Mind in Society

Development of Higher Psychological Processes

L. S. Vygotsky, Michael Cole,Vera John-Steiner,Sylvia Scribner,Ellen Souberman

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780674076693
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of cognitive development in his own words—collected and translated by an outstanding group of scholars. "A landmark book." — Contemporary Psychology The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society corrects much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky's important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English.The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Humans are the only animals who use tools to alter their own inner world as well as the world around them. Vygotsky characterizes the uniquely human aspects of behavior and offers hypotheses about the way these traits have been formed in the course of human history and the way they develop over an individual's lifetime.From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of the mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that makes clear Vygotsky's continuing influence in the areas of child development, cognitive psychology, education, and modern psychological thought.Chapters include:
1. Tool and Symbol in Child Development
2. The Development of Perception and Attention
3. Mastery of Memory and Thinking
4. Internalization of Higher Psychological Functions
5. Problems of Method
6. Interaction between Learning and Development
7. The Role of Play in Development
8. The Prehistory of Written Language

Part One / Mind in Society

Basic Theory and Data

1

Tool and Symbol in Child Development

The primary purpose of this book is to characterize the uniquely human aspects of behavior, and to offer hypotheses about the way these traits have been formed in the course of human history and the way they develop over an individual’s lifetime.

This analysis will be concerned with three fundamental issues: (1) What is the relation between human beings and their environment, both physical and social? (2) What new forms of activity were responsible for establishing labor as the fundamental means of relating humans to nature and what are the psychological consequences of these forms of activity? (3) What is the nature of the relationship between the use of tools and the development of speech? None of these questions has been fully treated by scholars concerned with understanding animal and human psychology.

Karl Stumpf, a prominent German psychologist in the early years of the twentieth century, based his studies on a set of premises completely different from those I will employ here.¹ He compared the study of children to the study of botany, and stressed the botanical character of development, which he associated with maturation of the whole organism.

The fact is that maturation per se is a secondary factor in the development of the most complex, unique forms of human behavior. The development of these behaviors is characterized by complicated, qualitative transformations of one form of behavior into another (or, as Hegel would phrase it, a transformation of quantity into quality). The conception of maturation as a passive process cannot adequately describe these complex phenomena. Nevertheless, as A. Gesell has aptly pointed out, in our approaches to development we continue to use the botanical analogy in our description of child development (for example, we say that the early education of children takes place in a “kinder-garten").² Recently several psychologists have suggested that this botanical model must be abandoned.

In response to this kind of criticism, modern psychology has ascended the ladder of science by adopting zoological models as the basis for a new general approach to understanding the development of children. Once the captive of botany, child psychology is now mesmerized by zoology. The observations on which these newer models draw come almost entirely from the animal kingdom, and answers to questions about children are sought in experiments carried out on animals. Both the results of experiments with animals and the procedures used to obtain these results are finding their way from the animal laboratory into the nursery.

This convergence of child and animal psychology has contributed significantly to the study of the biological basis of human behavior. Many links between child and animal behavior, particularly in the study of elementary psychological processes, have been established. But a paradox has now emerged. When the botanical model was fashionable, psychologists emphasized the unique character of higher psychological functions and the difficulty of studying them by experimental means. But this zoological approach to the higher intellectual processes—those processes that are uniquely human—has led psychologists to interpret the higher intellectual functions as a direct continuation of corresponding processes in animals. This style of theorizing is particularly apparent in the analysis of practical intelligence in children, the most important aspect of which concerns the child’s use of tools.

PRACTICAL INTELLIGENCE IN ANIMALS AND CHILDREN

The work of Wolfgang Köhler is particularly significant in the study of practical intelligence.³ He conducted many experiments with apes during World War I, and occasionally compared some of his observations of chimpanzees’ behavior with particular kinds of responses in children. This direct analogy between practical intelligence in the child and similar response by apes became the guiding principle of experimental work in the field.

K. Buhler’s research also sought to establish similarities between child and ape.⁴ He studied the way in which young children grasp objects, their ability to make detours while pursuing a goal, and the manner in which they use primitive tools. These observations, as well as his experiment in which a young child is asked to remove a ring from a stick, illustrate an approach akin to Köhler’s. Buhler interpreted the manifestations of practical intelligence in children as being of exactly the same type as those we are familiar with in chimpanzees. Indeed, there is a phase in the life of the child that Buhler designated the “chimpanzee age” (p. 48). One ten-month-old infant whom he studied was able to pull a string to obtain a cookie that was attached to it. The ability to remove a ring from a post by lifting it rather than trying to pull it sideways did not appear until the middle of the second year.⁵ Although these experiments were interpreted as support for the analogy between the child and apes, they also led Buhler to the important discovery, which will be explicated in later sections, that the beginnings of practical intelligence in the child (he termed it “technical thinking"), as well as the actions of the chimpanzee, are independent of speech.

Charlotte Buhler’s detailed observations of infants during their first year of life gave further support to this conclusion.⁶ She found the first manifestations of practical intelligence took place at the very young age of six months. However, it is not only tool use that develops at this point in a child’s history but also systematic movement and perception, the brain and hands—in fact, the child’s entire organism. Consequently, the child’s system of activity is determined at each specific stage both by the child’s degree of organic development and by his or her degree of mastery in the use of tools.

K. Buhler established the developmentally important principle that the beginnings of intelligent speech are preceded by technical thinking, and technical thinking comprises the initial phase of cognitive development. His lead in emphasizing the chimpanzee-like features of children’s behavior has been followed by many others. It is in extrapolating this idea that the dangers of zoological models and analogies between human and animal behaviors find their clearest expression. The pitfalls are slight in research that focuses on the preverbal period in the child’s development, as Buhler’s did. However, he drew a questionable conclusion from his work with very young children when he stated, “The achievements of the chimpanzee are quite independent of language and in the case of man, even in later life, technical thinking, or thinking in terms of tools, is far less closely bound up with language and concepts than other forms of thinking.’⁷

Buhler proceeded from the assumption that the relationship between practical intelligence and speech that characterizes the ten-month-old child remains intact throughout her lifetime. This analysis postulating the independence of intelligent action from speech runs contrary to our own findings, which reveal the integration of speech and practical thinking in the course of development.

Shapiro and Gerke offer an important analysis of the development of practical thinking in children based upon experiments modeled after Köhler’s problem-solving studies with chimpanzees.⁸ They theorize that children’s practical thinking is similar to adult thought in certain respects and different in others, and emphasize the dominant role of social experience in human development. In their view, social experience exerts its effect through imitation; when the child imitates the way adults use tools and objects, she masters the very principle involved in a particular activity. They suggest that repeated actions pile up, one upon another, as in a multi-exposure photograph; the common traits become clear and the differences become blurred. The result is a crystalized scheme, a definite principle of activity. The child, as she becomes more experienced, acquires a greater number of models that she understands. These models represent, as it were, a refined cumulative design of all similar actions; at the same time, they are also a rough blueprint for possible types of action in the future.

However, Shapiro and Gerke’s notion of adaptation is too firmly linked to a mechanical conception of repetition. For them, social experience serves only to furnish the child with motor schemas; they do not take into account the changes occurring in the internal structure of the child’s intellectual operations. In their descriptions of children’s problem solving, the authors are forced to note the “specific role fulfilled by speech” in the practical and adaptive efforts of the growing child. But their description of this role is a strange one. “Speech,” they say, “replaces and compensates for real adaptation; it does not serve as a bridge leading to past experience but to a purely social adaptation which is achieved via the experimenter.” This analysis does not allow for the contribution speech makes to the development of a new structural organization of practical activity.

Guillaume and Meyerson offer a different conclusion regarding the role of speech in the inception of uniquely human forms of behavior.⁹ From their extremely interesting experiments on tool use among apes, they concluded that the methods used by apes to accomplish a given task are similar in principle and coincide on certain essential points to those used by people suffering from aphasia (that is, individuals who are deprived of speech). Their findings support my assumption that speech plays an essential role in the organization of higher psychological functions.¹⁰

These experimental examples bring us full circle to the beginning of our review of psychological theories regarding child development. Buhler’s experiments indicate that the practical activity of the young child prior to speech development is identical to that of the ape, and Guillaume and Meyerson suggest that the ape’s behavior is akin to that observed in people who are deprived of speech. Both of these lines of work focus our attention on the importance of understanding the practical activity of children at the age when they are just beginning to speak. My own work as well as that of my collaborators is directed at these same problems. But our premises differ from those of previous investigators. Our primary concern is to describe and specify the development of those forms of practical intelligence that are specifically human.

RELATION BETWEEN SPEECH AND TOOL USE

In his classic experiments with apes Köhler demonstrated the futility of attempting to develop even the most elementary sign and symbolic operations in animals. He concluded that tool use among apes is independent of symbolic activity. Further attempts to cultivate productive speech in the ape have also produced negative results. These experiments showed once more that the purposive behavior of the animal is independent of any speech or sign-using activity.

The study of tool use in isolation from sign use is common in research work on the natural history of practical intellect, and psychologists who studied the development of symbolic processes in the child have followed the same procedure. Consequently, the origin and development of speech, as well as all other sign-using activity, were treated as independent of the organization of the child’s practical activity. Psychologists preferred to study the development of sign use as an example of pure intellect and not as the product of the child’s developmental history. They often attributed sign use to the child’s spontaneous discovery of the relation between signs and their meanings. As W. Stern stated, recognition of the fact that verbal signs have meaning constitutes “the greatest discovery in the child’s life.”¹¹ A number of authors fix this happy “moment” at the juncture of the child’s first and second year, regarding it as the product of the child’s mental activity. Detailed examination of the development of speech and other forms of sign use was assumed to be unnecessary. Instead, it has routinely been assumed that the child’s mind contains all stages of future intellectual development; they exist in complete form, awaiting the proper moment to emerge.

Not only were speech and practical intelligence assumed to have different origins, but their joint participation in common operations was considered to be of no basic psychological importance (as in the work of Shapiro and Gerke). Even when speech and the use of tools were closely linked in one operation, they were still studied as separate processes belonging to two completely different classes of phenomena. At best, their simultaneous occurrence was considered a consequence of accidental, external factors.

The students of practical intelligence as well as those who study speech development often fail to recognize the interweaving of these two functions. Consequently, the children’s adaptive behavior and sign-using activity are treated as parallel phenomena—a view that leads to Piaget’s concept of “egocentric” speech.¹² He did not attribute an important role to speech in the organization of the child’s activities, nor did he stress its communicative functions, although he was obliged to admit its practical importance.

Although practical intelligence and sign use can operate independently of each other in young children, the dialectical unity of these systems in the human adult is the very essence of complex human behavior. Our analysis accords symbolic activity a specific organizing function that penetrates the process of tool use and produces fundamentally new forms of behavior.

SOCIAL INTERACTION AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF PRACTICAL ACTIVITY

Based on the discussion in the previous section, and illustrated by experimental work to be described later, the following conclusion may be made: the most significant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development, converge. Although children’s use of tools during their preverbal period is comparable to that of apes, as soon as speech and the use of signs are incorporated into any action, the action becomes transformed and organized along entirely new lines. The specifically human use of tools is thus realized, going beyond the more limited use of tools possible among the higher animals.

Prior to mastering his own behavior, the child begins to master his surroundings with the help of speech. This produces new relations with the environment in addition to the new organization of behavior itself. The creation of these uniquely human forms of behavior later produce the intellect and become the basis of productive work: the specifically human form of the use of tools.

Observations of children in an experimental situation similar to that of Köhler’s apes show that the children not only act in attempting to achieve a goal but also speak. As a rule this speech arises spontaneously and continues almost without interruption throughout the experiment. It increases and is more persistent every time the situation becomes more complicated and the goal more difficult to attain. Attempts to block it (as the experiments of my collaborator R. E. Levina have shown) are either futile or lead the child to “freeze up.’

Levina posed practical problems for four- and f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editors’ Preface
• Contents
• Introduction Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner
• Biographical Note on L. S. Vygotsky
• Baste Theory and Data
• Educational Implications
• Afterword Vera John-Steiner and Ellen Souberman
• Notes
• Vygotsky’s Works
• Index