Gal’perin’s Elaboration of VygotskyAuthor(s): James V.

Wertsch
Source: Human Development , Vol. 43, No. 2 (2000), pp. 103-106
Published by: S. Karger AG

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26763449

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 Commentary

Human Development 2000;43:103–106

Gal’perin’s Elaboration of Vygotsky

James V. Wertsch
Washington University, St. Louis, Mo., USA

Key Words
Abstract concepts W Gal’perin W Rationality W Vygotsky

In the mid 1970s I observed several sessions of an English language class for young
children in Moscow. This class was taught by Elena Negnevitskaya, a psycholinguist
who spoke excellent English and was interested in a wide range of psychological and
linguistic theories. The sessions were attended by about a dozen children, who sat
around a table in the middle of a midsized room on the first floor of an apartment
building in the center of the city. A parent or grandparent usually accompanied each
child to the class and sat around the edge of the room in a sort of spectators’ circle. There
was a great deal of the warm and intense interaction between teacher and children char-
acteristic of Russian schools in general, with a focus on group and individual recitation
in particular.
One of the instructional techniques that proved most memorable to me, and one
that provided a great deal of enjoyment and laughter among the children, was used by
Negnevitskaya whenever a student made a mistake in English. Her response would be to
produce a direct translation in Russian of what the child had said. For example, Negne-
vitskaya would respond to an utterance in English such as ‘They was there’ by saying the
Russian equivalent (Oni byl tam), at which point the children would burst out laughing
at how silly this sounded in their native language.
Negnevitskaya explained to me that this was a procedure that grew out of Piotr
Gal’perin’s theory of mental development, and the article by Arievitch and Stetsenko
provides insight into why. In their review of Gal’perin’s ideas about systemic-theoreti-
cal concept formation they go through several areas of instruction where the technique

The writing of this chapter was assisted by a grant from the Spencer foundation. The statements
made and the views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. Not for quotation.

© 2000 S. Karger AG, Basel James V. Wertsch, Department of Education

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has been studied and applied. The focus throughout on the transformation from naı̈ve-
empirical to theoretical thought reflects some of the main lessons that have derived
from Gal’perin’s writings. For example, in the case of language instruction, such as what
I witnessed in the English classes in Moscow, the goal was to change children’s orienta-
tion in speech activity. Specifically, the goal was to help children discover the ‘implicit
rational structure of language’ [Arievitch and Stetsenko, this issue] and on that basis
construct general, reflective models for grammatical relations.
As Arievitch and Stetsenko make clear, Gal’perin had a major impact on many
different areas of formal instruction in the Soviet Union and now in Russia. His is an
impact that to date has been little appreciated in the West, and for this reason Arievitch
and Stetsenko are making a major, and much needed, contribution by writing this arti-
cle. The single important exception to this generalization about the neglect of Gal’per-
in’s work in the West can be found in the Netherlands, where his ideas have been widely
discussed for decades. Even there, however, it is only in the last few years that an
extended authoritative text about Gal’perin has appeared in English [Haenen, 1996].
An additional source of information to the West about Gal’perin’s ideas has been the
writing of Vasili Davydov [1988], who studied with Gal’perin and whose work contin-
ued to reflect Gal’perin’s influence throughout Davydov’s life.
In their article Arievitch and Stetsenko argue that Gal’perin’s ideas constitute an
extension and elaboration of some of Vygotsky’s basic claims, and there is little doubt in
my mind that this is the case. It is well known that Gal’perin tended to operate some-
what in isolation from other Vygotsky followers such as A.N. Leont’ev and A.R. Luria,
but that makes him no less of an important figure when trying to understand Vygotsky’s
heritage and impact on Soviet and Russian psychology. In my view, however, Gal’perin
focused on only one side of Vygotsky’s complex theoretical musings, and in what follows
I shall try to map out just how he fits into a broader picture. This is not to deny for a
moment that Gal’perin clarified and extended Vygotsky’s ideas in an important way.
He clearly went beyond his mentor in some essential respects. However, like Davydov,
he tended to focus on one side of Vygotsky’s framework and to say relatively little about
the other.
The two sides of Vygotsky’s thinking that I have in mind are what have led me to
call him an ‘ambivalent rationalist’ [Wertsch, 1995, 1998]. In much of his writing,
Vygotsky was clearly oriented toward the sort of human cognition of primary concern to
figures like Gal’perin and Davydov. From this perspective, human cognition – and
indeed human nature – is taken to develop in the direction of increasing levels of
abstract rationality. Rational reflection and rational self-regulation are assumed to be
the teloi of human development.
Vygotsky’s views on these matters are reflected in his writings on concept develop-
ment. From this perspective, successful human development is characterized by the
transition from ‘unorganized heaps’ and other groupings based on subjective criteria, to
‘complexes’ with their objective but unstable foundations, to ‘pseudoconcepts’, which
outwardly mimic conceptual groupings, and finally to ‘genuine concepts’ with objective,
stable foundations in meaning and denotation.
A good formulation of Vygotsky’s position on these matters can be found in chap-
ters 5 and 6 of Thinking and Speech [1987]. In these chapters Vygotsky laid out an
account of concept development on the basis of his empirical studies using the ‘Vygot-
sky blocks’ and his studies of adult-child interaction in formal instructional settings
where abstract rationality is privileged.

104 Human Development Wertsch

2000;43:103–106

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 A funny thing happens, however, when one turns from the last page of chapter 6 of
Thinking and Speech to the first page of chapter 7. Instead of writing about increasingly
advanced and powerful levels of abstract, rational reflection and self-regulation, Vygot-
sky quotes from the poet Osip Mandel’shtam, from others writers such as Tolstoy and
Dostoevsky, and from Stanislavsky. Furthermore, he writes about highly contextualized
aspects of situated speech such as ‘sense’ and ‘abbreviation’ instead of foundational
issues for someone concerned with abstract rationality, issues such as decontextualized
meaning and grammatical relations, maximal explicitness in the surface form of utter-
ances, and so forth.
In my view, this major shift in interest and orientation reflects a deep ambivalence
and wonderment Vygotsky had about what it is to be human. Instead of focusing solely
on abstract rationality as the telos of human development, he also took note of a second
dimension of human consciousness. This second dimension cannot be ranked as a high-
er or lower form of development than abstract conceptual rationality. Instead, it is simp-
ly a qualitatively different side of mental life, something he sometimes described in
terms of an ‘aesthetic reaction’ or the ‘harmony of the imagination’ [Vygotsky, 1971]
rather than abstract rational thought.
It is quite difficult to be certain of what Vygotsky had in mind when referring to
these two aspects of human consciousness, let alone to describe his ideas in a nutshell. I
think it is possible, however, to identify the origins of his ideas on these issues. On the
one hand, it is clear that Vygotsky valued Enlightenment ideas and values concerned
with abstract rationality. This was part of the Marxist intellectual setting in which he
lived and worked, but he seems to have been equally affected by other intellectual
figures from the Enlightenment.
On the other hand, Vygotsky was heavily influenced by ideas from the German
Romantics and from the poets and writers of his own day. His fascination with Man-
del’shtam is a case in point, a case that has been explored more deeply in recent writings
by figures such as Vladimir Zinchenko [1997]. According to his widow, Mandel’shtam
had extremely romantic, if not mystical ideas about how he wrote his poetry. These
ideas have everything to do with transforming thought into words via sense-laden inner
speech, as described in chapter 7 of Vygotsky’s Thinking and Speech, and virtually noth-
ing to do with abstract rationality.
In my view, Vygotsky clearly recognized the power of the Romantic, as well as the
Enlightenment sides of human consciousness, and he struggled throughout his career to
incorporate both into his view of human nature. However, rather than melding them
into a coherent, integrated whole, he was able to explore the two only in relative isola-
tion. Of course this is not something about which one can be overly critical. No one
has found a very satisfactory answer to the puzzle of how to integrate these two teloi
of human nature or the two theories of meaning [cf. Taylor, 1985] associated with
them. The point is simply that unlike many psychologists, Vygotsky made room for
both aspects of human consciousness and in the end vacillated between them in his
writings.
Hence when Arievitch and Stetsenko discuss Gal’perin’s claims about the need to
encourage theoretical, rather than empirical concepts in terms of ‘one of the most potent
ideas in Vygotskian psychology’ (see p. 70), I would readily agree. Perhaps somewhat
differently from them, however, I would put the emphasis on one (i.e., one of the most
potent ideas). They are right in tracing this line of reasoning in Vygotsky and how it has
been elaborated and extended in Gal’perin’s writings. In particular, they are right in

Gal’perin’s Elaboration of Vygotsky Human Development 105

2000;43:103–106

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noting some of the weaknesses in how Vygotsky’s ideas have been taken over and devel-
oped and in arguing that Gal’perin had some important things to say about how to
clarify and strengthen these ideas.
In the end, however, I view Gal’perin as focusing on only one side of Vygotsky’s
writings on human consciousness. While Vygotsky was clearly concerned with this
aspect of our mentality, he also was intrigued with the harmony of the imagination that
was of concern to the Romantics and to his contemporaries on the Soviet scene. We
should welcome the important contributions Gal’perin made to our understanding of
this aspect of Vygotsky’s thinking, and we should welcome the insights Arievitch and
Stetsenko have provided in their analysis. Among other things, their writings raise even
more intriguing questions about how to characterize the source of Vygotsky’s ambiva-
lence about rationality and how the two sides of human consciousness that he envi-
sioned can be understood in a more overarching system.

References

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(9), pp. 3–83; Part 3: 30 (10), pp.3–77.
Haenen, J. (1996). Piotr Gal’perin: Psychologist in Vygotsky’s footsteps. Commack, NY: Nova Science Publishers.
Taylor, C. (1985). Human agency and language. Philosophical papers I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1971). The psychology of art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Vygotsky, L.S. (1987). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky: Vol. 1. Problems of general psychology. Including the
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Wertsch, J.V. (1995). Vygotsky the ambivalent Enlightenment rationalist. Volume XXI, Heinz Werner Lecture Series,
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[Mandel’stham’s walking stick and Mamardshvili’s pipe: The beginnings of an organic psychology.] Moscow:
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2000;43:103–106

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