The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky: Problems of General Psychology, Including the Volume Thinking and Speech

394 Pages·1987·64.2 MB·English

by  Robert W. Rieber

THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
L. S. VYGOTSKY
Volume 1
Problems of General Psychology
Including the Volume Thinking and Speech
COGNITION AND LANGUAGE
A Series in Psycholinguistics • Series Editor: R. W. RIEBER
Recent Volumes in this Series:
COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT AMONG SIOUX CHILDREN
Gilbert Voyat
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF L. S. VYGOTSKY
Volume 1: Problems of General Psychology
Edited by Robert W. Rieber and Aaron S. Carton
CRAZY TALK: A Study of the Discourse of Schizophrenic Speakers
Sherry Rochester and J. R. Martin
DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLINGUISTICS: Three Ways of Looking at a
Child's Narrative
Carole Peterson and AUyssa McCabe
DIALOGUES ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND THOUGHT
Edited by Robert W. Rieber
LANGUAGE AND COGNITION: Essays in Honor of Arthur J. Bronstein
Edited by Lawrence J. Raphael, Carolyn B. Raphael, and
Miriam B. Valdovinos
MEANING AND CONTEXT: An Introduction to the Psychology of Language
Hans Hormann
Edited and with an Introduction by Robert E. Innis
PSYCHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND LEARNING
O. Hobart Mowrer
THE USE OF WORDS IN CONTEXT: The Vocabulary of College Students
John W. Black, Cleavonne S. Stratton, Alan C. Nichols, and
Marian Ausherman Chavez
A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each
new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For fur
ther information please contact the publisher.
THE COLLECTED WORKS OF
L. S. VYGOTSKY
Volume 1
Problems of General Psychology
Including the Volume Thinking and Speech
Edited by
ROBERT W. RIEBER
John Jay College
and the Graduate Center
City University of New York
New York, New York
and
AARON S. CARTON
State University of New York at Stony Brook
Stony Brook. New York
Prologue by
JEROME S. BRUNER
Translated and with an Introduction by
NORRIS MINICK
PLENUM PRESS. NEW YORK AND LONDON
library of Congress Cataloging in Publi~ation Data
Vygolskii. L. S. (Lev Semenovich). 1896-1914.
The collecled works of L. S. VYIIOlsky.
(Cognilion and language)
Translation of: Sobranie s<)Chinenii.
Vo!. 1- indude$ bibliographie$ and index.
Contents: v. I. Problems of general psycholollY.
I. Psychololly-Colle.:ted works. I. Rieber. R. W. (Robert W.) II. CarlOn. Aaron S.
III. Title. [V. Series.
BF121.V9413 1981 ISO 81·7219
ISB:,\,·13: 918-1-~612-8919-7 .... 15BN·I3: 97g..1-~613·16S~8
001: 10.IOO7/97S-1~613-16S~8
109876
Thi~ volume is published under an allreement wilh the
Copyright Agtncy of the USSR (VAAP)
® 1987 Plenum Press. New York
Solkover reprint oflhe hardcover lSI edition 1987
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No par! of this book may be reproducw, stored in a retricval system, or lransmillw
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EDITORS' FOREWORD
The Collected Works of Lev Semonovich Vygotsky comprise a series of six volumes,
originally published in Moscow by Pedagogika between 1982 and 1984 and comprising
the work done by Vygotsky between 1924 and his early death in 1934. The present vol
ume is the first of this series to appear in English but it is actually Volume 2 in the
Russian series. It contains a complete rendition of Thinking and Speech (which may be
known to English readers as Thought and Language, the title assigned to an abridged,
interpretative translation by Hanfmann and Vakar in 1962) and five Lectures in Psy
chology which are here published for the first time in English and essentialIy comprise
Vygotsky's systematization of psychological theory and data in respect to the develop
ment in childhood of perception, memory, thinking, emotions, imagination, and will.
The volumes which are yet to appear in English are respectively concerned with: (1)
theory and history of psychology; (2) problems of developmental psychology; (3) child
and adolescent psychology; (4) "defectology" (or "special education" in American par
lance); and (5) a "scientific archive" consisting of a critique of Spinoza's studies of the
passions and an important essay, "Tool and Sign."
The decision by the Translator and Editors to render the title of the first segment
of this volume, Mysclzlenie i Rech', as Thinking and Speech and not as Thought and
Language, as it was previously translated, was a very intentional one. We hope the de
cision will exemplify and signal the philosophy to be followed in preparing all six vol
umes. The translations will be as true as we can make them to the meanings we per
ceive Vygotsky intended. Reevaluations -- and possible reformulations --of Vygotsky's
contributions (if there are to be any) must follow upon the preparation of faithful
translations. Although many readers perceive Vygotsky's ideas some six decades after
his death not only as current and modern but also as precursors of theorization and re
search yet to come, the translation of his works must not be allowed to become an oc
casion for subtle revisions which would make the texts seem even more consonant than
they are with one or another current belief or scientific trend.
Thus since myschlenie is a Russian present participle and mysl is a "thought" or
"idea," and since Vygotsky describes a thinking process in his discussions, "thinking"
seemed a better rendering of his intended meaning than "thought."
The rendering of rech' as "speech" rather than "language" is based first on the sim
ple fact that dictionaries gloss iazyk as "language" or "tongue" and rech' as "speech."
v
VI Editors' Foreword
More significant is the fact that we know Vyogtsky studied the linguistics of Troubet
skoy, Baudouin de Courtenay, Jakobson, de Saussure, and possibly of Sapir and
Bloomfield and that these thinkers rigorously distinguished, as did Vygotsky, speech
from language. Speech (or in Saussure's terms, "speaking acts" or paroles) is what
linguists studied and language (Saussure's la langue) is the grammatical and semantic
system which is to be conceptualized or derived from observing speech. Vygotsky's
care and consistency in using "speech" and "language" and his obvious interest in the
relation between speaking and thinking, which is so ingeniously examined in the
experiments he reported in Chapter 7 of the work, unequivocally justifies the
rendering we have chosen. As Dr. Minick argued: "Sapir and Whorf were interested in
the relationship between thought and language. Vygotsky was interested in the
relationship between thinking and speech."
Since Vygotsky and the early linguists wrote, speech pathologists have sought to
distinguish speech as a physiological product from language as a psychosocial product.
They are concerned with distinguishing motor processes from intellectual ones. But
the distinction they seek to make, however important, is not the distinction Vygotsky
had in mind and it would be improper and possibly misleading to allow the translation
to suggest that he did. Nor is Vygotsky's use of "speech" to be construed as being in any
way equivalent to Chomsky's use of "language." Indeed, despite differences in their
concerns for the relations between language and mind, Chomsky and Vygotsky for the
most part agree in their usage of the terms "speech" and "language."
The process of collecting materials already published in Russian as well as hith
erto unpublished manuscripts from Vygotsky's personal archives and elsewhere, the
identification of references where necessary, and other editorial tasks were carried out
by a commission of leading Soviet psychologists consisting, in large part, of Vygotsky's
former students and collaborators. This Editorial Commission was led by AN. Za
porozhets and included T. A Vias ova, G. L. Vygotskaya, V. V. Davydov, A N. Leon
tiev, A R. Luria, A V. Petrovskii, A S. Smirnov, B. C. Khelemendik, D. B. El'konin,
and M. G. Yaroshevskii. The Editorial Secretary for the Commission was L. A
Radzikhovskii. It was this Editorial Commission which, as far as possible, organized
the volumes according to their themes, and within each volume they arranged the pa
pers, monographs, books, lectures, lecture notes, and occasional fragments in chrono
logical order. In publishing the English translation, each volume will retain the form of
its Russian model -- including the critical apparatus provided by the Moscow-based
Editorial Commission --but will be published in a different sequence and will contain
additional notes, introductions, and commentaries from selected contributors outside
of the Soviet Union.
Dr. Bruner's Prologue to this volume describes, at some length, the scant supply
of Vygotskyian materials which have heretofore been available to English-speaking
readers. The present series of six volumes will not only make available a number of
works which have not ever before been translated but also include archival materials
located by the Moscow-based Editorial Commission which have never been published
at all. Yet these Collected Works do not include a number of entries which are to be
found in the inventory provided by Michael Cole and his editorial associates as an
epilogue to the volume they called Mind and Society (1978). That list includes refer
ences to youthful works of literary criticism produced between 1915 and 1923 as well
as references to pieces which, for the most part, seem to be either variant forms of
those to appear in the present collection, or popularizations of scientific concepts for
the public media or for special audiences. If the six volumes now to appear in English
do not provide the most complete collection possible, they will at least provide the En-
Editors' Foreword vii
glish-speaking reader with the bulk of what Vygotsky had written and taught in his
classes and they will certainly provide a richer and wider range of Vygotskyian materi
als than has been available. If it should turn out that some of the omissions are of a
significant nature and are reflective of earlier tendencies to censor aspects of Vygot
sky's thought, we must hope that continued scholarly exchange and a widening of the
scope of academic freedom throughout the world will eventually remedy those defects.
The present publication of the Collected Works in English was first made possible
through the efforts of Frank Columbus, who was a Senior Editor at Plenum. At Robert
Rieber's suggestion, Mr. Columbus negotiated the necessary copyright agreements
with the Soviet publisher of the six volumes. Later, Eliot Werner assumed the role of
Senior Editor and manager of the project at Plenum, and both Mr. Columbus and Mr.
Werner are owed acknowledgment and thanks for their help in bringing this volume
out.
For many of those who participated in widening and enriching American psychol
ogy in recent decades, the available Vyogtskyian literature provided considerable
promise as a basis for further theorization, for continued experimental research on his
postulates, for deriving the ontogenesis of mind from society rather from nativist
givens or from a random and chaotic environment, and for a socially oriented psychol
ogy implicitly and immediately applicable to education and to the therapy of cognitive
defects. Among those who have directly or indirectly contributed to the establishment
of an American branch of Vygotskyian psychology are several whom we have consti
tuted as an informal advisory board for the publication of the Collected Works. These
include Jerome Bruner, Michael Cole, John Dore, Joseph Glick, Sylvia Scribner, the
late Gilbert Voyat, and James Wertsch. While none of them can be held accountable
for any of the defects which may appear in these volumes, they are all to be acknowl
edged and thanked for one or another form of contribution to the production of this
volume.
In the present volume, the endnotes of the Moscow-based Editorial Commission
are marked in the text by superscript arabic numerals and their translations appear at
the end of the text. The endnotes to the English Edition are marked in the text by
arabic numerals enclosed by square brackets, [ ], and they appear in a separate section
at the end of the text. Unless initialed by the translator or editors, footnotes are
translations from the Russian text.
Robert Rieber and Aaron S. Carton
New York
CONTENTS
Prologue to the English Edition ......................................................................................... 1
Jerome Bmner
The Development of Vygotsky's Thought: An Introduction.......................................... 17
Norris Minick
THINKING AND SPEECH
Preface.................................................................................................................................... 39
Chapter 1. The Problem and the Method of Investigation ........................................... 43
Chapter 2. The Problem of Speech and Thinking in Piaget's Theory ......................... 53
Chapter 3. Stern's Theory of Speech Development....................................................... 93
Chapter 4. The Genetic Roots of Thinking and Speech ................................................ 101
Chapter 5. An Experimental Study of Concept Development .............................. 121
Chapter 6. The Development of Scientific Concepts in Childhood ............................ 167
Chapter 7. Thought and Word ........................................................................................... 243
LECTURES ON PSYCHOLOGY
Lecture 1. Peception and Its Development in Childhood ............................................. 289
Lecture 2. Memory and Its Development in Childhood ................................................ 301
ix
x Contents
Lecture 3. Thinking and Its Development in Childhood ............................................... 311
Lecture 4. Emotions and Their Development in Childhood ........................................ 325
Lecture 5. Imagination and Its Development in Childhood ......................................... 339
Lecture 6. The Problem of Will and Its Development in Childhood .......................... 351
Afterword to the Russian Edition ...................................................................................... 359
A.RLuria
Notes to the Russian Edition
Thinking and Speech .................................................................................................... 375
Lectures on Psychology ............................................................................................... 384
Notes to the English Edition ............................................................................................... 387
Author Index .......................................................................................................................... 391
Subject Index .......................................................................................................................... 393