrongly taken to be positivists. Many of the
most
brilliant parts of 'Crisis' are polemics precisely against positivist
thinking e.g. Vygotsky says that there can be no facts without conceptions
and no conceptions (even the most abstract) without an element of fact i.e.
the incursion of some element of an objective reality. He argues against the
idea that there can be direct perception of the world through sense
impressions as argued by empiricism. He quotes Engels a number of times to
this effect. He also states that induction is worthless without analysis.
(By the way, his talk about molecules being the smallest units in which one
can talk about water is taken directly from Engels.)
As far as the units of analysis are concerned, at one point he does say
something which I found puzzling - namely, that the study of social
psychology should begin with the individual. He justifies this by saying
'each person is to some degree a measure of the society or rather class to
which he belongs, for the whole totality of social relationships is
reflected in him... We must reconquer the right for psychology to examine
what is special, the individual as a social microcosm, as an expression of
the measure of the society.' Vygotsky argues for this on the basis of the
methodological principle of moving from the special to the general. While
his general observation about individuals is true, I cannot see why it forms
the _preferred_ starting point for him, were it not, I suspect, that he
thinks that there are too many practical and methodological problems in a
'mass psychology' that can justify itself as a science.
Bruce Robinson