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Lev Semenovich Vygotsky thinking speech. Book: “Thinking and Speech

Thinking and speech (collection) Lev Vygotsky

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About the book "Thinking and speech (collection)" Lev Vygotsky

Despite the fact that the history of mankind has thousands of years, the true capabilities of our brain and psyche have not yet been studied even by half. Various areas of psychology and psychiatry are developing very rapidly, but the success of scientists in this area is not at all great. Knowing already quite a lot and, it seems, already approaching the solution, researchers always come to a dead end. As if nature itself does not want people to finally open the mysterious Pandora's box, because no one can even imagine what a complete study of the functions and capabilities of the brain will turn out for a person.

Lev Vygotsky, the famous Soviet psychologist, the founder of the cultural-historical theory in psychology, in his time managed to conduct so much research, make so many fundamental conclusions and discoveries that, it seems, so far, many of his ideas are waiting for study and development. Unfortunately, the great scientist passed away at the age of thirty-eight, but even in such a short period of time he managed to do so much for psychology that today, his works are considered one of the fundamental works in the field of modern psychological science.

Before you is a unique collection, where under one cover are three of the most famous works of the great scientist - these are "Thinking and Speech", "Imagination and Creativity in Childhood" and "Consciousness and Psyche". It is difficult to overestimate the cognitive value of these scientific works. They represent the most detailed study of the most difficult questions of experimental psychology. And despite the fact that these scientific studies were created in the 20s and 30s of the last century, they are relevant to this day. Thinking and Speech, for example, is considered a classic work by Vygotsky and is the work that actually founded the very science of psycholinguistics.

It is also worth noting that Vygotsky's collection Thinking and Speech is not a work of art, but a deep research work, so one should not expect an easily perceived text from this work. The text is entirely scientific, full of specialized, narrowly focused concepts and terms. This collection is recommended for reading by professional psychologists, scientists, teachers, as well as students of specialized educational institutions and anyone who wants to get acquainted with the fruits of the great Soviet scientist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky.

Read the collection of Lev Vygotsky's "Thinking and Speech", which includes his most famous scientific research and use the most useful information. Enjoy reading.

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The point here is not the lack of appropriate words and sounds, but the lack of appropriate concepts and generalizations, without which understanding is impossible. As Leo Tolstoy says, it is almost always not the word itself that is incomprehensible, but the concept that is expressed by the word. The word is almost always ready when the concept is ready. Therefore, there is every reason to consider the meaning of a word not only as a unity of thinking and speech, but also as a unity of generalization and communication, communication and thinking.

The word always refers not to any one separate object, but to a whole group or to a whole class of objects. Because of this, every word is a hidden generalization, every word already generalizes, and from a psychological point of view, the meaning of a word is, first of all, a generalization. But generalization, as it is easy to see, is an extraordinary verbal act of thought that reflects reality in a completely different way than it is reflected in direct sensations and perceptions.

With automatic, instinctive adaptation, the mind is not aware of the categories. The execution of an automatic act does not give our mind any task.

The natural conclusion from this conception is Piaget's proposition, which says that the egocentric character of thought is so necessarily internally connected with the very psychological nature of the child that it always manifests itself naturally, inevitably, steadily, regardless of the child's experience. “Even experience,” says Piaget, “is not able to deceive children's minds so set up in this way; things are to blame, but children never.

“We called the thought of the child egocentric,” says Piaget, “wishing to say that this thought is still autistic in its structure, but that its interests are no longer directed exclusively to the satisfaction of organic needs or the needs of play, as in pure autism, but are also directed and on mental adaptation, like the thought of an adult.

What is this central link that makes it possible to reduce to unity all the individual features of children's thinking? It lies, from the point of view of Piaget's main theory, in the egocentrism of children's thinking. This is the main nerve of his entire system, this is the cornerstone of his entire construction.

The transition from internal to external speech is a complex dynamic transformation - the transformation of predicative and idiomatic speech into syntactically dissected and understandable speech for others.

Its essence lies in the fact that the meanings of words, more dynamic and broader than their meanings, reveal other laws of association and merging with each other than those that can be observed when combining and merging verbal meanings. We called that peculiar way of combining words that we observed in egocentric speech, the influence of meaning, understanding this word simultaneously in its original literal meaning (infusion) and in its figurative meaning, which has now become generally accepted. Meanings, as it were, flow into each other and, as it were, influence each other, so that the previous ones are, as it were, contained in the subsequent one or modify it. As for external speech, we observe similar phenomena especially often in artistic speech. The word, passing through any work of art, absorbs all the variety of semantic units contained in it and becomes, in its meaning, as if equivalent to the entire work as a whole. This is especially easy to explain on the example of the titles of works of art. In fiction, the title stands in a different relation to the work than, for example, in painting or music. It expresses and crowns the entire semantic content of the work to a much greater extent than, say, the title of a painting. Words such as "Don Quixote" and "Hamlet", "Eugene Onegin" and "Anna Karenina" express this law of influence of meaning in its purest form. Here, one word actually contains the semantic content of the whole work. A particularly clear example of the law of the influence of meanings is the title of Gogol's poem Dead Souls.

We have so far named predicativity and reduction of the phasic side of speech as two sources from which the contraction of inner speech flows. But both of these phenomena already indicate that in inner speech we generally encounter a completely different relationship between the semantic and phasic aspects of speech than in oral speech. The phasic side of speech, its syntax and its phonetics are reduced to a minimum, simplified and condensed as much as possible. The meaning of the word comes first. Inner speech operates mainly with semantics, but not with the phonetics of speech. This relative independence of the meaning of a word from its sound side comes through in inner speech extremely prominently.

We will begin with this second path - the comparison of inner speech with oral and written, especially since we have already traversed this path almost to the very end and that we have already prepared everything for the final clarification of thought. The whole point is that the same circumstances that sometimes create the possibility of purely predicative judgments in oral speech and which are completely absent in written speech are constant and unchanging companions of inner speech, inseparable from it. Therefore, the same tendency to predicativity must inevitably arise and, as experience shows, inevitably arises in inner speech as a constant phenomenon and, moreover, in its purest and absolute form. Therefore, if written speech is the polar opposite of oral speech in the sense of maximum expansion and the complete absence of those circumstances that cause the subject to be omitted in oral speech, inner speech is also the polar opposite of oral speech, but only in the opposite sense, since absolute and constant predicativity dominates in it. Oral speech, thus, occupies a middle place between written speech, on the one hand, and inner speech, on the other.

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Reader in general psychology. Psychology of thinking. - M., 1981. - S. 153
Vygotsky Lev Semenovich (November 5 (17), 1896 - July 11, 1934) - Soviet psychologist, creator of the cultural and historical concept of the development of higher mental functions. Graduated from the Faculty of Law of Moscow University and the Faculty of History and Philosophy of the University. Shanyavsky (1917). He began his scientific and pedagogical activity in Gomel. He worked at the Moscow State Institute of Experimental Psychology (from 1924), at the Academy of Communist Education, then at the Institute of Defectology he created. Professor at the Institute of Psychology in Moscow. Distinguishing two lines in the development of behavior: natural and cultural, L. S. Vygotsky put forward the position that higher, specifically human mental processes (voluntary attention, logical memory, conceptual thinking, etc.) are carried out like labor processes with the help of special tools " spiritual production" - signs. Initially, these cultural techniques and means are formed in the joint activities of people, and then they also become individual psychological means of controlling behavior. In the development of each of the mental functions, such mediation gradually turns from external to internal.

One of the main problems on the basis of which the cultural-historical theory was developed is the problem of the relationship between thinking and speech. The fundamental work of L. S. Vygotsky “Thinking and speech” (M., 1934) is also presented in the anthology by three separate articles devoted, respectively, to general theoretical issues, analysis of the genetic origins of thinking and speech, structural and semantic features of inner speech (according to I, IV, VII ch.), studies of egocentric speech (11 and 7 ch.) and the problem of the development of concepts in ontogenesis (V ch.). Works: Pedagogical psychology. M., 1926; Etudes on the history of behavior. M.-L., 1930 (with A. R. Luria); Mental development of children in the learning process. M., 1935; The problem of mental retardation. - In the book: Mentally retarded child. M., 1935; Selected psychological studies. M., 1956; Development of higher mental functions. M., 1960; Imagination and creativity in childhood. Ed. 2nd. M., 1968; Psychology of art. Ed. 2nd. M., 1968.

PROBLEM AND RESEARCH METHOD
The problem of thinking and speech belongs to the circle of those psychological problems in which the question of the relationship between various psychological functions, various types of activity of consciousness comes to the fore. The central point of this whole problem is, of course, the question of the relation of thought to the word.

The whole question rests on the method of investigation, and we think that if we pose the problem of the relationship between thinking and speech from the very beginning, we must also find out in advance what methods should be applicable in the study of this problem, which could ensure its successful solution.

We think that we should distinguish between two kinds of analysis used in psychology. The study of all psychological formations necessarily presupposes analysis. However, this analysis can take two fundamentally different forms, one of which, we think, is to blame for all the failures that researchers suffered in trying to solve this centuries-old problem, and the other is the only correct and starting point in order to make at least the very first step towards its solution.

The first method of psychological analysis could be called the decomposition of complex psychological wholes into elements. It could be compared to the chemical analysis of water, decomposing it into hydrogen and oxygen. An essential feature of such an analysis is that as a result of it, products are obtained that are alien in relation to the analyzed whole, - elements that do not contain the properties inherent in the whole as such, and have a number of new properties that this whole could never discover. . With a researcher who, wishing to solve the problem of thinking and speech, breaks it down into speech and thinking, exactly the same thing happens as would happen to any person who, in search of a scientific explanation of some properties of water, for example, why water extinguishes a fire, or why the law of Archimedes applies to water, would resort to the decomposition of water into oxygen, and hydrogen as a means of explaining these properties. He would be surprised to learn that hydrogen itself burns, and oxygen supports combustion, and he would never be able to explain from the properties of these elements the properties inherent in the whole.

Nowhere were the results of this analysis more evident than in the field of the doctrine of thought and speech. The word itself, which is a living unity of sound and meaning and containing, like a living cell, in the simplest form all the basic properties inherent in speech thinking as a whole, turned out to be split into two parts as a result of such an analysis, between which the researchers then tried to establish an external mechanical association.

We think that the decisive and turning point in the whole doctrine of thought and speech is the transition from this analysis to another kind of analysis. This latter we could designate as an analysis that divides a complex unified whole into units. By unity we mean such a product of analysis which, unlike elements, has all the basic properties inherent in the whole, and which are further indecomposable living parts of this unity. Not the chemical formula of water, but the study of molecules and molecular motion is the key to explaining the individual properties of water. In the same way, a living cell, which retains all the basic properties of life inherent in a living organism, is a real unit of biological analysis. A psychology that wants to study complex unities needs to understand this. It must find these indecomposable, preserving properties inherent in the given whole as a unity of the unit, in which these properties are presented in the opposite form, and with the help of such an analysis, try to resolve the specific questions that arise before it. What is such a unit, which is further indecomposable and which contains the properties inherent in speech thinking as a whole? We think that such a unit can be found in the inner side of the word - in its meaning.

In the word, we have always known only one of its external, facing us side. Meanwhile, in its other, inner side, the possibility of solving the problems of interest to us about the relationship between thinking and speech is hidden, for it is precisely in the meaning of the word that the knot of that unity that we call verbal thinking is tied.

A word always refers not to any single object, but to a whole group or to a whole class of objects. Because of this, every word is a hidden generalization, every word already generalizes, and from the psychological point of view, the meaning of a word is, first of all, a generalization. But generalization, as it is easy to see, is an extremely complex act of thought that reflects reality in a completely different way than it is reflected in direct sensations and perceptions. The qualitative difference of the unit in the main and the main is a generalized reflection of reality. By virtue of this, we can conclude that the meaning of the word that we have just tried to reveal from the psychological side, its generalization, is an act of thinking in the proper sense of the word.

But at the same time, meaning is an integral part of the word as such, it belongs to the realm of speech as much as to the realm of thought. A word without meaning is not a word, but an empty sound. The word, devoid of meaning, no longer belongs to the realm of speech. Therefore, meaning can equally be considered both as a phenomenon of speech in nature and as a phenomenon related to the field of thinking. It is speech and thinking at the same time, because it is the unit of speech thinking. If this is so, then it is obvious that the method of studying the problem of interest to us cannot be other than the method of semantic analysis, the method of analyzing the semantic side of speech, the method of studying verbal meaning. By studying the development, functioning, structure, and in general the movement of this unit, we can learn much of what the question of the relationship between thinking and speech, the question of the nature of verbal thinking, can reveal to us. The primary function of speech is the communicative function. Speech is primarily a means of social communication, a means of expression and understanding. This function of speech is also usually separated from the intellectual function of speech in analysis, which breaks it down into elements, and both functions are attributed to speech, as it were, in parallel and independently of each other. Speech, as it were, combined both the functions of communication and the functions of thinking, but in what relation these two functions stand to each other, how they develop and how both are structurally combined with each other - all this remained and remains still unexplored. Meanwhile, the meaning of a word is as much a unit of these two functions of speech as it is a unit of thought. That direct communication of souls is impossible is, of course, an axiom for scientific psychology. It is also known that communication, not mediated by speech or any other system of signs or means of communication, as it is observed in the animal world, makes possible only communication of the most primitive type and in the most limited sizes. In fact, this communication through expressive movements does not even deserve the name of communication, but rather should be called infection. A frightened gander, seeing danger and raising the whole flock with a cry, not only informs her of what he saw, but rather infects her with his fright. Communication, based on reasonable understanding and on the intentional transmission of thoughts and feelings, certainly requires a certain system of means, the prototype of which was, is and always will be human speech, which arose from the need for communication in the labor process.

In order to convey any experience or content of consciousness to another person, there is no other way than to refer the transmitted content to a certain class of phenomena, and this, as we already know, necessarily requires generalization. Thus, it turns out that communication necessarily involves the generalization of the development of verbal meaning, i.e. generalization becomes possible with the development of communication. Thus, the highest forms of psychological communication inherent in a person are possible only due to the fact that a person, with the help of thinking, generally reflects reality.

It is worth referring to any example in order to be convinced of this connection between communication and generalization, these two main functions of speech. I want to let someone know that I'm cold. I can make him understand this with the help of a series of expressive movements, but real understanding and communication will take place only when I am able to generalize and name what I am experiencing, i.e., to attribute the feeling of cold I experience to a certain class of states, familiar to my interlocutor. That is why the whole thing is incommunicable for children who do not yet have a known generalization. The point here is not the lack of appropriate words and sounds, but the lack of appropriate concepts and Generalizations, without which understanding is impossible. As Tolstoy says, it is almost always not the word itself that is incomprehensible, but the concept that is expressed by the word. The word is almost always ready when the concept is ready. Therefore, there is every reason to consider the meaning of a word not only as a unity of thinking and speech, but also as a unity of generalization and communication, communications and thinking. The fundamental significance of such a formulation of the question for all genetic problems of thinking and speech is completely immeasurable. It lies primarily in the fact that only with this assumption does a causal-genetic analysis of thinking and speech become possible for the first time.
GENETIC ROOTS OF THINKING AND SPEECH
The main fact that we encounter in the genetic consideration of thinking and speech is that the relationship between these processes is not a constant value, unchanged throughout development, but a variable value. The curves of development repeatedly converge and diverge, intersect, level off in separate periods and run in parallel, even merge in their separate parts, then branch out again.

This is true of both phylogenesis and ontogenesis. First of all, it should be said that thinking and speech have genetically completely different roots. (This fact can be considered firmly established by a number of studies in the field of animal psychology. The development of one and the other function not only has different roots, but also proceeds throughout the entire animal kingdom along different lines.

(The studies of the intelligence and speech of great apes, in particular the studies of Koehler (1921) and Yerkes (1925), are of decisive importance in establishing this paramount importance of a fact.

In Köhler's experiments we have absolutely clear proof that the rudiments of intellect, that is, thinking in the proper sense of the word, appear in animals independently of the development of speech and not at all in connection with its success. The "inventions" of monkeys, expressed in the manufacture and use of tools and in the use of "detours" in solving problems, constitute the primary phase in the development of thinking, but the phase is pre-speech.

The absence of speech and the limitation of "trace stimuli", the so-called "representations", are the main reasons for the greatest difference between the anthropoid and the most primitive man. Koehler says: “The absence of this infinitely valuable technical aid (language) and the fundamental limitation of the most important intellectual material, the so-called “representations,” are therefore the reasons why even the slightest beginnings of cultural development are impossible for chimpanzees.”

The presence of a human-like intellect in the absence of any human-like speech in this respect and the independence of intellectual operations from its “speech” - this is how one could succinctly formulate the main conclusion that can be drawn in relation to the problem of interest to us from Köhler’s research.

Köhler, with the accuracy of experimental analysis, showed that the determinant for the behavior of a chimpanzee is precisely the presence of an optically actual situation. Two propositions can be regarded as undoubted in any case. First, the intelligent use of speech is an intellectual function, under no circumstances determined directly by the optical structure. Second, in all tasks that involved structures other than optically relevant structures (mechanical, for example), chimpanzees moved from an intellectual type of behavior to pure trial and error. Such a simple operation from a human point of view as the task of putting one box on top of another and maintaining balance at the same time or removing a ring from a nail turns out to be almost inaccessible to the “naive statics” and mechanics of a chimpanzee. From these two propositions, it follows with logical inevitability that the assumption that it is possible for a chimpanzee to master the use of human speech is psychologically highly improbable.

But the matter would be decided extremely simply if we really did not find any rudiments of speech in monkeys. In fact, we find in chimpanzees a relatively highly developed "speech", in some respects (primarily phonetically) humanoid. And the most remarkable thing is that the speech of a chimpanzee and his intellect function independently of each other. Koehler writes about the "speech" of chimpanzees, which he observed for many years at an anthropoid station on about. Tenerife: “Their phonetic manifestations, without any exception, express only their aspirations and subjective states; therefore, they are emotional expressions, but never a sign of something "objective" (Kohler, 1921).

Koehler described extremely varied forms of "verbal communication" between chimpanzees. In the first place should be placed emotional and expressive movements, very bright and rich in chimpanzees (facial expressions and gestures, sound reactions). Next come the expressive movements of social emotions (gestures when greeting, etc.). But "their gestures," says Koehler, "like their expressive sounds, never signify or describe anything objective."

Animals perfectly "understand" each other's facial expressions and gestures. With the help of gestures, they "express" not only their emotional states, Koehler says, but also desires and impulses directed to other objects. The most common way in such cases is for the chimpanzee to start the movement or action that it wants to perform or to which it wants to induce another animal (pushing another animal and initial walking movements when the chimpanzee "calls" him to go with him; grasping movements when the monkey wants bananas from another, etc.). All these are gestures directly related to the action itself.

We may now be interested in establishing three points in connection with the characteristics of chimpanzee speech. First, this connection of speech with expressive emotional movements, which becomes especially clear in moments of strong affective arousal in chimpanzees, does not represent any specific feature of anthropoid apes. On the contrary, it is rather an extremely common feature for animals with a vocal apparatus. And this same form of expressive vocal reactions undoubtedly underlies the emergence and development of human speech.

Second, emotional states represent a sphere of behavior in chimpanzees, rich in speech manifestations and extremely unfavorable for the functioning of intellectual reactions. Koehler notes many times how the emotional and especially the affective reaction completely destroys the intellectual operation of the chimpanzee.

And third: the function of speech in chimpanzees is not exhausted by the emotional side, and this also does not represent an exceptional property of the speech of anthropoid apes, it also makes their speech related to the language of many other animal species and also constitutes the undoubted genetic root of the corresponding function of human speech. Speech is not only an expressive-emotional reaction, but also a means of psychological contact with their own kind. Both the apes observed by Koehler and the chimpanzees of Yerkes exhibit this function of speech with complete certainty. However, this function of connection or contact is in no way connected with the intellectual reaction, i.e., the thinking of the animal. Least of all, this reaction can recall the intentional, meaningful communication of something or the same impact. Essentially, this

an instinctive reaction, or at least something extremely close to it.

We can sum up. We were interested in the relationship between thinking and speech in the phylogenetic development of both functions. To clarify this, we resorted to the analysis of experimental studies and observations on the language and intelligence of anthropoid apes. We can briefly formulate the main conclusions.

1. Thinking and speech have different genetic roots.

2. The development of thinking and speech proceeds along different lines and independently of each other.

3. The relationship between thinking and speech is not at all constant throughout phylogenetic development.

4. Anthropoids reveal human-like intelligence in some respects (rudiments of the use of tools) and human-like speech in completely different respects (emotional phonetics of speech and rudiments of the social function of speech).

5. Anthropoids do not show a relationship characteristic of a person - a close connection between thinking and speech. Both are not in any way directly related in chimpanzees.

6. In the phylogeny of thinking and speech, we can undoubtedly state the pre-speech phase in the development of the intellect and the pre-intellectual phase in the development of speech.

In ontogeny, the relationship between the two lines of development—thinking and speech—is much more vague and confused. However, even here, completely leaving aside any question of the parallelism of onto-. and phylogeny, or about another, more complex relationship between them, we can establish both different genetic roots and different lines in the development of thinking and speech.

Recently, we have received experimental evidence that the child's thinking passes through the pre-verbal stage in its development. Kohler's experiments on chimpanzees were transferred to the child, who did not yet speak, with appropriate modifications. Koehler himself repeatedly involved a child in the experiment for comparison. Buhler systematically investigated the child in this respect.

“These were actions,” he says of his experiences, “quite similar to those of a chimpanzee, and therefore this phase of a child's life can be quite aptly called a chimpanzee-like age; in this child, the last hug was 10, 11 and 12 months. “At a chimpanzee-like age, a child makes his first inventions, extremely primitive, of course, but extremely important in a spiritual sense” (Buhler, 1924).

What is theoretically most important in these experiments is the independence of the rudiments of intellectual reactions from speech. Noting this, Buhler writes: “It was said that speech is at the beginning of the formation of a person; maybe, but before it there is still instrumental thinking, i.e. understanding mechanical connections, and devising mechanical means for mechanical ends."

The pre-intellectual roots of speech in the development of the child were established a very long time ago. Crying, babbling, and even the first words of a child are stages in the development of speech, but pre-intellectual stages. They have nothing to do with the development of thinking.

The generally accepted view considered children's speech at this stage of its development as an emotional form of behavior par excellence. The latest research (Sh. Buhler et al. - the first forms of the child's social behavior and inventory of his reactions in the first year, and her collaborators Getzer and Tuder-Harth - the child's early reactions to the human voice) have shown that in the first year of a child's life, i.e. e. it is at the pre-intellectual stage of the development of his speech that we find a rich development of the social function of speech.

The relatively complex and rich social contact of the child leads to the extremely early development of "means of communication". Undoubtedly, it was possible to establish unambiguous specific reactions to the human voice in a child as early as the third week of life (pre-social reactions) and the first social reaction to the human voice in the second month. In the same way, laughter, babble, showing, gestures in the very first months of a child's life act as a means of social contact.

Thus, in a child of the first year of life, we find already clearly expressed those two functions of speech that are familiar to us from phylogenesis.

But the most important thing that we know about the development of thinking and speech in a child is that at a certain moment, at an early age (about 2 years), the lines of development of thinking and speech, which have been going separately until now, intersect, coincide in their development and give rise to a completely new form of behavior, so characteristic of man.

V. Stern better and earlier than others described this most important event in the psychological development of the child. He showed how the child "awakens a dark consciousness of the meaning of language and the will to conquer it." The child at this time, as Stern says, makes the greatest discovery of his life. He discovers that "every thing has its own name" (Stern, 1922).

This turning point, starting from which speech becomes intellectual, and thinking - speech, is characterized by two completely undoubted and objective signs by which we can reliably judge whether this turning point in the development of speech has occurred. Both of these points are closely related.

The first is that the child who has this fracture begins to actively expand his vocabulary, his vocabulary, ask about each new thing: what is it called. The second point is the extremely rapid, spasmodic increase in the vocabulary that occurs on the basis of the active expansion of the child's vocabulary.

As you know, an animal can learn individual words of human speech and apply them in appropriate situations. Before the onset of this period, the child also learns individual words, which are for him conditional stimuli or substitutes for individual objects, people, actions, states, desires. However, at this stage, the child knows as many words as are given to him by the people around him.

Now the situation is fundamentally different. The child himself needs the word and actively strives to master the sign that belongs to the object, the sign that serves to name and communicate. If the first stage in the development of children's speech, as Maiman rightly showed, is in its psychological significance affective-volitional, then from this moment speech enters the intellectual phase of its development. The child, as it were, discovers the symbolic function of speech.

Here it is important for us to note one fundamentally important point: only at a certain, relatively high stage in the development of thinking and speech does “the greatest discovery in a child’s life” become possible. In order to “open” speech, one must think.

We can briefly formulate our conclusions:

1. In the ontogenetic development of thinking and speech, we also find different roots of both processes.

2. In the development of a child's speech, we can undoubtedly state the "pre-intellectual stage", as well as in the development of thinking - the "pre-verbal stage".

3. Up to a certain point, both developments proceed along different lines independently of each other.

4. At a certain point, both lines intersect, after which thinking becomes verbal, and speech becomes intellectual.

We are now approaching the formulation of the main proposition of our entire article, a proposition of the highest methodological significance for the entire formulation of the problem. This conclusion follows from a comparison of the development of speech thinking with the development of speech and intellect, as it proceeded in the animal world and in the earliest childhood along separate, separate lines. This comparison shows that one development is not simply a direct continuation of another, but that the very type of development has also changed. Speech thinking is not a natural, natural form of behavior, but a socio-historical form, and therefore differs mainly in a number of specific properties and patterns that cannot be discovered in natural forms of thinking and speech.

Synopsis of the article by L. S. Vygotsky “Thinking and Speech”

I. Problem and method of research

The problem of the relation of thinking to speech is reduced to the question of the relation of thought to the word. There are two ways to solve this problem:

2 poles of the solution - identification and complete separation complete fusion of thinking and speech of thinking and speech

In general, two main forms of analysis are used in psychology: 1. The decomposition of complex psychological wholes into elements (as a result, elements are obtained that are alien to the given whole) 2. The division of the whole into units (a unit is a product of analysis that has the properties of the whole) Through the second form of analysis, one can single out a unit speech thinking - the meaning of the word

The word belongs to a class of objects and is a generalization - a verbal act of thought

The meaning of a word can be considered both a speech phenomenon and a mental phenomenon.

Method for studying the problem of the relationship between thinking and speech - the method of semantic analysis

The initial function of speech is communicative (since communication that is not mediated by a sign system is limited and primitive)

In the process of communication, it becomes possible to generalize

The meaning of a word can be considered both as a unity of thinking and speech, and as communication and thinking, and as a unity of generalization and communication:

Meaning of the word*

unity of generalization and communication

unity of thought and speech unity of communication and thought

II. Genetic roots of thinking and speech

The relationship between thinking and speech is a variable, their curves sometimes intersect, sometimes diverge, but they have different genetic roots.

There is a pre-speech phase in the thinking of monkeys (the beginnings of thinking in the absence of speech are visible from the experiments of W. Keller) BUT: the presence of an optically relevant situation is decisive for the behavior of chimpanzees, two positions: 1. Speech is an intellectual function that is not determined by the optical structure 2. In all non-optical structures chimpanzees operate by trial and error

On the one hand, thinking and speech are separated BUT: on the other hand, monkeys also have the rudiments of human speech (in the phonemic sense). 3. The function of their speech is communication with their own kind (and not just emotional and expressive)

The main conclusions of L. S. Vygotsky on the problem of thinking and speech in phylogenesis: 1. Thinking and speech have different genetic roots 2. Their development follows two different lines 3. The relationship between thinking and speech is not constant in phylogenesis 4. Anthropoids have human-like intelligence on the one hand (the beginnings of the use of tools) and speech - on the other (the beginnings of the social function of speech) 5. anthropoids do not have a close connection between thinking and speech

In the ontogeny of a child, one can also distinguish a pre-intellectual stage, for example, the babble of a child (this stage is necessary to establish social contact). At an early age (about 2 years), the lines of development of thinking and speech, which went separately, coincide (then the child understands that "every thing has its own name" V. Stern)

Speech becomes intellectual, and thinking becomes verbal Signs of this fracture: 1. The child actively expands his vocabulary (“What is it?”) 2. Based on this, there is an abrupt increase in the vocabulary

The main conclusions of L. S. Vygotsky on the problem of thinking and speech in ontogenesis: 1. In the ontogenetic difference between thinking and speech, their roots are also different 2. There is also a pre-intellectual phase of speech and a pre-verbal phase of thinking 3. Up to a certain point, the two lines follow different paths 4. At a certain point, these lines coincide and thinking becomes verbal, and speech becomes intellectual.

After the coincidence of thinking and speech, there is not just a continuation of their development, but a change in the type of development. III. thought and word

“The relation of thought to word is, first of all, not a thing, but a process; this relation is a movement from thought to word and vice versa…”

The task is to study the phases in which the thought moves to the word

L. S. Vygotsky distinguishes five plans of movement from thought to word: 1. External plan of speech (phasic side): word –> chaining of words 2. Internal plan of speech (semantic side): sentence –> word as a semantic unit

These two plans relate to speech itself and form a complex unity, but their development goes in opposite directions (the semantic side - from the whole to the part, the external - from the part to the whole). First of all, the grammatical (external) and psychological (internal) subject and predicate do not match.

Example: We were thinking about the clock (psychological subject), and it fell (psychological predicate). Here the psychological subject and predicate coincide with the grammatical ones. BUT: if we thought that something fell (psychological subject), and then found out that it was a clock (psychological predicate), then here the movement of thought goes the other way around - the psychological subject and predicate do not coincide with the grammatical ones.

3. Syntax of inner speech: a. The main syntactic form of inner speech is predicativity (phrase abbreviation)

Example 1: Thought: “tram B is on, on which we will now go there.” Word: "goes" or "B"

b. Reduction: the role of speech stimuli is minimized when the thoughts of the speakers are unidirectional c. Features of the structure of inner speech: i. The predominance of the meaning of the word over its meaning

Example: “Summer sang the whole, so go dance!” Meaning - dance Meaning - perish

There is a more independent relationship between meaning and word than between meaning and word.

ii. Agglutination is the formation of a single noun from several words: · Firstly, a compound word includes several words abbreviated in sound · Secondly, a compound word acts as a single, and not as a combination of words iii. Meanings "merge" according to other laws than verbal meanings

Example: "Dead Souls" by N.V. Gogol - the meaning of the title runs through the entire poem, and refers not to the dead serfs, but to the heroes of the poem who are spiritually dead.

In inner speech, the word absorbs the meaning of the previous ones, so this meaning can be difficult to convey through speech.

Conclusions of L. S. Vygotsky on the issue of inner speech: Vygotsky concludes that the hypothesis of the genesis of inner speech from external and egocentric is correct Also the conclusion that external speech is not just a vocalization of internal speech, but the transformation of predicative into extended

4. Thought as a Plan of Speech Thinking Units of thought and speech do not coincide. It is not always possible to find words to express your thoughts, because the structure of thought is different from the structure of words. The thought covers the whole subject, and the words are the individual parameters of the subject, i.e. “what is contained in the thought simultaneously, in speech develops successively” The thought does not coincide with either the word or its meaning, but the path from thought to word lies through the meaning Units of thought and speech do not coincide. It is not always possible to find words to express your thoughts, because the structure of thought is different from the structure of words. The thought covers the whole subject, and the words are the individual parameters of the subject, i.e. “what is contained in the thought simultaneously, in speech develops successively” The thought does not coincide with either the word or its meaning, but the path from thought to word lies through the meaning

5. The motivating sphere of consciousness Thought arises not by itself, but depending on the motivating sphere of consciousness (needs, affects and emotions, etc.)

Understanding someone else's thought becomes possible when we delve into its affective-volitional side.

So, the movement of thought goes through the following phases: motive - thought - the internal plan of speech - the semantic side of external speech - the phasic side of external speech

-- [ Page 1 ] --

L. S. VYGOTSKY

THINKING AND SPEECH

Fifth edition, revised

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky. Thinking and speech. Ed. 5, rev. - Publisher

"Labyrinth", M.,

Editor: G. N. Shelogurova. Artist: I. E. Smirnova.

Figures not reproduced in this text

The fifth edition of the main book of L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) "brought him

posthumous world fame, reproduces the first (1934) edition. The denominations made in the second (1956) and third (1982) editions have been restored, some typographical errors and inaccuracies of the fourth (1996) edition have been corrected, and the original unity of the author's intention and style has been restored.

Rudomino CONTENTS Preface Chapter One The problem and method of research Chapter Two The problem of speech and thinking of the child in the teachings of J. Piaget Chapter Three The problem of the development of speech in the teachings of V. Stern Chapter Four Genetic roots of thinking and speech Chapter Five Experimental study of the development of concepts Chapter Six Study of the development of scientific concepts in childhood Chapter Seven Thought and word Literature PREFACE This work is a psychological study of one of the most difficult, most intricate and complex issues of experimental psychology - the question of thinking and speech. Systematic experimental development of this problem, as far as we know, has not yet been undertaken by any of the researchers. Solution tasks, which stood before us, at least with a primary approximation, could be carried out only through a series of private experimental studies of individual aspects of the question of interest to us, such as the study of experimentally formed concepts, the study of written speech and its relationship to thinking, the study of inner speech, etc. .

In addition to experimental research, we inevitably had to turn to theoretical and critical research. On the one hand, we had to, through theoretical analysis and generalization of a large amount of factual material accumulated in psychology, through comparison, comparison of phylo and ontogenesis data, outline the starting points for solving our problem and develop the initial prerequisites for independently obtaining scientific facts in the form of a general doctrine of the genetic roots of thinking and speech. On the other hand, it was necessary to subject the most ideologically powerful of the modern theories of thinking and speech to a critical analysis in order to build on them, to clarify the paths of our own searches, to draw up preliminary working hypotheses and to oppose from the very beginning the theoretical path of our research to the path that led to the construction of the dominant sciences in modern

e, but untenable and therefore in need of revision and overcoming theories.

Following this rule, we introduced into the context of the study of the development of scientific concepts a working hypothesis about learning and development that we developed elsewhere and on different material. And, finally, the theoretical generalization, bringing together all the experimental data, turned out to be the last point of application of theoretical analysis to our study.

Thus, our research turned out to be complex and diverse in its composition and structure, but at the same time, each particular task facing the individual segments of our work was so subordinate to the general goal, so connected with the previous and subsequent segment, that the whole work as a whole - we we dare to hope so - it is essentially a single, albeit divided into parts, study, which is entirely, in all its parts, aimed at solving the main and central task - the genetic analysis of the relationship between thought and word.

In accordance with this main task, the program of our study and the present work was determined. We started by posing the problem and looking for research methods.

Then, in a critical study, we tried to analyze the two most complete and strong theories of the development of speech and thinking - the theory of Piaget and V. Stern, in order to oppose our formulation of the problem and the method of research from the very beginning to the traditional formulation of the question and the traditional method and thereby outline what, in fact, we should look for in the course of our work, to what final point it should lead us. Further, we had to preface our two experimental studies of the development of concepts and the main forms of speech thinking with a theoretical study that clarifies the genetic roots of thinking and speech and thereby outlines the starting points for our independent work on the study of the genesis of speech thinking. The central part of the whole book is formed by two experimental studies, one of which is devoted to elucidating the main path of development of the meanings of words in childhood, and the other to a comparative study of the development of scientific and spontaneous concepts of the child.

Finally, in the concluding chapter, we tried to bring together the data of the entire study and present in a coherent and integral form the entire process of verbal thinking, as it is drawn in the light of these data.

As with any research that seeks to introduce something new into the solution of the problem under study, the question naturally arises with regard to our work, what does it contain in itself that is new and, therefore, controversial, which needs careful analysis and further verification. In a few words we can enumerate the new things that our work introduces into the general doctrine of thought and speech. If we do not stop at a somewhat new formulation of the problem, which we allowed, and in a certain sense, a new research method that we applied, what is new in our research can be reduced to the following points: 1) experimental establishment of the fact that the meanings of words develop in childhood , and the definition of the main steps in their development;

2) revealing the unique path of development of the child's scientific concepts in comparison with his spontaneous concepts and elucidating the basic laws of this development;

3) disclosure of the psychological nature of written speech as an independent function of speech and its relation to thinking;

4) experimental disclosure of the psychological nature of inner speech and its relation to thinking. In this enumeration of the new data contained in our study, we had in mind, first of all, what the present study can contribute to the general theory of thinking and speech in the sense of new, experimentally established psychological facts, and then already those working hypotheses and those theoretical generalizations that inevitably had to arise in the process of interpreting, explaining and comprehending these facts. It is neither the right nor the obligation of the author, of course, to enter into an assessment of the significance and truth of these facts and these theories. This is the business of critics and readers of this book.

This book is the result of almost a decade of continuous work by the author and his collaborators on the study of thinking and speech. When this work began, not only its final results were not clear to us, but also many of the questions that arose in the middle of the study. Therefore, in the course of our work, we repeatedly had to revise the previously put forward provisions, discard and cut off many things as found to be incorrect, rebuild and deepen others, and finally develop and write completely anew. The main line of our research has steadily developed all the time in one main direction, taken from the very beginning, and in this book we have tried to expand explicite much of what our previous works contained implicite, but at the same time - and much of what we before it seemed right to exclude from the present work as a direct error.

Some of its parts were used by us earlier in other works and published

as a manuscript

in one of the distance learning courses (Chapter V).

We are well aware of all the inevitable imperfection of that first step in the new direction which we have tried to take in this work, but we see its justification in the fact that, in our opinion, it advances us in the study of thinking and speech in comparison with the state of this problems that had developed in psychology at the time of the beginning of our work, revealing the problem of thinking and speech as the key problem of all human psychology, which directly leads the researcher to a new psychological theory of consciousness. However, we touch on this problem only in a few concluding words of our work and break off the study at its very threshold.

CHAPTER ONE THE PROBLEM AND METHOD OF INVESTIGATION The problem of thinking and speech belongs to the circle of those psychological problems in which the question of the relationship between various psychological functions and various types of activity of consciousness comes to the fore. The central point of this whole problem is, of course, the question of the relation of thought to the word. All other questions related to this problem are, as it were, secondary and logically subordinate to this first and main question, without the resolution of which even the correct formulation of each of the further and more particular questions is impossible;

Meanwhile, it is precisely the problem of interfunctional connections and relations that, oddly enough, is an almost completely undeveloped and new problem for modern psychology.

The problem of thinking and speech is as ancient as the science of psychology itself, and it is precisely at this point, in the question of the relation of thought to the word, that it is the least developed and the most obscure. Atomistic and functional analysis, which dominated scientific psychology throughout the last decade, led to the fact that individual mental functions were considered in an isolated form, the method of psychological knowledge was developed and improved in relation to the study of these separate, isolated, isolated processes, while the problem of the connection of functions with each other, the problem of their organization in the integral structure of consciousness remained all the time out of the field of attention of researchers.

That consciousness is a single whole and that the individual functions are connected in their activity with each other in an inseparable unity - this idea does not represent anything new for modern psychology. But the unity of consciousness and the connection between individual functions in psychology was usually postulated rather than served as the subject of research. Moreover, postulating the functional unity of consciousness, psychology, along with this indisputable assumption, based its research on a tacitly recognized by all, clearly not formulated, completely false postulate, which consists in recognizing the immutability and constancy of interfunctional connections of consciousness, and it was assumed that perception is always and in the same way is connected with attention, memory is always connected in the same way with perception, thought with memory, etc. From this, of course, it followed that interfunctional connections are something that can be put out of brackets as a common factor and that may not be taken into account when performing research operations on the individual and isolated functions remaining inside the brackets. Thanks to all this, the problem of relations is, as said, the least developed part in the whole problematic of modern psychology.

This could not help but have a most severe effect on the problem of thinking and speech. If you look at the history of the study of this problem, you can easily be convinced that this central point about the relationship of thought to the word has always escaped the attention of the researcher, and the center of gravity of the whole problem has constantly shifted and shifted to some other point, switched to some other point. or another question.

Starting from antiquity, the identification of thinking and speech through psychological linguistics, which declared that thought is “speech minus sound”, and up to modern American psychologists and reflexologists, who consider thought as “an inhibited reflex not revealed in its motor part”, goes through a single line of development of the same idea, which identifies thought and speech. Naturally, all the teachings adjoining this line, by the very essence of their views on the nature of thought and speech, always faced the impossibility of not only deciding, but even raising the question of the relation of thought to word. If thought and word coincide, if they are one and the same, no relation between them can arise and cannot serve as an object of investigation, just as it is impossible to imagine that the relation of a thing to itself can be an object of investigation. Whoever merges thought and speech closes the way for himself to raise the question of the relationship between thought and word and makes this problem unsolvable in advance. The problem is not resolved, but simply bypassed.

At first glance, it may seem that a doctrine that is closer to the opposite pole and develops the idea of independence of thought and speech is in a more favorable position in terms of the questions that interest us.

Those who look at speech as an external expression of thought, as its garment, those who, like the representatives of the Würzburg school, strive to free thought from everything sensible, including the word, and to imagine the connection between thought and word as a purely external connection, indeed, they not only pose, but in their own way they try to solve the problem of the relation of thought to the word. Only such a solution, offered by the most diverse psychological trends, always proves to be unable not only to solve, but even to pose this problem, and if it does not circumvent it, like the study of the first group, then it cuts the knot instead of untying it. Decomposing speech thinking into its constituent elements, alien to each other - into thought and word - these researchers then try, having studied the pure properties of thinking as such, independently of speech, and speech as such, independently of thinking, to imagine the connection between both as a purely external mechanical dependence between two different processes.

As an example, one could point to the attempts of one of the modern authors to study, using this method, the decomposition of verbal thinking into its constituent elements, the connection and interaction of both processes. As a result of this study, he comes to the conclusion that speech-motor processes play an important role, contributing to a better flow of thinking. They help the processes of understanding by the fact that, with difficult, complex verbal material, inner speech performs work that contributes to a better capture and unification of what is understood. Further, these same processes benefit in their course as a certain form of vigorous activity, if inner speech joins them, which helps to feel, embrace, separate the important from the unimportant during the movement of thought, and finally, inner speech plays the role of a contributing factor in the transition from thought to loud speech.

We have given this example only to show how, having decomposed speech thinking as a well-known single psychological formation into its constituent elements, the researcher has no choice but to establish a purely external interaction between these elementary processes, as if it were two heterogeneous , within unrelated forms of activity.

This more favorable position, in which the representatives of the second trend find themselves, lies in the fact that, in any case, it becomes possible for them to raise the question of the relationship between thinking and speech. This is their advantage. But their weakness lies in the fact that the very formulation of this problem is wrong in advance and excludes any possibility of a correct solution of the problem, because the method they use of decomposing this single whole into separate elements makes it impossible to study the internal relations between thought and word. Thus, the question rests on the method of research, and we think that if from the very beginning we pose the problem of the relationship between thinking and speech, we must also find out in advance what methods should be applicable in the study of this problem, which could ensure its success. permission.

We think that we should distinguish between two kinds of analysis used in psychology. The study of all psychological formations necessarily presupposes analysis. However, this analysis can take two fundamentally different forms, one of which, we think, is responsible for all the failures that researchers have suffered in trying to solve this centuries-old problem, and the other is the only correct starting point in order to take at least the very first step. towards its solution.

The first way of psychological analysis can be called the decomposition of complex psychological wholes into elements. It could be compared to the chemical analysis of water, decomposing it into hydrogen and oxygen. An essential feature of such an analysis is that as a result of it, products are obtained that are alien in relation to the analyzed whole - elements that do not contain the properties inherent in the whole as such, and have a number of new properties that this whole could never discover. . With a researcher who, wishing to solve the problem of thinking and speech, decomposes it into speech and thinking, exactly the same thing happens as would happen to any person who, in search of a scientific explanation of some properties of water, for example, why water extinguishes fire or why the law of Archimedes applies to water, would resort to the decomposition of water into oxygen and hydrogen as a means of explaining these properties. He would be surprised to learn that hydrogen itself burns, and oxygen supports combustion, and he would never be able to explain from the properties of these elements the properties inherent in the whole. In the same way, psychology, which decomposes verbal thinking in search of an explanation of its most essential properties, inherent in it precisely as a whole, into separate elements, will later search in vain for these elements of unity inherent in the whole. In the process of analysis, they evaporated, vanished, and he has no choice but to look for an external mechanical interaction between the elements in order to reconstruct in a purely speculative way the properties that disappeared in the process of analysis, but are subject to explanation.

In essence, this kind of analysis, which leads us to products that have lost the properties inherent in the whole, is not, from the point of view of the problem to which it is applied, an analysis in the proper sense of the word. Rather, we have the right to consider it as a method of cognition, inverse to analysis and in a certain sense opposite to it. After all, the chemical formula of water, which applies equally to all its properties, applies equally to all its species in general, equally to the Great Ocean as well as to a raindrop. Therefore, the decomposition of water into elements cannot be the way that can lead us to an explanation of its specific properties. It is, rather, a way of raising to the general than analysis, i.e., dismemberment in the proper sense of the word. In the same way, an analysis of this kind, applied to psychological integral formations, is also not an analysis capable of revealing to us all the concrete diversity, all the specifics of those relationships between the word and thought that we encounter in everyday observations, observing the development of verbal thinking in childhood. , behind the functioning of speech thinking in its most diverse forms.

This analysis also essentially turns into its opposite in psychology, and instead of leading us to an explanation of the concrete and specific properties of the whole under study, it elevates this whole to a more general directive, to a directive that is capable of explaining to us only something that applies to the whole. speech and thinking in all their abstract universality, beyond the possibility of comprehending the concrete patterns that interest us. Moreover, an analysis of this kind, unplannedly applied by psychology, leads to deep delusions, ignoring the moment of unity and integrity of the process under study and replacing the internal relations of unity with external mechanical relations of two heterogeneous and alien processes. Nowhere were the results of this analysis more evident than in the field of the doctrine of thought and speech. The word itself, which is a living unity of sound and meaning and containing, like a living cell, in the simplest form all the basic properties inherent in speech thinking as a whole, turned out to be split into two parts as a result of such an analysis, between which the researchers then tried to establish an external mechanical association.

Sound and meaning in a word are not connected in any way. Both of these elements, united in a sign, says one of the most important representatives of modern linguistics, live completely apart. It is not surprising, therefore, that only the saddest results for the study of the phonetic and semantic aspects of language could come from such a view. A sound cut off from thought would lose all the specific properties that alone made it the sound of human speech and singled it out from the rest of the realm of sounds that exist in nature.

Therefore, in a meaningless sound, they began to study only its physical and mental properties, that is, what is not specific for this sound, but common with all other sounds that exist in nature, and, consequently, such a study could not explain to us why a sound that has such and such physical and mental properties is the sound of human speech and what makes it so. In the same way, the meaning, torn off from the sound side of the word, would turn into a pure representation, into a pure act of thought, which began to be studied separately as a concept that develops and lives independently of its material carrier. The barrenness of classical semantics and phonetics is largely due to precisely this gap between sound and meaning, this decomposition of the word into separate elements.

Similarly, in psychology, the development of children's speech was studied from the point of view of its decomposition into the development of the sound, phonetic side of speech and its semantic side. The thoroughly studied history of children's phonetics, on the one hand, has been completely unable to unite, even in the most elementary form, the problem of the phenomena related to this. On the other hand, the study of the meaning of a child's word led researchers to an autonomous and independent history of children's thought, between which there was no connection with the phonetic history of children's language.

It seems to us that the decisive and turning point in the whole doctrine of thought and speech, furthermore, is the transition from this analysis to another kind of analysis.

This latter we could designate as an analysis that divides a complex unified whole into units. By unity we mean such a product of analysis, which, unlike elements, has all the basic properties inherent in the whole, and which is further indissoluble living parts of this unity.

Not the chemical formula of water, but the study of molecules and molecular motion is the key to explaining the individual properties of water. In the same way, a living cell, which retains all the basic properties of life inherent in a living organism, is a real unit of biological analysis.

A psychology that wants to study complex unities needs to understand this. It must replace the methods of decomposition into elements by the method of analysis, which divides into units. It must find these indecomposable, preserving properties inherent in a given whole as a unity, units in which these properties are presented in the opposite form, and with the help of such an analysis, try to resolve the specific questions that arise before them.

This inner side of the word has so far hardly been subjected to special studies. The meaning of the word was also dissolved in the sea of all other representations of our consciousness or all other acts of our thought, just as a sound divorced from the meaning was dissolved in the sea of all other sounds existing in nature. Therefore, it is just as accurate as with regard to sound. of human speech, modern psychology cannot say anything that would be specific to the sound of human speech as such, just as in the field of the study of verbal meaning, psychology cannot say anything except what characterizes verbal meaning to the same extent as everything else. other ideas and thoughts of our consciousness.

This was the case in associative psychology, and it is the same in principle in modern structural psychology. In the word, we have always known only one of its external, facing us side. The other, its inner side - its meaning, like the other side of the Moon, has always remained and still remains unexplored and unknown. Meanwhile, in this, the other side, the possibility of solving the problems that interest us about the relationship between thinking and speech is hidden, for it is precisely in the meaning of the word that the knot of that unity that we call speech thinking is tied.

In order to clarify this, it is necessary to dwell in a few words on the theoretical understanding of the psychological nature of the meaning of a word. As we shall see in the course of our study, neither associative nor structural psychology gives any satisfactory answer to the question of the nature of the meaning of a word. Meanwhile, the experimental study presented below, as well as the theoretical analysis, show that the most essential, the most determining the inner nature of verbal meaning, lies not where it was usually sought.

The word always refers not to any one separate object, but to a whole group of shields to a whole class of objects. Because of this, every word is a hidden generalization, every word already generalizes, and from a psychological point of view, the meaning of a word is, first of all, a generalization. But generalization, as it is easy to see, is an extraordinary verbal act of thought that reflects reality in a completely different way than it is reflected in direct sensations and perceptions.

When they say that the dialectical leap is not only a transition from non-thinking matter to sensation, but also a transition from sensation to thought, they mean by this that thinking reflects reality in consciousness in a qualitatively different way than direct sensation. Apparently, there is every reason to assume that this qualitative difference of the unit in the main and main is a generalized reflection of reality. By virtue of this, we can conclude that the meaning of the word that we have just tried to reveal from the psychological side, its generalization, is an act of thinking in the proper sense of the word. But at the same time, meaning is an integral part;

the word as such, it belongs to the realm of speech as much as to the realm of thought.

A word without meaning is not a word, but an empty sound. The word, devoid of meaning, no longer belongs to the realm of speech. Therefore, meaning can equally be considered as a phenomenon that is speech in nature, and as a phenomenon related to the field of thinking. The meaning of a word cannot be said in the same way as we used to say freely in relation to the elements of the word, taken separately.

What does it represent? Speech or thinking? It is speech and thinking at the same time, because it is the unit of speech thinking. If this is so, then it is obvious that the method of studying the problem of interest to us cannot be other than the method of semantic analysis, the method of analyzing the semantic side of speech, the method of studying verbal meaning. On this path, we have the right to expect a direct answer to the questions that interest us about the relationship between thinking and speech, because this relationship itself is contained in the unit we have chosen, and by studying the development, functioning, structure, and in general the movement of this unit, we can learn much of what will clarify for us the question of the relationship between thinking and speech, the question of the nature of verbal thinking.

The methods which we intend to apply to the study of the relationship between thought and speech have the advantage of combining all the virtues inherent in analysis with the possibility of a synthetic study of the properties inherent in any complex unit as such. We can easily be convinced of this by the example of another side of the problem of interest to us, which also always remained in the shadows. The primary function of speech is the communicative function. Speech is primarily a means of social communication, a means of expression and understanding. This function of speech is also usually separated from the intellectual function in analysis, which breaks it down into elements, and both functions are attributed to speech, as it were, in parallel and independently of each other. Speech, as it were, combined both the functions of communication and the functions of thinking, but what is the relationship between these two functions to each other, what caused the presence of both functions in speech, how they develop and how both are structurally combined with each other - all this remained and remains still unexplored.

Meanwhile, the meaning of a word is as much a unit of these two functions of speech as it is a unit of thought. That direct communication of souls is impossible is, of course, an axiom for scientific psychology. It is also known that communication, not mediated by speech or any other system of signs or means of communication, as it is observed in the animal world, makes communication possible only of the most primitive type and in the most limited sizes. In essence, this communication by means of expressive movements does not deserve the name of communication, but rather should be called contagion.

A frightened gander, seeing danger and raising the whole flock with a cry, not so much informs her of what he saw, but rather infects her with his fright.

Communication, based on reasonable understanding and on the intentional transmission of thoughts and feelings, certainly requires a certain system of means, the prototype of which was, is and always will be human speech, which arose from the need for communication in the labor process. But until very recently, the matter has been presented in an extremely simplified form in accordance with the prevailing view in psychology. It was believed that the means of communication is a sign, word, sound. Meanwhile, this delusion stemmed only from an analysis that was incorrectly applied to the solution of the whole problem of speech, decomposing into elements.

The word in communication is mainly only the external side of speech, and it was assumed that the sound itself is capable of being associated with any experience, with any content of mental life and, because of this, transmit or communicate this content or this experience to another person. Meanwhile, a more subtle study of the problem of communication, the processes of understanding and developing them in childhood led researchers to a completely different conclusion.

It turned out that just as communication is impossible without signs, it is also impossible without meaning. In order to convey any experience or content of consciousness to another person, there is no other way than to assign the transmitted content to a certain class, to a certain group of phenomena, and this, as we already know, certainly requires generalization. Thus, it turns out that communication necessarily presupposes the generalization and development of verbal meaning, i.e.

generalization becomes possible with the development of communication. Thus, the highest forms of psychological communication inherent in a person are possible only due to the fact that a person, with the help of thinking, generally reflects reality.

In the sphere of instinctive consciousness, in which perception and affect dominate, only infection is possible, but not understanding and not communication in the proper sense of the word. Edward Sapir made this clear in his writings on the psychology of speech. “Elementary language,” he says, “must be associated with a whole group, with a certain class of our experience. The world of experience must be extremely simplified and generalized in order to be able to symbolize it. Only in this way does communication become possible, for a single experience lives in a single consciousness and, strictly speaking, we communicate. In order to be communicated, it must be assigned to a certain class, which, by tacit agreement, is considered by society as a unity.

Indeed, it is worth referring to any example in order to be convinced of this connection between communication and generalization - these two main functions of speech. I want to let someone know that I'm cold. I can make him understand this with a series of expressive movements, but real understanding and communication will take place only when I can generalize and name what I experience, i.e.

relate the feeling of cold I experience to a certain class of states familiar to my interlocutor). That is why the whole thing is incommunicable for children who do not yet have a known generalization.

The point here is not the lack of appropriate words and sounds, but the lack of appropriate concepts and generalizations, without which understanding is impossible. As Leo Tolstoy says, it is almost always not the word itself that is incomprehensible, but the concept that is expressed by the word (36, p. 143). The word is almost always ready when the concept is ready. Therefore, there is every reason to consider the meaning of a word not only as a unity of thinking and speech, but also as a unity of generalization and communication, communication and thinking.

The fundamental significance of such a formulation of the question for all genetic problems of thinking and speech is completely immeasurable. It lies primarily in the fact that only with this assumption does a causally genetic analysis of thinking and speech become possible for the first time. We begin to understand the real connection that exists between the development of children's thinking and the social development of the child only when we learn to see the unity of communication and generalization. Both of these problems, the relationship of thought to the word and the relationship of generalization to communication, should be the central issue, the solution of which is devoted to our research.

However, in order to expand the prospects of our research, we would like to point out some more points in the problem of thinking and speech, which, unfortunately, could not be the subject of direct and direct research in this work, but which, naturally, are revealed after behind it and thereby give it its true meaning.

In the first place we would like to put here the question, which we set aside for almost the entire length of the study, but which suggests itself when it comes to the problems of the whole doctrine of thinking and speech, namely, the question of the relationship of the sound side of the word to its meaning. We think that the shift in this question that we observe in linguistics is directly related to the question of interest to us about changing the methods of analysis in the psychology of speech.

Therefore, we will briefly dwell on this issue, since it will allow us, on the one hand, to clarify the methods of analysis that we defend better, and on the other hand, it reveals one of the most important prospects for further research.

Traditional linguistics considered, as already mentioned, the sound line of speech as a completely independent element, independent of the semantic side of speech. The combination of these two elements then formed speech. Depending on this, a separate sound was considered to be the unit of the sound side of speech, but sound, divorced from thought, loses, along with this operation, everything that makes it the sound of human speech and includes it in the ranks of all other sounds. That is why traditional phonetics was oriented primarily towards acoustics and physiology, but not towards the psychology of language, and therefore the psychology of language was completely powerless to resolve this side of the issue.

As the modern phonological trend in linguistics, which has found the most lively response in psychology, correctly points out, the most essential feature of the sounds of human speech is that this sound, which has a certain function of a sign, is associated with a known meaning, but the sound itself, as such, is an insignificant sound. , is not really a unit that connects the sides of speech. Thus, the unit of speech in sound turns out to be a new understanding not of an individual sound, but of a phoneme, i.e., a further indecomposable phonological unit that retains the basic properties of the entire sound side of speech in the function of signification. As soon as sound ceases to be a meaningful sound and breaks away from the sign side of speech, it is now deprived of all the properties inherent in human speech. Therefore, only such a study of the sound side of speech, which will use the method of dividing it into units that preserve the properties inherent in speech, as properties of the sound and semantic sides, can be fruitful both linguistically and psychologically.

We will not set out here the specific achievements that linguistics and psychology have achieved by applying this method. Let us just say that these achievements are in our eyes the best proof of the beneficence of that method, which is in its nature completely identical with the method used by the present study and opposed by us to analysis that resolves into elements.

The fruitfulness of this method can be tested and shown on a whole series of questions that are directly or indirectly related to the problem of thinking and speech, included in its circle or bordering on it. We name only in the most general form the general range of these questions, since, as already mentioned, it allows us to reveal the prospects facing our research in the future, and, consequently, to clarify its significance in the context of the entire problem. We are talking about the complex relationship of speech and thinking, about consciousness as a whole and its individual aspects.

If for the old psychology the whole problem of interfunctional relations and connections was a completely inaccessible area for research, now it is becoming open to the researcher who wants to apply the method of unity and replace it with the method of elements.

The first question that arises when we talk about the relation of thinking and speech to other aspects of the life of consciousness is the question of the connection between intellect and affect. As is known, the separation of the intellectual side of our consciousness from its affective, volitional side is one of the main and fundamental vices of all traditional psychology. At the same time, thinking inevitably turns into an autonomous flow of self-thinking thoughts, it breaks away from the fullness of living life, from the living motives, interests, inclinations of a thinking person, and at the same time either turns out to be a completely unnecessary epiphenomenon that cannot change anything in a person’s life and behavior, or turns into some kind of original and autonomous ancient force, which, interfering in the life of consciousness and in the life of the individual, has an incomprehensible influence on it.

He who has torn thinking from the very beginning from affect has forever closed the road to explaining the causes of thinking itself, because the deterministic analysis of thinking necessarily presupposes the discovery of the driving motives of thought, needs and interests, motives and tendencies that direct the movement of thought in one direction or another. In the same way, whoever separated thinking from affect made it impossible in advance to study the reverse influence of thinking on the affective, volitional side of mental life, for a deterministic consideration of mental life excludes both the attribution to thinking of a magical power to determine a person’s behavior by one of its own systems, and the transformation of thought into an unnecessary appendage of behavior, into its powerless and useless shadow.

An analysis that divides a complex whole into units again points the way to the solution of this vital question for all the doctrines we are considering. He shows that there is a dynamic semantic system, which is a unity of affective and intellectual processes. He shows that every idea contains in a revised form the affective relation of a person to the reality represented in this idea. It allows you to reveal the direct movement from the needs and motives of a person to a certain direction of his thinking and the reverse movement from the dynamics of thought to the dynamics of behavior and specific activity of the individual.

We will not dwell on other problems, since, on the one hand, they could not enter into our work as a direct subject of research, and on the other hand, we will touch upon them in the final chapter of this work when discussing the prospects that open up before it. We will only say that the method we use makes it possible not only to reveal the inner unity of thinking and speech, but also allows us to fruitfully investigate the relationship of speech thinking to the entire life of consciousness as a whole and to its individual most important functions.

It only remains for us, at the conclusion of this first chapter, to outline in the briefest outline the program of our investigation. Our work is a single psychological study of an extremely complex problem, which had to be composed of a number of private studies of an experimental-critical and theoretical nature. We begin our work with a critical study of that theory of speech and thought which marks the pinnacle of psychological thought in this matter and which, at the same time, is polar opposite to the path we have chosen for the theoretical consideration of this problem. This first study should lead us to the formulation of all the main concrete questions of the modern psychology of thinking and speech and introduce them into the context of living modern psychological knowledge.

To investigate such a problem as thinking and speech for modern psychology means at the same time to wage an ideological struggle against the theoretical views and views that oppose it.

The second part of our study is devoted to a theoretical analysis of the basic data on the development of thinking and speech in phylogenetic and ontogenetic terms. We must mark from the outset the starting point in the development of thought and speech, since the misunderstanding of the genetic roots of thought and speech is the most common cause of erroneous theory in this matter. The center of our research is the experimental study of the development of concepts in childhood, which is divided into two parts: in the first, we consider the development of experimentally formed, artificial concepts; in the second, we try to study the development of the child's real concepts.

Finally, in the final part of our work, we try to analyze the structure and functioning of the process of speech thinking as a whole on the basis of theoretical and experimental studies.

The unifying moment of all these individual studies is the idea of development, which we tried to apply primarily to the analysis and study of the meaning of the word as a unity of speech and thinking.

CHAPTER TWO THE PROBLEM OF THE CHILD'S SPEECH AND THINKING IN THE TEACHING OF J. PIAGET CRITICAL STUDY I Piaget's studies constituted a whole epoch in the development of the doctrine of the child's speech and thinking, of his logic and outlook. They are marked with historical significance.

Piaget, for the first time, with the help of the clinical method of studying children's speech and thinking, developed and introduced by him into science, systematically studied the features of children's logic in a completely new perspective with extraordinary courage, depth and breadth of coverage. Piaget himself, finishing the second volume of his works, accurately and clearly, through a simple comparison, notes the significance of the turn he made in the study of old problems.

“We believe,” he says, “that the day will come when the thought of the child, in relation to the thought of the normal civilized adult, will be placed on the same plane as the “primitive thinking” characterized by Lévy-Bruhl, or autistic and symbolic thought, described by Freud and his students, or "morbid consciousness", unless this concept, introduced by Blondel, merges one day with the previous concept" (1, p. 408)1.

Indeed, the appearance of his first works on the historical significance of this fact for the further development of psychological thought should be fairly compared and compared with the dates of publication of Lévy-Bruhl's Les fonctions mentales dans les socits infrieures, The Interpretation of Dreams.

Freud or Blondel's "La conscience morbide".

Moreover, between these phenomena in various fields of scientific psychology there is not only an external similarity, determined by the level of their historical significance, but a deep, blood, internal relationship - a connection in the very essence of the prisoners and the philosophical and psychological tendencies embodied in them.

It is not for nothing that Piaget himself relied to a large extent in his studies and constructions on these three works and on their authors.

We need not dwell now in detail on the clarification of what exactly Piaget's turn in his research consists of - a turn that opened up new paths and new perspectives in the study of speech and thinking of the child. This is excellently done in E. Claparède's preface to the French edition of the book.

“At the time,” he says, “how the problem of children's thinking was turned into a problem of quantitative order, Piaget posed it as a qualitative problem. While the progress of a child's mind was formerly seen as the result of a certain number of additions and subtractions (enrichment with new data of experience and elimination of certain errors, the explanation of which science considered it its task), we are now shown that this progress depends primarily on the fact that the mind the child gradually changes his very character” (1, p. 60).

This new formulation of the problem of children's thinking as a qualitative problem led Piaget to what might be called, in contrast to the previously dominant trend, a positive characterization of the child's mind. While in traditional psychology children's thinking usually received a negative characterization, compiled from a list of those flaws, shortcomings, minuses of children's thinking that distinguish it from adult thinking, Piaget tried to reveal the qualitative originality of children's thinking from its positive side. Previously, they were interested in what the child does not have, what he lacks in comparison with an adult, and they determined specifically.

The disadvantage of children's thinking is that the child is not capable of abstract thinking, of forming concepts, of connecting judgments, of inferring, etc., etc.

In new studies, the focus was on what the child has, what his thinking has as its distinctive features and properties.

In essence, what Piaget did new and great is as ordinary and simple as, indeed, many great things, which can be expressed and characterized with the help of the old and banal proposition, which Piaget himself cites in his book from the words of Rousseau and which says that the child is not at all a small adult and his mind is not at all the small mind of an adult. Behind this simple truth, which Piaget revealed and substantiated with facts in the application to children's thinking, there is also an essentially simple idea - the idea of development. This simple idea illuminates with great light all the numerous and meaningful pages of Piaget's research.

But the deepest crisis experienced by modern psychological thought could not but affect the new direction in the study of the problems of children's logic.

He left a seal of duality on these studies, as on all outstanding and truly pioneering psychological works of the era of crisis. In this sense, Piaget's books can also be rightly compared with the works of Freud, Blondel and Levy-Bruhl, which we spoke about above. Both those and these are the offspring of a crisis that has gripped the very foundations of our science, marking the transformation of psychology into a science in the exact and true meaning of the word, and arising from the fact that the actual material of science and its methodological foundations are in sharp contradiction.

The crisis in psychology is first of all a crisis of the methodological foundations of this science. It has its roots in its history. Its essence lies in the struggle between materialistic and idealistic tendencies that have collided in this field of knowledge with such sharpness and force that they do not currently encounter, it seems, in any other science.

The historical state of our science is such that, in the words of Brentano, "there is a lot of psychology, but there is no single psychology." We could say that this is precisely why there is a lot of psychology, because there is no general, unified psychology. This means that the absence of a unified scientific system that would encompass and unite all modern psychological knowledge leads to the fact that each new factual discovery in any field of psychology, which goes beyond the simple accumulation of details, is forced to create its own theory, its own system for explaining and understanding of the newly found facts and dependencies, is forced to create its own psychology - one of many psychologies.

This is how Freud, Levy-Bruhl, Blondel created their psychology. The contradiction between the factual basis of their teachings and the theoretical constructions erected on this basis;

the idealistic character of these systems, which takes on a deeply peculiar expression in each of the authors;

the metaphysical flavor in a whole series of their theoretical constructions - all this is the inevitable and fatal discovery of that duality, which we spoke of above as the seal of the crisis. This duality stems from the fact that science, taking a step forward in the field of accumulation of factual material, takes two steps back in its theoretical interpretation and illumination. Modern psychology at almost every step presents the saddest spectacle of how the latest and most important discoveries, which are the pride and the last word of science, are positively stuck in pre-scientific ideas, in which semi-metaphysical theories and systems created ad hoc envelop them.

Piaget seeks to avoid this fatal duality in a very simple way: he wants to close himself in a narrow circle of facts. Apart from the facts, he does not want to know anything. He consciously avoids generalizations, especially - going beyond his own limits of psychological problems in related areas - logic, theory of knowledge, history of philosophy. The soil of pure empiricism seems to him the most reliable. “These studies,” Piaget says of his work, “are primarily a collection of facts and materials. Not a definite system of presentation, but a single method imparts unity to the various chapters of our work” (1, p. 64).

This is the most valuable thing in the works that interest us now. The discovery of new facts, the scientific culture of the psychological fact, its careful analysis, the classification of materials, the ability to listen to what they say, in the words of Claparede, all this is undoubtedly the strongest side in Piaget's research. A sea of new facts, large and small, of first and second magnitude, revealing something new and supplementing what was previously known, poured into child psychology from the pages of Piaget.

Piaget owes the discovery of new facts, their gold placer, first of all, to the new method that he introduced - the clinical method, the strength and originality of which put it in one of the first places in the methodology of psychological research and make it an indispensable tool in the study of complex, holistic formations of children's thinking in their change and development.

This method gives a real unity to all of Piaget's most diverse factual studies, summarized in coherent, harmonious, vitally full-fledged clinical I/ pictures of children's thinking.

New facts and a new method of obtaining and analyzing them give rise to many new problems, of which a significant part of them are put before scientific psychology for the first time, and the other part is put, if not again, then in a new form.

It is worth mentioning, for example, the problem of grammar and logic in children's speech, the problem of the development of children's introspection and its functional significance in the development of logical operations, problems) understanding verbal thought between children and many others. others

But Piaget, like all other researchers, did not manage to avoid that fatal duality to which the modern crisis of psychological science dooms even its best representatives. He hoped to hide from the crisis behind a reliable, high wall of facts. But the facts betrayed him and betrayed him. They led to problems. Problems - to a theory, albeit undeveloped and unexpanded, but nevertheless a genuine theory, which Piaget was so eager to avoid. Yes, there is theory in his books. It's inevitable, it's fate.

“We just tried,” says Piaget, “to follow step by step the facts in the form in which they were presented to us by the experiment. Of course, we know that an experiment is always determined by the hypotheses that give rise to it, but so far we have limited ourselves only to consideration of the facts” (1, p. 64). But whoever considers the facts inevitably considers them in the light of one theory or another.

Facts are inextricably intertwined with philosophy, especially those facts of the development of children's thinking that Piaget discovers, communicates and analyzes. And whoever wants to find the key to this rich collection of new facts must, first of all, reveal the philosophy of the fact, its extraction and comprehension. Without this, the facts will remain mute and dead.

Therefore, in this chapter, devoted to a critical examination of Piaget's research, we will not dwell on individual problems.

We must try to reduce to unity, to generalize all these diverse problems of children's thinking, to find their common root, to single out the main, main, determining factor in them.

But in doing so, our path must be directed towards a critique of the theory and methodological system underlying those studies, the key to understanding and evaluating which we are looking for. The factual should concern us only insofar as it supports the theory or specifies the methodology of the research.

This should be the path of our critical study of the problem of speech and thinking of the child in Piaget's work.

For the reader who would like to capture with a single glance the entire complex structure underlying Piaget's numerous and meaningful studies, the way that its author leads, setting out the course and results of his research, is unsuitable. Piaget consciously and deliberately avoids the system in his exposition. He is not afraid of reproaches for the lack of coherence of his material, which for him is a pure study of facts.

He warns against a premature attempt to embrace in a single system all the variety of concrete factual features of children's thinking that has been outlined. As a matter of principle, he refrains, in his own words, from too systematic exposition, and even more so from any generalizations that go beyond the limits of the child's psychology. He is convinced that for educators and for all those whose work requires accurate knowledge of the child, the analysis of facts is more important than theory.

Only at the very end of a whole series of his studies, Piaget promises to try to give a synthesis, which otherwise would be constantly constrained by the presentation of facts and would constantly strive, in turn, to distort these latter. Thus, the attempt to strictly separate theory from the analysis of facts, the synthesis of the entire material as a whole from the presentation of individual studies, and the desire to follow the facts step by step, as they are presented by experiment, distinguish this path chosen by Piaget.

As already mentioned, we cannot follow the author along this path if we want to capture with a single glance all his construction as a whole and understand the principles that determine it - the cornerstones of the building. We must try to find the central link in this whole chain of facts, from which the connecting links extend to all other links and which supports this whole construction, taken as a whole.

In this regard, the author himself helps us. In custody In his book, in a brief summary of its content, he tries to make such a general overview of all studies as a whole, bring them to a known system, outline the connection between the individual factual results found in the study, and reduce this complex variety of facts to unity.

The first question that arises here is the question of the objective connection of all those features of children's thinking that are established by Piaget's research.

Are all these features separate phenomena, independent of each other, irreducible to a common cause, or do they represent a certain structure, a known coherent whole, based on some central fact that determines the unity of all these features? These studies touch upon a number of features of children's thinking, for example, egocentricity of speech and thinking of the child, intellectual realism, syncretism, misunderstanding of relationships, difficulty in awareness, inability to self-observe in childhood, etc.

The question is whether these phenomena constitute some incoherent whole, i.e., whether they owe their existence to a series of random and fragmentary causes that have no connection with each other, or whether they form a coherent whole and thus represent their own special logic" ( l, C. 370). The author's positive answer to this question naturally makes him move from the field of analysis of facts to the field of theory and reveals to what extent the analysis of facts itself (although in the author's presentation it precedes the formulation of the theory) is actually determined by this theory.

What is this central link that makes it possible to reduce to unity all the individual features of children's thinking? It consists, from the point of view of Piaget's main theory, in the egocentricity of children's thinking. This is the main nerve of his entire system, this is the cornerstone of his entire construction.

“We tried,” he says, “to reduce to egocentrism most of the characteristic features of children's logic” (1, p. 371). All these traits form a complex that determines the child's logic, and this complex is based on the egocentric nature of the child's thinking and child's activity. All other features of children's thinking flow from this basic feature, and along with its affirmation or denial, all other threads are strengthened or fall, with the help of which theoretical generalization tries to comprehend and realize, to connect into a single whole all the individual features of children's logic. So, for example, the author directly says about one of the central features of children's thinking, about syncretism, that it is a direct result of children's egocentrism (1, p. 389).

Thus, we must first of all see what this egocentric character of children's thinking consists in and in what connection it stands with all the other features that together constitute the qualitative originality of children's thought in comparison with the thought of an adult. Piaget defines egocentric thought as a transitional, intermediate form of thinking, located from a genetic, functional and structural point of view between artistic thought and directed rational thinking. Thus, it is a transitional stage, a connecting genetic link, an intermediate formation in the history of the development of thinking.

This distinction between rational or directed thought and non-directed thought, which Bleuler proposed to call autistic thought, is borrowed by Piaget from the theory of psychoanalysis. “A directed thought,” he says, “is conscious, that is, it pursues goals that are clearly presented to the mind of the one who thinks. It is reasonable, that is, it is adapted to reality and seeks to influence it. It contains truth or error, it is expressed by speech.

Autistic thought is subconscious, that is, the goals that it pursues, or the tasks that it sets for itself, are not presented to consciousness. It does not adapt itself to external reality, but creates for itself an imaginary reality, or the reality of a dream. It strives not for the establishment of truth, but for the satisfaction of desire, and remains purely individual. As such, it cannot be expressed directly by speech, it is revealed primarily in images, and in order to be communicated, it must resort to indirect methods, evoking through symbols and myths the feelings that guide it” (1, p. 95).

The first form of thinking is social. As it develops, it obeys the laws of experience and pure logic more and more. But artistic thought, as its very name shows, is individual and is subject to a sum of special laws, which need not be precisely defined here.

Between these two extreme forms of thought "there are many varieties as regards the degree of their communication. These intermediate varieties must obey a special logic, which, in turn, is intermediate between the logic of autism and the logic of the mind. We propose to call egocentric thought the most important of these intermediate forms, i.e. thought, which, like the thought of our children, tries to adapt itself to reality without being communicated as such” (1, p. 96).

Piaget formulates this proposition regarding the intermediate character of egocentric childish thought even more clearly elsewhere, when he says:

“Any egocentric thought in its structure occupies an intermediate place between autistic thought (which is not directed, i.e., hovering on a whim, like a dream) and directed understanding” (1, p. 229).

Not only the structure, but also the function of this form of thinking forces us to place it in the genetic series between autistic and real thinking. As mentioned above, the function of this thinking is not so much in adapting to reality, but in satisfying one's own needs. This thinking is not so much directed to reality as to the satisfaction of desire. This makes egocentric thought related to autistic thought, but at the same time there are essential features that separate them.

These include new functional moments that bring egocentric thought closer to the real thought of an adult, directed at reality, and push it far ahead in comparison with the logic of a dream, daydream or daydream.

“We called the thought of the child egocentric,” says Piaget, “wishing to say that this thought is still autistic in its structure, but that its interests are no longer directed exclusively to the satisfaction of organic needs or the needs of play, as in pure autism, but are also directed and on mental adaptation, like the thought of an adult ”(l, C. 374).

Thus, from the functional side, moments are outlined that both bring together and separate egocentric thought from the other two extreme forms of thinking. Considering these points again, leads to the conclusion that constitutes Piaget's main hypothesis that "the thought of the child is more egocentric than ours, and that it represents the middle between autism in the strict sense of the word and socialized thought" (1, p. 376).

Perhaps it should be noted from the outset that in this dual characterization of egocentric thought, Piaget constantly emphasizes points that bring egocentric thought closer to autism rather than separate them. In one of the concluding paragraphs of his book, he emphatically recalls the truth that "for egocentric thought, the game in general is the supreme law" (1, p. 401).

This emphasis on points of convergence, rather than separating, is especially noticeable in the characterization of one of the main manifestations of egocentric thought - syncretism. Piaget sees syncretism and other features of children's logic as a direct result of children's egocentrism. Here is what he says about this almost central feature of children's logic: “When reading the results of our work, one might perhaps think that egocentric thought, which produces the phenomena of syncretism, is closer to autistic thought and to dreaming than to logical thought. The facts that we have just described really represent various aspects that make them related to a dream or dreams” (1, p. 173).

However, here, too, Piaget is inclined to consider the mechanism of syncretic thought as a mediating moment between logical thought and what psychoanalysts have called a bold word - the "symbolism" of dreams. Freud, as you know, showed that in a dream there are two main functions that govern the emergence of dream images: condensation, which causes several different images to merge into one, and displacement, which transfers the signs belonging to the first from one object to another.

Piaget, following Larson, believes that “between these functions of condensation and displacement and the functions of generalization (which is a type of condensation) there must be intermediate links. Syncretism is precisely the most essential of these links” (1, p. 174). Thus, we see that not only egocentrism as the basis of children's logic, but also its main manifestations, like syncretism, are considered in Piaget's theory as intermediate transitional forms between the logic of dreams and the logic of thinking.

“Syncretism,” he says elsewhere, “by its very mechanism is an intermediate link between autistic thought and logical thought, as, indeed, are all other manifestations of egocentric thought.” For the sake of this last comparison, we stopped at the example of syncretism. As we can see, what Piaget asserts in relation to syncretism, he extends to all other features, to all other manifestations of children's egocentric thought.

In order to elucidate the central idea for Piaget's entire theory about the egocentric nature of children's thinking, it remains to outline the third and main point, namely the genetic relationship in which egocentric thought stands to the logic of dreams, to pure autism, on the one hand, and to the logic of rational thinking, on the other. We have already seen that, structurally and functionally, Piaget considers egocentric thought as an intermediate connecting link between these two extreme stages in the development of thinking.

Piaget solves the question of the genetic connections and relationships that unite these three groups in the development of thinking in the same exact way.

The original, basic idea of his whole concept of the development of thinking as a whole and the source of the genetic definition of children's egocentrism is the position that he borrows from the theory of psychoanalysis, namely the position that the primary form of thinking, determined by the very psychological nature of the child, is an artistic form;

realistic thinking, on the other hand, is a late product, as if imposed on the child from outside with the help of prolonged and systematic coercion, which is exerted on him by the social environment that surrounds him.

“Mental activity,” Piaget proceeds from this, “is not entirely a logical activity. You can be smart and not very logical at the same time.”

The various functions of the mind are not at all connected with each other necessarily in such a way that one cannot meet without the other or before the other. “Logical activity is proof, it is a search for truth, while finding a solution depends on the imagination, but the very need, the very need for logical activity arises rather late” (1, p. 372).

“This delay,” says Piaget, “is due to two reasons: firstly, thought goes to the service of direct satisfaction of needs much earlier than it forces itself to seek the truth. The most randomly emerging thinking is a game, or at least a kind of mirage imagination, which allows you to take a barely born desire for a feasible one. This has been observed by all authors who have studied children's games, children's testimony, and children's thought.

The same was convincingly repeated by Freud, who established that the pleasure principle precedes the reality principle. But the thought of a child up to the age of 7-8 years is imbued with the tendencies of the game, in other words, before this age it is extremely difficult to distinguish fiction from a thought taken for truth” (1, p.

Thus, from a genetic point of view, autistic thinking appears to be an early, primary form of thinking, logic arises relatively late, and egocentric thought occupies a middle place from a genetic point of view, forming a transitional stage in the development of thinking from autism to logic.

In order to elucidate in its entirety this conception of the egocentrism of childish thought, which, unfortunately, is not formulated anywhere by the author in a coherent, systematic form, but which is the determining factor in his entire construction, we must dwell on one last point, namely, on the question of the origin of this egocentric character of children's thinking and on its, so to speak, scope or scope, i.e., on the boundaries, on the limits of this phenomenon in various spheres of children's thinking.

Piaget sees the roots of egocentrism in two circumstances. Firstly, following psychoanalysis, in the asocial nature of the child and, secondly, in the peculiar nature of his practical activity.

Piaget says many times that his basic proposition regarding the middle character of egocentric thought is hypothetical. But this hypothesis is so obviously close to common sense, it seems so obvious, that the fact of children's egocentrism seems to him hardly disputed. The whole question to which the theoretical part of this book is devoted is to determine whether egocentrism entails those difficulties of expression and those logical phenomena that are considered in this book, or the opposite happens.

“However, it is clear that from a genetic point of view it is necessary to start from the activity of the child in order to explain his thought. And this activity, without a doubt, is self-centered and selfish. The social instinct develops in clear forms late. The first critical period in this regard should be attributed to 7-8 years” (1, p. 377). To the same age, Piaget refers and dates the first period of logical reflection, as well as the first efforts that the child makes to avoid the consequences of egocentrism.

In essence, this attempt to derive egocentrism from the late development of the social instinct and from the biological egoism of childish nature is already contained in the very definition of egocentric thought, which is regarded as individual thought in contrast to socialized thought, which for Piaget coincides with rational or realistic thought.

As for the second question regarding the scope or coverage of the sphere of influence of this egocentrism, it must be said that Piaget is inclined to attach universal significance, to absolutize this phenomenon, considering it not only basic, primary, root for all children's thinking and behavior, but also universal.

Thus, we have seen that Piaget considers all manifestations of childish logic in all their richness and diversity as direct or distant manifestations of childish egocentrism.

But this is not enough - the influence of egocentrism extends not only upwards, along the line of consequences arising from this fact, but also downwards - along the lines of the causes that led to its occurrence. Piaget, as already mentioned, connects the egocentric nature of thinking with the egoistic nature of the child's activity, and this latter with the antisocial nature of the entire development of the child up to the age of 8.

With regard to individual, most central manifestations of children's egocentrism, for example, in relation to the syncretism of children's thought, Piaget says directly and unambiguously that we have features that distinguish not this or that sphere of children's thinking, but determine the entire thinking of the child as a whole. “Syncretism,” he says, “thus permeates the entire thought of the child” (1, p. 390). “Children's egocentrism,” he says elsewhere, “appears to be significant until the age of 7 or 8, when the skills of socialized thought begin to be established.

But until the age of 7-12, the consequences of egocentrism, and in particular syncretism, permeate the entire thought of the child, both purely verbal (verbal understanding) and aimed at direct observation (understanding of perceptions). After 7 years, these features of egocentrism do not disappear instantly, but remain crystallized in the most abstract part of thought, which is most difficult to operate on, namely, on the plane of purely verbal thought” (1, p. 153).

The latter leaves no doubt that the sphere of influence of egocentrism, according to Piaget, up to 8 years of age coincides directly with the entire area of \u200b\u200bchildren's thinking and perception as a whole. The peculiarity of the turning point that the development of children's thinking makes after the age of 8 lies precisely in the fact that this egocentric character of thought is retained only in a certain part of the child's thinking, only in the sphere of abstract reasoning. Between the ages of 8 and 12, the influence of egocentrism is limited to one sphere of thought, one section of it. Until the age of 8, it is unlimited and occupies the entire territory of children's thought as a whole.

These are, in general terms, the main points that characterize the concept of egocentric thought in Piaget's theory, a concept, as already mentioned, of central, decisive importance for all his research, which is the key to understanding the analysis of all the factual materials contained in the book.

The natural conclusion from this conception is Piaget's proposition, which says that the egocentric character of thought is so necessarily internally connected with the very psychological nature of the child that it always manifests itself naturally, inevitably, steadily, regardless of the child's experience. “Even experience,” says Piaget, “is not able to deceive children's minds so set up in this way;

Things are to blame, but children, never.

The savage who invokes rain by a magical rite attributes his failure to the influence of an evil spirit. According to the apt expression, it is impenetrable to experience.

Experience dissuades him only in individual, very special technical cases (agriculture, hunting, production), but this fleeting partial contact with reality does not in the least affect the general direction of his thought. And doesn’t the same thing happen to children, and with even greater reason, because all their material needs are foreseen by the care of their parents, so that, perhaps, only in manual games does the child get acquainted with the resistance of things? (1, pp. 372-373).

This impenetrability of the child of the day of experience is associated for Piaget with his main idea, which is that “a child's thought cannot be isolated from the factors of education and from all those influences to which an adult subjects the child, but these influences are not imprinted on the child, as on photographic film. , they are assimilated, i.e., deformed by the living being that is subjected to them, and are introduced into its own substance. It is this psychological substance of the child, in other words, this structure and functioning, characteristic of the child's thought, that we have tried to describe and explain to a certain extent” (l, p. 408).

These words reveal the main methodological setting of Piaget's entire study, which attempts to study the psychological substance of the child, which assimilates the influences of the social environment and deforms them according to its own laws. It is this egocentricity of children's thought that Piaget considers, in short, as the result of a deformation of the social forms of thinking that take root in the psychological substance of the child, a deformation that takes place according to the laws by which this substance lives and develops.

We have come close, touching on this last formulation, as if casually abandoned by the author, to revealing the philosophy of Piaget's entire study, to the problem of social and biological laws in the psychological development of the child, to the question of the nature of child development as a whole.

About this methodologically most complex side of the matter, which remains extremely little disclosed in the presentation of the author, we will speak separately and further.

We should first be interested in considering and criticizing the stated concept of children's egocentrism in essence, from the point of view of the theoretical and actual viability of this concept.

II But autistic thinking, considered from the point of view of phylogenetic and ontogenetic development, is not at all the primary stage in the mental development of the child and humanity. It is not at all a primitive function, the starting point of the entire process of development, the initial and basic form from which all the rest originate.

Even considered from the point of view of biological evolution and from the point of view of the biological analysis of the behavior of an infant, autistic thinking does not justify the main position put forward by Freud and adopted by Piaget, the position that autism is the primary and main stage, over which all further stages in the development of thinking are built. that the earliest emerging thinking is, in the words of Piaget, a kind of mirage imagination;

that the pleasure principle, which governs artistic thinking, precedes the reality principle, which governs the logic of rational thinking. And what is most remarkable is that it is precisely biologically oriented psychologists, and in particular the author of the doctrine of autistic thinking, E. Bleiler, who come to this conclusion.

More recently, he has pointed out that the very term "autistic thinking"

gave rise to many misunderstandings. This concept began to be invested with content that brings autistic thinking closer to schizophrenic autism, it began to be identified with egoistic thinking, etc. Therefore, Bleuler now proposed calling autistic thinking unrealistic, opposing it to realistic, rational thinking. Already behind this forced change of name lies an extremely important change in the content of the concept itself, which is denoted by this name.

Online Library http:// www. koob. en

L. S. VYGOTSKY

THINKING AND SPEECH

Fifth edition, revised

Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky. Thinking and speech. Ed. 5, rev. - Publishing house "Labyrinth", M., 1999. - 352 p.

Editor: G.N. Shelogurova Illustrator: I.E. Smirnova Computer typesetting: N.E. Eremin

The fifth edition of the main book of L. S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) ”, which brought him posthumous world fame, reproduces the first (1934) edition. The denominations made in the second (1956) and third (1982) editions have been restored, some typographical errors and inaccuracies of the fourth (1996) edition have been corrected, and the original unity of the author's intention and style has been restored.

ISBN 5-87604-097-5

All-Russian

state library

foreign, literature

them. M I. Rudomino

Preface 5

Chapter Two The Problem of Speech and Thinking of the Child in Teaching Zhpiage 20

Chapter Three The problem of the development of speech in the teachings of V. Stern 73

Chapter Four Genetic Roots of Thinking and Speech 81

Chapter Five An Experimental Study of the Development of Concepts 109

Chapter six

Study of the development of scientific concepts in childhood 171

Chapter Seven Thought and Word 275

Literature 337

textological commentary 339

I.V. Peshkov. Once again "Thinking and speech", or on the subject of rhetoric 341

Name Index 348
FOREWORD

The present work is a psychological study of one of the most difficult, most intricate and complex issues of experimental psychology - the question of thinking and speech. Systematic experimental development of this problem, as far as we know, has not yet been undertaken by any of the researchers. The solution of the problem that confronted us, at least with a primary approximation, could be carried out only through a series of private experimental studies of individual aspects of the issue of interest to us, such as the study of experimentally formed concepts, the study of written speech and its relationship to thinking, the study of inner speech, etc. .d.

In addition to experimental research, we inevitably had to turn to theoretical and critical research. On the one hand, we had to, through theoretical analysis and generalization of a large amount of factual material accumulated in psychology, through comparison, comparison of phylogenesis and ontogenesis data, outline the starting points for solving our problem and to develop the initial prerequisites for independently obtaining scientific facts in the form of a general doctrine of the genetic roots of thinking and speech.On the other hand, it was necessary to subject the most ideologically powerful of the modern theories of thinking and speech to a critical analysis in order to build on them, to clarify for oneself the ways of one's own searches, to make preliminary working hypotheses and to oppose from the very beginning the theoretical path of our research to the path that led to the construction of theories that dominate modern science, but are untenable and therefore need to be revised and overcome.

In the course of the study, it was necessary to resort to theoretical analysis twice more. The study of thinking and speech inevitably touches on a number of adjacent and borderline areas of scientific knowledge. Comparison of the data of the psychology of speech and linguistics, the experimental study of concepts and the psychological theory of learning turned out to be inevitable. It seemed to us that it was most convenient to resolve all these incidental questions in their purely theoretical formulation, without analyzing independently accumulated factual material. Following this rule)", we introduced into the context of the study of the development of scientific concepts a working hypothesis developed by us in another place and on other material, a working hypothesis about learning and development. )" research.

6 foreword

In accordance with this main task, the program of our study and the present work was determined. We started by posing the problem and looking for research methods.

Then, in a critical study, we tried to analyze two of the most complete and strong theories of the development of speech and thinking - the theory of Piaget and W. Shtrzen, in order to oppose our formulation of the problem and the method of research from the very beginning to the traditional formulation of the question and the traditional method and thereby outline what, in fact, should we look for in the course of our work, to what final point it should lead us. Further, we had to preface our two experimental studies of the development of concepts and the main forms of speech thinking with a theoretical study that clarifies the genetic roots of thinking and speech and thereby outlines the starting points for our independent work on the study of the genesis of speech thinking. The central part of the entire book is formed by two experimental studies, one of which is devoted to elucidating the main path of development of the meanings of words in childhood, and the other to a comparative study of the development of scientific and spontaneous concepts of the child. Finally, in the final chapter, we tried to bring together the data of the entire study and present in a coherent and integral form the entire process of verbal thinking, as it is drawn in the light of these data.

foreword 7

the nature of written speech as an independent function of speech and its relation to thinking; 4) experimental disclosure of the psychological nature of inner speech and its relation to thinking. In this enumeration of the new data contained in our study, we had in mind, first of all, what the present study can contribute to the general theory of thinking and speech in the sense of new, experimentally established psychological facts, and then already those working hypotheses and those theoretical generalizations that inevitably had to arise in the process of interpreting, explaining and comprehending these facts. It is neither the right nor the obligation of the author, of course, to enter into an assessment of the significance and truth of these facts and these theories. This is the business of critics and readers of this book.

Some of its parts were used by us earlier in other works and published as a manuscript in one of the correspondence courses (Chapter V). Other chapters were published as reports or prefaces to the works of those authors whose criticism they are devoted to (Ch. II and IV). The remaining chapters, as well as the entire book as a whole, are published for the first time.

Chapter first

PROBLEM AND METHOD OF RESEARCH

The problem of thinking and speech belongs to the range of those psychological problems in which the question of the relationship between various psychological functions, various types of consciousness activity comes to the fore. The central point of this whole problem is, of course, the question of the relationship of thought to word. All the rest of the questions related to this problem are, as it were, secondary and logically subordinate to this first and main question, without the resolution of which even the correct formulation of each of the further and more particular questions is impossible; Meanwhile, it is the problem of interfunctional connections and relationships, oddly enough, is an almost completely undeveloped and new problem for modern psychology.

The problem of thinking and speech - as ancient as the science of psychology itself - is precisely at this point, in the question of the relation of thought to the word, that it is the least developed and the most obscure. Atomistic and functional analysis, which dominated scientific psychology throughout the last decade, led to the fact that individual mental functions were considered in an isolated form, the method of psychological knowledge was developed and improved in relation to the study of these separate, isolated, isolated processes, while the problem of the connection of functions with each other, the problem of their organization in the integral structure of consciousness remained all the time out of the field of attention of researchers.

That consciousness is a single whole and that the individual functions are connected in their activity with each other in an inseparable unity - this idea does not represent anything new for modern psychology. But the unity of consciousness and the connection between individual functions in psychology was usually postulated rather than served as the subject of research. Moreover, postulating the functional unity of consciousness, psychology, along with this indisputable assumption, based its research on a tacitly recognized by all, clearly not formulated, completely false postulate, which consists in recognizing the immutability and constancy of interfunctional connections of consciousness, and it was assumed that perception is always and in the same way connected with attention, memory is always connected in the same way with perception, thought with memory, and so on. From this, of course, it followed that interfunctional relationships are something that can be taken out of brackets as a common factor

problem and research method 9

and what may not be taken into account when performing research operations on the individual and isolated functions remaining inside the brackets. Thanks to all this, the problem of relations is, as said, the least developed part in the whole problematic of modern psychology.

If we try to briefly formulate the results of historical work on the problem of thinking and speech in scientific psychology, we can say that the entire solution to this problem, which was proposed by various researchers, has always and constantly fluctuated - from the most ancient times to the present day - between two extreme poles. - between identification, complete fusion of thought and word, and between their equally metaphysical, equally absolute, equally complete rupture and separation. Expressing one of these extremes in a pure form, or combining both of these extremes in their constructions, occupying, as it were, an intermediate point between them, but all the time moving along an axis located between these polar points, various teachings about thinking and speech revolved in one and the same vicious circle, the way out of which has not been found so far. Starting from antiquity, the identification of thinking and speech through psychological linguistics, which declared that thought is “speech minus sound”, and up to modern American psychologists and reflexologists, who consider thought as “an inhibited reflex not revealed in its motor part”, goes through a single line of development of the same idea, which identifies thought and speech. Naturally, all the teachings adjoining this line, by the very essence of their views on the nature of thought and speech, always faced the impossibility of not only deciding, but even raising the question of the relation of thought to word. If thought and word coincide, if they are one and the same, no relation between them can arise and cannot serve as an object of investigation, just as it is impossible to imagine that the relation of a thing to itself can be an object of investigation. Whoever merges thought and speech closes the way for himself to raise the question of the relationship between thought and word and makes this problem unsolvable in advance. The problem is not resolved, but simply bypassed.

Lev Semenovich Vygotsky thinking speech. Book: “Thinking and Speech

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L. S. VYGOTSKY

THINKING AND SPEECH

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