Abstract
The concept of child development—the most important features of child development—factors contributing to child development—heredity and the environment—the role of the cerebral cortex in development—the interaction of biological and social factors—the subject of pedology.
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Notes
- 1.
Granville Stanley Hall (1846–1924) was the student of William James and Wilhelm Wundt, and the teacher of John Dewey and Arnold Gesell. Founder of the American Psychological Association, Hall stood halfway between nineteenth-century Victorianism and modern psychology. On the one hand, he was one of the first people to speak of “adolescence” as a special stage between childhood and adulthood, and to describe it as an age of “storm and stress”. On the other, he was one of the last people to take seriously the idea that ontogenesis was just a fast-forward version of phylogenesis (so, e.g., when children peel bark off trees or skin animals for fun, they are re-enacting primitive hunter-gatherer behavior). He believed that adolescents required firm leadership, harsh discipline, and regular beatings, and he opposed all attempts to reason with or teach them.
- 2.
Wilhelm Louis Stern (1871–1938) was a student of Ebbinghaus and later a founder of personalistic psychology. He is best known today for two achievements. Firstly, he invented the IQ, the relationship between mental score revealed by the Binet test and the child’s “passport” age. Secondly, he invented the main way in which early childhood age is notated. Together with his wife Clara he developed a theory of child language similar to Chomsky’s, where the idea of language is given at birth and the vocabulary is given by the environment. Many of his other notions of “convergence” are similar—the personality is given at birth, but the various roles we must enact are given by experience.
Vygotsky rejects all such compromises: they are undialectical combinations of contradictory theories, and they have a tendency to combine the weak points of both. Vygotsky’s own approach, illustrated above, requires negating both theories, e.g. negating the notion that development is reduced to the expansion of structures present at birth and negating the notion of quantitative increase, both of which can be seen in Stern’s theory of child speech.
Vygotsky speaks of meeting Stern and voicing his objections to the theory (Vygotsky, 1998: 245). But what Vygotsky says is that Stern moved in the opposite direction from the one he suggested, making the theory still more idealistic. Here, Vygotsky confirms that convergence is a good way of explaining Pavlov’s conditional reflex: the stimulus is given by the environment but the response by the endowment. The problem is that neither intelligence nor free will can be explained by conditional reflexes.
- 3.
Ivan Pavlov was a member of the Imperial Military Medical Academy and then the Soviet Academy of Sciences, where he founded the Pavlov Institute of Physiology in 1925. In Ape, Primitive, and Child, Vygotsky and Luria cite Sherrington’s visit to Pavlov’s laboratory at the institute.
A classic example of such distortion instinct is provided by one of Pavlov’s experiments in which a conditional reflex: to cauterization of the skin by means of electric current was fostered in a dog. At first, the animal responded to the painful stimulus with a violent defensive reaction, it strained to break out of its stall, seized the device in its teeth, and fought with all its might. But as a result of a lengthy series of experiments, during which the painful stimulus was accompanied by food stimulus, the dog began to respond to the burning sensation of its skin with a reaction that corresponded usually to feeding. The well‐known English physiologist, Charles Scott Sherrington, who was present at these experiments declared, looking at the dog, ‘Now I understand the joy of the Christian martyrs as they went to the stake’. With these words, Sherrington implied the vast horizon, which this classical experiment opened up. In this simple experiment he discerned the prototype of those profound changes in our nature that are induced in us by education and the influence of the environment.
- 4.
As with Pavlov and Sherrington’s confusion between dog salivation and martyrdom, the confusion happened because of empiricism: things that look similar but are really different. Unlike their confusion, though, this confusion has persisted, because it is empiricism supported by statistics.
- 5.
Francis Galton (1822–1911) was a medical student and a mathematician; for example, he tried to figure out the best way to cut a cake and to make tea. Like Mendel (who Galton did not know about), he did a lot of experiments on peas. He discovered that the effects of heredity are often diluted, so for example three grams of pea weight above the average in a parent plants only predicts about one gram above the average in the offspring plants.
When his half-cousin Charles Darwin published “The Origin of Species” he decided that this principle might apply to human beings. Since he was related to England’s most famous scientist, and since the proportion of eminent men decreased as you added relations, he decided that genius was hereditary. He also thought that people without genius should become monks or nuns, while people like himself should have as many children as possible. He never had children himself, however; perhaps he simply could not bear to dilute his own genius.
Galton’s work on peas was discredited by the rediscovery of Mendel, who showed that sometimes a trait was not expressed at all in the next generation. But his student, Karl Pearson (1857–1936) took Mendel’s laws into account and used much more sophisticated statistics (the chi-squared test and the Pearson Product Moment Correlation). These seemed to show that there really was some relationship between, for example, good school grades in parents and good school grades in children. This mathematical relationship was then taken up by Bühler and Peters, and it is still with us today. As Vygotsky says, the mathematical relationship is simply too “expansive”—it combines natural heredity with cultural endowment.
- 6.
“Chromatin” is a compound of DNA, RNA, and protein which is found in eukaryotic cells (i.e. not in bacteria but in cells that have a defined nucleus). In Vygotsky’s time, the make-up of chromatin was not understood (the structure of DNA and RNA was not yet explained). But Vygotsky knew about chromosomes and understood their function in cell reproduction.
Similarly, the role of semantic codes (e.g. the use of indirect questions, elaborated nouns, and abstract metaphors in middle class households) was not understood. But Blonsky clearly understood that working people had the same meaning potential as other people, even though the conditions of labour did not allow it to be realized.
- 7.
Vygotsky is referring to: Edinger and Fischer (1913).
Max Rothmann (1868–1916) was a German neuro-anatomist. Rothmann operated on dogs to remove the brain, comparing the behavior of the dog with that of a newborn child and marking many similarities. These similarities suggest that lower psychological functions are not actually located in the brain, but that as the brain develops they are “transferred upwards”, as Kretschmer later speculated.
Ludwig Edinger (1855–1918) was, like Rothmann, a student of Carl Weigart, and he too became very interested in the problem of how infants survive without myelin sheathing on the brain neurons. So he studied the phenomenon of hydroencephaly, where children are born with a normal skull and meninges, but without any brain, or at least without any cerebral hemispheres. Such children appear normal at birth: they cry, have a feeding reflex, they have the “Moro” reflex (grasping at their mothers, like monkey offspring), and they can live for many months. Edinger and Fischer reported on a case of a child who survived for three and a half years.
- 8.
Kurt Koffka (1886–1941) was a student of Carl Stumpf, for whom he wrote a thesis about the sense of rhythm. He wrote an important monograph called “Growth of the Mind” in which he argued that most early learning was simply sensorimotor learning. Unlike most of the Gestaltists, Koffka believed that this was different from later learning, which he called “ideational”, and which he recognized was dependent on language. However, Koffka considered the naming process all important; for Vygotsky, learning to name is only the beginning of learning concepts. After naming (proper nouns), the child would have to learn to generalize (common nouns), and then to abstract (abstract nouns) before arriving at true concepts around the age of adolescence.
Koffka took part in Luria’s second trip to Uzbekistan. He wrote a paper that came to the very opposite conclusion from Luria’s—Luria had found that uneducated Uzbek peasants scored differently on tests of lower skills such as perception as well as on higher skills such as syllogistic reasoning. Koffka reanalyzed Luria’s data and showed that there was no big difference between Uzbeks and others on the perception tests, but there was a difference in syllogistic reasoning (Luria and Vygotsky, 1930/1992). Note that Koffka’s interpretation is actually closer to what Vygotsky’s theory would have predicted, as well as more consistent with the division of the brain into higher centers and lower centers that all of the psychologists of the time shared.
- 9.
Vygotsky uses the word инoбытиe, and it is tempting to translate this as “alter ego”, except that in English “alter ego” suggests a Doppelganger, a secret identity or a frenemy, while here the meaning is more philosophical. It is literally “other-being” or “being otherwise”, the idea that social factors and biological factors are “otherness” to each other but ultimately express one and the same set of facts. A child, for example, can be viewed as biological or as social but there are not two different children. Likewise, in linguistics, a word can be treated as either a biologically produced material sound or a socially produced mental meaning, but there is really only one datum and not two. In Spinoza, who had a strong influence on Vygotsky, this one datum corresponds to a unity of body and mind or a unity of nature and God—each is the other to the other, but for precisely this reason, they are one and the same kind of thing viewed from “above” and from “below”. In Hegel: Anderssein, Andersheit or Anderheit is the second stage of a thing, after An-sich (Kant’s “thing in itself”). For Hegel, it is not really an “antithesis” but rather a “the thing out of itself” or maybe a “thing for another”.
Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (Hикoлáй Ивáнoвич Бyxápин, 1888–1938) was a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee. He was a “favorite” of Lenin, but Lenin noted that Bukharin tended to approach everything from the purely “social” side—from the side of the environment. For example, Bukharin strongly supported “Proletarian Culture”, which Lenin and Trotsky opposed. While in prison under Stalin, awaiting execution, Bukharin wrote four books, one of which was concerned with philosophy and child psychology (“Philosophical Arabesques”). The book doesn’t mention Vygotsky, but it does suggest a view of child speech development that is remarkably close to Vygotsky’s.
- 10.
Dmitri Iosifovich Ivanovsky (Дмитpий Иocифoвич Ивaнoвcкий 1864–1920) was a chemist, a botanist, and a microbiologist who studied plant diseases. This led him, while still a student, to study diseases in tobacco plants, including the tobacco mosaic virus. In 1892, he speculated that this disease was caused by new organisms even smaller and more basic than bacteria, and this led to the foundation of a new “unified” science that combined chemistry, botany, medicine, and microbiology: virology. Virology today is not really a unitary science: viruses are studied as part of medicine, or botany, or zoology.
References
Edinger, L., & Fischer, B. (1913). Ein Mensch ohne Grosshirn. [Pflüger's] Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie des Menschen und der Tiere 152, 112, 535–561. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01681030
Luria, A.R., & Vygotsky, L.S. (1930/1992). Ape, primitive man and child: Essays in the history of behaviour (E. Rossiter, Trans.). Hemel Hempstead Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1998). The collected works of L.S. Vygotsky (Vol. 5). Plenum.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2022). The Concept of Pedology. In: L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works, Volume 3. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 11. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2972-4_1
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