Piaget Vygotsky

The Social Genesis Of Thought

Anastasia Tryphon, Jacques Vonèche, ANASTASIA TRYPHON, Jacques Vonèche

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317775157
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

This book is the outcome of a long and passionate debate among world experts about two of the most pivotal figures of psychology: Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotksy. The occasion was a week-long advanced course held at the Jean Piaget Archives in Geneva. The most interesting outcome of the meeting is that, in spite of differences in aims and scopes (epistemogenesis versus psychogenesis), in units of analysis (events versus action) and in social contents (Swiss capitalism versus Soviet communism) both Piaget and Vygotsky reached a similar conclusion: knowledge is constructed within a specific material and social context. Moreover, their views complement each other perfectly: where Vygotsky insists on varieties of psychological experiences, Piaget shows how, out of diversity, grows universality, so much so that the most communist of the two is not necessarily the one who was so labelled.
This book is not only of interest to developmental, social and learning psychologists, but also deals with issues pertinent to education, epistemology, language, thought and cognition, anthropology and philosophy. It is likely to shed some light on the state of affairs in psychology for the general reader too, because it is clear and precise, straightforward and uses virtually no jargon.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Anastasia Tryphon & Jacques Vonèche

Jean Piaget Archives, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Leading up to the common centenary of the birth of Piaget and Vygotsky in 1996, the Jean Piaget Archives Foundation decided to devote its 14th advanced course to a comparison of Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories. The aim of the course was essentially to evaluate the state of the art in both schools at a peak moment for both of them and, by the same token, to tackle some basic oppositions between the two systems. The organisers wondered whether such oppositions were not superficial, and wanted to measure the depth and the width of the gap, if any, between them, to check whether such oppositions were not mainly due to over-orthodox and dogmatic followers eager to promote themselves by setting up easy targets that could be described as “men of straw”. In other words, our epistemological problem was: are we faced here with two radically different world hypotheses, or are Piaget and Vygotsky comrades-in-arms against a common enemy, the old associationism, which is still a live issue for many psychologists today?

In order to answer this central question, this book will place the two thinkers and researchers in their common historical and critical context, especially in their common struggle to overcome the dichotomy between behaviourism and the psychologies of consciousness by constructing developmental views, designed to transcend the opposition without falling into the old pitfalls of nativism or empiricism—which would have meant replacing recent mistakes with errors that originated some 200–300 years ago. This book will thus review their common fascination and opposition (for obvious reasons) to Gestalt psychology, and their relationship to construction and interpretation, as well as the determinant role played by their selection of different units for the analysis of development in the type of theories they created. Their common claim to Rationality as a telos for development will be questioned, as well as their construction of social understanding and the mechanisms by which they explain the double character of any knowledge as being, at the same time, internal and external. In particular, the simple opposition between a Piagetian inside-out construction and a Vygotskyan outside-in one will be discussed. In the second part of this volume, several applications of Vygotsky’s and Piaget’s theories, especially in the classroom, will be discussed.

Our intention, in this introduction, is not to review or summarise all these important contributions but rather to limit ourselves to a brief comparison of Vygotsky and Piaget during the short period (1920–1934) in which they were contemporary in the scientific community. This was the time when Vygotsky was elaborating his historical-critical theory while Piaget’s earlier publications in psychology were already widely read and his experiments replicated. Piaget’s books, such as Language and thought (1923), Judgement and reasoning (1924), and Physical causality (1927) were being translated into several languages. No wonder, then, that Vygotsky read them and commented on them. It is also not surprising, given the originality of Piaget’s books at the time, that Vygotsky was durably influenced by them in his own research and theorising. In their book, Understanding Vygotsky, René van der Veer and Jan Valsiner (1993) estimate that several hundred children were tested using Piagetian tasks in the then Soviet Union.

This interest in Piaget can be explained in two main ways: (1) the very process of constructing a new society and a new conception of human beings prompted Communist thinkers to look for alternative views of humanity; (2) the necessity for a revolutionary country to fight bourgeois science, represented in psychology by various forms of associationism. Piaget was one of the few possible choices. His book Language and thought was not a study of the acquisition of language by associating a word to a thing. It was not even a cognitive or an emotional approach to language acquisition. It was a study in communication among children interacting freely in the non-oppressive environment of l’Ecole active. In addition, this was also the time when Henri Wallon¹ advised Piaget to reverse his perspective on development by no longer explaining cognition by social factors, but socialisation by cognitive mental structuring:

Instead of making sociability the agent … of relational thought, I would rather reverse perspectives and say that, when, because of his/her mental development which is conditioned by organic development, the child becomes capable of holding simultaneously in mind two different viewpoints … then sociability will be translated into relational thought.

Beside offering a theoretical alternative to Soviet psychologists, Piaget also presented a methodological one, because, if Anna O. (Freud & Breuer, 1895/1991) allegedly described psychoanalysis as the “talking-cure”, Piaget’s method could also be defined as a talking approach very similar in many respects to the psychoanalytic method. Piaget’s “free conversations” (a term so important to him that he requested it as the French title of his interviews with the television journalist J.C. Bringuier, 1977) require a free-wheeling, relaxed attitude from children and a definite absence of prejudice from the adult interviewers. So the two dimensions so essential in Vygotsky’s thinking, the historical-social and the language-grounded, were already present in Piaget’s writings. Apparently the two men were ready for a dialogue.

This fact is especially obvious in Piaget’s preface to the Russian edition of Language and thought (1932, pp.55–56, our translation) in which he wrote:

Thanks to this preface, I have the great pleasure to express publicly my gratitude to the Soviet psychologists for their choice to undertake the translation of my work into Russian and especially for the organisation of the series of researches they are currently continuing. The goal of these researches is to complement and correct the work done in Geneva. I wish to disclose here in a few words the immense meaning for me of this beginning collaboration.

In the work published here, the dominant idea is, so it seems to me, that children’s thinking cannot be defined only by innate psycho-biological factors cum influences from the physical environment. One must also and most probably above all take into account the relationships between the child and the social milieu. I do not mean to say that the child reflects thoughts and opinions expressed around him; this would be banal. The very structure of individual thought depends on the social surroundings. Whenever one thinks for oneself alone in an egocentric way (so typical of childhood) one is subjected to one’s own fancies, desires and personal inclinations, and, as such, this sort of thinking is totally different from rational thought. Whenever one is under the systematic influence of a determined social milieu (like a child subjected to adult authority) one comes to think according to determined external rules. These rules generate verbalism and verbal syncretism in one’s thinking or what is called legalism in one’s own moral judgement. Conversely, the more individuals collaborate with one another, the more the rules of that collaboration develop and give a discipline to their thinking that shapes reason theoretically and practically. Egocentrism, constraint and collaboration are the three tendencies among which the child’s developing thought oscillates and to which adult thinking is linked differently if it remains autistic or if it is integrated into one or another type of social organisation.

This is just an outline. In real life, social influences and individual organic aptitudes of thought are interwoven in a most subtle fashion. An important methodological problem necessarily arises here in the case of child psychology. If children’s thinking depends on the relation between the individual and the social environment, how can we determine exactly what belongs to each of these two factors? When one works within one single social milieu (such as that of Genevan children) as I was forced to do, this determination is impossible. One has to study children in a totally different and very diversified social environment to make this determination.

This is the reason why I take great pleasure in having such qualified collaborators as some Soviet psychologists. They study children in a very different milieu from that I observed myself. Nothing is more useful to science than this confrontation of researches by Russian psychologists and by other psychologists in other countries.

As far as the specific results of the researches described in this volume are concerned, I should add so much to what was written in 1922 that I could not possibly do it in a short preface. I am well aware that my results are only fragmentary and questionable. But this does not distress me, because I know that others go on with such researches.

The sad reality seems to be that Piaget and Vygotsky never met, in spite of this preface. There are some speculations about a possible encounter in Moscow at a conference on Pedology, but here is no evidence of such a meeting between the two men, neither in Piaget’s letters, nor in the recollections of Vygotsky’s daughter. What seems more likely is that Piaget met Luria in 1929 at Yale University, New Haven, for the Congress of Psychology (a proven fact according to a letter from Piaget to I. Meyerson; see Fonds Meyerson, Paris: Université de Paris) and that both decided to collaborate in one form or another in a triangle: Luria, Vygotsky, Piaget.

So we are reduced to restating in this introduction what each of them wrote about the other.

VYGOTSKY ON PIAGET

In Chapter 2 of his own book Thought and language (1934/1962), Vygotsky criticised the concept of egocentrism as presented by Piaget. In Chapter 6 of the same book, Vygotsky discussed critically Piaget’s distinction between spontaneous and “scientific” or learned concepts.

Vygotsky considers egocentrism as the cornerstone of Piaget’s theoretical system. Indeed, there is no doubt that, for Piaget, mental development goes from the solipsism of the baby to the egocentrism of the child and from there to the decentration of the adult. But what Vygotsky regrets in this view is the linearity of such a conception of mental development. For Vygotsky, there is no such thing as a linear movement from egocentric to socialised language. On the contrary, his own observations, in Russia, show that egocentric language is much more than a mere companion to action to be disposed of at the right time. Egocentric language is, in addition, more than an emotional discharge of tension within the child or a simple means of expression. Egocentric language should be considered as an instrument of thinking adapted to all sorts of problem-solving situations, because it helps the child define a problem and build up plans for a possible solution.

Clearly, Vygotsky was fusing into one concept the notion of egocentric language à la Piaget and that of internal, private language. Therefore, Vygotsky could not accept Piaget’s idea that egocentric language disappears with age. On the contrary, he maintained that school-aged children continue to use egocentric language as a means to a cognitive end, the only difference being that egocentric language, having been internalised, is less and less observable, although the mental processes at stake remain the same.

Thus, if for Piaget the developmental movement goes from the individual to the social, for Vygotsky language is originally and primarily social. Development goes from a lack of differentiation of the various functions of language towards a progressive differentiation and an hierarchisation of the initially fused functions. Egocentric language becomes a way for the child to transfer external social behaviour into intra-psychic functions.

At the very end of Chapter 2 of Thought and language, Vygotsky points out some conceptual “errors” made by Piaget. The first one bears on the notion of syncretism. Vygotsky feels that the child tends to think syncretically about unfamiliar situations or objects but not about familiar ones. Familiarity depends on the education received by the child. The role of educational methods is crucial here for Vygotsky.

Vygotsky’s second criticism has to do with the degree of universality of the developmental trends observed by Piaget. Obviously, Piaget’s discoveries are not universal but historically and socially grounded.

In Chapter 6 “The development of scientific concepts in childhood”, Vygotsky deals with the distinction Piaget makes between spontaneous and non-spontaneous or scientific concepts that are learned in schools. Piaget considers spontaneous concepts as more revealing of the inner structure of children’s thinking processes than learned ones. Vygotsky thinks that spontaneous and scientific concepts are intertwined in their development in a highly complex relationship that makes teaching effective only when it points to the road for development.

He takes the example of two concepts: exploitation, which is taught in school as a scientific concept, and the notion of brother, which is spontaneous. He shows that exploitation develops before brotherhood (as concepts not as behaviours!). In general, in Soviet Russian children, scientific concepts anticipate spontaneous ones. This demonstrates, according to Vygotsky, the structuring and generalising effects of schooling on children’s awareness about their own mental processes. As he says, reflective consciousness comes about through the door of scientific concepts.

This discovery is, for Vygotsky, a specific instance of a more general problem: the relationship between development and learning. Vygotsky is opposed to Piaget’s spontaneism in those matters; he thinks that formal education in one specific domain definitely influences development in other domains of knowledge by a sort of generalisation process that is essential for him.

PIAGET ON VYGOTSKY

Piaget’s comments on Vygotsky are known mainly through his preface to the English translation of Vygotsky’s Thought and language (Piaget, 1962, p.1): “It is not without sadness that an author discovers, twenty-five years after its publication, the work of a colleague who has died in the meantime, when that work contains so many points of immediate interest to him which should have been discussed personally and in detail.”

But this statement does not mean that Piaget had no knowledge of Vygotsky’s work. As a matter of fact, the preface to Kostyleff’s book La réflexologie et les essais d’une psychologie structurale, published in 1947, shows that Piaget was not unaware of the various trends of Soviet psychology. Piaget was also a rather frequent visitor to the Soviet Union as evidenced by his short paper (re-published in this book) Some impressions of a visit to soviet psychologists (1956). He met with Luria and Leont’ev and evidently discussed Vygotskyan and post-Vygotskyan psychology.

Although he is in general agreement with Vygotsky, Piaget points out some differences. On egocentrism and egocentric language, Piaget acknowledges Vygotsky’s criticisms but makes his own position more explicit using more recent studies carried out by him and his collaborators. However, he disagrees with Vygotsky’s assumption that egocentric and communicative languages are both socialised but differ only by their functions. To illustrate the opposition between his and Vygotsky’s positions, he gives the following example (Piaget, 1962, p.8):

… if an individual A mistakenly believes that an individual B thinks the way A does, and if he does not manage to understand the difference between the two points of view, this is, to be sure social behaviour in the sense that there is contact between the two, but I call such behaviour unadapted from the point of view of intellectual co-operation.

The writing of the word cooperation as co-operation indicates Piaget’s will to appeal to mental operations in the structuring of social relations, which is the stand that Henri Wallon wanted him to take back in 1928 showing that logical operations are as important as social relations in the shaping of decentration in the child’s mind.

This is followed by a detailed discussion by Piaget of the general agreement between Vygotsky and himself about ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Qu’est-ce que l’intelligence? Piaget, Vygotsky, and the 1920s crisis in psychology
• 3. The role of abstract rationality in Vygotsky’s image of mind
• 4. Structure and development. Reflections by Vygotsky
• 5. Mechanisms of internalisation and externalisation of knowledge in Piaget’s and Vygotsky’s theories
• 6. Units of analysis in psychology and their interpretation: Social interactionism or logical interactionism?
• 7. The social construction of rational understanding
• 8. Construction and interpretation: Exploring a joint perspective on Piaget and Vygotsky
• 9. Social interaction and individual understanding in a community of learners: The influence of Piaget and Vygotsky
• 10. Relationships between the clinical method and the zone of proximal development in a constructivist approach to language acquisition
• 11. Intentionality, communication, and language
• 12. Some impressions of a visit to Soviet psychologists
• Author index
• Subject index