Some reflections on L.S.

Vygotsky’s Thought and Language*

JERRY FODOR

M.I.T., Cambridge. Mass.

According to the textbook accounts, philosophy and psychology achieved an amicable

divorce towards the end of the last century. Psychology assimilated the experimental
method and became the science of the mind (or, in some versions, of behavior).
Philosophy went on doing whatever it is philosophers do.
As often happens with textbook accounts, this one is a little lacking in its feeling for
nuance. On the one hand, philosophers speculating about mental processes had never
been entirely unaware of the possible bearings of experimental findings upon their
theories, though it is true enough that they rarely thought of running the experiments.
Thus, discussions of the Mollyneaux problem run through the Empiricist literature
from Locke forward and the examples of perceptual illusions with which contemporary
psychologists enliven introductory courses are sometimes borrowed from Berkeley.
If epistemology was not entirely unaware of the existence of what would now be
recognized as specifically psychological problems, it is equally true that contemporary
psychology has not abandoned the body of epistemological assumptions that consti-
tute much of its philosophical heritage. The discovery that experimental research on
mental processes is possible in principle (and occasionally rewarding in fact) marks the
beginning of modern psychology. But, very often, the psychological experimenter is
motivated by theories which are recognizably (if unconsciously) borrowed from the
philosophy of mind. Thus, the profound similarities between modern associationism
and classical Empiricism have repeatedly been remarked, as has the indebtedness of
Gestalt psycholgy to philosophical Rationalism.

* Thought and Language was first published in
1934 and is, of course, a classic in the literature
on cognitive development. I have, however,
chosen to treat it as a contemporary text rather
than a period piece, both because many of
Vygotsky’s notions are still widespread in
psychology, and because they seem to me in-
trinsically worth a run for their money. Page
references are to L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and
Language (1965) Cambridge, Mass., M.I.T.
Press.

Cognition I (I), pp. 83-95

84 Jerry Fodor

The official dichotomization of philosophy and psychology has not, in short, spared
psychologists the necessity of dealing with characteristically philosophical issues.
Rather, the philosophy in psychology books has tended to go underground, living the
life of the implicit assumption and the unstated methodological postulate. Psychol-
ogists have not been able to stop doing philosophy, for no one can think seriously
about mentation without eventually dealing with the sorts of issues that presented
themselves to Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Kant. But they have often managed to stop
noticing when they are doing philosophy, and from not doing it consciously, it is a short
step to not doing it well.
Vygotsky’s book is a classic example of this state of affairs. What Vygotsky wanted
to do was pursue a straightforward ‘scientific’ investigation of the relation between
talking and thinking: one which adopted no philosophical preconceptions whatever
and no generalizations except those dictated by experimental results. What, in fact,
happened was that at every move Vygotsky’s hand was forced by largely a priori as-
sumptions about the nature of concepts; assumptions whose influence is evident
both in the decisions Vygotsky makes about what experiments are worth running and
in the conclusions he accepts on the basis of his experimental results. And, since the
assumptions he adopts are seen to be untenable as soon as they are made explicit, it is
small wonder that they eventually run him into a muddle. The present paper is a
meditation on these unhappy events.
Vygotsky’s book is ostensibly about the ‘problem of thought and language’, a
problem that bothered his generation more than it bothers ours. ‘The problem’ is
simply whether thought and language can be distinguished, and Vygotsky, sensibly,
holds that the answer is ‘yes’. There is every reason to suppose that some thinking is
nonverbal: one need not say anything to oneself when one thinks how a steak tastes
served medium rare. Conversely, there is abundant reason to suppose that some ver-
balization is unaccompanied by thought. This last point is something more than a
joke. The theory that says intelligent talking is reciting aloud to the dictation of a small
inner voice lacks both logical coherence (who dictates to the voice?) and introspective
plausibility.
If the traditional problem of thought and language now strikes one as slightly un-
interesting, that is perhaps because it was almost invariably formulated in the nar-
rowest possible terms. Thought was identified with problem solving (as though one
cannot think ‘Sunday will perhaps be warm’) and language was identified with speech.
On both grounds one is at a loss to understand what Vygotsky is up to when he argues
for the phylogenetic independence of thought from language on the evidence that
problem solving in apes is largely independent of vocalization. It is not self-evident that
problem solving in experimental situations is a reasonable paradigm either for ape
mentation or for ours. And it is still less evident why the call system of apes ought to be
 Some reflections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language 85

compared to a human language. Vygotsky’s astonishing remark that human speech

‘certainly originated’ in such vocalizations as apes produce in high motivational states
(40) is presumably to be treated as a lapse.
It is worth remarking that the problem of the relation between thought and language
can be disentangled from the context of phylogenetic and ontogenetic theorizing in
which it has traditionally been enmeshed. For that matter, there is an important sense in
which it can, and should, be freed of any specifically linguistic context, since it belongs
with a class of problems about cognition that have nothing in particular to do with
language.
For example, something psychologists worry about less than they might is the routine
ability of higher organisms to interpret information in any one input mode in terms of
information from any other. What we see often determines how we take what we hear.
The way things smell affects the way they taste, and vice versa and so on. It is tempting
(perhaps it is mandatory) to explain such interactions by assuming that sensory channels
transduce stimulus data into a central computing language rich enough to represent
visual, tactual, auditory, gustatory and olfactory information as well as whatever ab-
stract conceptual apparatus is involved in thought. In such a language are performed the
calculations involved in evaluating the auditory implications of visual inputs, the
gustatory implications of olfaction, etc. It is, in any event, self-evident that the language
in which we integrate visual and auditory information cannot be either the language of
vision or the language of audition, though it must contain both.
Insofar as one accepts this sort of model, one is led to think of a natural language as
analogous to a sensory mode, i.e., as providing a channel through which input data
can gain access to the central information handling system. Linguistic data, like sen-
sory data, are subject to integration and interpretation in light of memory information
and current experience (for the integration and interpretation of which they are in turn
available). Presumably the computations underlying these integrative processes are
effected in the central code. If this is so, then the production and comprehension of
speech involve translating between this central code and a natural language.
On this account, the problem of thought and language is primarily the problem
of characterizing these information exchanges between natural languages and the
central computing language. The distinction between the programming languages
in which real computers talk to their environment and the machine languages in which
they talk to themselves thus provides a precedent for a distinction between the internal
code in which our thinking is carried out and the linguistic systems in which we ex-
change the results of our computations.
Nor is (anecdotal) evidence’for the psychological reality of such a distinction
entirely lacking. We tend to lose detail about the form and source of input information
faster than we lose its content, and this would be the natural expectation if the central
86 Jerry Fodor

language is distinct from, and relatively neutral between, the various codes that the
input systems use. Did you first hear or read that the sum of the angles of a triangle
is 180 degrees? If you are French/English bilingual, try to remember whether you saw
the dubbed or the original version of ‘Devil in the Flesh’. Probably you have to do it
by trying to recall the circumstances in which you saw the film; if so, what you have lost
in memory is precisely information which specifies the original input code.
These reflections suggest aspects of the problem of thought and language which lead
directly to deep questions in theoretical psychology. To what extent is the presumed
internal code innate, to what extent is it labile? It bears on this question whether a
natural language, once learned, can be incorporated into the computing language,
thereby itself becoming a vehicle of thought. Or again, however exact the analogy be-
tween languages and sensory modes, it is important that languages are learned. If
talking a language involves translating into and out of a central computing language,
then learning a language must involve constructing a system (in effect, a ‘compiler’)
for effecting this translation. It is, however, hard to imagine that we, or any other
mechanism, could be able to construct compilers for arbitfury codes. What, then, are
the innate constraints on the codes that we can learn to compile? What must a lan-
guage be that a man may learn to speak it?1
There are, in short, a number of ways in which the problem of thought and lan-
guage might profitably be revived. None of these, however, figure in Vygotsky’s
book which, despite its title, is primarily concerned with issues in the theory of cog-
nitive development. There is, Vygotsky maintains, a preverbal stage in thought and a
preintellectual stage in speech. Moreover, the eventual recruitment of verbal categories
in the service of thought, and the corresponding acquisition of the capacity to express
thought in verbalization, is by no means an instantaneous achievement on the part of
the developing child. That ‘word meanings evolve . . . as the child develops’ (124) is
perhaps the central thesis of Vygotsky’s book. Specifically, this is understood to mean
that the type of concept a child is capable of entertaining at a given stage is char-
acteristic of its developmental level. The mental development of a child is thus viewed
as a progression which finds its terminus in the achievement of fully adult patterns of
conceptualization.

1. In the Philosophical Investigations, Witt-
genstein (1953) criticizes some remarks of
Augustine’s on language learning: ‘Augustine
describes the learning of human language as if
the child came into a strange country and did
not understand the language of the country;
that is, as if it already had a language, only not
this one. Or again: as if the child could al-
ready think, only not yet speak. And “think”
would heremean somethinglike “talk to itself”‘.
(para. 32) Wittgenstein seems to suppose that
the absurdity of that sort of view is self-evident.
I have been arguing, on the contrary, that the
Augustinian account is likely to be precisely
correct.
 Some rejections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language 87

Now, there is a serious prima facie objection to this sort of line which Vygotsky fails
to meet in any satisfactory way. It is that if the conceptualizations of children are
radically different from those of adults, it is extremely difficult to imagine how children
and adults could ever manage to understand one another. All the more so if the alleged
differences are supposed to be differences in word meanings, for that is to say that
adults and children are, in a fairly strict sense, talking different languages; a situation
only barely disguised by the similarities of the phonological and syntactic system the
languages employ.
Vygotsky’s way of dealing with this objection is simply hopeless. He says, ‘...(the
child’s) usage of words coincides with that of adults in its objective reference but not
in its meaning’ (130). That is, the child and the adult are supposed to be employing
terms that exhibit extensional but not intensional identity.
To see that this solution cannot be right, consider the case of witches, ghosts, goblins,
and elves. Since these concepts have the same extension (namely, the null set), our
discussions with children about which of them (e.g.) rides on broomsticks cannot be
mediated by a merely extensional consensus. Analogously, one could hardly teach a
child that Lenin was the father of the revolution if you agree on who the terms refer
to but not on what they mean. On the contrary, the condition upon a statement which
expresses a synthetic identity being informative is precisely that one knows what the
terms mean but not what they refer to. (Cf., Frege, 1952).
Of course, children and adults often do misunderstand one another in ways that
suggest differences in the conceptual equipment each brings to the communication
situation. But, prima facie, these would seem to be differences of degree, not dif-
ferences of kind. For example, adult concepts form a rich and elaborately intercon-
nected network, of which the child’s developing conceptual system is at best a sketch.
So that, even when parent and child use the same words, the adult may sense res-
onances and ironies that escape the child. Compare the way you read Alice in Wonder-
land now with the way you read it the first time.
In fact, however, Vygotsky does not understand the differences between the adult’s
concepts and the child’s in terms of the relative systematicity of the former. On the
contrary, it is a serious objection to Vygotsky’s account of the nature of concepts that
he fails to realize the extent to which each obtains its identity from its position in a net-
work which connects them all. We shall see that, like most philosophical Empiricists,
Vygotsky thinks that concepts are severally related to experience by necessary and
sufficient conditions for their application, so that whether a given concept applies is,
at least in principle, independent of any fact about the world except those mentioned in
its definition. The difficulties with this sort of view have been persuasively argued by
such philosophers as Quine (1961) and Putnam (1962), and I shall not review them here.
In short, there are obvious quantitative differences between the mentation of adults
 88 Jerry Fodor

and children, and one might consider how far an appeal to these might take one in ex-
plaining the occasionally startling differences in their cognitive styles. For Vygotsky,
however, the differences are radical and epistemic. It is not just that the adult knows
more than the child, or that he sees more of the ways in which what he knows inter-
connects. Rather, adults and children use different kinds of concepts. Hence, they must
misunderstand each other essentially; and, insofar as they appear to communicate,
the appearances must be misleading. Nothing less than this is entailed by the view that
word meanings evolve.
Insofar as this is prima facie an unpalatable consequence, pretty strong evidence will
be needed to support it. But the striking fact about Vygotsky’s theory is that it is
motivated almost entirely by his failure to find in children conceptual capacities which
he assumes, on strictly a priori grounds, are paradigmatic of the mentation of adults.
Of course, this finding might show that conceptualization undergoes radical develop-
mental changes. But it might equally show (what is considerably less exciting) just that
Vygotsky was wrong about the nature of adult concepts.
One can put this point in a way that makes the (presumptive) error sound less like
an empirical mistake and more like a philosophical muddle. Vygotsky assumes a grada-
tion of concepts from concrete-and-infantile to abstract-and-adult. Now, the question
whether children’s concepts are, in Vygotsky’s sense, concrete is an empirical question,
as is the question whether adults have concepts that are, in Vygotsky’s sense, abstract.
But the logically prior question whether any sense can be made of the notions of
concreteness and abstractness themselves is an a priori question, not an experimental
one. I think that Vygotsky has in large part created the problem he is trying to solve by
unwarranted assumptions about what makes for conceptual abstractness.
What Vygotsky thinks a concept is emerges most clearly from the experimental proce-
dures he uses to test for them. According to an editorial footnote borrowed from Con-
ceptual Thinking in Schizophrenia:
‘The material used in the concept formation tests consists of 22 wooden blocks
varying in color, shape, height, and size. There are 5 different colors, 6 different
shapes, 2 heights (the tall blocks and the flat blocks), and 2 sizes of the horizontal
surface (large and small). On the underside of each figure, which is not seen by
the subject, is written one of the four nonsense words: lag, bik, mur, cev. Regard-
less of color or shape, lag is written on all tall large figures, bik on all flat large
figures, mur on the tall small ones, and cev on the flat small ones. At the beginning
of the experiment all blocks, well mixed as to color, size and shape, are scattered
on a table in front of the subject. . the examiner turns up one of the blocks (the
“sample”), shows and reads its name to the subject, and asks him to pick out all the
blocks which he thinks might belong to the same kind. After the subject has done
so... the examiner turns up one of the “wrongly” selected blocks, shows that this
 Some rejections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language 89

is a block of a different kind, and encourages the subject to continue trying. As

the number of the turned blocks increases, the subject by degrees obtains a basis
for discovering to which characteristics of the blocks the nonsense words refer.
As soon as he makes this discovery the.. . words.. . come to stand for definite kinds
of objects (e.g., lag for large tall blocks, bik for large flat ones), and new concepts
for which the language provides no names are thus built up. The subject is then
able to complete the task of separating the four kinds of blocks indicated by the
nonsense words. Thus the use of concepts has a definite functional value for the
performance required by this test. Whether the subject actually uses conceptual
thinking in trying to solve the problem.. . can be inferred from the nature of the
groups he builds and from his procedure in building them: Nearly every step in his
reasoning is reflected in his manipulations of the blocks. The first attack on the
problem; the handling of the sample; the response to correction; the finding of the
solution - all these stages of the experiment provide data that can serve as indica-
tors of the subject’s level of thinking.’ (56-57)
In short, what the child must learn to do in the task Vygotsky sets is think of the
objects before him as being characterized by some rather small number of criteria1
properties. For example, he must learn to attend to the color, size and shape of the
blocks, but to ignore indefinitely many such task-irrelevant properties as their weight,
texture, distance from his hand, and so on. Having isolated the properties that are
relevant to sorting, the child must then learn to choose those of the objects that exhibit
some Boolean function of the criteria1 properties. Characteristically, his language
provides him with words for each of the criteria1 properties (‘large’, ‘red’, etc.) but fails
to provide him with (single) words which exactly characterize the relevant Boolean
functions. Since it does, however, provide him with phrases (‘large and red’ etc.), and
since he has presumably got these sorts of phrases well under control prior to his ex-
perience in the experimental situation, it would seem hazardous to claim either that
‘new concepts for which the language provides no names are.. . built up’ in the course of
the experiment or that the experimental situation recapitulates the experience of the
child learning word meanings in his (first) language. What seems to be going on is rather
that the child is learning that ‘bik’ translates ‘large and flat’ in the nonce-language of
the experiment.
Two points need to be stressed. First, that for purposes of this test, and, so far as I
can discover, throughout Vygotsky’s book, mastery of a concept requires the isolation
of sensory invariants whose presence or absence determines whether an individual falls
under the concept. Vygotsky repeatedly speaks of a hierarchy of abstractness in which,
it appears, the defining conditions for the application of higher level concepts are to be
specified as functions of lower level concepts. Second, the mathematics of concept for-
mation is assumed to be the set theoretic operations of forming the union, intersection,
90 Jerry Fodot

complement, etc., of sets of objects exhibiting the criteria1 attributes. According to

Vygotsky, ‘ . . .the advanced concept presupposes more than unification (i.e., more than
applicability of the concept to a variety of individuals). To form such a concept, it
is also necessary to abstract, to sing14 out elements and to view the abstracted ele-
ments apart from the totality of the concrete experience in which they are embedded.’
(76). The condition upon a concept is, then, that the individuals falling under it should
share some Boolean function of criteria1 attributes and the condition upon forming a
concept is that the relevant criteria should be abstracted out of the noisy attributes with
which they co-occur in individual objects. Finally, criteria1 attributes are themselves
functions of sensory invariants.
Now, the question is whether, in general, adult concepts have these characteristics.
This question is important since it turns out, on Vygotsky’s data, that skilled perfor-
mance on his test is a rather late achievement, one which Vygotsky is disinclined to attrib-
ute to the pre-adolescent. So, if adult conceptualization is what Vygotsky thinks it is, and
what the Vygotsky test presupposes that it is, the history of mental development is
indeed the history of the child’s gradual approximation of adult mastery of Boolean
logic. If, on the other hand, adult concepts do not, in general, fit the Vygotsky model,
if an adult concept isn’t the sort of thing that Vygotsky supposes it to be, then there is
less interest in the fact that children find it hard, and adults find it less hard, to perform
with Vygotsky blocks. The same could be said, after all, of bricks.
Vygotsky himself mentions a number of adult concepts that fail to fit the model,
including the concept of furniture, the concept of a family, and the concept of table-
ware. In each case (and one could add indefinitely more; indeed, it is difficult to think
of concepts that do fit Vygotsky’s model other than lag, bik, mur, and cev) there is no
sensory attribute, and no Boolean feature of sensory attributes, characteristic of all and
only the instances that fall under the concept. Hence there is no way of learning the
concept by abstracting a sensory invariant from each of its instances. What knives,
spoons, and forks have in common is not that they look, feel, etc. alike, but that they
are used for analogous purposes. Say, if you wish, that that is the property abstracted
out by the child. But you will hardly say that this defining property (being used for
eating) is less abstractly related to sensory data than the defined concept (tableware).
There is thus no point in saying that the child learns the concept by abstracting out the
property, since, if there is a puzzle about how he does the one, there is the same puzzle
about how he does the other.
Vygotsky recognized concepts which lack the appropriate kind of invariants as
apparent counter-examples to his account of concepts and to his account of concept
learning. But he does so only in order to castigate them (and here the vocabulary of
opprobrium becomes explicitly philosophical) as merely factitious, concrete, lacking in
logical unity, unreal (!) and so on.
 Some reflections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language 91

Why the concept of family relation is less logical, more concrete, less real, more fac-
titous, etc., than the concepts lag, bik, mur, and cev., escapes me. After all, is not the
relation ‘father of’ asymmetrical, intransitive, irreflexive, and so on? And aren’t these
logical relations in good standing? Indeed, they are the same logical relations required
to define a hierarchy. What, then, could lead one to say that the child who understands
why two people who look as different as James Smith and Alfred Smith are both called
Smith is operating at a less abstract conceptual level than an adult who can learn to sort
blocks into blue squares and red spheres?
If there is no reason to suppose that concepts must, in general, be defined by re-
ference to sensory invariants, there is still less reason to suppose that such defining
properties as there are must be specifiable by Boolean operations. Predictably, Vygotsky
runs into serious troubles when he touches upon the child’s mastery of any of the in-
definitely many concepts which cannot be so specified. For example, most children
presumably learn that there is no largest number. But this fact cannot be represented
by the sort of finitistic mathematics with which Vygotsky hopes to treat adult con-
cepts. Vygotsky’s treatment of the learning of arithmetic relations is thus exhausted by
the remark ‘at the earlier stage certain aspects of objects had been abstracted and gen-
eralized into ideas of numbers’ (114). This is, of course, fudge. What aspects of objects
could be abstracted out to provide the notion of number? Their cardinality? And how,
from any finite number of such abstractive processes, could the child conceivably arrive
at the notion that the number of numbers is infinite?
It would appear that Vygotsky simply has not got a clear idea of the enormous com-
putational complexity of the concepts children are required (and normally manage)
to acquire. For example, one would think it a sufficient explanation of why children
find it hard to learn to write that the task involves the internalization of an extremely
complex body of information, including a mapping of acoustic onto geometric ob-
jects and a refined system of motor integrations involved in producing the latter. (A
better question than ‘why do children find it hard to learn to write’ is ‘why do children
find it easy to learn to talk.‘) Vygotsky, however, has to make up reasons.
‘Written language demands conscious work because its relation to inner speech
is different from that of oral speech... Inner speech is condensed, abbreviated,
speech. Written speech is deployed to its fullest extent, more complete than oral
speech.. . etc.’ (100).
Does Vygotsky suppose that it would be easier to learn to write if we allowed the child
to write only notes? Surely there is a profound problem about how we learn to write
that is quite independent of the problem about how we learn to write grammatically,
well, coherently, etc.? Analogously, if the problem about writing is only or primarily
that ‘the motives for writing are . . . more abstract, more intellectualized, further re-
moved from immediate needs . . .’ (98) than the motives for oral speech, why can’t we get
 92 Jerry Fodor

a machine to do it? The fact is that the transformations of the speech signal which must
be internalized in learning to read or write are so complicated that no theorist is cur-
rently able to formalize them in any very satisfactory way. But we are unlikely to be
able to appreciate the character of what the child achieves in becoming literate if we
assume that Boolean functions represent the upper bound on the complexity of the
operations he can learn to perform.
There is a variety of different morals one might consider drawing at this point. For
example, the following.
It is a fundamental assumption of Vygotsky’s, and, apparently, of many Piagetians,
that operations of a specified computational power are either available or absent across
the board at any given developmental stage. At a given stage, a child’s concepts are
either concrete or they are not; Boolean operations are either ‘there’ or they aren’t. A
child has ‘reversible’ operations or he doesn’t. Exigetical accuracy requires certain
caveats. Piagetians think that a new kind of operation is likely to show first in motor
tasks, whence it is ‘internalized’ to subserve the purposes of cognition and perception.
And it is in the spirit of both Vygotsky and Piaget to suppose that vestiges of ‘lower’
levels of conceptualization are occasionally exhibited at ‘higher’ developmental stages.
As in Hegel, development involves the transcendence of early integrations, but it also
involves their preservation.
Nevertheless, the general point is clear enough. Take a time slice of a child and you
will find pervasive and homogeneous limits upon the type of concepts it can form. De-
velopmental stages are to be characterized by reference to such limits; ideally, by the
construction of formalisms which express them precisely. The primary goal of theories
in cognitive development is thus to exhibit the changing mental capacities of the child in
terms of an orderly progression of such formalisms, and to characterize the endogenous
and exogenous pressures which occasion transitions between them.
There are, however, alternative views. One might suppose that computational
power is quite unevenly distributed among the tasks with which a given child is con-
fronted at a given time. Formally quite powerful computational processes may thus be
available to the very young child, though only for the performance of quite specific
sorts of computations. For example, no one rational can now doubt the formal power
of the mechanisms underlying the acquisition of syntax. What is striking is that the child
who is exploiting these mechanisms for language learning apparently does not have
analogously powerful systems available for ‘general problem solving’ (e.g., for per-
forming with Vygotsky blocks). Essentially similar remarks could presumably be made
about the power, and the specificity, of the computational procedures underlying the
ontogenesis of spatial orientation, face recognition, locomotion, depth perception, ob-
ject constancy, and so on.
One thus considers the possibility of viewing the mental life of children in a way that
 Some rejections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language 93

is quite alien to the Vygotskyian (or the Piagetian) tradition. Classical developmental
psychology invites us to think of the child as a realization of an algebra which can be
applied, relatively indifferently, to a wide variety of types of cognitive integrations, but
which differs in essential respects from the mathematics underlying adult mentation.
The alternative picture is that the child is a bundle of relatively special purpose com-
putational systems which are formally analogous to those involved in adult cognition
but which are quite restricted in their range of application, each being more or less
tightly tied to the computation of a specific sort of data, more or less rigidly endoge-
nously paced, and relatively inaccessible to purposes and influences other than those
which conditioned its evolution. Cognitive development, on this view, is the maturation
of the processes such systems subserve, and the gradual broadening of the kinds of
computations to which they can apply.
I will not insist upon the ethological plausibility of this view (which, however, I think
is considerable). Suffice it to remark upon the increasing body of evidence that very
complicated cognitive processes are in fact to be found in the young child ifyou look in
the right places. See, for a variety of types of examples, recent work by Bower (1966),
Bloom (1970), Eimas et al. (1971), etc. The moral seems to be that the young child
differs from the adult not in the kinds of conceptual integrations it can effect, but rather,
in the ar’eas in which it can effect them. Adults can bring their thinking to bear on a wide
area of what we call, in our ignorance, ‘general’ problem solving. Children seem to have
available comparably powerful computational apparatus, but it is special purpose
equipment. This too is a difference of quantity, not quality. For, there must be some
structure to the types of problems that adults can solve, though we are hardly in an
optimal position to see it. Our mentation might look, to a suitably intellectual angel,
structured, task specific, and endogenously constrained in ways that differ in degree
rather than in kind from the mentation of our progeny. How, after all, could this fail
to be true? We are related to our children.
I have been arguing that viewing the development of the childs’ mental capacities as
the development of the ability to do Boolean operations has some very curious conse-
quences. First, the child’s achievement of complicated conceptual integrations is
consigned to relatively low developmental levels, while the test of maturity is taken to
be the mastery of mathematically trivial operations. The mathematics required to char-
acterize the structure of faces or the syntax of a language is presumably far more power-
ful than that required to characterize correct performances with Vygotsky blocks.
Yet the child is good at talking and recognizing faces long before he is good at the
Vygotsky test. A natural conclusion is that the Vygotsky test does not engage the com-
putational procedures that are most central to the child’s concept attainment; that the
test results are, in that sense, artifactual. This is not the conclusion Vygotsky draws.
The second consequence of Vygotsky’s curious views about the nature of mature
94 Jerry Fodol

conceptualization is that many of the remarks he makes about the way children operate
at ‘lower’ developmental stages are exactly applicable to normal adult thought. This is,
of course, a way of saying that Vygotsky’s stages do not correspond to anything in
rerum natura. Thus, Vygotsky says: ‘Since children of a certain age think in pseudo-
concepts, the words designate to them complexes of concrete objects, their thinking
must result in participation, i.e., in bonds unacceptable to adult logic. A particular thing
may be included in different complexes on the strength of its different concrete attri-
butes and consequently may have several names; which one is used depends on the
complex activated at the time’ (71-72). Followed, inevitably, by talk about how similar
children and primitives are in these respects. But, of course, if they are in that boat, so
are we. For, we think a chair may be ‘Queen Anne’, or ‘too low to reach the light bulb
by standing on’, etc. And which of these ‘attributes’ we use depends precisely on the
complex activated at the time: e.g., on whether we are interested in antiques or in
changing the light bulb. What else couldit depend on?
It is not only Vygotsky’s remarks about intermediate levels of conceptualization that
apply with full force to the conceptualizations of adults. ‘The young child takes the
first step toward concept formation when he puts together a number of objects in an
unorganized conger’ies, or ‘heap’. . . at this stage, word meaning denotes nothing more
to the child than a vague syncretic conglomeration of individual objects.’ (59). Now, this
might mean that the child does what he does for no reason at all; not that there is a
special kind of concept underlying his behavior, but that there is no concept whatever;
he is simply pushing blocks around. This, however, is not Vygotsky’s line. Rather, the
phenomenon is ‘ . ..the result of a tendency to compensate for the paucity of well-
apprehended objective relations by an overabundance of subjective connections and to
mistake these subjective bonds for real bonds between things’ (60). It is interesting to
note the work that words like ‘real,’ ‘objective,’ etc. do in this passage. They serve
simultaneously to compare the concept allegedly governing the child’s sorting with
Vygotsky’s notion of paradigmatic adult concepts and to castigate the former as on-
tologically unsound. In fact, why are not ‘all the things I like’ or ‘all the things that
happened to me on the way to the ofice’ etc. perfectly acceptable adult concepts? And
how could one possibly suppose that employing these very sophisticated notions some-
how indicates a lower level of functioning than operating with notions like ‘blocks that
are both blue and square?’
Once again, I do not wish to deny that there may be sor?le sense in which children’s
thinking is relatively concrete, subjective, factitious, etc. 1 am claiming only that
Vygotsky is driven to this conclusion less by his data than by some quite unreasonable
philosophical convictions about what it is to think abstractly, logically, maturely, and
so on. Indeed, once the muddle is straightened up and it is seen that the inability to
deal with Boolean functions need not, ipso facto, entail primitive mentation, the data
 Some reflections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language 95

that Vygotsky has left appear pretty sketchy. He says, for example, that ‘even abstract
concepts are often translated into the language of concrete action (by children):
‘Reasonable means when I am hot and don’t stand in a draft’ (78). But Socrates, who
wanted to know what ‘good’ means, had the same trouble with his adult informants:
they persisted in providing him with examples of good things, acts, people, or what-
ever. The problem wasn’t, of course, that their mental functioning was impaired; it was
that they didn’t have the concept of a definition (neither, by the way, did Socrates).
Similarly, among the anecdotes that are supposed to convince us of the concrete,
etc., character of children’s thinking is the following. ‘A pre-school child who, in
response to the question, ‘Do you know your name’? tells his name, lacks... self-
reflective awareness: He knows his name but is not conscious of knowing it.’ (91) But
this is a joke. It is, in fact, this joke:
(A road. Vladimir’and Estragon enter right)
Vladimir.: ‘Could you tell me the time?’
Estrirgon: ‘Yes.’
(Silence. Exit left slowly. Fade.)

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