Abstract
One of the twentieth century’s most imaginative accounts of how human mental activity derives from social activity was outlined by the Soviet psychologist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896–1934). Although nearly half a century has passed since his death, Vygotsky’s ideas continue to motivate a great deal of interesting research in psychology and semiotics in the USSR and are beginning to be more widely utilized in the West. In this chapter I will outline three central themes in Vygotsky’s account of social and psychological functioning. I will examine these themes one by one, but I will also demonstrate how they are interrelated in a single theoretical framework. The three themes to be examined are: (1) the use of developmental, or genetic, analysis; (2) the claim that individuals’ psychological processes emerge out of social processes; and (3) the claim that the mediational means used in individuals’ psychological processes result from the mastery and internalization of social sign systems, especially language.
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Wertsch, J.V. (1983). The Role of Semiosis in L. S. Vygotsky’s Theory of Human Cognition. In: Bain, B. (eds) The Sociogenesis of Language and Human Conduct. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1525-2_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-1525-2_2
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