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Lev Vygotsky was born in Byelorussia in 1896 and graduated in Literature from
Moscow University in 1917. In 1924, he moved back to Moscow to work at the Institute of
Psychology. He was widely involved in developing the education program of the young
Soviet Union and in particular in the education of deaf and dumb children. He died of
tuberculosis in 1934, entirely unknown outside of the Soviet Union.
But in the meantime he had created, with the collaboration of Aleksandre Luria and A
N Leontiev a completely new and scientific approach to psychology, which did not become
known at all in the West until 1958, and was not published in the West till 1962, and for
example, it is only in the last few years that his work has become available in Australia.
Vygotsky was a child of the Russian Revolution. All of them saw the Revolution as
the beginning of creating a new world, and they all saw their work as contributing not only
to overcoming the devastation of the Revolution and the Civil War and the legacy of Russia’s
semi-feudal past, but of building a new “socialist human being”. Vygotsky saw the
construction of a communist education system and the abolition of the boundary between
education and work, along with the development of modern industry under conditions of
socialist construction, as providing the conditions for the emergence of a new and higher
type of human being.
Internationally, during the 1920s and 30s, psychology was in the midst of an enormous
crisis, and Vygotsky subjected all the contemporary schools of psychology to painstaking
critique, while freely drawing on the insights of every school from Wilhelm Wundt’s
introspective “empirical psychology”, to Adler’s individual psychology, structuralism and
Gestalt psychology.
Vygotsky read widely, his first major work being The Psychology of Art published in
1925, and he was well read in Hegel and Marx. The French Marxists Georges Politzer and
Henri Wallon provided for Vygotsky the initial direction for a study of psychology. Vygotsky
was acquainted with Georg Lukacs and found rich sources of inspiration in Marx’s early
writings such as the 1844 Manuscripts and The German Ideology and Theses on Feuerbach,
which were available in the Soviet Union by this time, not to mention Engels’ works such as
Anti-Duhring.
However, we have to remember the incredibly difficult conditions that confronted
genuine scientific work in the Stalinist USSR, quite apart from the fact of total isolation from
the West and desperate poverty and social crisis.
Now, when the Bolsheviks came to power it became very fashionable, so to speak, to
apply Marxism to any particular branch of activity. This generally involved whipping a few
quotes out of the classics of Marxism, particularly Anti-Duhring or Dialectics of Nature and
demonstrating that this or that line was in accordance with the precepts of Communism.
The whole period of Vygotsky’s professional life was a period of intense factional
strife in the Soviet Union, and in particular the period during which Stalin established
absolute power within the USSR.
Under these conditions, scientific debate, or any other kind of debate for that matter,
became extremely difficult. All that was required was for your opponent to stand up and
demonstrate that your position on this or that question of science or art was “bourgeois” while
their own was consistent with Marxism, and you could find yourself in danger of
denunciation and disappearance. No scientific debate could take place without intensive
lobbying and bureaucratic positioning and the overall cultural level of the milieu in which
your life was to be decided was a very low one.
To be added to this difficulty one has to take account of the fact of Pavlov. Ivan
Pavlov was one of the greatest scientists of the time who had genuinely introduced a
revolution into psychology with his scientific approach to the study of nervous reactions in
animals. Pavlov was a behaviourist. His work was based exclusively on observable
behaviour and physiology.
His discovery of the conditioned reflex was of enormous importance for biology and
psychology, since it demonstrated the physiological basis for consciousness and also showed
how organisms could develop complex behavioural reactions in adapting to their
environment.
The Bolsheviks were desperate to keep Pavlov in Russia and provided him with every
possible incentive to remain. He was a star.
Until 1923 the Moscow Institute of Psychology was headed by one Chelpanov who
was an adherent of Wilhelm Wundt’s introspective psychology, but he was overthrown at
this time by one Kornilov who claimed to have applied Marxism to psychology and put
forward a species of behaviourism. The wedding of behaviourism with Marxism was a
powerful formula for an official Soviet psychology.
Imagine then the impact when, only a year after Kornilov’s triumph, the unknown
young graduate in literature from Byelorussia went to the rostrum at the Second Congress on
Psychoneurology to deliver an attack on behaviourism.
This is the position with Behaviourism: states of mind are not observable, except by
introspection; only behaviour is observable, only behaviour can be the subject of science.
Consciousness is like the “ether” of nineteenth century physics or the Spirit of theology — it
is a fiction.
Chomsky remarked that designating Psychology as “Behavioural Science” is like
calling Physics the “Science of Meter Readings”.
Since behaviourism sees higher psychological functions as illusions, then it is
predisposed to view the higher psychological functions as just highly elaborated forms of the
same basic elements which are observable in animals, and therefore that the work of
psychology is to begin with the detailed observation of animals, and their conditioned
reflexes and work one’s way up to the more complex behaviour of human beings. For these
people, all the phenomena of human culture are just self-delusion.
B F Skinner for example said, in 1989; “Human behaviour will eventually be
explained, ... by the cooperative action of ethology (that’s study of the behaviour of animals in
their natural environment), brain science (i.e neurology as a branch of biology), and behaviour
analysis."
In considering the question “Can machines think?”, Alan Turing thought the question
is meaningless and should be reduced to one of the capacity of a machine to imitate the
behaviour of person, for which the answer is: “Any day now”.
Behaviourism is quite incapable of accounting for the higher psychological functions,
for the simple reason that behaviourism itself discounts consciousness altogether.
But more importantly, behaviourism is the theory corresponding to the practice of
seeking compliance: “How can I get the subject to do x or y?” By eliminating the subject’s
consciousness from the equation, one creates a technology of stimulus and reaction.
A word on Pavlov. Vygotsky was rightly a great admirer of Pavlov. While it was a
great mistake to try to account for the higher psychological functions by the conditioned
reflex, any such understanding has to rest on this foundation.
Also, Vygotsky learnt a great deal from Pavlov in terms of experimental method; the
way Pavlov focused on just one reaction, and instead of observing it in its finished and static
state, Pavlov studied how a reaction could be introduced into the organism by the
intervention of the experimenter. In this way, Pavlov was able to understand the genesis of
a reflex, and in this way uncovered the secret of the whole organism.
There are a number of aspects of the Vygotsky School’s method of work which clearly
have their origin in Pavlov.
Development
The history of evolution of animals was the development of more and more complex
and elaborate networks of conditioned reflexes until the basis for the higher psychological
functions of human beings had been created.
The history of the cultural development of humanity has been the invention of more
and more complex tools for mastery of external nature and symbols for mastery of our
internal nature, with people becoming more and more dependent on their tools and symbols
without which they are powerless, and their mentality becomes more and more taken up with
abstractions and symbols and less and less concerned with concrete sensuality.
The history of a child’s growing up begins from utter helplessness and is concerned
with becoming skilled in the use of the tools and symbols provided by the adult world for the
mastery of their own nature.
Intelligence and Language have different roots. Even before she learns to speak, the
young child exercises intelligence; her first words on the other hand — “Gi'mme”, “Mine”,
“Mummy” — have nothing to do with intelligence, being more like verbalisations which the
child utters quite unconsciously as a kind of enhancement of certain activities.
Initially, a child uses words as tools not symbols for something, but tools which are
inseparable from action of which they are a part. A word is not the name of a something for
a very young child. “Things” in fact barely exist for the very young child who is not yet aware
of themself as a subject standing opposite to an objective world.
As a child develops self-consciousness and begins to become aware of the relation
between themself and the objective world, between their actions and their perceptions, words,
and for that matter things, are entirely instrumental. They exist only in connection with this or
that activity of the child. A word is not so much the name of a thing, but the handle by which
she grasps.
Concrete and Abstract Thinking
I would now like to make a very telescoped run through the successive stages which
Vygotsky identified in the development of a child’s use of words. This run through will
demonstrate that the way a child deals with the world goes through a succession of
transformations in which the child totally “re-arms” themself at critical stages in their
development.
Vygotsky used the kind of experimental technique I mentioned earlier, posing to a
child problems which were too difficult for them to solve and prompting them to use
various things to help them. A lot of use was made of sets of geometrical objects of various
shapes, sizes, colours and so on and the child’s efforts to organise them into groups and so on.
The first stage in a child’s perception, which is reflected in the way she uses words, is
what Piaget called “Syncretism”. If you've been to any of my previous talks on Hegel you'll
know immediately what syncretism is about. It’s much like a stream of consciousness, “one
damn thing after another”. The child organises things into groups quite subjectively, just as
they strike her attention. When shown a “triangle” and asked to point to another “triangle”,
it’s the first thing that strikes her eye.
Complexes
The next range of forms Vygotsky observed are called “Complexes”. Gradually the
child learns to identify likeness and makes what are called “Chain complexes”. The big red
triangle is like the little blue triangle, but then the child links the little blue triangle with the
little green disc and then the big black disc and then the big white square ....
The complex is a kind of extended family, and the nanny and the lodger are as much a
part of the family as mum and dad at this stage.
The next stage, my brother recently observed in his young daughter. He reported to me
that Marissa was forming everything she saw into family groups: “mummy, daddy and baby
one”. This is in fact the most common type of grouping in a child’s life-experience: knife,
fork and spoon; dress, tee-shirt and panties, and so on. The child makes “family groups” and
things are deliberately excluded from the group on the basis of likeness. She wants one of
each.
On the basis of the experience of forming these groups the child begins to become
aware of the range of properties of things separately from their concrete existence, at first by
their distinctness in a group of unlike things. In making this next transformation, she is
assisted by the adult use of words. The child’s world is dominated by this adult world and
achieving understanding with adults and the way they use words is a survival matter for the
child.
The child begins to be able to sort things into groups sharing a common attribute, but
at first this is somewhat chaotic and inconsistent, their concept of likeness is often somewhat
far-fetched, and she uses the same word to grasp things which to the adult mind are miles
apart, like calling the doorbell a “phone” because it rings and the TV a “phone” because it’s a
plastic thing that also makes noise. Vygotsky called these words “diffuse complexes”.
The “family” is now coming to be united, not by subjective caprice, but by a common,
objective, sensible attribute.
Pseudo-concepts
Gradually, being guided by the adult use of words, the child gets more and more
skilled at abstracting properties from the concrete perception of objects and is able to form
sets of blue things, sets of round things and so on. Vygotsky calls these “pseudo-concepts”.
All the other strands of cognitive psychology of his time held that at this stage in a child’s
development she has learnt to use concepts and subsequent development is nothing more than
getting better and better at it.
This error is understandable for two reasons. Firstly, the child and the adult do
understand each other as they must, because the word is being used to refer to the same
concrete things. This does not however mean that the child is thinking the same way as an
adult. On the contrary.
The second reason is that while Vygotsky had the advantage of a familiarity with
Hegel and Marx, even the pinnacles of philosophy and science in the West held that
concepts are nothing more than symbols standing for a set of objects. This position of
positivism is still widely held and in fact more or less accurately describes what Vygotsky
calls a “pseudo-concept”.
How do you explain to a young child who has learnt to identify “fish” that she is
wrong when she refers to a dolphin as a “fish"? The child has learnt that the adult means by a
fish all those long slippery things with a tail and two eyes that live in the water, and now ...!
In fact, as a concept, “fish” has nothing at all to do with the sensuous attributes of things.
“Fish” are united by an ideal called Darwin’s Theory of Evolution (or whatever). Although
the adult and the child have been understanding each other, they have been talking about
entirely different things.
Concepts
Philosophers like Rudolph Carnap or psychologists like B F Skinner would be with
the child on this one: words indicate groups of objects in the real world. But this is not the
case. As Hegel, and Pragmatist philosophers like Dewey and Bridgman for example,
understood, words are meaningful only within the context of a whole theory of the world
and how human beings act within it.
Words actually designate both an ideal and sensuous objects in the real world. It
is generally in the course of school education based formal disciplines and the written
languages that the modern child makes the transition to thinking in concepts.
The same process was involved in the induction of young adults into the laws, magic,
and so on of earlier cultures.
Internalising
The verbalisation dies away to silent speech and eventually even the silent speech dies
away and the population of objective things has now been reconstructed in a mental world
that the child is able to move around in and manipulate in thought. Learning to read is of
course the classic instance of this process of “silent speech”.
Just as the chimp solves problems by internalising his frantic efforts to get to the
banana, the child internalises the whole activity that goes along with the ego-centric speech.
When the child discovers that words can be used as names for things she is now able to
internalise the visual picture of the thing and her own activity with the thing and an
idealisation of the thing in the form of its name.
Theories of Psychology
Now we mentioned above how behaviourism fits into this picture, as a theory of
psychology which supports a particular way of working with other people, namely trying to
control the behaviour of other people. The old carrot and stick psychology is pretty deeply
embedded in a our social system, isn’t it? “Give me a bowl of pasta and I'll give you ten
bucks”.
There is a cybernetic theory of learning: about people “processing data”, about
communication, sending signals, “decoding” messages and so on. The cybernetic theory of
knowledge is linked to some kind of decision theory, according to which people make rational
decisions about what do according to information received. Unsurprisingly, this is a favourite
theory of those who earn their living as collectors and distributors of information. It is also a
favourite among those who collect and distribute value, in the finance industry, as well as the
media, higher education, politics and so on.
The various biologically based theories of psychology, of genetic determinism and
biochemical determinism, are based on practices of medical production and intervention.
They treat people like bits of meat really. Which we are, sometimes, when we're really
dysfunctional!
Vygotsky school is based on collaborative problem solving. Co-laboration, working
together. It began in the early days of the Soviet Union, with people treating each other with
respect and struggling to overcome the enormous social problems of the young workers’
republic, working together.
I just want to make a few points which I think are the limitations of Cultural Historical
Activity Theory, the Vygotsky School, as it has come down to us historically.
Defending a Theory
Isolated within the Soviet Union and struggling to exist even there at all, the School
which began with people collaborating and struggling to solve problems of building
socialism, turned into a group of people defending a common theory. A very good body of
theory, worthy of defending, but once a group of people is formed around defending a
common theory, we have problems.
Vygotsky and his collaborators drew concepts and insights from the most diverse
sources. While criticising the work of Piaget, Buhler, Köhler, Freud, Adler, Pavlov and so on
and so on, they freely incorporated insights from these other schools, to help them
overcoming the enormous problems they faced.
Also, any practice which gets caught up in academia, so that it becomes a body of
theory which relates to the world outside academia as an object is in dire trouble, and
although it would be wrong to exaggerate this observation, the Vygotsky School has to some
extent become victim of this. In the 1920s and 30s it was an active participant in building the
revolution; nowadays it has a tendency to study social struggle from the outside. Until
Activity theorists become active participants in the struggle to discover how people can live
and sruggl eto make that change, the theory is in trouble.