Abstract
In the first lecture, Vygotsky gave definitions, listed four laws, and then discussed three groups of theories concerning the nature of development. In addition to lectures, students also had the opportunity to visit Vygotsky’s clinical practice; the first lecture seems to have been followed by a short visit that offered students the opportunity to familiarize themselves first hand with the kinds of developmental disorders referred to in the first lecture (e.g. “infantilism ”). In this lecture, Vygotsky begins again with definitions and then lists three distinctive features of pedological methods: holism , clinical practice, and the comparative-genetic method . Finally, he sums up the lecture.
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Notes
- 1.
Vygotsky is referring to the tutorial or practicum which accompanies the main lectures. These were apparently clinical sessions where Vygotsky could bring in patients and allow the students through observation to confirm what they had learnt. In this case he appears to have brought in some instances of “infantilism” or arrested development. There is no record of the clinical examination in the transcript, however; we only have transcripts for the main lectures.
- 2.
Vygotsky uses the term момент moment (“moment”) in a holistic way that may be unfamiliar to many readers, and it is sometimes translated as “factor” or “aspect,” to avoid confusion with some indefinite segment of time longer than a second and shorter than a minute. Yet the two meanings of “moment”, temporal and holistic, are related, and the relationship is lost if we translate it that way.
Suppose development is a continuous process, in which simpler wholes are differentiated into more complex ones. Imagine that this continuous process is divided into “frames”, by a film or a motion picture. Within each frame, we have a functioning whole and not simply a set of parts. Each frame portrays a complete moment of development in the sense that it depicts a functioning whole and not just one aspect or factor of development. Because development is uneven and heterogeneous, each complete moment foregrounds some aspects or factors of development and backgrounds others. The word “moment” was used in an analogous way in mathematics, physics, and philosophy in Vygotsky’s time.
- 3.
G. S. Korotaeva, the Выготский (2001) Russian editor of the transcripts, precedes this paragraph with: Это все определения отрицательны, or “All of the foregoing is only a negative definition,” and she notes that this dismisses the foregoing negative definitions as inadequate. Korotaeva is correct to point out that this is all part of Vygotsky’s method, but we prefer to put commentary in the footnotes rather than insert them in the text. This is not simply to keep the text itself “clean”; it also permits more expansive explanations (which may of course be ignored by readers who find them unnecessary).
For example: Vygotsky is always historical. In the last chapter, Vygotsky recognized that environmentalist explanations of development emerged in opposition to innatist ones. In this one, he recognizes that an idea like holism emerges in opposition to another idea like comprehensiveness. Vygotsky does not believe in simply splitting the difference, finding a compromise, or trying to combine them eclectically. Opposed ideas are opposed for good, historical reasons, and in human history differences in thinking like these are not set aside, papered over, or stitched up, but instead fought out.
Historical struggles like these, however, are not simply one negation after another. Historically, no idea gives way until there is a positive alternative, and positive alternatives can and do emerge from the clash and fragmentation of ideas. So, in the last chapter, we saw that Vygotsky recognized that there was positive content in innatism—the idea that the present is prepared for in some way by the past. Similarly, there was positive content in environmentalism: the idea that development involves the emergence of some new structure that was not internal to the developing organism before. In this chapter, Vygotsky recognizes that we cannot derive a positive definition of holism simply by negating comprehensiveness and negating analysis: on the contrary, a workable, positive definition of holism must include various facets of the subject matter and it must also include analysis. Which facets must be included, and what kind of analysis is holistic analysis? That is what Vygotsky explains next. But he does begin with a negation, by explaining what kind is not!
- 4.
Note that the word “element” in the last sentence should probably be “unit”. It is not clear if the mistake is Vygotsky’s or that of the transcriber. In any case, Vygotsky’s idea is clear. It is in fact the same point that he made when discussing how each science must have a method proper to its object of study; to avoid reductionism, each method must have a unit of analysis proper to the properties it wishes to explain.
Vygotsky’s reasoning here is both chemical and mathematical, and the Russian word he uses, разложения (“breaking down”, “division”, or “expansion”) can be understood in both ways. We can understand his distinction between elements and units chemically, by thinking of “breaking down” or “dividing up” a water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. We can understand the distinction mathematically, by thinking of a process of division that is “raised” (возводит) or “expanded” to the structural elements rather than the functional units. As Vygotsky points out, with water this will account for some universal properties such as molecular structure, chemical inertness, and electrical properties, but not particular properties such as putting out fire or floating ships. With numbers, it will treat all numbers as if they were primes, and cannot even account for the distinction between even and odd numbers, much less factors higher than two. To take Vygotsky’s example in the previous paragraph, once a child is producing grammatical sentences, we cannot simply study them as strings of phonemes, nor can a book be understood as a long list of semantically unrelated sentences.
- 5.
Since water is only one of Vygotsky’s examples, this would read a bit better without “of water”. But our goal is to reproduce what Vygotsky actually said in his lecture and in the transcript accurately, and Vygotsky, like any busy lecturer, sometimes “rises to the concrete” and stays there a bit too long.
- 6.
In the fourth paragraph above, Vygotsky seemed to be saying that studying one facet at a time is not the same as a holistic analysis. But here he appears to argue exactly the opposite: in order to perform a holistic analysis, it is necessary to study one aspect of a phenomenon at a time.
Yet there is no contradiction. Analyses can have different purposes: structural, functional, and genetic (i.e. developmental). If I take apart a complexly differentiated structure such as an organism into its different organs and tissues, I will find that no single organ has the functional properties of the whole organism; it is only when we take apart tissues into cells that we can find a unit that has functional properties that are analogous to the whole. But if I look at a function such as digestion, I will find that I can indeed examine specific and separate organs such as teeth, tongue, esophagus, stomach and bowels quite meaningfully. For example, studying the function of digestion requires a good knowledge of the digestive system but knowledge of the reproductive system is largely beside the point. A genetic analysis, on the other hand, has to be holistic in order to be genetic, because structures and functions are not differentiated at the beginning of development.
Pedology is, as Vygotsky established in the first lecture, not a structural analysis of the child per se, or even of child learning per se. it is not even a functional analysis: it is a genetic one, which can include both structural and functional analysis as part of a historical analysis of development.
- 7.
Korotaeva says that влияния (“influence”) was in the original stenogramme, and she replaced this with the word взаимодействия (“interaction”). Léopoldoff-Martin has put back the original word “influence” in her French translation. For English as well, “influence” seems better than “interaction”, on negative and positive grounds. Negatively, Vygotsky is emphasizing the barrenness of analyzing speech development into hereditary factors and environmental ones, but if the analysis can show how heredity and environment do interact, the analysis is hardly barren. More positively, “influence” suggests fluid in English, and the previous paragraph used aqueous metaphors like “confluence” and “merging” to describe the idea of convergence (usually, in Vygotsky, associated with the work of William Stern).
- 8.
As Vygotsky implies in this passage, the values of words can change according to their specific situation, and some of the words that Vygotsky uses in this passage have changed since he used them.
Vygotsky uses the term значение (znacheniya, “meaning”) to mean roughly what Saussure (1916/1972) meant by valeur (“value”) in his Course in General Linguistics, Chapter Four: on the one hand, the relationship between language and something that isn’t language (e.g. between a name and a person), and on the other the relationship between one particular meaning and other meanings (e.g. the difference between a pronoun, a nickname, a given name, a family name). These two variables determine the valeur of a word in a specific situation of use.
Vygotsky uses the term фонема (fonema, “phoneme”) to refer to what we today call a “morpho-phoneme”. A phoneme is simply a sound difference, and modern phonetics treats phonemes as independent of meaning (e.g. the difference between /h/ and /m/, neither of which can be used on their own). But a morpho-phoneme is a sound difference that coincides with a difference in meaning in actual use (e.g. the difference between “he” and “me”). It is clear, from the example of Russian cases that follows, that it is this morpho-phoneme that Vygotsky has in mind.
- 9.
Russian has cases. So does English, with pronouns like “he”, “him” and “his”. But Russian has a lot more, and these cases apply to all pronouns, proper nouns, and common nouns. Perhaps we can make this paragraph a bit more familiar to the English reader if we rewrite it using tense and number instead of case, like this:
‘Let me give you a simple example. Take these two words, the word “day” and the word “played”. At the beginning of one word and the end of the other we are dealing with one and the same sound /d/. In their physical properties, in their articulatory and physiological properties, the sounds are completely identical; they are one and the same sound. But one sound is a morpho-phoneme, a unit of speech. Why? I ask you: Is the sound /d/ at the end of “played” signifying something? The “~ed” in “played” means something, does it not? Does the /d/ sound in the word “day” signify anything by itself? No. This means that here we are dealing with a morpho-phoneme while there we just have a sound. If we spread out the word into separate letters like “d” and “a” and “y” or even into separate sounds like /d/ and /e/ and /ı/ then to me the whole word is just an arbitrary combination of different letters and sounds. But if I spread this word out into parts like these, “play” and “~ed” I see that the sound contains the basic property of human speech, the function of meaning, albeit in a very embryonic form since the sound in itself does not mean an object or an attitude of intension, of meaning in relation to an object, but merely two grammatical functions, tense and number, that distinguish the meaning “played” in comparison to “plays” or “play” or “will play”. Still, here the unit is a morpho-phoneme, and as our analysis has shown, human speech on the one hand, self-develops (or, develops itself) and on the other hand, the construction of the developed form is not on the basis of sounds but on the basis of morpho-phonemes, that is, sounds that are performing the basic function, namely, the function of meaning.’.
- 10.
Vygotsky is using the term “structurally” to mean almost the opposite of what it means today. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the international phonetic alphabet made it possible to compare minute distinctions in speech sound across languages, and the “science of speech” became synonymous with the study of minimal phonetic units which do not by themselves convey sense (e.g. /d/ vs. /t/). This approach to language, as units which mutually define and refer to each other rather than refer to conditions of understanding that lie outside themselves, in the social environment, eventually became structuralism, post-structuralism, and ultimately deconstruction, the idea that meanings are nothing but textual oppositions.
But Vygotsky was already impatient with the analysis of structure “in itself”. Here, Vygotsky points out that this approach cannot explain development. On the contrary, it leads us to an unsolvable version of “Plato problem”. If sounds mean nothing without words, and words mean nothing without sentences, then the child cannot learn anything until the child learns everything. When Vygotsky says that the child learns “structurally”, he means that what the child learns is not sounds without words, or words without sentences, but whole Gestalten, structural units that include sounding, wording, and meaning together.
With this, Vygotsky predicts the systemic-functional analysis of early child language which M. A. K. Halliday was able to do in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Halliday (2004) showed that although there may be very big differences between the sound system of child protolanguage and mother tongue, there is a semantic continuity—the child’s basic systems of meaning are established first interpersonally and then intra-personally even before the child learns adult words and wordings. In a sense, the child’s mother tongue is actually a second language: old meanings in new wordings and soundings.
- 11.
The Sterns do say that /r/ is among the first sounds that they observe in their children’s babble. See: Stern and Stern (1928) Die Kindersprache: Eine Psychologische Und Sprachtheoretische Untersuchnung. Leipzig: Verlag von Johann Ambrosius Barth, p. 183. The Sterns do not, of course, discuss the acquisition of Russian; their three children are learning German.
How to explain Vygotsky’s observations on children learning Russian? When Vygotsky says that the sound /r/ is associated with complex semantic functions that the child has not yet learned, he may be thinking of prefixes such as при (“pri~”) пре (“pre~”), and пере (“pere~”), part of complex morphology in Russian. But note that these are not simple acts of articulating /r/ but combinations of the voiced liquid semi-vowel sound /r/ with the unvoiced plosive stop /p/; there may indeed be articulatory problems which delay their deployment.
- 12.
- 13.
Some readers will find this annoyingly imprecise: Vygotsky says that the difference between six and “nine or twelve” is four, and then he speaks vaguely of features in the mind of a six-year-old that are typical of a twelve-year-old rather than a three-year-old. But there are (at least) three reasons for Vygotsky’s vagueness (in addition to the reason he gives here, which is our inability to predict underlying causes from overlying symptoms). First of all, as Vygotsky said earlier, intelligence and “mental development” is only one aspect of general child development. Secondly, these years are not “passport” years; they are most likely years measured by the Binet-Simon tests, and this is (according to Vygotsky in Chapter Fourteen of the History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions 1997: 231–239) a purely symptomatic measurement whose relationship to underlying mental development is unclear. Thirdly, Vygotsky knows that even children who have the same mental age on the Binet-Simon tests will perform very differently when offered leading questions, started solutions, or demonstrations (this is the now well-known method for diagnosing a zone of proximal development). Therefore, Vygotsky’s vagueness is entirely appropriate; it serves to indicate the many methodological problems that remain to be solved in the young science of pedology.
- 14.
A central theme of these pedological lectures is that the child is not a small adult. What Vygotsky means is that a child does not simply have the traits of adulthood in miniature; the child has his or her own traits, and these are qualitatively different from adult traits; they prepare the way for adult traits, but they often do so negatively. For example, crawling, autonomous speech and complexes prepare the way for walking, talking and true concepts not directly but by their inadequacy, by their overthrow and by their revolutionary reconstruction.
Here, however, Vygotsky discusses what is really an instance of pathological development: a child who is, in some ways, precisely a small adult, namely the wunderkind. In doing this he is careful to distinguish between rapid development and advanced development. We can think of this as a distinction between relatively rapid development on the ontogenetic scale and relatively advanced development on a sociogenetic scale.
For example, it is one thing to begin the study of music or painting at an early age, like Willy Ferrero, who was a precocious child but a mediocre adult musician. Willy Ferrero performed widely and was well known in Russia in Vygotsky’s time (see Imagination and Creativity in Childhood 2004). It is quite another thing to be at the forefront of development in art or science. Shakespeare did not produce any significant work until he was nearly thirty, and Franz Liszt, who Vygotsky discusses next, was a rather poor wunderkind but nevertheless turned out to be at the forefront of an important cultural innovation in how music was listened to.
- 15.
Some inaccuracies here. Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was Hungarian and not German. He didn’t begin to play the piano until he was seven or eight, and his best work comes from much later in his life: he taught and composed music well into his seventies, and his influence on music continued well after his death, since he was a highly gifted teacher (who did not charge for lessons, since he considered it a contribution to future generations). Nevertheless, and in fact for precisely these reasons, Liszt is an extremely good example of how to distinguish a wunderkind from the kind of genuinely transformative talent which enables the next stage in cultural-historical development. Liszt made classical music popular in an age before recording possible by transcribing a vast body of orchestral work so that it could be played on a single instrument, namely the piano. This made it a form of home entertainment available to middle class families. On tour, he was the object of one of the first real personality cults in music, a trend that persists to this day. He also invented the symphonic poem, a romantic genre that forms a bridge between classical and modern music.
- 16.
Consider, for example, a story about the eight-year-old Carl Friedrich Gauss. His schoolmaster asked the boys to add all the numbers from one to a hundred in order to keep them busy until recess. Gauss immediately provided the answer, realizing that it was bound to be (1 + 100) + (2 + 99) + (3 + 98) … (50 + 51) = 50 × 01 = 5050. According to the story, however, little Carl completed the task quickly in order to be allowed to go out and play.
- 17.
Vygotsky doesn’t explain how the child did it. But suppose a child can add or subtract on his or her fingers like other children. One-five-year old, watching her mother cut an apple into sixths and then into twelfths, decides that if a finger can be an apple, a finger can also be a twelfth of an apple. This allows the child to figure out, on her fingers, that 3/4 − 2/3 = 9/12 − 8/12 = 1/12. This is, of course, not the way that an adult would do the problem. It is something the child invented—as a child, and not as a little adult.
Korotaeva has a note here that says: ‘В стенограмме “Левана”’ which means ‘In the stenogramme, “Levan”’. But Korotaeva has replaced “Levan” with “Lehmann”. If she is right, Vygotsky is referring to: Lehmann (1891) Ein Wunderkind: Erzählung aus der Neuzeit. (A Child Prodigy: A story of modern times). But that doesn’t explain the references to experiments. It seems possible that Vygotsky is referring to experiments by (Kurt) Lewin or by (Rosa) Levina. There is also a Czech educator of the deaf in Vygotsky’s time called G. Lehmann (see Volume 2 of the English translation of Vygotsky’s Collected Works 1993: 325).
- 18.
There appears to be a misprint in the stenogramme: Vygotsky appears to mean 8.5 years and not 1.5 years.
- 19.
Vygotsky says that any clinical science which uses observable processes to try to understand unobservable ones involves the comparative method. For example, if I try to understand observable loss of speech in a patient with Alzheimer’s, I cannot observe the plaques and protein tangles in the brain directly (until the patient dies and an autopsy is performed). But I can compare that patient with a normal person. I can also compare that patient’s speech with the same patient’s speech a month, a year, or a decade earlier. Both of these methods are comparative, but only the latter is a comparative-genetic method.
If we take a case of “accelerated development” such as Willy Ferrero and compare that accelerated development with the development of a genuine musical genius such as Franz Liszt we are certainly doing comparative research. The same thing is true if we compare a case of musical genius with normal musical ability, or even a case of “accelerated development” (e.g. an “experimental group” with a particular educational environment, say, immersion in a foreign language) with “normal development” (a “control group” without that educational environment). All of these are comparative types of research.
But they are not comparative-genetic. We cannot call them holistic, because the comparison between an experimental group and a control group is designed to focus on a single trait and not on the whole of individual (that is the whole purpose of using groups and using controls). We cannot call them developmental, because all of the children are supposed to be at the same level of development. So Vygotsky would not consider this research pedology, and in fact this research is often quite explicitly aimed at the kind of “accelerated development” that Vygotsky considered pathological.
- 20.
In Anglophone scientific literature, “methodology” is often used as a rough synonym for what Vygotsky is calling “method” here. But for Russians, “methodology” is a kind of meta-science: it is literally the study of different methods and theoretical approaches. Clearly, Vygotsky would call the topic of this chapter “method” and not “methodology”, and that is how we have translated it. But then we need a term for the “system of techniques” borrowed from diverse disciplines which does not rise to the level of method and which must be subordinated to the pedological method. For this, we have chosen to borrow the term Vygotsky himself uses, “methodics”, even though this term doesn’t really exist in English. Perhaps it should.
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Vygotsky, L.S. (2019). The Characteristics of the Method of Pedology. In: L. S. Vygotsky's Pedological Works. Perspectives in Cultural-Historical Research, vol 7. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0528-7_2
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