Abstract
Abstract rationality has increasingly been a target of attack in contemporary educational research and practice and in its place practical reason and situated thinking have become a focus of interest. The argument here is that something is lost in this. In illustrating how we might think about the issue, this paper makes a response to the charge that as a result of his commitment to the ‘Enlightenment project’ Vygotsky holds abstract rationality as the pinnacle of thought. Against this it is argued that Vygotsky had a far more sophisticated appreciation of reason and of its remit. The paper proceeds first by examining the picture of Vygotsky that is presented in the work of James Wertsch, and especially his claim that Vygotsky was an ambivalent rationalist, goes on to provide an account of Vygotsky that corrects this picture, and develops this in the light of the work of Robert Brandom, who shares Vygotsky’s inheritance of Hegel. The conclusion towards which this piece points is that the philosophical underpinnings of Vygotsky’s work provide a radically different idea of rationality and epistemology from that characterised as abstract rationality and that this has significance for education studies.
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Notes
It is only recently that a wide range of Vygotsky’s work has been made available to the English reader and with the work, the extent of philosophical influence on him by Spinoza and Hegel. The two books by which he is most commonly known (Thought and Language and Mind in Society) are by their editors’ admission not representative.
The expression ‘hierarchical form of reason’ is used to capture the belief in progress towards a universal form of rationality of which different cultural groups exhibit characteristics which place them higher or lower on an evolutionary scale.
Derry (2000) ‘Foundationalism and anti-foundationalism: seeking enchantment in the rough ground’ in V. Oittinen (ed) Evald Ilyenkov’s philosophy revisited, Kikimora Publications, Helsinki.
The first English language edition of an edited version of this work translated the title as Thought and Language and this is the name by which Vygotsky’s work is commonly known. The English edition of the Collected Works Volume 1 (1987) used the more correct translation of Thinking and Speech.
See Young (forthcoming) Bringing Knowledge back in: from social constructivism to social realism in the sociology of education, Taylor Francis.
‘... the disinterest of mainstream philosophy of mind in matters of education results from an inherited Cartesianism, according to which ... mental contents can and ought to be analyzed in terms of an individual’s mental states.’ (Westphal 2000)
This is not to deny that learning can be supported in a number of ways including didactic approaches which involve practice and habituation.
In the original Russian of Vygotsky’s text the term scientific here has a more general meaning and applies to academic concepts.
(C is circumference of the earth, r is radius of the earth; R is the new radius after 10 meters is added to the circumference) C = 2π r; C + 10 metres = 2π R; r + 10/2π = R; R − r = 1.6 meters (i.e. the additional gap).
See Derry (2004) The Unity of Intellect and Will: Vygotsky and Spinoza in Educational Review, Volume 56, Number 2 for a short discussion of the influence of Spinoza on Vygotsky.
McDowell credits Brandom’s writings and conversations with shaping his own thinking and singles out a seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that he attended in 1990 relating that ‘the effect is pervasive; so much so that I would like to conceive ...[Mind and World] as a prolegomenon to a reading of the Phenomenology much as Brandom’s forthcoming Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment is...a prolegomenon to his reading of that difficult text.’ (McDowell 1996, p. ix).
Brandom claims that Hegel was struggling with issues concerning conceptual objectivity that ‘analytic philosophy has had laboriously to rediscover in this century, due to the efforts of such thinkers as Wittgenstein, Sellars, Quine, and Kuhn.’ (Brandom 1999) For a clear account of Hegel’s work that opens the way to an understanding of these issues see Stephen Houlgate’s Introduction to Hegel.
By using the shorthand ‘foundationalist tradition’ here I mean to capture the tradition that Hegel criticises in the Phenomenology––both dualism and representationalism are elements in a foundational approach to knowledge.
David Bakhurst (1997) has brought to our attention the links between McDowell’s work and the Vygotskian tradition through his work on the philosopher Ilyenkov.
Initiation into such a space opens the opportunity for the development of word meaning.
Design here entails far more than the formalities involved in the sort of lesson planning which details what resources and activities will be used at which point.
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Derry, J. Abstract rationality in education: from Vygotsky to Brandom. Stud Philos Educ 27, 49–62 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9047-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-007-9047-1