[xmca] Vygotsky ´ s historicism

Hi Sasha (if I may),

On 3/29/08 9:26 PM, "Alexander Surmava" <monada@netvox.ru> wrote:
> Vygotsky realized the very first steps in
> critical overcoming of old metaphysical psychology so that we can compare
> his role in the history of psychology with the role of Emmanuel Kant in the
> history of philosophy. You surely know that overcoming of the old
> philosophical metaphysics needed in additional theoretic work, in insights
> of such great figures as Fichte, Shelling, Hegel and Marx. The same
> situation we meet in psychology.

I think I can understand the frustration for people who have been working
for years in a program of research which Vygotsky merely initiated 80 years
ago, when those of us in the west focus mainly on Vygotsky and seem to
ignore what has developed since.

But at the same time your analogy with Kant captures something important.
Just as Kant has been a tremendously important figure who people return to
again and again, in part to understand the work of those who came after him,
in my view there is much we can learn by returning to Vygotsky. Speaking for
myself, I am not yet at all clear on what he was trying to do, and I find
returning to his texts very rewarding. They offer us something fresh and
exciting.

> What Vygotsky understood as thinking?
> It¹s absolutely evident that he shared the sensualistic interpretation of
> thinking well-known in formal logic as a process of bringing of sensually
> perceived single instance under general concept. From this point of view a
> dull schoolchild who thoughtlessly acquire the skill of formal operations
> with words and can easily make formal group from words like ³aryk²
> (irrigation ditch in Central Asia), ³water², ³hoe² and ³melon² has a more
> developed thinking, a thinking approaching the ³scientific concepts²,
> whereas an illiterate peasant stands ³on more primitive² stage so that his
> thinking can be estimated as only ³thinking in complexes².

I can't agree that this is the interpretation of thinking that Vygotsky
offers us. Several weeks ago I posted a hasty message on concepts, and I'm
going to copy some of it here with a bit more detail. I mentioned that I can
see (at least) two accounts of concepts in V's writing. In Crisis and in
Educational Psychology he presents the first account. Later (in Pedology of
the Adolescent for example) he rejects this account and substitutes a
second. The first seems to be exactly what you are describing: that concepts
are a form of abstraction, facilitated by naming. In Crisis he writes:

³Everything described as a fact is already a theory. These are the words of
Goethe to which Munsterberg refers in arguing the need for a methodology.
When we meet what is called a cow and say: 'This is a cow,' we
add the act of thinking to the act of perception, bringing the given
perception under a general concept. A child who first calls things by their
names is making genuine discoveries. I do not see that this is a cow, for
this cannot be seen. I see something big, black, moving, plowing, etc., and
understand that this is a cow. And this act is an act of classification, of
assigning a singular phenomenon to the class of similar phenomena, of
systematizing the experience, etc. Thus, language itself contains the basis
and possibilities for the scientific knowledge of a fact. The word is the
germ of science and in this sense we can say that in the beginning of
science was the word² (47)

This idea that we "add" the act of thinking *to* the act of perception is a
very common view of how concepts work. It can be found widely in cognitive
psychology. It's an interpretation of thinking as separate from perception,
as logical classification, as generalization, based on linguistic
categories. Thinking gives 'form' to a 'content' that is provided by the
senses.

But the second account is quite different. In the Pedology of the Adolescent
Vygotsky rejects this view that concepts are abstract and mental (again
citing Goethe, this time critically):

³Here we come close to establishing one of the central points that must be
explained if we are to overcome the usual error relative to the break
between form and content in the development of thinking. From formal logic,
traditional psychology adopted the idea of the concept as an abstract mental
construct extremely remote from all the wealth of concrete reality. From the
point of view of formal logic, the development of concepts is subject to the
basic law of inverse proportionality between the scope and content of a
concept. The broader the scope of a concept, the narrower its content. This
means that the greater the number of objects that the given concept can be
applied to, the greater the circle of concrete things that it encompasses,
the poorer its content, the emptier it proves to be. The process of forming
concepts according to formal logic is extremely simple. The points of
abstracting and generalizing are internally closely connected with each
other from the point of view of one and the same process, but taken from
different aspects. In the words of K. Bühler, what logic terms an
abstraction and generalization is completely simple and understandable. A
concept from which one of the traits is taken away becomes poorer in
content, more abstract and augmented in scope, and becomes general."

So he is now rejecting the model of thinking as a formal, logical process of
categorization and abstraction. In its place he proposes that using a
concept is a process that penetrates deeply into the concrete character of
reality, in a complex unity of judgment, apperception, interpretation, and
recognition.

"The concept begins to be understood not as a thing, but as a process, not
as an empty abstraction, but as a thorough and penetrating reflection of an
object of reality in all its complexity and diversity, in connections and
relations to all the rest of realityŠ. Thus, we see that for the
psychologist, the concept is an aggregate of acts of judgment, apperception,
interpretation, and recognition. The concept taken in action, in movement,
in reality, does not lose unity, but reflects its true nature. According to
our hypothesis, we must seek the psychological equivalent of the concept not
in general representations, not in absolute perceptions and orthoscopic
diagrams, not even in concrete verbal images that replace the general
representations ­ we must seek it in a system of judgments in which the
concept is disclosed² (54-55).

In other words, conceptual thinking is a new way of seeing things, a
transfomed kind of perception, a transformed consciousness in
which multiple psychological functions work together. Judgment, perception,
recognition all work together to enable us to see something in its complex,
diverse linkages within a totality. I was thinking about this passage one
day while sitting in a garden filled with agave cactus. My scientific
knowledge of these plants is limited, but I was able to *see*, albeit dimly,
their hidden roots, their invisible interactions with surrounding plants,
their microscopic use of water and air.... To think scientifically is to
have a transformed perception of the world, one which involves interacting
(talking and working) with others.

> Generally the dialectic never deals with ³unities² of two different things,
> but only with identities of oppositions. An alive single whole splitting to
> opposite contradictory sides is inevitable basis of dialectical movement,
> its condition sine qua non.

I won't try to offer a reading of V's position on language for the simple
reason that I don't yet fully understand it! But I suspect it's equally
dialectical. Can't we read Vygotsky as trying to write about the way that
each child today has to work within ontogenesis to reconcile two seemingly
distinct practices, speaking and thinking, which phylogenetically were
rooted together in human practical activity but which have developed and
split? Ontogenesis does not recapitulate phylogeny: because each child has
to start at a new and different moment in human history, ontogenesis is
constantly facing new tasks. Adult thinking is not ahistorically logical, it
is the particular synthesis of higher psychological functions that is
possible at a particular point in phylogenesis.

Martin

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Received on Sun Mar 30 10:07 PDT 2008