Vygotsky E-Book

Jan Derry

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Journal of Philosophy of Education
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 401

Beschreibung

Vygotsky Philosophy and Education reassesses the works of Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky work by arguing that his central ideas about the nature of rationality and knowledge were informed by the philosophic tradition of Spinoza and Hegel. * Presents a reassessment of the works of Lev Vygotsky in light of the tradition of Spinoza and Hegel informing his work * Reveals Vygotsky's connection with the work of contemporary philosophers such as Brandom and McDowell * Draws on discussions in contemporary philosophy to revise prominent readings of Vygotskian psychology and revisits educational debates where Vygotsky's ideas were central * Reveals the limitations of appropriations of Vygotsky which fail to recognize the Hegelian provenance of his work * Shows the relevance of Brandom's inferentialism for contemporary educational theory and practice

Leseprobe

Contents

Series Editor Preface

Preface

1 Introduction

NOTES

REFERENCES

2 Situated Cognition and Contextualism

DECONTEXTUALISATION

THEORISING THE INSTITUTIONAL

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

SITUATED COGNITION

THE TRANSFER PROBLEM AND THE IMPLICATIONS FOR POLICY

DETERMINATION, CONDITIONING OR SHAPING?

NOTES

REFERENCES

3 Constructivism and Schooling

REPRESENTATION AS A PARADIGM

ROBERT BRANDOM

THEORISING MEDIATIONAL MEANS WITHIN A REPRESENTATIONALIST PARADIGM

CONSTRUCTIVISM

SCHOOLING, CONSTRUCTIVISM AND KNOWLEDGE

CONCLUSION

NOTES

REFERENCES

4 Vygotsky and Piaget

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHILOSOPHIC BACKGROUND

VYGOTSKY AND PIAGET: SCIENTIFIC/EVERYDAY CONCEPTS

CONSCIOUSNESS

CONCLUSION

NOTES

REFERENCES

5 Spinoza and Free Will

FREEDOM

FREE WILL

SPINOZA AND TRUTH

DETERMINISM AND DEVELOPMENT

CONCLUSION

NOTES

REFERENCES

6 Vygotsky, Hegel and the Critique of Abstract Reason

KANT AND DUALISM

HEGEL AND DUALISM

VYGOTSKY AND HEGEL

NOTES

REFERENCES

7 Vygotsky, Hegel and Education

FOUNDATIONALISM AND ANTI-FOUNDATIONALISM

THE CONCEPTION OF SCIENCE

THE IDEA OF DEVELOPMENT

THE IDEAL AND THE REAL

IMPLICATIONS FOR EDUCATION

NOTES

REFERENCES

Index

The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series

The Journal of Philosophy of Education Book Series publishes titles that represent a wide variety of philosophical traditions. They vary from examination of fundamental philosophical issues in their connection with education, to detailed critical engagement with current educational practice or policy from a philosophical point of view. Books in this series promote rigorous thinking on educational ­matters and identify and criticise the ideological forces shaping education.

Titles in the series include:

Vygotsky Philosophy and EducationJan DerryEducation Policy: Philosophical CritiqueEdited by Richard SmithLevinas, Subjectivity, Education: Towards an Ethics of Radical ResponsibilityAnna StrhanPhilosophy for Children in Transition: Problems and ProspectsEdited by Nancy Vansieleghem and David KennedyThe Good Life of Teaching: An Ethics of Professional PracticeChris HigginsReading R. S. Peters Today: Analysis, Ethics, and the Aims of EducationEdited by Stefaan E. Cuypers and Christopher MartinThe Formation of ReasonDavid BakhurstWhat do Philosophers of Education do? (And how do they do it?)Edited by Claudia RuitenbergEvidence-Based Education Policy: What Evidence? What Basis? Whose Policy?Edited by David Bridges, Paul Smeyers and Richard SmithNew Philosophies of LearningEdited by Ruth Cigman and Andrew DavisThe Common School and the Comprehensive Ideal: A Defence by Richard Pring with Complementary EssaysEdited by Mark Halstead and Graham HaydonPhilosophy, Methodology and Educational ResearchEdited by David Bridges and Richard D SmithPhilosophy of the TeacherBy Nigel TubbsConformism and Critique in Liberal SocietyEdited by Frieda Heyting and Christopher WinchRetrieving Nature: Education for a Post-Humanist AgeBy Michael BonnettEducation and Practice: Upholding the Integrity of Teaching and LearningEdited by Joseph Dunne and Pádraig HoganEducating Humanity: Bildung in PostmodernityEdited by Lars Lovlie, Klaus Peter Mortensen and Sven Erik NordenboThe Ethics of Educational ResearchEdited by Michael McNamee and David BridgesIn Defence of High CultureEdited by John Gingell and Ed BrandonEnquiries at the Interface: Philosophical Problems of On-Line EducationEdited by Paul Standish and Nigel BlakeThe Limits of Educational AssessmentEdited by Andrew DavisIllusory Freedoms: Liberalism, Education and the MarketEdited by Ruth JonathanQuality and EducationEdited by Christopher Winch

This edition first published 2013Copyright © Jan Derry 2013Editorial organisation © Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain

Registered OfficeJohn Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

Editorial Offices350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UKThe Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK

For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-blackwell.

The right of Jan Derry to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book.

Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and author(s) have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services and neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for damages arising herefrom. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data applied for

Paperback ISBN: 9781118368770

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Wassily Kandinsky, Komposition VII, 1913, oil on canvas. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow, Russia / The Bridgeman Art Library. © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2013.Cover design by Design Deluxe.

Series Editor Preface

Anyone who trained to be a teacher in the latter half of the twentieth century is likely to have studied developmental psychology, and within this one name stood out: that of Jean Piaget. But alongside Piaget, and not entirely overshadowed, another figure was apparent, someone whose work was less readily assimilated, less easily reduced to simple stages, and whose profound innovations in psychology came only dimly into view: this, of course, was Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky. For psychologists, Vygotsky has remained a key, though controversial, thinker, and estimations of the value of his work have fluctuated. For philosophers, he has continued to be perceived as a marginal figure: in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy the only reference to him is in Denis Phillips’s entry for the philosophy of education, and there he is just one in a list of theorists and researchers who are not philosophers. In fact Vygotsky’s theoretical innovations had implications for the philosophy of mind, but this philosophical importance of his work has for the most part simply been missed. Institutional boundaries within the academy have not eased the reception of his work, and they have hidden its interdisciplinary richness, while political prejudice has in contrary ways blocked the path of its wider recognition. In consequence, the lines along which Vygotsky’s thought has been inherited have been various, and the perspectives that have held sway have been decidedly partial.

Against this background, and in the light of an ever-burgeoning secondary literature, it is the unique achievement of Jan Derry’s Vygotsky, Philosophy and Education to have brought together these disparate lines of thought. In particular, it is through her reassessment of the significance of Vygotsky’s philosophical background that a more coherent reading becomes possible. The robustness of the critique this generates is such as to rebut some leading accounts of the work, and in consequence it paves the way for a renewal of Vygotsky studies. What should be apparent also, from the plethora of classroom examples that Derry works through, is that she approaches these discussions with the benefit of varied experience as a practising teacher. This helps to make the practical implications of the study all the more apparent.

It was an important step forward for Vygotsky when he came to see the implications of Marx’s ‘reverse method’, according to which things need to be understood not as progressive increments to an initial state but rather in terms of their higher form: human anatomy is the key to the anatomy of the ape. Vygotsky’s ‘zone of proximal development’ provides a small-scale, familiar example of this, but the conceptual and methodological implications are far wider. It is a related strength of Derry’s text that it avoids a developmental historical account of Vygotsky’s thought in favour of an approach that exploits the vantage point of the present: it is from here that the diverse and disparate paths of enquiry that have been associated with Vygotsky’s name can coherently be brought into view. Contemporary debates in learning theory can then be read in the light of leading-edge philosophy of mind, while philosophical psychology can be seen to dovetail with aspects of Spinoza, Hegel and Marx. Indeed, Derry’s appreciative account of the philosophy of John McDowell, Robert Brandom and, behind them, Wilfrid Sellars, reveals the background significance of Hegel, a philosopher whose determining importance for Vygotsky has been wildly underestimated. In its affirmation of this and in its understanding of the diverse traditions of thought that are crossed here, Derry’s book complements and extends the lines of research elaborated in David Bakhurst’s The Formation of Reason, published in this series in 2011.

In sum, Derry has undertaken a fascinating study. She has written a book that challenges received ideas in learning theory, that overturns the positions held by leading Vygotsky scholars, and that reveals more fully the congruence of current philosophy of mind with the insights of this remarkable Russian psychologist who was working nearly a century ago and whose potential importance has still not fully been realised.

Paul Standish, Series Editor

Preface

It was at the Institute of Education, London, that I was introduced to Vygotsky’s work by Jane Miller. Later my interests in his work deepened, especially through lively discussions and disagreements with colleagues – David Guile, John Hardcastle, Tony Burgess, Anton Franks, Arthur Bakker, Richard Noss, Bob Cowen, Celia Hoyles, Gunther Kress, Shirley Franklin and Carey Jewitt. It is particularly important for me to have worked with Michael Young and Harry Daniels. In 1999 I benefited greatly from being a member of the Sociocultural Theory Seminar Series, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council.

Aware of my interests, the late Michael Cowen mentioned a book to me by John McDowell called Mind and World. This led me to see links with the work of David Bakhurst, whom I had come to know of through his work on Vygotsky and Ilyenkov. Later, when I met David, I learnt that the connection was not merely coincidental as David had been supervised by John McDowell at Oxford. David is one of the few philosophers who appreciate that systematic speculative reflection on the nature of education has an invaluable contribution to make to philosophy and philosophical anthropology. His work has proved highly influential amongst educationalists interested in Vygotsky. Unfortunately the time needed for the philosophical reflection that David’s work suggests is necessary is tantalisingly difficult to secure.

This book draws on Hegel, and I have benefited from being a member of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, which provides a forum that does full justice to the richness of his thought. My appreciation of Hegel has been deepened by listening to members of the Society, in particular Ken Westphal. I have also benefited from the lively discussion list on Cultural Historical Activity Theory, organised by Michael Cole. In addition, personal discussions with Anne Edwards, Mariane Hedegaard, Peter Medway, Yrjö Engeström, Johan Muller, Joseph Dunne, Uffe Juul Jensen, Peter Jones and Charles Crook have always helped me greatly.

I am particularly indebted to Paul Standish, who read the manuscript, and to Andrew Davis and Seth Chaiklin, who read substantial sections of it. They made extremely helpful suggestions. The errors that remain are, of course, my own.

My heartfelt thanks to my family, especially my brother Colin Dubery, for their forbearance when my work consumed me and I had little time for family life.

Finally, my thanks to Geoff Kay, who was my teacher 40 years ago and whose friendship and conversations over the years have enriched my life.

Jan DerryLondon, May 2013

1

Introduction

This book is a response to the claim that Vygotsky holds abstract rationality as the pinnacle of thought. The claim is based on the belief that Vygotsky subscribed to what is referred to as the ‘Enlightenment project’. The book aims to show that Vygotsky had a far more sophisticated appreciation both of reason and of its remit than this fashionable characterisation implies. Its argument is developed through an exploration of some aspects of the philosophy of Hegel and Spinoza, to both of whom Vygotsky acknowledges a debt. In the dominant, predominantly psychological research literature, the nature of the philosophical underpinnings of Vygotsky’s work tends to receive little attention. Not only is that neglect contested here, but the argument is carried a stage further, claiming that the limitations that critics see in Vygotsky’s work are based on misapprehensions of his understanding of reason. In support of this it is argued that Hegel’s investigation of the presuppositions of claims to knowledge already contains a critique of the frame of reference used by these commentators – commentators who view Vygotsky, in this aspect of his work, as having an ‘old-fashioned’ conception of reason that cannot do justice to diversity.

A recurring theme of this book is Vygotsky’s conception of the nature of abstract reason, but such are the ramifications of this that it is necessary to go well beyond an examination of any particular aspect of Vygotsky’s work. Vygotsky was concerned above all with questions of education. While education may appear to be non-philosophical and certainly to lie outside the range of what most philosophers write about, it has, by virtue of its direct involvement with thought and intellect, a philosophical dimension. As education leads towards philosophy, so philosophy can gain from an engagement with education, precisely because the latter is not only engaged with questions of mind and world but engaged with them in a real and practical sense.

It was Piaget, with his genetic epistemology, who brought the study of the development of faculties into direct contact with philosophy. Vygotsky, Piaget’s contemporary, appreciated that any inquiry on the part of philosophy into the nature of mind and world could not be separated from the study of the mind in its development. Those familiar with Vygotsky’s work will appreciate the extent of his influence within education and also be aware of the debates about pedagogy and knowledge that his work has generated. Accordingly, although this book focuses on the question of abstract reason in Vygotsky, it concludes by illustrating how the philosophical tradition that inspired Vygotsky has significant implications for these debates.

While Vygotsky was explicit about the importance of philosophy for theory, he did not actually spell out the philosophy that informed his argument, yet this omission, if this is how it is to be judged, does not detract from the subtlety and sophistication of his approach. The dualism of the ideal and real, of mind and world, that has underpinned criticism of Vygotsky both in his own time and in the current period has been taken up not only by his follower Evald Ilyenkov, but also by contemporary analytical philosophers. David Bakhurst has written on this directly: in claiming normativity to be a necessary element of the sociogenesis of mind, he has brought to our attention links between the philosophy of John McDowell and Ilyenkov. For modern philosophy the questions requiring careful analysis concern empiricism and knowing. The two contemporary philosophers whose work is most important in this book have both taken a Hegelian approach to make explicit points, which, though unexpressed, are necessarily assumed in the forms of argument that they analyse. In Mind and World McDowell addresses the problem of how a separate mind can connect with a world by working through a number of highly developed arguments about how we come to know. His enquiries lead to the unusual conclusion that, rather than possessing the means of thought solely in one’s head, ‘the dictates of reason are there [in the world] anyway, whether or not one’s eyes are open to them’ (McDowell, 1996, p. 91). Following Wilfrid Sellars, he refers to this sphere as ‘The Space of Reasons’.

For McDowell and also for Robert Brandom, the other contemporary philosopher whose work I shall highlight, this concept plays a crucial role. Simply summarised, the gist of the argument is that in order to make a claim of knowing we are not, as commonly thought, giving a description of an event but placing our claims about it in a space of reasons – that is to say, making claims on the basis of knowing what follows from them and what it is necessary to assume in order to make them in the first place. Where a word is used without the user being aware of its conceptual connections to other concepts, these connections are still present. The implication of Brandom’s argument is that context, not simply conscious intention, imparts reason. This approach, which results from bringing a Kantian argument to bear upon a Humean residue in empiricist conceptions of knowledge, identifies human knowing as fundamentally different from the ‘knowing’ of machines. For example, a human shout of ‘Fire!’ is fundamentally different as far as general awareness is concerned from the differential response of a fire alarm, though both are an alert to the same danger. For Brandom, what is distinctive about human beings is the ability to operate in the light of reasons rather than to respond simply to causes. McDowell refers to this as our second nature, emphasising our being human as something other than pure matter yet still part of nature.

When the distinction between the human and the natural is dualistically drawn as a distinction of mind and world, a clear boundary exists between the conceptual (mind) and the nonconceptual (nature). Such a distinction exists for Kant, but for McDowell, who adopts a Hegelian standpoint in Mind and World and speaks of the ‘unboundedness of the conceptual’, it is fundamentally misconceived. McDowell rejects the separation of mind and world underlying so much philosophy in favour of a frame of thought in which reasons exist in the world that humans have developed. In adopting this frame of thought McDowell takes up a position similar to Vygotsky’s. For both, mind is social and to give an account of mindedness and intellect it is necessary to look beyond the individual and to attend to external mediation in the formation of higher mental functions.

The arguments of McDowell, Brandom, Sellars, Bakhurst and, with them, Vygotsky cast a distinctive light on rationality and reason.1 In their hands these concepts take on quite a different shape from the mainstream of philosophical thought that comes through Descartes, Locke, Hume and Kant down to modern analytical philosophy. To give a bare outline, a once prevailing view in analytical philosophy presents rationality as abstract and decontextualised: it relies on the idea that reason is separated from the world and can be applied to it with greater or lesser degrees of adequacy. When applied to education such a position can lead to the most extreme forms of formalised teaching.

It is beyond the remit of this book to begin to spell out the many practical ­implications of the philosophical issues it considers. However, one topic must be mentioned that confirms that there are such implications and that these are of crucial importance. This is the way ‘abstract’ reason has been made the culprit for the poverty of educational practice in mass schooling. McDowell’s claim that receptivity – our experience of the world through our senses – is already ‘conceptual’ involves a conception of reason quite different from that with which critics such as James Wertsch quite correctly take issue – the extreme of a decontextualised schooled knowledge, presented without regard to its genetic development or any sense that learning involves actualising concepts. This matter of decontextualisation is taken up in Chapter 2, which presents the critique of Vygotsky’s alleged abstract rationalism and considers the theory of situated cognition which has been proposed in its place.

Chapter 3 turns to ‘constructivism’, which plays a central role in much post-Vygotskian thought. Criticism here is directed against what is argued to be the ‘representationalist paradigm’ implicit in conceptions of the active construction of meaning into a bare ‘given’. It is argued that constructivism leads to particular pedagogic strategies that, though not part of a more sophisticated analysis, are influential in the rhetoric of classroom practice, specifically the undermining of the authority of the teacher, of knowledge (in texts) and of the belief that knowledge is a matter of plurality in the sense that no one approach is superior to any other.

Chapter 4 uses the debate between Vygotsky and Piaget on conscious awareness, egocentrism and development to illustrate the differences between their philosophical backgrounds. The purpose of this chapter is to show how the different philosophical presuppositions of each author lead to different theoretical positions.

Chapter 5 turns to elements of Spinoza’s philosophy that influenced Vygotsky. In particular it is concerned with Spinoza’s formulation of knowing in terms of a holism of one substance of which everything is a part, as opposed to a dualism that assumes fundamental separations. Spinoza’s approach leads to a conception of truth not as an attribute but as an actualisation of a process understood as many-sided. From this standpoint, freedom appears quite differently from the Cartesian conception of wilful agency. It is understood as self-determination: to be free is to be the cause of oneself rather than subject to external causes, and this depends upon ‘adequate ideas’.

Chapter 6 turns to Hegel, who follows a similar approach to Spinoza, progressively ‘exorcising’ claims to know to reach a distinctive conception of knowing. This conception, rather than being based on secure foundations, sees new knowledge arising out of a working through of existing claims to knowledge to show that more is implicated than appears initially to be the case.

Chapter 7 considers this anti-foundationalist character of the philosophy of Spinoza, Hegel and Vygotsky in order to argue that the conception of reason ­central to Vygotsky’s work bears no relation to the caricature of abstract rationality criticised by contemporary post-Vygotskian researchers.

This order is not a linear sequence as the criticisms levelled against situated cognition and constructivism in Chapters 2 and 3 presuppose philosophical ideas that are not discussed until Chapters 5 and 6. On the other hand, those philosophical ideas would not make sense in the context of this book without an examination of post-Vygotskian research. Furthermore, it must be stressed that the later chapters are intended only to address those parts of Spinoza and Hegel that are relevant for understanding Vygotsky’s work. The aims of this book are: first, to show that Vygotsky was influenced by a different tradition of philosophy from that which has influenced post-Vygotskian research; and second, to demonstrate that this difference is significant and has implications for educational practice.

Apart from the complexities of the differences between the philosophical traditions, there is the additional difficulty that neither Vygotsky nor post-Vygotskian researchers spell out their philosophical presuppositions in detail. Vygotsky, it is true, acknowledged the philosophic influence on his thinking, and it is often only a matter of following the leads he gave to find his sources. With his commentators, however, things are much less clear and the scope for attributing to them positions they do not hold is necessarily that much greater. But it must be stressed that the criticisms made of various works of commentary on Vygotsky for failure to appreciate the significance of the philosophical traditions in which he was working stop far short of denying the value of the contribution of those traditions to the understanding of the nature of reason.

NOTES

1 Bakhurst’s The Formation of Reason (2011) offers an original defence of a sociohistorical ­account of mind that utilises the work of all the thinkers here mentioned, especially McDowell.

REFERENCES

Bakhurst, D. (2011) The Formation of Reason (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell).

McDowell, J. (1996) Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).

2

Situated Cognition and Contextualism

The interpretation of Vygotsky raises issues at the heart of contemporary debates in educational theory and practice, and nowhere is this more true than in connection with situated cognition and constructivism. The critical question here is how knowledge and understanding are related to immediate context, whether causally or ­constitutively or in some combination of these (Robbins and Aydede, 2009). This chapter and the next consider the division of opinion concerning situated cognition, contextualism and constructivism. But first, and in order to better place these ­matters within the main theme of this book, consideration is given to what has been termed ‘decontextualised rationality’. This will demonstrate the importance of placing Vygotsky’s work in its properphilosophical context and, hence, preventing the foreclosure of areas of investigation by commentators who do not pay it due regard.

‘Decontextualised rationality’ is a term used by Wertsch to characterise a ‘voice’ (in Bakhtin’s sense) or ‘social speech type’ that emerged with the Enlightenment:

The defining characteristic of the voice of decontextualised rationality is that it represents objects and events (i.e. referentially semantic content) in terms of ­formal, logical, and, if possible, quantifiable categories. The categories used in this form of representation are decontextualised in the sense that their meaning can be derived from their position in abstract theories or systems independent of particular speech contexts.1 (Wertsch, 1992, p. 120)

Wertsch goes on to write that ‘the voice of decontextualised rationality contrasts with “contextualised forms of representation” in that the latter represent events and objects in terms of their concrete particularity’ (p. 120). He sees the distinction between decontextualised rationality and contextualised forms of representation as particularly significant in the case of schooling: there, it seems, even when ‘other forms of representing the objects and operations at issue would do equally well or better’ (p. 120), decontextualised modes of discourse are privileged. The focal point of Wertsch’s argument is forms of ‘representation’, and, as we shall see below, the emphasis that he lays upon them has a decisive influence on his account of decontextualised rationality. The question of what precisely decontextualised rationality is and how it is best understood is not clearly worked out, but for Wertsch it has significant ramifications as his references to teaching and learning make clear.2 In the context of schooling the natural sciences and mathematics would ­typically fit Wertsch’s description of decontextualised rationality. For example, the concept electron takes its meaning from its position within a tightly bounded atomic theory. The application of the concept electron does not rely on any specific personal context for its sense. This can be distinguished from what Wertsch describes as ‘contextualised forms of representation … that … represent objects in terms of their concrete particularity’ (p. 120). In schools this might be associated with expressive subjects such as literature or art where the legitimacy of what Wertsch would call a different voice is not only acceptable but required. Wertsch’s concern is with the dominance of ‘the voice of decontextualised rationality’ in schooling. It is important to note that Wertsch’s work is set within a broader context of thought dealing with the nature ofrationality. For instance, referring toHabermas’s analysis of instrumental rationality and to Lukács’s examination of reification, Wertsch points beyond formal instructional settings to a wider tendency in modern society to privilege the ‘decontextualised, rational voice’ (p. 121). In an educational context this theme appears in various works concerned with theoretical knowledge – for example, in Donald Schon’s critique of technical rationality (1983) and in Paul Hirst’s rethinking of the character of reason (Hirst, 2008) and its place in education.3 Here we are particularly concerned with Wertsch and his reading of Vygotsky and related literature. To grasp the nature of the issues involved it is necessary to consider the following: decontextualisation, theorising the institutional, historical background, situated cognition, the transfer problem and the question of determination.

The issue of decontextualisation appears in various ways in the literature relating to general questions about curricula and pedagogy, but here our specific concern is to consider the charge of decontextualised rationality levelled against Vygotsky.

DECONTEXTUALISATION

Decontextualised rationality is a recurring theme in those critical interpretations of Vygotsky that pay little attention to the philosophical tradition in which he formulated his ideas.4 Contemporary discussion of Vygotsky’s work is influenced by developments in postmodernist thought, which, in attempting to supersede the problems of abstract rationality, has often failed to give thought and reason proper consideration. Postmodernism has caricatured the tradition of the Enlightenment, which has more to say than some texts on Vygotsky have recognised. But the examination of what exactly is meant by decontextualised rationality is underdeveloped.

The question of Vygotsky’s commitment to an ideal of development characterisedby abstract universal reason is typically addressed against a background of ­sociogenetic accounts of the development of mind. Although it is accepted that Vygotsky revealed the sociogenesis of thought, recent commentaries raise the question of how far his commitment to absolute reason limited his conception of the variety and multiplicity of modes of thought. Is Vygotsky’s commitment to universal reason simply an expression of the context in which he worked, a time when the unenlightened understanding characteristic of colonialist perceptions of the primitive was pitted against the modern? Or does it derive from the instrumentalMarxism of Soviet practice, concerned with the possibility of the creation of ‘socialist man’? Or, again, is its fundamental role in his thought rooted in the philosophical tradition from which he came? And if this last is so, does it stand in direct contradiction to his concept of sociogenesis?

Jay Lemke, a prominent researcher in the field and a semiotician, who interprets Vygotsky from an explicitly postmodern standpoint,5 appears to adopt the first of these alternatives: ‘Despite the optimism that Lev Vygotsky undoubtedly shared with his times, I hope that he did not believe that abstract symbolic formulations were the highest goal of meaning-making’ (Lemke, 1999, p. 91). Like Lemke, Wertsch is concerned with what he sees as ambivalence in Vygotsky’s writings. He presents Vygotsky as an Enlightenment rationalist who ‘embraced human rationality as the telos of human development’, adding that ‘as a Marxist he also viewed rationality as an essential tool for constructing a centrally planned economy and state’ (Wertsch, 1996, p. 25, italics added).6 But he believes that Vygotsky’s theory of sociogenesis can be detached from what he construes as the instrumental aspect of Vygotsky’s ideas. My own account takes issue with this reading of Vygotsky’s work and develops this criticism by exploring the meaning of rationality for Vygotsky. It argues that his work forms a coherent unity. It exposes the influences on Vygotsky’s work of German idealist philosophy in order to show that Vygotsky’s understanding of rationality was far more sophisticated than the instrumental and decontextualised concept of reason attributed to him.

The claim that Vygotsky’s work is coloured by its period can, of course, be turnedagainst those who make it: the argument that his embrace of universal reason issimply an expression of modernism can be met with the rejoinder that its rejection is an equally simple expression of postmodernism. Certainly the impetus to disengage from universalising reason within educational research and the social sciences emerged in the context of research conducted in the milieu of multiculturalism, partly out of a concern to do justice to the variety and legitimacy of human response and creativity, particularly in the case of American schooling. It also drew inspiration from anthropological critiques of colonialism. But what is more important than historical name-calling is recognition of the fact that the validation of the multiple ways in which individuals make meaning through their activities can lead to exactly the same sort of determinism believed to be inherent in the idea of universal ­reason.7 The idea that an individual’s thought processes are directly and causally the result of the context that provides their genesis is a mirror image of the determinism in Stalinist practice that Wertsch, for example, opposes so strongly.

In contrast to Wertsch’s conflation of Marxism and Soviet practice, David Joravsky argues that Vygotsky looked to Marx rather than Stalinist reductionism for inspiration. Highlighting the difference between, for example, Marx’s aesthetic theory – which saw the ‘young Marx … ask[ing] the same question about the persistent appeal of Greek classics that he [Vygotsky] was asking aboutHamlet. How could it be that the beautiful works of a slave owning society are still beautiful in a capitalist society and will be under socialism?’ – and the crude base–superstructuremetaphors that were adopted as orthodox Marxism by the Third International,Joravsky challenges the ground on which Wertsch levels his charges of instrumentalism (Joravsky, 1989, pp. 256–257). Universalising rationality comes under attack from those for whom the most critical dimension of the constitution of thought is context.

In addition to the antinomy between causal accounts and the understanding of art and imaginative literature that troubled Vygotsky, a further issue stands behind readings of rationality, that of the poverty of mass schooling. Although the present chapter examines the way that the notion of context is counterposed against decontextualised rationality, it is also important to note that much of theliterature on Vygotsky has developed in relation to issues raised directly byschooling. Inevitably, when Vygotsky’s work is being quarried for ideas about change and intentional development in schooling, the way in which it is construed must be affected. Once it is accepted that education is the decisive factor in the development of intellect, then the responsibility for failure cannot be blamed on the innate capacities of students; responsibility falls on educational practices and the conditions in which those practices take place.8 Because so much of the work making use of Vygotsky addresses the failures of schooling, the argumentsdeveloped are inevitably influenced by the current poverty of practice of mass schooling. The failure of schooling for large numbers of children tends to beexplained by the inadequacy of curriculum content, particularly in terms of its relevance for the lives of learners. As a result abstract rationality is blamed and more concrete conditions, such as the condition in which teachers work and the constraints on their practices, are absolved.

The counter-position to abstract rationality calls for an approach that takes account of the context in which human activity takes place – that is, within institutions – and it is to the demand for such an approach that we now turn.

THEORISING THE INSTITUTIONAL

Particular questions about Vygotsky’s work are raised within such different agendas that a variety of readings of Vygotsky has emerged (Burgess, 1993). In their effort to understand the work of Vygotsky in its complexity and cultural-historical context, Jaan Valsiner and René Van der Veer note the ‘various myths circulating among the fascinated followers of [this] interesting scholar’ (Valsiner and Van der Veer, 2000, p. ix). My concern here, as has been indicated, is with that tendency in the reading of Vygotsky that sees his conception of rationality as decontextualised. In order to examine this, we need initially to understand the background against which decontextualisation is construed by various commentators – first, in the work on situated cognition and, second, in the theorisation of context.

Vygotskian research raises crucial questions about aspects of cognition that are not covered in cognitivist approaches to the nature of thinking. The idea that processes of thought are generated and sustained externally raises the question of how this comes about. Interest in externalist accounts of mind has led researchers to examine the way that cognitive achievements are made collaboratively and through the medium of external artefacts (Clark, 1997, 1998; Wilson and Clark, 2009).9 The quest to specify causes and effects within this field is compelling since one of its driving forces is the pressure to operationalise theory for development and change.10

The commitment to providing a clear account results in the fact that a key demandof contemporary Vygotskian research has been to fill what may be considered a gap in Vygotsky’s original project – namely, to identify the specific mechanisms and relations to context through which the sociogenesis of mind takes place. Thus James Wertsch, Norris Minick and Flávio José Arns write:

A complete account of the organization of human cognitive activity, manifested in a task carried out on either the individual or the social level, must go beyond narrowly defined psychological phenomena and consider the forces that create the context in which human cognition is defined and required to operate at the level of societal and cultural organisation. (Wertsch, Minick and Arns, 1984, p. 171)

The fact that Vygotsky saw language as a ‘generalised semiotic system’ rather than as ‘a multitude of speech genres and semiotic devices that are tightly linked with particular institutions and … social practices’ (Forman, Minick and Stone, 1993, p. 6) is viewed as a limitation of his work. According to Michael Cole, ‘One cannot develop a viable sociocultural conception of human development without looking carefully at the way … institutions develop, the way they are linked with one another, and the way human social life is organized within them’ (Cole, 1996, p. 6).

Wertsch, Tulviste and Hagstrom criticise Vygotsky for limiting his analysis of the relationship between intermental and intramental functioning to small groups, arguing that ‘he did relatively little to specify how intermental functioning and mediational means fit into a broader framework of sociocultural processes’ (Wertsch, Tulviste and Hagstrom, 1993, p. 343). For them Vygotsky’s failure to provide an account of the causal role of each of the contextual elements in the development of specific modes of mind is evidence of universalism, which they view in a negative light:

we think it is essential to recognise that, in isolation, a concern with this level of social process suggests a kind of universalism that is antithetical to the argument for social situatedness that Vygotsky himself was pursuing. This is because it fails to specify any reason to expect semiotically mediated intermental functioning to vary as a function of cultural, historical, and institutional setting. (Wertschet al., 1993, p. 343)

Wertsch et al. go beyond theorising the institutional to demanding the theorisation of some concrete mechanism: ‘In order to avoid this shortcoming [i.e. the lack of such mechanism] a sociocultural approach must posit some concrete mechanism for connecting cultural, historical, and institutional processes with mediated ­intermental and intramental processes’ (p. 343).

But in a later article Hatano and Wertsch note the need for an alternative to ‘some form of simple, mechanistic transmission’ (Hatano and Wertsch, 2001, p. 79). Nevertheless they run into difficulty in offering an alternative when it comes to explaining the means laid down by human activity in facilitating and sustaining mental processes. Any alternative cannot rely on a reductive image of mind that understands things in terms simply of mechanical response. There are grounds for believing that the concept of representation implicit in their analysis of cultural tools leads to precisely the type of ‘mechanist transmission’ from which they seek to distance themselves. Take the following sentence: ‘This knowledge or system of representation can be regarded as a form of culture in mind, something constituted through participation in practice’ (Hatano and Wertsch, 2001, p. 79). It is revealing in two closely connected ways. The first involves the equation of knowledge with a system of representation; the second, the idea that this knowledge or system of representation or form of culture in the mind is constituted through participation in practice. Both these themes are discussed further in Chapter 3. For the moment our immediate concern is with anticipations of these lines of argument in the history of Vygotskian debate and research, with reference in particular to two themes in the literature: the debate between John Anderson and James Greeno regarding the contrast between abstract knowledge and contextualised knowing, and Wertsch’s account of the shaping of cognition by mediational means.

Before considering the idea that knowledge (understood as a system of representation) is constituted through participation in practice, we need to be clear about different interpretations of Vygotsky’s work and the different evaluations of howit can most profitably be built upon. Furthermore, it is important to rememberthat the same terms have different meanings in different branches of Vygotskian research. For instance, for contemporary American scholars the phrase ‘the institutional framework’ does not have the same ring as it did amongst scholars in the 1930s, connoting, as it did then, historical and class background (Van der Veer, 2000). At the same time, some scholars in the 1920s would, under the rubric of Marxism, have accepted the arguments put forward by their contemporaries as non-Marxist or even anti-Marxist claims. The pattern is confused and confusing. Hence it is often necessary, when using a term, to qualify its meaning even when it appears self-evident.

As noted already, Vygotsky has been accused of neglecting the institutional framework in favour of the semiotic system. His focus on a semiotic system as opposed to a more specific account of the relationships between institutions, social practices and mind has a deep history. It is not by chance that two expressions, ‘cultural-historical’ and ‘sociocultural’, characterise Vygotskian research.11 The differences between these expressions reflect different traditions, the former stressing the importance of the historical, and the latter the contextual. In order to gain an understanding of the reasons for the difference between these traditions of research it is necessary to appreciate the historical background to post-Vygotskian research.

THE HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Wertschet al. (1993) sketch the rationale for using the distinct expressions ­‘cultural-historical’ and ‘sociocultural’ to characterise post-Vygotskian research. It is important to appreciate the different traditions in which these distinct expressions arose and the extent to which the interpretation of the cultural-historical tradition has been influenced by the experience of Stalinism. It is telling that Wertsch associates sociocultural research with ‘the notion of culture derive[d] from the tradition of Boas’ (Wertsch, del Rio and Alvarez, 1995, p. 10).12 It is this tradition in anthropology that proved so influential for the criticism of ‘evolutionism’ and the assumptions of the ‘psychic unity’ of humankind made in anthropology. It is this aspect of evolutionism – that is, the view of history asuniversal human progress – that Wertsch claims to find in Vygotsky’s work and that he associates with his philosophical commitment to the Enlightenment. Of the tradition stemming from Vygotsky’s Russian followers, if not from Vygotsky himself, Wertsch writes:

it assumed a notion of culture that is clearly in line with universalistic assumptions about the psychic unity of humankind and evolutionist claims associated with these assumptions … The evolutionist assumptions indexed by the term ‘sociohistorical’ and ‘cultural-historical’ are one place where most authors in this volume part ways with Vygotsky’s followers, if not Vygotsky himself. It is for this reason that we prefer the term ‘sociocultural’. (Wertschet al., 1995, p. 10)

This passage illustrates two reasons why Wertsch wishes to keep the terms ‘sociocultural’ and ‘cultural-historical’ distinct: first, there is the rejection of what he and other contemporary commentators perceive as evolutionism; and second, and associated with this, there is his rejection of the psychic unity of humankind.Reaction against any suggestion of psychic unity goes hand in hand with a distancing from the notion of mind as universal. There are, however, problems with understanding exactly what is meant by ‘universal’ here. What ‘psychic unity’ might mean in Vygotskian terms is considered in Chapters 5 and 6, where it will be argued that the distinctive feature of human beings’ ‘experiencing’ of the world is that it is via second nature. It is to this – experiencing the world via second nature – that the claim of universalism is attached.

Within the field of research under consideration, much of the terminology is underspecified and carries the historical baggage of political events, particularly of the history of Marxism and of the various practices justified in its name. Apart from ‘universal’, there are other terms, such as the aforementioned ‘evolutionism’, that inform consideration of Vygotsky’s work, and the negative connotations associated with them are evident in the ambivalence of Wertsch’s efforts to situate Vygotsky. When it comes to questions of development and history, politically positioned ­conceptions and terminology are apt to inform analysis. While noting Scribner’s argument against any crude caricature of Vygotsky’s understanding of history as recapitulationist,13 Wertsch et al. still claim that Vygotsky’s work with Luria on ‘primitive thinking … [made] strong assumptions about universal rationality and progress’ (Wertsch et al., 1995, p. 8). On the other hand, Wertsch et al. acknowledge that ‘Vygotsky seemed to recognise historical processes other than those that fall under the heading of universal human progress’ (p. 8). Scribner emphasises that Vygotsky’s conception of history was sophisticated and that Vygotsky argued that ‘only “sloth” … would assimilate his theory to recapitulationist or parallelist positions’14 (Scribner, 1985, p. 138). Wertschet al. also recognise that Vygotsky did not accept the view that primitive languages were ‘simpler or less adequate in all ways’; on the contrary, he adopted the opposite position (Wertschet al., 1995, p. 9).

Vygotsky’s comment that only a form of intellectual sloth could lead a commentator to reduce his approach to a simplistic notion of development indicates that he was working towards a more complex view – one that was far from the caricature that aligns his work with what became Soviet practice. This more complex view put him at odds with his colleagues and those followers who formed the Kharkov school. In relation to Vygotsky’s followers, Kozulin notes that:

The Kharkovites solved the problem of the relation between consciousness and activity in the following way: ‘The development of the consciousness of a child occurs as a result of the development of the system of psychological operations, which, in their turn, are determined by the actual relations between a child and reality.’ This insistence on ‘the actual relations of reality’ became a major point of disagreement between the Kharkovites and Vygotsky. (Kozulin, 1986, pp. xliv–xlv).15

Kozulin argues that when the disagreement between the Kharkov school and Vygotsky is considered in the context of the Soviet Union, it can be seen necessarily to have specific consequences. As he puts it: ‘the thesis of “actual relations with reality” fitted the Soviet dialectical materialist credo of the 1930s much better than Vygotsky’s more complex cultural-historical model’16 (Kozulin, 1986, p. xlv). The members of the Kharkov school of Soviet colleagues and followers of Vygotsky (Leontiev, Luria, and Zaporozhets) argued that ‘activity’ should be used as the basic analytic unit in psychology. There was debate in the Soviet Union over whether this extended or distorted Vygotsky’s basic ideas (Wertsch, Minick and Arns, 1984, p. 154; Bakhurst, 1990).

Kozulin alerts us to the possibility that there might be rather more in what Vygotsky was working towards than what in fact developed in the work of his ­followers, who were inevitably compromised by the difficult political conditions of Stalinism. The attempt to work out the mechanics of the relationship between the historical, social and cultural determinations of mind took place against the background of differences emerging in Vygotskian research conditioned by political events in the Soviet Union. In the early 1930s Leontiev and many others loosenedtheir connection with Vygotsky and moved from Moscow to Karkhov to create a scientific school and to develop the ‘activity approach’. This change of focus from the consciousness of the cultural-historical school of Vygotsky towards a more ‘materialist’ approach occurred in a climate of terror that had become life-threatening (Zinchenko, 1995, p. 39). The issue that more than any other dividedthese schools was to do with whether research should focus on the problem of consciousness and on the problem of ‘object-orientedness, in both internal and external mental activity’ (Zinchenko, 1995, p. 41). The Kharkov school moved from the former to the latter. The differences occurred during a period of intense political pressure, at a time when some of Vygotsky’s work had already been banned.

A sharp distinction was drawn between materialism and idealism, as these were then conceived. According to Zinchenko: