Abstract
For the late Vygotsky, there was a unity/identity of body and mind, which expresses itself in the irreducible {speaking | thinking} unit. There is not a preexisting mental structure or already conceived idea that determines what comes out of the speaker’s mouth. Instead, thinking is born in speaking, a suggestion that has not been taken up in current educational psychology. In this chapter, we articulate a late Vygotskian Spinozist approach appropriate for a cultural psychology of education. Thought is born in the process of its articulation for the Other and, in so doing, for the person itself. We expand Vygotsky’s focus from speaking to communicating and develop a monist perspective on its relationship with thinking. In the mature individual, communicative thinking develops in response to and together with the changing situation. In children and adolescents, communicative thinking develops on two planes: a situational and an ontogenetic one. Here, the two lines of development are difficult to tease apart. In this chapter, we provide two types of case studies: the development of thinking and speech in the case of (a) university professors in the course of lecturing and (b) high school students in a physics lesson.
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Notes
- 1.
Plato, in Cratylus, attributes to Heraclitus the idea that everything is in motion, flux, and therefore that there is nothing that ever stands still. To be useful, thinking itself has to follow this never self-identical world (see also Bakhtin 1993).
- 2.
In some research on gesturing, the functions of (certain) gestures may be precisely to increase the activation and, thereby, to facilitate the thinking and its external expression.
- 3.
It would not be unusual to find the word “meaning ” in the place of signification . We avoid its use because, pragmatically speaking, “the philosophical concept of meaning has its place in a primitive idea of the way language functions“(Wittgenstein 1953/1997: 3).
- 4.
This point, which Vygotsky was making over eighty years ago, has been taken up in contemporary research within the emerging field of situated cognition (Roth and Jornet 2013). Holding it as one of its essential tenets, “situated cognition research rejects the hypothesis that neurological structures and processes are similar in kind to the symbols we create and use in our everyday lives” (Clancey 1993: 87). Accordingly, conflating psychological structures and processes with linguistic and formal descriptions (such as propositions, maps, or graphs) constitutes a category error on the part of researchers.
- 5.
Also expressed as: either p or not-p and tertium non datur [a third is not given].
- 6.
The transcription conventions used throughout this book are available in the Appendix.
- 7.
It turns out that in this diagram, because of the physical laws of blackbody radiation that relate color and temperature, the return curves should be the same as the heating curves, and the relationship between temperature and color is not linear.
- 8.
Those readers a little familiar with physics will quickly note that the two curves do not intersect each other nor do they intersect the ordinate axis at S = 0, as per the standard of physics.
- 9.
It is only some time later, while elaborating the consequences of some formula under discussion, that he finds what is wrong with the graph. He then produces in less than 10 s and without hesitation the equivalent to Fragment 3.2 in the correct graph.
- 10.
The very same phenomenon has been reported from other physics classes in other countries (e.g. Roth 2006).
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Roth, WM., Jornet, A. (2017). Communicating | Thinking. In: Understanding Educational Psychology. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39868-6_3
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