Tuesday September 24th at 9am Pacific Daylight Savings Time
Guest Speaker: Aaro Toomela, Tallinn University, Estonia – Professor of Cultural and Neuropsychology School of Natural Sciences and Health, and Faculty Member at the Institute of Psychology.
Summary: Vygotsky explicitly aimed at constructing a general-unifying theory of psychology. Therefore, it can be assumed that his writings on different topics complement one another. In some papers he proposed general principles that apply to all theoretical ideas at more specific levels of analysis. Vygotsky’s theoretical statements can be coherently interpreted only in the context of the general principles he formulated. In this presentation the general principles of Vygotsky’s approach are described and applied to explanation of the essence of human creativity.
Contact Francine Smolucha at lsmolucha@hotmail.com for the ZOOM link to join the session.
Readings:
Toomela, A. (2019). The Psychology of Scientific Inquiry. Cham: Springer Nature.
For the presentation slides, please see here.
Bernard Schneuwly asked Aaro Toomela why his presentation did not mention ‘dialectic’
(as a fundamental principle for Vygotsky). There are two issues here:
1. How does dialectic as methodology relate to the structural-systemic theory that Vygotsky put forth? (1930 “On Psychological Systems”, 1932 “Imagination and its Development in Childhood”, etc.)
2. By omitting dialectic from Vygotsky’s theory does his theory no longer have (or require) a connection to Marxism?
Dialectic does have a limitation because it is limited to reconciling two different ideas (or phenomena).In a system with more than two distinctly different components, a synthesis that reconciles a thesis and its antithesis is not sufficient. Yet we are still dealing with a
synergy in which the whole is more than the sum of the parts. This also goes beyond Gestalt psychology because we are considering dynamic developmental systems, rather than an isolated image.
Just searched through Vygotsky’s lecture from 1930 “On Psychological Systems”, looking for any mention of dialectic.
There was only one time when dialectical logic was. compared to formal (analytic) logic. What are we to think?
Hello,
As I also said in my presentation, it is useful to interpret Vygotsky’s theory as a whole. Vygotsky had very clear understanding about the relationships between extremely abstract principles of dialectics and psychology – or any other science. In The Crisis in psychology he wrote:
The path of Marxists must be different. Direct application of the theory of dialectical materialism to questions of natural science, and in particular to the group of biological sciences or to psychology, is impossible, just as it is impossible to directly apply it to history and sociology. […] Just as history, sociology needs a mediating special theory of historical materialism, which explains the concrete significance of the abstract laws of dialectical materialism for a given group of phenomena. In the same way, a theory of biological materialism, psychological materialism, which has not yet been created, is needed as a mediating science, which explains the concrete application of the abstract propositions of dialectical materialism to a given area of phenomena.
(Collected works – in Russian – 1982, Vol 1, pp. 419-420; 1997 English translation of the Collected Works, Vol. 3, p. 330)
So, Vygotsky is not saying that general principles of dialectics are wrong. He says that these principles are too abstract, too general – as such these principles become misleading without special unifying theory of a science where the principles of dialectics are applied.
Also, about relationships between Marxism and Vygotsky’s theory – Vygotsky was clear here too: “I would, further, consider it incorrect to define psychology as Marxist […] Not everything which is connected with Marxism should be called Marxist.” (1997 English version, pp. 339-340; pp. 432-433 in 1982 Russian version).
I think the question becomes – if we find more specific principles, which elaborate the dialectical principles, do we still need to go back to the abstract dialectical ideas? I think it is not necessary. Vygotsky’s (and definitely not only his) epistemology, which can be called “structural-systemic”, specifies these more specific, even though still general, principles. For instance, thesis-antithesis is too limited indeed; if we understand that it is not abstract thesis-antithesis but a specific number and qualities of parts or elements of a structure, that is important, this specific approach turns out to be more realistic. (Parenthetically, it is not entirely correct to say that a whole can be more than the sum of its parts; Gestalt psychologist never said it. In such “quantitative” language the essence is lost: whole is different from its parts – none of the parts has properties a whole has. Vygotsky has in numerous places expressed similar qualitative understanding of part-whole relationships).
With best wishes
Aaro
Aaro, Thank You for replying to my comment. I particularly like your reformulation of the cliche of “a whole is more than the sum of its parts” that is often used to define synergy. I agree that “the whole is different from the sum of its parts” and that the
parts change when they become constituent parts of the whole.
Also, we should consider whether dialectic has to be limited to a synthesis of two opposites or whether multiple elements could be synthesized in a dialectic (?)
This comment refers also to Aaro’s comments below.
Dialectics is not a theory, it is a way of thinking in order to grasp “reality”, the idea being that reality – and above all social reality – develops through contradictions, i.e. unity of contraries. This way of thinking, as one knows, has been particularly well developed by Hegel, in his Science of logic. It has been used by Marx in order to write his Capital. It has been deeply commented in Lenin’s Philosophical notebooks Vygotsky read as soon as they were published in 1929 and which deeply influenced his way of thinking dialectically. And it is the way of thinking of Vygotskij, although he doesn’t very often refer to it explicitly. He does it for instance in opposing formal logic to dialectical logic in his analysis of concept formation in adolescent. But more generally, if you analyze his thinking, it is deeply dialectical; he is one of the most deeply dialectical thinkers I know of. Just to give you here one example:
“There is a contradiction inherent in the problem as it actually exists. No accurate cognition of reality is possible without a certain element of imagination, a certain flight from the immediate, concrete, solitary impressions in which this reality is presented in the elementary acts of consciousness. The processes of invention or artistic creativity
demand a substantial participation by both realistic thinking and imagination. The two act as a unity. » (Collected Works, Vol. 1, p. 349)
The unity of contraries, of contradictory processes, are the motor of transformation. I could give many other examples of dialectical figures in Vygotsky’s thinking: unity of form and content: negation of negation; the inversion of inside to outside; the dominant which becomes dominated; self-movement; and… mediation, a dialectical Hegelian concept, Vygotky referring explicitly to Hegel and his dialectical definition of mediation in his book manuscript History of development of higher psychological functions. In a text I wrote on these questions, with the example of concept formation in adolescence will appear in short in French and Portuguese; I can send it in these languages to interested persons.
But the best contribution to this question is Sève’s text “Vygotskij; une démarche dialectique en psychologie” [Vygotsky: a dialectical approach in psychology]. I can also send it to interested colleagues.
Bernard,
Some thoughts on your comments. First, you wrote: “Dialectics is not a theory, it is a way of thinking in order to grasp “reality””. I would say “way of thinking” is essentially a theory, or at least a hypothesis. According to Vygotsky, “thinking is a system of internal organization of experience.” (Pedagogical Psychology, 1926). We think in order to understand the sensed world better. The more the structure of thought, “the way of thinking”, corresponds to the way the world is organized, the more we can understand this world. Vygotsky distinguished four developmentally ordered types of thought according to the word meaning structure. Each more developed structure of (verbal) thought allows to organize sensory experiences in ways that represent better and better the organization of the world that is experienced. In that sense the way of thinking, the way we can organize our thoughts, is a theory of how the world is organized. Vygotsky’s “true concepts” (he distinguished them in some places from less developed “scientific concepts”) are in several ways similar to dialectical thinking even though thinking in “true concepts” is more complex than just following principles of dialectics. I think “structural-systemic” thinking is essentially the same as thinking in “true” concepts.
I think, second, that Vygotsky was not so much “dialectical thinker” as he was “thinker in true concepts”. And there is a hierarchical qualitative difference. Thinking in true concepts is more structured than dialectical thinking. In addition to the quotes I brought in the previous comment, another helps to understand the difference. Vygotsky: “We must not forget only that the volume and content of a concept are always in inverse proportion, and since the volume of world principles tends to infinity, their psychological content is diminished to zero with the same rapidity.” (Consciousness as a problem of the psychology of behavior, 1925).
Principles of dialectics are such overabstract principles. They do not contain enough “content” in order to be useful. Vygotsky did not try to answer a question, what is a thesis and what is antithesis, he looked for answers of more specific, even though still general, questions. Vygotsky: “By banishing consciousness from psychology, we are firmly and forever locked in a circle of biological absurdity. … For us, with such a formulation of the question, access to the study of the most important problems is forever closed – the structure of our behavior, the analysis of its composition and forms. We are forever doomed to remain with the false idea that behavior is the sum of reflexes.” (ibid., my emphasis).
Principles of structures can be translated back to dialectics: every novel element/part of the more complex system can be understood as an antitehsis to the whole structure the novel part is going to be synthesised into (thesis-antithesis opposition can be understood as some X being a thesis whereas antithesis must be some non-X). However, if we replace the terms part and whole with thesis-antithesis and synthesis, respectively, we lose specificity. In other words, we can tell what are parts of some complex structure, but how can we tell, what is a thesis and what is antithesis in a synthesis?
In addition, going already beyond Vygotsky, there are other important aspects of thinking structural-systemically that are not distinguished in dialectical thought. There is important similarity between thinking in scientific/logical concepts and thinking in true concepts: both must have a formal-logical structure. Yet there is a very important difference as well: only true concepts allow to justify the premisses of the logical operations; this does not happen in logical-conceptual thinking. There are some differences more, but this is already another story.
Altogether – I fully agree that Vygotsky’s thinking was dialectical. However, it was much more complex than that, he built a novel specific kind of Marxist-dialectical theory, theory that was meant to explain human psyche.
With best wishes,
Aaro