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What are Higher Psychological Functions?

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Abstract

The concept of Higher Psychological Functions (HPFs) may seem to be well know in psychology today. Yet closer analysis reveals that HPFs are either not defined at all or if defined, then by a set of characteristics not justified theoretically. It is not possible to determine whether HPFs exist or not, unless they are defined. Most commonly the idea of HPFs is related to Vygotsky’s theory. According to him, HPFs are: (1) psychological systems, (2) developing from natural processes, (3) mediated by symbols, (4) forms of psychological cooperation, which are (5) internalized in the course of development, (6) products of historical development, (7) conscious and (8) voluntary (9) active forms of adaptation to the environment, (10) dynamically changing in development, and (11) ontogeny of HPFs recapitulates cultural history. In this article these characteristics are discussed together with the relations among them. It is concluded that HPFs are real psychological phenomena.

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Notes

  1. Very often the first and most important question to be answered by science is what exactly the studied thing or phenomenon is. The question may emerge, how can we define before, what we are actually going to find out after our studies? Popper, nevertheless, demonstrated that nothing can be observed unless we have defined what it is, about what we are going to make observations. The reason is clear here: the world can be described in endlessly many ways and therefore in order to observe, we need to select what we are going to observe (and, thus, what we are going to ignore – everything else!). There is no contradiction here. Our definitions before the studies are actually hypotheses about what we are studying. Through studies we either reject our hypotheses or keep them as theories or models until some falsifying evidence is found. So, one can say that in the beginning of studies, our definitions reflect what we guess the studied thing or phenomenon is and after studies our definitions become the theory of the thing or the phenomenon studied.

  2. I attribute all “cultural-historical” theory, as it is called today, to Vygotsky. This I do despite the fact that some important theoretical publications are attributed to him together with Luria. By comparing Vygotsky’s early psychological works (between about 1924–1929), obviously authored by him alone, with the later ones, as if coauthored with Luria, I have reached a subjective impression that Luria did not add anything theoretically noteworthy to his theory. Quite clearly Luria has extended Vygotsky’s theory and contributed substantially to the development of it, especially in neuropsychology. Yet all these novel contributions emerged years after Vygotsky’s death. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that independently of whether my impression is correct or not, the arguments in this paper would not change.

  3. Structure and system were two terms that were used as synonymous by Vygotsky. Today both of the terms have acquired misleading connotations, especially in Anglo-American psychology. So structuralism can refer to atomism and system in so-called dynamic systems approach is understood as something opposite to structure. Instead of inventing a new term, I have used the term “structural-systemic” to refer to understanding according to which the world is a system composed from elements or components in specific relationships at different levels of analysis. What is whole at one level of analysis may be a component of a more complex structure at another. Wholes that emerge in hierarchical synthesis of elements have qualities (see for the definition of quality, Toomela 2014c) that are different from the qualities of the parts they are composed of. This view was followed by Vygotsky (and many other Continental European psychologists of his time, most notably gestalt psychologists).

  4. In 1996 I used the term “shared” instead of overlapping. Even though “shared” is commonly used in such context, the word is misleading and does not convey the idea well enough. Sharing – even when referring to using or enjoying together implies dividing at the same time (cf. Barnhart 1988, “share”, p. 993). If people share food, for instance, then they enjoy time of eating together but the food they consume is totally different. There would be no understanding of communicative signs, if the meaning would be truly “shared”, i.e., divided. Understanding emerges actually, when sign meanings overlap (intramentally) among the communicating organisms.

  5. Very important theoretical consequences follow from understanding that communication is based on sensed artificial objects. These issues remain beyond the scope of this paper. I only mention one idea to understand the importance of this fact. Namely, the fact that all signs and symbols must be available for senses excludes the possibility that signs in the world surrounding us exist independently of an interpreter. Our senses react only to certain aspects of the physical and chemical worlds whereas signs belong to the social-psychological world. The objects we perceive as visual signs, for example, are actually broken into millions of pieces when the contact with light is transformed into a pattern of neural signals. On the basis of the pattern of activation of the receptors and corresponding neural signals, figures must be distinguished from the ground and synthesized into a whole sign again in mind. Signs also do not refer externally; a word “dog” does not directly connect to a real dog in the physical-biotic world. The connection is always and exclusively intramental. So sign – unity of communicative form and its referent – emerges only in the individual-environmental interaction, in psyche. This point may be hard to take. Perhaps it would help to understand it if to think whether there would be signs in the world if there were nobody to interpret them. Sign without meaning, form without (intramental) meaning is not a sign but just another physical object.

  6. In psychology today, the concept of cause is understood as if there is only one possible conceptualization of it – the Cartesian linear cause → effect understanding. Actually there are several different theories of causality; structural-systemic theory can also be understood as a theory of causality (see Toomela 2012, for a discussion of different theories of causality in psychology).

  7. Even though this principle as applied to thinking systems I learned from Lotman, to the best of my knowledge, he did not connect this particular principle to the general principles of structural-systemic theory, to the general principle of emergence of any kind of novelty in hierarchical synthesis.

  8. I bring one example from the history of science, which in my opinion reflects the functioning of sign-mediated thought. Vitruvius described a story about Archimedes’ famous discovery (Vitruvius 1914, Book IX, Introduction, 9–12; pp. 253–254). King Hiero contracted a goldsmith to make a crown from gold. The crown was made and given to the king; the weight of the crown was exactly the same as the weight of the gold given to the goldsmith. But after receiving the crown, doubts emerged whether the crown was really made of gold or perhaps some of the gold was replaced with silver of the same weight. Archimedes was invited to determine whether the crown was made of gold only or not. There was no obvious solution at hand for the problem. Once Archimedes went to take a bath and observed that the more he sank into it, the more water ran out of the tube (εὕρηκα!). Archimedes began to experiment with pieces of silver and gold of the same weight and found that less water runs out from a vessel if the gold was put in it. Then he compared the amount of water running out from the vessel when a piece of gold was sank there and when the crown in question with equal weight was sank. More water spilled over the vessel than was supposed to if it were made of gold. The theft was discovered.

    Here we see all important aspects of sign-mediated thought. First, the emergence of doubt: visually and in weight, the crown was sensed as gold. The doubt that the crown could not be made of pure gold, emerged because of using language – the goldsmith was accused to be dishonest. We also observe here how generalization becomes crucial: the situation involved the crown, the dubious honesty of the goldsmith, Archimedes and his bath, vessels with water and pieces of gold and silver of equal weight. All these were generalized into one whole structure of the problem to be solved. Nothing in purely sensory-based experiences would lead to connecting such remotely related experiences into one whole. Further, actions – experiments – were conducted to discover the solution for the problem; these actions were aimed at solving conflict between knowledge obtained directly from senses and knowledge communicated with cultural signs. The solution is called now the Archimedes principle (cf. Archimedes 1897, Bk I). Thus we see here also the historical nature of sign meanings, another characteristic of HPFs – once created, the meanings can pass over to the next generations in the history of the human kind.

  9. It is worth mentioning that “is related to” is used deliberately here. The content of psychological cooperation is never determined by the external world alone; all messages (to be more precise, all external forms of signs without content) in communication are interpreted individually after experiencing them through senses and therefore the result of that interpretation can be very different from the intention of the other, who tried to communicate certain ideas. Increasing overlap of understanding one another, overlap in signs meanings, emerges in the very complex process of individual development, or, more correctly, in the process of the development of all individuals involved in the communication. The central thesis adopted by many activity theorists, according to which the social world (or, even more widely, the world of artifacts, cf. Cole 1996) can determine the content of individual minds, is wrong.

  10. Perhaps full book chapter or an article should be written on this question alone. Intuitively my statement may seem to be incorrect. There seem to be messages with totally overlapping meanings. Yet I believe it is not so. Say, for instance, I ask a group of people to add “2 + 2 = ?” and everybody in the group would end up with an answer “4”. Everything may seem to be overlapping here. But not necessarily. Every of the listeners or readers, in our case, might ask, why I asked to perform this task? Some may ask further, why this task and not some other? We can go further, and think, what “4” means for each of you, who got the result. I am sure, the overlap in answers to these and many other questions about the situation would decrease with every of such questions so that we would end up with unique patterns of answers to these questions.

  11. According to several religious philosophers, (Christian) God not only created the universe but also continues constantly to preserve it; in this sense God constantly recreates the world (see, e.g., Descartes 1985a, b). Now we find that it is humans, who constantly recreate their culture and through this themselves. Just an observation.

  12. I translate Russian “perezhivaniye” here as “experience”.

  13. I am not, of course, the first to end up with such a definition. John Locke arrived at a similar definition a little bit earlier than me: “Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a man’s own mind” (Locke 1908, p. 220). Nevertheless, Locke also believed that consciousness accompanies any kind of thought, any kind of sensory experience: “When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so” (ibid. p. 466). I disagree with that idea: hearing, etc., is one kind of processes whereas knowing that we do it, is another; the first does not imply the second. In fact, I am not alone with this idea as well. Aristotle provided essentially similar argument far before Locke proposed his view on consciousness (cf. Aristotle 1984c, p. 677, 425b)

  14. In fact, there is almost no developmental psychology as well. Mental development, according to structural-systemic view, is hierarchical reorganization of mental structures. If a mental structure is hierarchically reorganized, the way how mind operates becomes different as well. True mental development is reflected in two parallel changes. On the one hand, qualitatively novel ideas can be understood, qualitatively novel problems and tasks can be solved, qualitatively novel goals can be achieved through behavior. On the other hand, externally similar things, ideas, problems, etc. become internally different. The same tasks, for instance, will be solved by different psychic operations. More generally, the kinds of relationships of units of thought change in the course of psychic development. So-called developmental psychology today with extremely rare exceptions is aimed at describing what humans can do at different ages and not how, by which psychic processes external behavior is organized. No wonder the idea of recapitulation disappeared from “developmental” psychology – because what is recapitulated is not necessarily what is done by humans at different stages of their development but how.

  15. It is worth mentioning that Haeckel did not think that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis exactly. On the contrary, he made a clear distinction between what he called paligenetic processes, i.e., ontogenetic recapitulations, and cenogenetic processes, i.e., embryonic variations (cf. Haeckel 1905a, Chapter I, esp. p. 8). Thus finding unparalleled changes in two lines of development is obviously no reason to reject the idea of recapitulation.

  16. “Mainstream psychology is an approach to the science of mind accepted by majority of psychologists and defined by ontological and epistemological qualities questioned by representatives of non-mainstream psychology.” (see Mainstream Psychology in Toomela 2014a, for the definition and discussion of it)

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Estonian Research Council Grant No IUT03-03 (Academic and personal development of an individual in the system of formal education).

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Toomela, A. What are Higher Psychological Functions?. Integr. psych. behav. 50, 91–121 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-015-9328-0

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