Source: https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/chat/index.htm
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 12:09:31+00:00

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The meanings of Abstract and Concrete in Marxist Psychology derive from Hegel and Marx but both words have a long and complicated etymology from the Latin. ‘Concrete’ is derived from the Latin concrescere – to grow together. ‘Abstract’ comes from the Latin abstractus, incorporeal, but also the French abstrait – expressing a quality rather than a concrete object, or isolated, secluded, and as a verb, from the Latin abstrahere – to drag away, to appropriate, to set free, to separate.
But there are two senses of ‘concrete’: ‘concrete’ as in an unfiltered image of a complex reality ('one damn thing after another’), and ‘concrete’ as in the scientific concentration of many abstractions in a mature concept or theory (a ‘concrete universal’). In both senses the ‘concrete’ conception captures all the complexity of the whole, but in the first case as a “chaotic conception” and in the second case as a reconstruction of the whole in concepts.
And there are two sense of ‘abstract’: ‘abstract’ in the sense of poorly connected to reality ('abstracted from its context’ or ‘cloud-cuckoo-land’), such as in the case of isolated facts or ill-founded theories, and ‘abstract’ in the sense of being the succinct product of a protracted process of analysis which strips away the inessentials and to capture things ‘in a nutshell’. But to the extent that the abstraction captures the whole it is also concrete.
Whilst a bare average is a “abstract generalisation,” the ‘unit of analysis’ is a “concrete universal” even though it is an abstraction!
Ilyenkov, E. (1960). Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital.
Marx, K. (1857). The Method of Political Economy, The Grundrisse.
An Action is what a person does – the most fundamental concept of Marxist Psychology.
“Action” is an ancient word, derived from the Latin and as old as the English language itself. “Consciousness,” on the other hand, dates from the 17th century, and behaviour is a quite recent invention.
Action was introduced as a concept in philosophy by Johann Gottlob Fichte (1762-1814) to overcome the dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity in Immanuel Kant’s philosophy. Action is implicit in Hegel’s philosophy but was given an idealist expression. However, Moses Hess, a follower of Fichte and a pioneer of communist philosophy, promoted the concept of Action with an essay called “The Philosophy of the Act.” After meeting with Marx in Paris in 1843, Marx adopted the key tenet of this work and gave expression to it in “Theses on Feuerbach.” Marx never elaborated the concepts of Action and Activity in a philosophical system, but Activity remained the fundamental concept for his work. When Vygotsky appropriated Marx’s work in creating a foundation for Psychology, he recovered the concept of Action and gave it practical application as the key concept for psychology. A. N. Leontyev further elaborated the concept of Action and gave it a systematic philosophical definition.
An Action is not however objective behaviour + subjective thought; action is a prior unity which is subsequently (i.e., in development) differentiated into subjective thinking and objective behaviour, as, for example, a growing child learning to subject their own behaviour to conscious control. An Action cannot be ‘broken down’ into movements and meanings (what you did and what you meant to do), because without the real unity of the two, it is not an Action. Nonetheless, actions contain an internal Contradiction in that what you mean to do is not always what you do, and vice versa. An Action can only be understood together with the train of thinking which manifested itself in an objective act, not limited to a momentary state of consciousness. Nonetheless, even in Marxist Psychology literature, “action” is frequently used in the everyday sense of a behavioural act.
All human activity is made up of actions, and nothing other than actions. An Action is thus the basic Unit of human life and all the phenomena of human life have to be understood in and through the study of actions.
Actions are the ‘molecular’ (as opposed to ‘molar’) units of human life. Actions are always directed to the realisation of some Goal (or Object), but in general the goals to which actions are directed are not meaningful in themselves, but acquire meaning only to the extent that they serve a Motive which is provided by the Activity of which the Action is a part.
An Action may require a whole series of phases (possibly carried out by different people) in order to attain its ultimate social aim, it remains an action insofar as it is executed by an individual, directed towards attaining its object, whose motive is implicit in the collaborative Activity of which it is a part.
All actions are mediated by the use of artefacts, and we take an action to be inclusive of the artefact with which it is mediated. Actions are simply inconceivable apart from the use of artefacts (which could be a spoken word, a piece of land, a tool or machine, even a human hand, etc.), and it is by means of artefacts, which are products of the broader Culture which frames the activity of which the action is a part, that the broader societal context of an aAction places its stamp upon how an action is carried out. We learn how to use artefacts by using them jointly with other people.
Although actions are taken to be the actions of individuals, actions are always ‘joint’, in several ways. (1) The goal of the action makes sense only in the context of the collaborative activity of which the action is a part, (2) The motive served by the action (which differs from the immediate goal of the action) is produced by the collaborative activity which the action serves, (3) The means by which the action is carried out, that is the artefact, is provided by the broader culture, and (4) The object of the action (such as the addressee of a spoken word) is generally another person, the relation to whom suffuses the action. Thus Marxist Psychology writers always take even such a solitary action as writing a book as a collaborative, social action.
Vygotsky paid a great deal of attention to speech as the most developed form of activity, and its basic unit, word meaning. In this context, “word” has to be understood as an action, in which the mediating artefact, is a spoken word, and meaning is the inner aspect of the word. The relation between a word meaning and a concept is the same as the relation between any action and the activity of which it is a part.
Hess, M. (1842. The Philosophy of the Act.
Leontyev, A. N. (1978). Activities, Consciousness and Personality.
Leontyev, A. N. (2009). The Development of Mind, pp. 369ff. A Contribution to the Theory of the Development of the Child’s Psyche.
Marx, K. (1845) Theses on Feuerbach.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1924). The Methods of Reflexological and Psychological Investigation. LSVCW v. 3, pp. 35-49.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1930). The Instrumental Method in Psychology, LSVCW, v. 3, pp. 85-90.
Activity is the collaborative pursuit of social ends – the basic substance of human social life.
‘Action’ and ‘activity’ developed the distinct meanings that they have in Marxist Psychology, with the concept of Activity being given a specific scientific meaning by A. N. Leontyev (1904-1979) in his Activity Theory. Although several different currents of Activity Theory have developed since, the concept of Activity remains essentially the same as the generalised notion of activity that was implicit in Vygotsky’s work, which introduced mediation to the concept of activity Marx elaborated in the Theses on Feuerbach in 1845.
The main unit of Activity is an Activity, the collaborative pursuit of a shared Object or Motive. Note the distinction between the mass noun ‘Activity’ and the countable noun ‘an Activity’ or ‘Activities’. In Russian, there is no distinction between mass nouns and countable nouns (both are Деятельность), and as a result in English language Marxist Psychology literature, the distinction is often blurred. However, the distinct advance which Leontyev made over Vygotsky and Marx was the identification of Activities, each with their own object, as the units of Activity. By establishing a unit of Activity, Leontyev produced the scientific concept of Activity, which had formally been known only as a generalised substance.
Leontyev distinguished between activity and “the dynamics of the nervous, physiological processes that realize this activity.” (Leonytev 2009, p. 396) Activity is composed solely of Actions, and involuntary and autonomous processes are not actions. He further specifies that activity is meaningful only in connection with the ensemble of social relations of which it is a part, and is essentially a collaborative process.
“... The main thing that distinguishes one activity from another, however, is the difference of their objects. It is exactly the object of an activity that gives it a determined direction. ... The main thing is that behind activity there should always be a need, that it should always answer one need or another” (Leontyev 1978).
Activity is composed of actions and nothing other than actions, but “one and the same motive may generate various goals and hence various actions” whilst “one and the same action may realize various activities” (2009, p. 401), so an activity is not simply a set of actions. Leontyev sums this up by saying that Actions are not ‘additive’ and ‘activity’ is a molar unit, whilst Action is the main, or molecular, unit of human life.
This brings us to the question of the implications of this concept of activity for Psychology, that is, for the study of consciousness and personality.
“(1) There is action as a process directed to a goal recognised in connection with a definite motive; this is the aspect of activity inwardly associated with the ‘unit’ of consciousness that we designate by the term ‘personal sense’.
Leontyev introduced the distinction between the really effective and merely understood motives, which he explains with the use of an example (2009, p. 365). A teacher may use a reward as an effective motive for a child to do their work, since the motive, to learn the subject matter, the child understands, but it is not sufficient for them to apply themselves. But over time, if the child submits to the teacher, Leontyev claims that the once merely-understood motive becomes a really effective motive.
The above is the conception of Activity of A. N. Leontyev. This conception has been subject to criticism. See ‘system of activity’ for a further development of the concept of activity by Yrjö Engeström.
See Concept for Vygotsky’s conception of activities. Vygotsky sought to make sense of a subject’s actions by means of the concept which motivates them. A concept is characterised not so much by the object itself (predmet), but rather by how the subject conceives of the object and consequently the means of addressing the problem. That is, one and the same problem may stimulate quite different actions as means of overcoming the problem.
Kaptelinin, V. (2005). The Object of Activity: Making Sense of the Sense-Maker, Mind, Culture, and Activity (12)1, 4 – 18.
Leontyev, A. N. (2009). The Development of Mind.
Artefacts (U.S. spelling: Artifacts) are material objects or processes which are products of human activity and/or are used by and incorporated in human actions, including both tools and signs.
‘Artefact’ is derived from the Latin arte (acquired skill) + facere (to make). The important distinction between products of nature and products of labour has been a central problem of political economy since the work of Adam Smith in the mid-18th century. Marx and Engels, following Benjamin Franklin (1705-1790), saw the production of tools as central to the evolution of the human species, and many have held the use of symbols to be the essential human trait. So, it has long been widely recognised that both kinds of artefacts are central to human development. However, it was only in the development of Marxist Psychology that ‘artefact’ took on a special philosophical/psychological meaning.
Artefacts are material objects or processes which are products of human activity and/or are used by and incorporated in human actions (but not the actions or activities themselves). Artefacts are therefore both material and ideal, in that they are obedient to the laws of physics, etc., but serve human social means and human ends.
The category of artefact includes tools (’technical tools’, such as computers, motor cars, spoons, but not concepts, methods, etc.), features of the humanised environment (such as landscape, buildings, roads) and the human body and the various prosthetics we use as extensions of our body, as well as such natural formations as the moon and constellations which are vested with meaning in human activities such as navigation. Also included as artefacts are symbolic objects and ‘psychological tools’ such as maps, books, email messages, signage and so on, and prototypically, the spoken word.
Note that the fact that spoken words are entirely ephemeral does not undermine their status as artefacts. The material properties of an artefact mean that the billions of reproductions of a word may be identified as the ‘same’ word, and thereby share the same ideal properties, acting as signs for the same concept(s). The same applies to common objects, such as the artefacts which are excavated by archaeologists, who are able to reconstruct the role of an artefact in human activities which have long since passed away. It is human activity which invests an artefact with meaning and use-value, and while the material properties of the artefact may provide the substrate for the ideal properties, those ideal properties themselves are products of the use of the artefact in activity, not the physical or chemical properties as such.
“The most essential feature distinguishing the psychological tool from the technical one is that it is meant to act upon mind and behavior, whereas the technical tool, which is also inserted as a middle term between the activity of man and the external object, is meant to cause changes in the object itself. The psychological tool changes nothing in the object. It is a means of influencing one’s own mind or behavior or another’s. It is not a means of influencing the object. Therefore, in the instrumental act we see activity toward oneself, and not toward the object.” (LSVCW, v. 3, pp. 85-90).
“psychological tools and their complex systems: language, different forms of numeration and counting, mnemotechnic techniques, algebraic symbolism, works of art, writing, schemes, diagrams, maps, blueprints, all sorts of conventional signs, etc. ...” (LSVCW v. 3, pp. 85-90).
“By being included in the process of behavior, the psychological tool modifies the entire course and structure of mental functions.” (LSVCW, v. 3, pp. 85-90).
The word ‘artefact’ does not include forms of activity or practices which have been ‘objectified’ in the sense that they have become standardised or institutionalised. Such standardised practices may indeed mediate actions, and are frequently referred to in psychological and sociological literature as ‘tools’, but they are not artefacts in the meaning of the word in Marxist Psychology. Usually, the institutionalisation or standardisation of forms of practice involves the creation of artefacts such as manuals, laws, journal articles and the coining of new words or terminology used in written and spoken language. But activities and actions are not artefacts; actions are mediated by artefacts, and it is these artefacts which are chiefly responsible for the stability and coherence of such practices, but it is important to distinguish between the artefacts and the actions which are mediated by the artefacts. When we utter a word or make a gesture, this is understood as the action of using a standardised material form (the sound of the word or the form of the gesture). The sound-object or gesture is an artefact, but the action of using it is an ‘artefact-mediated action’. It is important to distinguish between the action and the mediating artefact; one and the same meaning can be enacted with different signs, and one and the same sign can be used to enact different meanings. When an Activity becomes so standardised as to be ‘fossilised’, it remains an Activity, but is often referred to as a practice or an institution. The standardisation of an activity is a type of objectification, but is still distinguished from the production of tools and it is important not to blur the distinction between Actions, Activities and the Artefacts which are used to mediate Actions.
Whereas Vygotsky emphasised the role of psychological tools, the objectification of human powers in material objects (i.e., tools) transforms the labour process and consequently also plays a profound role in the development of consciousness. See A. N. Leontyev on how the production and use of tools lies at the foundation of the development of human consciousness (something which Marx had emphasised in the past).
Ilyenkov, E. V. (1977). The Concept of the Ideal.
Leontyev, A. N. (2009). The Origin of Human Consciousness, The Development of Mind, pp. 181-244.
Artificial concepts are concepts that are formed under experimental conditions.
The formation of concepts under laboratory conditions was first carried out by the German Psychologist Narziβ Ach, whose method was critically appropriated by Vygotsky and his assistant Leonid Sakharov.
Artificial concepts are concepts “that are formed under experimental conditions” (Vygotsky, 1934, p. 51). These concepts are invariably the combination of two or more contingent sensuous attributes of simple objects, such as “red-square” or “blue-round,” indicated by ‘nonsense words’. Sakharov modified Ach’s experiment to require the child subject to freely create groupings of the blocks to solve a puzzle, rather than simply observing and memorising a grouping made by the researcher, and this provided a much richer experimental process, revealing the process of concept formation. Nonetheless, the experiment had built into it the kind of result which could be expected, namely, grouping blocks according to their contingent attributes. It turned out that this limitation of the experimental design has some justification for use with children, but it also reinforced the prejudice that concepts of this type can exhibit the properties and are of the same kind as real concepts, which arise in the life of a social formation and are acquired by adolescents and adults in the course of their participation in professional and social life generally. This is not the case. In general, the concepts by means of we which orient our lives are quite distinct from the sensuous attributes by means of which we recognise things.
The types of concepts whose formation can be created under laboratory conditions are potential concepts, syncretic concepts, complexes (chain complexes, diffuse complexes, collection complexes and pseudoconcepts) and pre-concepts.
See (Vygotsky 1934a), An Experimental Study of Concept Development, Chapter 5 of Thinking and Speech, for the details of Vygotsky’s study of artificial concepts.
Sakharov, L. (1994). “Methods for Investigating concepts,” in The Vygotsky Reader, ed. R. van der Veer and Jaan Valsiner.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). The Problem and the Approach, Chapter 1 of Thinking and Speech, in LSVCW, v. 1, pp. 43 – 51.
The associative complex is an emergent concept in which one object forms the nucleus, to which diverse objects are associated by a different point of likeness in every case.
“because it is based on an associative connection between an object that is included in the complex and any of the features that the child notices in the object that acts as the complex’s nucleus. Around this nucleus, the child can build an entire complex composed of the most varied objects. Some objects may be included in the complex because they are the same colour as the nucleus. Others may be included on the basis of similarity in form, dimension, or any other distinguishing feature that the child notices” (LSVCW v. 1, p. 137).
While the child is able maintain a representation of an object so as to recognise others resembling it in some way, the child is unable to isolate, retain and apply a stable representation of any one feature. Nonetheless, this form of activity exhibits the basic capacities required for the development of stable complexes.
Behaviour (U.S. spelling Behavior) is the purely objective aspect of activity, excluding any reference to consciousness.
“Psychology as the behaviorist views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science. Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior. Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is the scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness. The behaviorist, in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response, recognizes no dividing line between man and brute” (1913).
Behaviourism was the dominant trend in psychology at the time that Vygotsky entered the field, and his views developed through a critique of Behaviourism and its Soviet variants. Marxist Psychology differs from Behaviourism because it bases itself on actions, which are a unity of behaviour and consciousness.
Behaviour is the objective aspect of activity, abstracting bodily movement from the consciousness which accompanies it, whilst, according to Vygotsky: “it is impossible to study human behaviour and the complex forms of human interrelated activity without reference to the human mind.” And the mind is, after all, the very subject matter of Psychology. Vygotsky admired the work of the Russian physiological behaviourist, I. V. Pavlov, and credited Pavlov for his consistent methodology in which a conditioned reflex was taken as the unit of analysis for behaviour.
However, Introspection plays only a subordinate role in Vygotsky’s psychology which relies on the observation of behaviour in order to reconstruct the psychological processes, by means of which alone human behaviour is comprehensible.
“We should not forget that there are whole sciences that cannot study their subject through direct observation! The historian and the geologist reconstruct the facts (which already do not exist) indirectly, and nevertheless in the end they study the facts that have been, not the traces or documents that remained and were preserved. Similarly, the psychologist is often in the position of the historian and the geologist. Then he acts like a detective who brings to light a crime he never witnessed” (LSVCW, v. 1, p. 49).
In his “Development of Mind,” A. N. Leontyev traced the evolutionary development of activity (understood very broadly) from the behaviour of simple organisms which lack a central nervous system through operations to actions and ultimately, with the development of conceptual thinking, activity. Likewise, actions, operations and behaviour change change one into another in the course of ontogenesis and microgenesis.
Leontyev, A. N. (1947). The evolution of the Psyche in Animals, The Development of Mind, 2009.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1924). The Methods of Reflexological and Psychological Investigation. LSVCW v. 3, pp. 35 – 49.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1929). Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology, Chapter 13, LSVCW, v. 3, pp. 310 – 332.
Watson, J. B. (1913). “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it.” Psychological Review, 20, 158 – 177.
A category is a concept by means of which sensuous knowledge may be made intelligible, or more generally, any more fundamental philosophical conception underlying others; often a class, i.e., a means of categorising things.
‘Category’ is derived from the Greek kategoria, which figured prominently in Aristotle’s writing and was Latinised as praedicare, and thus ‘predicate’ and ‘predicament’. Two main lines of development followed from these roots.
For Aristotle, kategoria was ‘what can be said of a subject’, i.e., in grammar, a predicate. In its Greek literal form, as kategoria, it came to mean in rhetoric, an accusation, the response to which would be an apologia. By transliteration into the Roman alphabet, category became a class into which concepts or objects could be assigned, and this is its principle usage in philosophy today. Kant took the categories to be a priori innate mental faculties which made it possible to make sense data intelligible, but this understanding was negated by Hegel and did not enter the Marxist tradition.
Vygotsky uses ‘category’ in his analysis of the relation of internal speech and thinking in Chapter 7 of Thinking and Speech to contrast psychological categories with grammatical categories.
“Any part of a complex phrase can become the psychological predicate and will carry the logical emphasis. The semantic function of this logical emphasis is the isolation of the psychological predicate. According to Paul, the grammatical category is to some extent a fossil of the psychological category. It therefore needs to be revived by a logical emphasis that clarifies its semantic structure. Paul demonstrates that a wide variety of meanings can reside in a single grammatical structure. Thus, correspondence between the grammatical and psychological structure of speech may be encountered less frequently than we generally assume. Indeed, it may merely be postulated and rarely if ever realized in fact. In phonetics, morphology, vocabulary, and semantics – even in rhythm, metrics, and music – the psychological category lies hidden behind the grammatical or formal category. If the two appear to correspond with one another in one situation, they diverge again in others. We can speak not only of the psychological elements of form and meaning, not only of the psychological subject and predicate, but of psychological number, gender, case, pronouns, superlatives, and tenses” (p. 252).
Vygotsky never uses ‘category’, however, in the sense of today’s Psychology of Concepts as the extension of a concept.
The psychological “processing” or overcoming of a traumatic experience.
The general idea of overcoming emotional crises by working over a critical experience is implicit in the Russian notion of perezhivanie, which was used by Fedor Vasilyuk in his approach to psychotherapy. It is arguable that is was also implicit in Vygotsky’s use of the concept of perezhivanie.
Freud, S. (1914) Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through (Further Recommendations on the Technique of Psycho-Analysis II).
Vasilyuk, F. (1984). The Psychology of Experiencing.
The chain complex, in which each object is connected with the next according to some feature, but then the next object according to a different feature.
“The child selects an object, or several objects, to match the model on the basis of some type of associative connection they have with it. The child then continues to select concrete objects to form a unified complex. However, his selection is guided by the features of objects selected in previous stages of this action, features that may not be found in the model itself. For example, the child may select several objects having corners or angles when a yellow triangle is presented as model. Then, at some point, a blue object is selected and we find that the child subsequently begins to select other blue objects that may be circles or semicircles. The child then moves on to a new feature and begins to select more circular objects” (LSVCW v. 1, p. 139).
The child is becoming adept in isolating features of objects from the perceptual field, but is unable to retain stable representations of them so that their generalisations resemble members of an extended family, and although sharing a family name, there is no one attribute uniting all the elements.
The chain complex marks an important stage in the development of complexive thinking.
The collection complex is an emergent concept in which the subject associates ‘complete sets’ of objects, often based on some activity where the objects complement one another .
“The most frequent form of generalization of concrete impressions that the child’s concrete experience teaches him is a set of mutually supplementary objects that are functionally or practically important and unified. Sets such as the cup, saucer and spoon, or the fork, knife, spoon and plate, or sets of clothing are good examples of the kinds of complex-collections that the child encounters in his daily life (LSVCW v. 1, p. 138-9).
“Under experimental conditions, the child selects objects to match the model that differ from it in colour, form, size of some other feature. However, the child’s selection of these objects is neither chaotic nor accidental. Objects are selected in accordance with features that differentiate them from the model (LSVCW v. 1, p. 138).
So the child endeavours to collect together a complete set of all the colours or all the shapes, and so on, like ‘mummy bear, daddy bear and little baby bear’.
It is important to note that while the other forms of complexive thinking, objects are associated by means of like features, the collection complex unites objects according to differing features. This is not indicative of instability in the isolation and recognition of features, however. The effort to synthesise complete sets indicates an awareness of more general relations and may use some practical situation as the nucleus for synthesis of the complex, for example, uniting knife, fork and plate, as found on the dinner table.
Complexes are the simplest form of ‘concept’ in which a subject abstracts empirical features from objects or situations and connects them with features abstracted from other objects or situations.
Vygotsky developed the concept of complexes, or ‘complexive thinking’ by use of the method of dual stimulation applied in Leonid Sakharov’s experimental study of concept development, described in Chapter 5 of Thinking and Speech.
These forms of activity are not true concepts because they do not organise the subject’s actions according to socially transmitted objective criteria, but rather by means of concrete attributes in the field of perception according to subjective and unstable criteria. As complexive thinking develops, it becomes more and more stable, and more and more coordinated with the activity of the social world around the subject, guided by the use of the language of the adult world.
“The foundation of the complex lies in empirical connections that emerge in the individual’s immediate experience. A complex is first and foremost a concrete unification of a group of objects based on the empirical similarity of separate objects to one another” (LSVCW v. 1, p. 137).
the Associative complex, in which one object forms the nucleus, to which diverse objects are associated by a different point of likeness in every case.
the Collection complex, in which the subject collects ‘complete sets’ of objects which complement one another, typically in connection with some activity.
the Chain complex, in which each object is connected with next according to some feature, but then the next object according to a different feature.
the Diffuse complex, where the subject unites objects according to empirical connections, but extended into domains in which the child has no practical experience.
the Pseudoconcept, where objects, events and situations are grouped in the same way that they are grouped by words in the adult language; that is, the pseudoconcept has the same extension as a true concept, but remains a concrete thought-form tied to the perceptual field.
With the pseudoconcept, an adult may be unaware that a child means something quite different by the same word, and may only become aware that the child has not in fact grasped the concept by some unexpected gaff on the part of the child.
All these complexes share in common that they organise activity according to features isolated from the field of perception. As such, they allow the child to coordinate their activity with the adult world and recognise objects and their social significance. But as forms of concrete thinking they are not true concepts. True concepts are culturally-historically created and transmitted forms of orientation to the world which are independent of the perceptual field, standing between the subject and the field of perception. A complex rests immediately on the field of perception.
Secondly, Vygotsky investigates concepts by observing the activity of children with symbolic artefacts from which the child’s consciousness can be inferred. That is, the inner aspect of actions, inaccessible to observation, is inferred from the observation of behaviour. Both internal and external aspects of the activity are essential to his idea of concept. The child or young person’s actions can be understood in terms of a concept acquired by the subject which makes sense of a whole system of their actions, that is, that various artefacts are taken to be signs for a certain entity, the relevant concept. The inner and outer aspects of the activity are inseparable, and neither would be what they are without its connection with the other. This is consistent with saying that a concept is a form of activity. Although Activity Theory, with its precise definition of ‘activity’ was only founded by A. N. Leontyev only after Vygotsky’s death, Vygotsky’s concept of concept played the same role in his psychology: – that which provides the motivation for actions and allows the observer to make sense of a subject’s actions.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). The Problem and the Method of Investigation, Thinking and Speech, Chapter 1, LSVCW, v. 1, pp. 43 – 51.
Consciousness is the totality of the subjective processes of a human being which mediate between a person’s physiology and their behaviour.
Consciousness first became an object of philosophical and scientific study with the philosophy of René Descartes (1596-1650), and has been a central problem for philosophy ever since. In the mid-19th century, the specialised and natural scientific study of consciousness emerged mainly in Germany, including the study of physiology, introspection, behaviour and cultural phenomena, leading to the development of Psychology as the science of the mind, or consciousness. By the 1920s, Psychology differentiated itself between those currents which affirmed Consciousness as the subject matter of Psychology, and Behaviourism, which rejected consciousness as a category open to scientific investigation. Marxist Psychology emerged out of this conflict.
Consciousness is the entirety of a person’s Subjective processes. Affect, Cognition, Thinking, Awareness, ‘the Unconscious’, Will, Intention, etc., are all included in the category of ‘consciousness’. Although Consciousness mediates between the material behaviour and physiology of the person, consciousness is not itself material. Consciousness is an appearance. Like the reflection in a mirror, consciousness can be entirely understood in terms of the material processes which underlie it, but just like the subject matter studied by the historian or the geologist, the subject matter of the psychologist, can only be studied indirectly, but studying the material processes which it mediates, in particular the social behaviour of human beings (and its development), and human physiology.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1929). Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology, LSVCW, v. 3, pp. 233 – 370.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). Thinking and Speech, Chapter 1, LSVCW, v. 1, pp. 43 – 51.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). Thinking and Speech, Chapter 7, LSVCW, v. 1, pp. 243 – 288.
Defect/compensation is the unit Vygotsky used for the psychology of disability.
In Soviet times, ‘defectology’ was the branch of science which dealt with the education and care of children with all kinds of disability, and Vygotsky chose to do a considerable amount of his work in this area. Vygotsky did not have a ‘deficit model’ of psychology, however. On the contrary, Vygotsky saw the deficit as being on the side of the community which fails to provide for people who differ from the norm.
The existence of obstacles is not only the main condition for the attainment of a goal but also the indispensable condition for the very emergence of the goal.
Vygotsky insisted that “education must cope not so much with these biological factors as with their social consequences.” (LSVCW, v. 2, p. 66) The defect and compensation must thus be understood in terms of their impact on the child’s social position. The unit of defect and compensation forms the key to solving the problem of the development of the child who suffers from being different from the social norm.
Vygotsky’s work was continued by many of his students and the work of Alexander Meshcheryakov on the education of deaf-blind children became famous.
Meshcheryakov, A. (1979. Awakening to Life.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1993). The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky, Volume 2. The Fundamentals of Defectology. Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Dialectical logic (or dialectics) is the logic of concepts, whereas formal logic is propositional logic.
Although dialectics dates back to the ancients, it was only with Hegel that dialectical logic was given a systematic exposition.
Formal logic considers the relation between the truth-value of propositions of the type x ∈ S (“x is an element of the set S”). Concepts are regarded as sets of discrete elements, that is, reduced to their extension and the validity of deductions is resolved by comparison of the elements of the relevant sets.
Dialectical logic, on the contrary, is concerned with the truth of positions of the form “c is absolute” (or “everything is c”). Thus, dialectics examines the limits of a concept, and the conditions under which it falls into contradiction with itself. The concepts which Dialectics deals with are true, concrete concepts, that is, concepts which embody the wisdom of human history and culture in them, not formal concepts.
Ilyenkov, E. (1974). Dialectical Logic.
Dichotomy is derived from the Greek, meaning “cut in two,” and means that a given field can be divided into two classes: male and female, emotion and reason, and so on.
In most cases, dichotomy turns out to be mistaken, except for trivial cases. “Inside the body” and “outside the body” does divide the world into two, but this dichotomy turns out to be of limited use in either medicine or psychology because of the continual interchange and movement between the inner and outer, and there are few processes which can be unambiguously assigned to either inner or outer.
But the problem of dichotomy is rarely resolved by the notion of “fuzzy boundaries” or “in-between cases.” Rather, it is a matter of Mediation between one and the other, of the mutual constitution of each by the other, their interdependence and relativity and of continual movement between one and the other.
And nor should the effort to avoid dichotomy (or “dualism”) lead us to deny distinction. To make a distinction, for example, between the individual and the social, is rational, though it is quite impossible to ascribe any set of features or characteristics unambiguously to the social or the individual. But to declare that the distinction does not exist is fruitless.
The diffuse complex is a form of proto-concept where the subject unites objects according to empirical connections, but extended into domains in which they have no experience.
“Given a yellow triangle as a model, for example, the child selects not only a triangle, but a trapezoid. With its sharp angles, the latter reminds the child of the triangle. Subsequently, a square is affiliated with the trapezoid, a hexagon with the square, a polygon with the hexagon and finally a circle with the hexagon” (LSVCW v.1, p. 141).
In everyday life: “What is unique to the diffuse complex is that it unifies things that are outside the child’s practical knowledge. The result is that the connections which provide its unity depend on false, vague, and undefined features” (LSVCW v. 1, p. 141). The attempt to grasp relations outside the person’s field of experience can only succeed through the mastery of true concepts.
The problem of cultural development of the child, Vygotsky Reader, pp. 57ff.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1930). The Instrumental Method in Psychology, LSVCW v. 3, pp. 85-89.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1931). Research Method. The history of the development of the higher mental functions, Chapter 2, LSVCW v. 4, pp. 27-82.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1931). The genesis of the higher mental functions. The history of the development of the higher mental functions, Chapter 5, LSVCW v. 4, pp. 97-120.
Hegel (1812). With what must science begin?
The extension of a concept is the object(s) which are referred to by a word or concept, as opposed to the sense in which the object(s) is indicated.
“We call this complex a pseudoconcept because it has strong external similarities to the concept that we find in the adult’s intellectual activity. However, in its essence, in accordance with its true psychological nature, it is very different from the true concept.
That is, the true concept and the pseudoconcept indicated by the same word have the same extension, but have a radically different sense.
Sometimes “reference” is used instead of “extension,” but it is more common to use “extension” when a generalised category of objects rather than an individual object is intended.
Luria described a series of experiments that were developed by Vygotsky’s team in which child subjects who are unable to complete a certain task, are offered a symbolic artefact to assist in overcoming the barrier and solving the problem. In The Problem of the Cultural Behavior of the Child, he shows that this experimental approach replicates the normal cultural development in which cultural artefacts are offered to a child when they come across a barrier and seek help from adults.
Using the experimental genetic approach, researchers are able to observe how, and at what stage of ontogenetic development, a child is able or unable to use a cultural artefact to solve tasks, and later internalise the cultural method. He shows that at a certain stage, the whole structure of a child’s psyche is transformed, and problems are solved in ways which are qualitatively different to how the younger child is able to solve them.
Goethe, J. W. v. (1810). Theory of Colours. Preface.
Luria A. R. (1928). The Problem of the Cultural Behavior of the Child.
Marx, K. (1867). Capital, Chaper 1, section 3.
“The word is comparable to the living cell in that it is a unit of sound and meaning that contains – in simple form – all the basic characteristics of the integral phenomenon of verbal thinking.” However, the intellect is not really just matter of word meanings, it is far more complex and intangible than that! Word meaning is just the germ-cell.
Engeström, Y. et al (2012). “Embodied Germ Cell at Work: Building an Expansive Concept of Physical Mobility in Home Care,” in Mind, Culture and Activity 19(3).
Goethe, J. W. v., (1795). Outline for a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1816). The Science of Logic.
Marx, K. (1857). “The Method of Political Economy,” Grundrisse.
Marx, K. (1867), Preface to the first German edition of Capital.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). Thinking and Speech. Chapter 1.
A Higher Mental Function (HMF), or Higher Psychological Function, is a psychological function organised by social cultural mediation.
In 1931 L. S. Vygotsky (1997, p. 1) wrote, “The history of the development of the higher mental functions is a field in psychology that has never been explored.” Vygotsky provided the term, Higher Mental Functions, with a theoretical and methodological rigour previously absent from the study of higher mental processes (Vygotsky 1997, pp. 30-31).
The analysis and structure of higher mental processes lead us directly to disclosing the basic problem of the whole history of the cultural development of the child, to elucidating the genesis of higher forms of behavior, that is, the origin and development of the mental forms that are the subject of our study.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1997) The Collected Works of L.S. Vygotsky, Vol. 4: The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions.
The ideal is those properties of an artefact which subsist only in their use in human activity, and not in of the physical or chemical properties of the artefact.
The ideal has a long history in philosophy, having generally been taken as a property of the (individual) human mind. Hegel was the first to give it meaning at all close that which it has in Marxist Psychology, which is owed to the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov. According to Ilyenkov the materialist concept of the ideal is owed to Marx (in his analysis of value in bourgeois society) and was introduced into Soviet psychology by S. L. Rubenstein.
“Ideality, according to Marx, is nothing else but the form of social human activity represented in a thing. Or, conversely, the form of human activity represented as a thing, as an object.
It is important to note that everything that is ideal is also material; conversely, almost every material thing we know has ideal properties – material and ideal are not opposites in that sense. Nonetheless, one and the same material object may have ideal properties (the value of a coin, the meaning of a word, the scale of a map) and material properties (the weight of the coin, the sound of the word, the size of the map). But the ideal properties are independent of the material properties which determined by natural processes, while the ideal properties are determined by social practices and norms of human social life.
If we were to look for an opposite to ‘ideal’ it would be ‘natural’. ‘Natural’ means not a product of human activity, whereas ‘ideal’ refers only to properties produced by human activity.
Ilyenkov, E. V. (1960). Dialectics of the Abstract & the Concrete in Marx’s Capital.
‘Material’ denotes, (1) in the broad sense, all that is outside the individual consciousness, but (2) in the narrow sense, those activities which are necessary for the production and reproduction of life itself.
(1) ‘Material’ is used to describe material entities and processes, such as the paper and ink which are the carriers of the written word, the pressure waves and air which are the carriers of speech, the human bodies and artefacts which are the carriers of activities and actions. Even though these processes which have been given as examples are controlled by human minds and are also ideal, they are all material in as much as they exist outside of consciousness, interconnected with other material processes across the entire universe, whether observed or not, and independently of whether and how they are interpreted. Also material are the natural processes such as earthquakes, the rotation of the Sun and the autonomic nervous system of the human body, over which human beings have no control and which existed before human beings walked the Earth.
The distinction Marx is making here, between those forms of activity which are necessary for the production and reproduction of life and those ‘ideological’ forms of activity which are necessary for the reproduction of the social relations or ‘spiritual’ activities not essential to the reproduction of life itself, is a relative distinction, important for the analysis of social change.
Matter is a philosophical category simply indicating everything that exists outside of Consciousness.
The concept of Matter originates with the ancient Greek atomists, most famously Democritus. Matter was conceived as an identical substance underlying all forms, different forms arising from different modes of movement and interaction between identical atoms. It was only with the emergence of modern philosophical materialism with Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) that the philosophical concept of matter acquired the scientific definition which it has in Marxist Psychology. In recent decades, a great deal of resistance has emerged to the recognition of a dichotomy between the philosophical concepts of matter and consciousness, often taking the form of an identification of thoughts with neuronal activity.
Matter is a philosophical category simply indicating everything that exists outside of consciousness. In philosophy, and in the foundations of Marxist Psychology, the concept of ‘matter’ does not concern such distinctions as that between waves and particles, between processes and things or social base and superstructure, but simply the distinction between consciousness and the world outside of consciousness which is ‘reflected’ in consciousness. It seems counter-intuitive that a materialist psychology defines matter in terms of consciousness but in fact, these two terms are meaningful only in contrast to one another.
See LSVCW, v. 3, pp. 310 – 332.
Mediation means ‘acting as a go between’, in Marxist Psychology, especially the use of tools and signs to act on an object.
Mediation entered the English language from the Anglo-Norman and French in the 14th century, initialling referring to the function of mediating disputes. Mediation was an important category for Hegel, but its use in Psychology dates from the first decade of the 20th century, to mean the interposition of processes between stimulus and result, or intention and realization. Vygotsky used ‘mediation’ in the specific sense of tool- and sign-mediation, and the concept is found in his earliest as well as his last works.
But there is one kind of mediation which has a special place in Marxist Psychology, and that is artefact-mediation of actions. Vygotsky describes artefact-mediation in terms of how a conditioned reflex: – stimulus A responds to stimulus B – is controlled by introducing the sign, X. X acts as the sign for B, and replaces B as the stimulus associated with A.
In natural memory a direct associative (conditional reflex) connection A→B is established between two stimuli A and B. In artificial, mnemotechnic memory of the same impression, by means of a psychological tool X (a knot in a handkerchief, a mnemonic scheme) instead of the direct connection A→B two new ones are established: A→X and X→B Just like the connection A→B each of them is a natural conditional reflex process, determined, by the properties of the brain tissue. What is new, artificial, and instrumental is the fact of the replacement of one connection A→B by two connections: A→X and X→B They lead to the same result, but by a different path. What is new is the artificial direction which the instrument gives to the natural process of establishing a conditional connection, i.e., the active utilization of the natural properties of brain tissue..
This relationship is also described as ‘double stimulation’. See ‘The Problem of the Cultural Development of the Child’ (Vygotsky 1929), Chapter 5.2 of Thinking and Speech, and The Instrumental Method in Psychology (Vygotsky 1930).
For example, B might be some complex object, event or situation which requires a certain response from us, A. Once we learn the word for it, X, that word evokes responses appropriate to B. The word then enters into our language use and acquires a range of nuances and meanings, and connections with other words and concepts. When confronted with the situation, B, and the sign, X, is evoked, and both B and X act as stimuli. The sign stimulus is mediated though consciousness, rather than being a conditioned reflex directly responding to the situation B, thus the subject is able to make a learned and intelligent response to the situation B.
The same basic schema applies if X is not a sign as such, but for example, if B is the fuel injector in an automobile and X is the accelerator pedal (a technical tool for controlling the fuel injector). Once we have learnt to drive we don’t even think “I need to operate the fuel injector ...,” but simply step on the accelerator. The whole achievement of automotive engineering in controlling the fuel supply to an engine so as to regulate the car’s speed is incorporated into that simple artefact which the instructor teaches the learner driver to use; the learner easily appropriates the action of the accelerator, without even understanding how internal combustion engines work.
In short, the humanised world in which we live is a world of artefacts, which together embody the accumulated wisdom of centuries. These artefacts mediate everything we do; we think in terms of signs and tools rather than the immediate sensory stimulation of the natural, material world in itself. At first sight uttering a word seems to be an immediate action – the production of a word, and it seems odd to take the action as using the artefact to act on the mind or behaviour of another person. The spoken word itself seems to be an action, rather than an artefact. But this way of seeing things is essential to being able to separate an action from its means.
Mediation is thus the means by which the culture of an entire community enters into the psychology of an individual, through the mediation of actions by signs (psychological tools) and (technical) tools. For example, at first a child’s action may be controlled by an adult commanding the child, mediated by certain words. Later the child learns to command their own behaviour, by appropriating these words by means of egocentric, or later, inner speech, and finally the words enter into the child’s psyche and, so long as everything goes well, without conscious awareness of the word.
A microcosm is a component of a larger complex process which displays all the phenomena of the larger whole.
Microcosm differs from unit of analysis or germ cell, because the microcosm must display not just the ‘essential’ features of the whole in embryonic form, but actually all the features. So, for example, the microcosm of capital would be one modern corporation, not a single commodity exchange. However, when Vygotsky says, in the final words of Thinking and Speech: “The meaningful word is a microcosm of human consciousness” it is unlikely that he intended anything other than to reiterate that word meaning is the unit of analysis of verbal thinking.
“A basic or, as is sometimes said, a constituting characteristic of activity is its objectivity [i.e., “object-relatedness"]. Properly, the concept of its object (predmet) is already implicitly contained in the very concept of activity. The expression “objectless activity” is devoid of any meaning. Activity may seem objectless, but scientific investigation of activity necessarily requires discovering its object. Thus, the object of activity is twofold: first, in its independent existence as subordinating to itself and transforming the activity of the subject; second, as an image of the object, as a product of its property of psychological reflection that is realized as an activity of the subject and cannot exist otherwise” (1978, ch. 3, p. 52).
Instead of using activities, characterised by the predmet as molar units, Vygotsky sought to make sense of a subject’s actions by means of the concept which motivates them, in a sense which is closer to Hegel’s use of Objekt. A concept is characterised not so much by the object (task) itself (i.e., predmet), but rather by how the subject conceives of the object (i.e., Objekt) and consequently the means of addressing the problem. That is, one and the same problem may stimulate quite different actions as means of overcoming one and the same problem.
Engeström, Y. (1987). Learning by Expanding. An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Chapter 2.
Kaptelinin, V. (2005). The Object of Activity: Making Sense of the Sense-Maker, Mind, Culture, and Activity 12(1), pp. 4 – 18.
Leontyev, A. N. (1978). Activity Consciousness and Personality, in Russian, and in German.
Leontyev, A. N. (2009). The Development of Mind, Erythros Press and Media.
An operation is an action controlled by the condition and in which the subject is not consciously aware and controlling the action.
In A. N. Leontyev’s studies (1947) of the phylogenetic evolution of activity from the most primitive organisms whose activity is determined by reflexes, the formation of operations marks an important stage of evolution. Operations emerge along with the cerebral cortex as fixed patterns of behaviour which can be adapted to conditions. The emergence of operations manifests the first capacity of organisms to form a generalised image of objects in its world. In the course of evolution, organisms increasingly gain control over operations, and when an operation is fully under the conscious control of the organism, which is able adapt the operation to conditions by conscious control, it is called an action.
In the course of the ontogenesis of human beings, we at first manage only the simplest tasks by consciously controlling them towards achieving the goal of the action. However, with repeated practice, in variable conditions, we learn to carry out the action, modified according to conditions without paying attention. This is typically illustrated by stepping over a kerb ‘automatically’ as we walk along, being aware only of the goal of our walk, such as reaching the next corner. These actions, which are carried out without conscious control and awareness, and determined by the conditions, are operations. This allows the subject to carry out a complex action, characterised by the fact that it is directed towards its goal, but composed of a multitude of operations (each step, for example) which are all controlled by the goal of the action, but determined by the immediate conditions.
However, when something ‘goes wrong’ – for example, a pot-hole in the footpath causes you to trip, the operation immediately reverts to conscious control as we try to regain our balance and the operation has become an action.
The development of the psyche to the point of being able to carry out a multitude of operations without paying attention allows the subject to carry out complex actions. Operations and actions may transform one into the other, but the action is controlled by its goal, the operation by its conditions.
Leontyev, A. N. (1947). An outline of the evolution of the psyche. In The Development of Mind, pp. 137-244.
The nature of perezhivaniya differs between children and adults and between children at different stages of development. An adult is already an independent citizen of their community, but perezhivaniya – such as the death of a spouse, the loss of their job, an unexpected victory in a court struggle – very often lead to changes in a person’s life and their social standing, and consequently in their psyche and personality. Sometimes however a person is not able to cope with the experience and “live through” it; in this instance a therapist may be required.
See the collection of excerpts on Perezhivanie at Notes on perezhivanie.
Stanislavskii, C. (1936). An Actor Prepares. Chapter 7. Units and Objectives.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). The Problem of the Environment.
A potential concept is a pre-intellectual form of activity which develops around the shared use of an artefact.
A potential concept is a pre-intellectual form of activity which people share in common with some animals, either through training or in cooperative activity in the wild. Like a complex, the potential concept is a response to the perceptual field, but unlike a complex sensuous features of the relevant stimulus are not isolated from the whole field. The potential concept fixes the functional significance of the object, situation or event for practical action, as a sign or signal for some action which becomes a habitual response to the whole given situation.
“The potential concept can be nothing other than a habitual action. In its most elementary form, it consists in that we expect that a similar ground will elicit a similar common impression. More precisely, we have an established set that this will be the case. If the potential concept is actually as we have just described it, a set on a habit, then it emerges very early in the child .... In my view, it is a condition that necessarily precedes the appearance of intellectual characteristics. In itself, however, it has nothing intellectual in it” (Groos, 1916, p. 196).
“Thus, this potential concept is a pre-intellectual formation arising very early in the development of thinking. Most contemporary psychologists agree that the potential concept, in the form we have just described it, is found in animals.” (p. 158) These pre-intellectual formations provide the basis for a child to break up the unity of the field of perception and so as to isolate objects and begin the process of concept formation.
“Potential concepts often remain at this stage of development, not making the transition to true concepts. Nonetheless, they play an extremely important role in the development of a child’s concepts. It is in the potential concept, in the associated abstraction of distinct features, that the child first destroys the concrete situation and the concrete connections among the object’s features. In this process, he creates the prerequisites for the unification of these features on a new foundation.” (1934, p. 158-9).
Practice means purposive activity; a practice is a form of purposive activity which is in some way routinised or institutionalised.
‘Practice’ is derived from the Latin practizare and the synonymous Latinised Greek word praxis – to direct practical experience, carry on a profession, habitual or customary mode of action, method, technique, etc., and has always had the meaning of conscious, purposive activity.
‘Practice’ and ‘praxis’ are synonymous in Marxist literature, including Marxist Psychology. However, the use of the phrase ‘theory and practice’, in reference to the practical and theoretical aspects of practice, has tended to suggest that theory was something distinct even opposite to practice. This is one of the reasons that the synonym praxis has come into use to definitively mean a unity of both practical and theoretical activity.
Pre-concepts are an embryonic form of true concept, manifested in the child carrying out logical or rule-governed operations within a restricted context.
To become consciously aware of something and master it you must first have it at your disposal. However, concepts, or, more properly, preconcepts (we prefer this designation for these concepts of the school child, since they have not yet attained the higher degree of development), emerge for the first time in the school-age child. They mature only during this period. Prior to this stage, the child thinks in general representations or complexes (a term we have used elsewhere to refer to the structure of generalizations that dominates the preschool period). Since preconcepts emerge only during the school age, it would be odd if the school child attained conscious awareness or mastery of them. This would mean that consciousness is not only capable of becoming consciously aware of its functions (i.e., of mastering them) but of creating them from nothing before they develop.
It has been suggested that, in the ‘double stimulation’ experiment, the artificial concepts created in the laboratory setting may make the transition to pre-concepts when they are freed from the immediate context in which they are acquired. For example, the nonsense word for round-short may be applied to candles of that shape, or counting 4 dolls is transferred to counting 4 cats.
Note that by “pre-concepts” Vygotsky does not mean all those thought forms used prior to the formation of true concepts, but just a certain type of immediate precursor to true concepts.
Although pre-concepts are acquired through concrete activities, there is nothing of the shared attribute or functional relation in preconcepts like that of number. Children may arrive at the use of preconcepts via the use of pseudoconcepts and potential concepts, but a preconcept is already a leap from complexive thinking.
It is worth pointing out that machines, as well as very young children who lack any life experience outside the family home, are capable of a high level of logical operation by means of preconcepts. What is required for the transition to true concepts is conscious awareness.
The pseudoconcept is a form of complexive thinking which resembles conceptual thinking because pseudoconcepts subsume the same objects and situations as the true concept indicated by the same word. However, like all complexes, the pseudoconcept unites objects by shared common features and is not a true concept.
The crowning achievement of the line of development which Vygotsky calls complexive thinking is the pseudoconcept, the distinguishing feature of which is that the abstraction and synthesis of objects or situations is directed by a word in the adult language. Here the abstraction of common features, whether from the field of practical action or from the field of sense perception, reaches a sufficient degree of precision and stability that the child is able to form groups of objects or situations which, within the bounds of their own experience, match those that adults indicate with the same word. That is, the pseudoconcept has the same extension as the true concept.
“The pseudoconcept is the most common form of complex in the preschooler’s real life thinking. It is a form of complexive thinking that prevails over all others. It is sometimes the exclusive form of complexive thinking. Its wide distribution has a profound functional basis and significance. This form of complexive thinking gains its prevalence and dominance from the fact that the child’s complexes (which correspond to word meanings) do not develop freely or spontaneously along lines demarcated by the child himself. Rather, they develop along lines that are preordained by the word meanings that have been established in adult speech.
“It is only in the experiment that we free the child from the directing influence of the words of the adult language with their developed and stable meanings” (LSVCW v. 1, p. 142-3).
“The child formed a complex with all the typical structural, functional, and genetic characteristics of complexive thinking. For all practical purposes, however, the product of this complexive thinking corresponded with the generalization that would have been constructed on the basis of thinking in concepts.
“This correspondence in the result or product of thinking makes it extremely difficult for the researcher to differentiate between cases where he is dealing with thinking in complexes and those where he is dealing with thinking in concepts” (LSVCW v.1, p. 143-4).
It is worth noting that what Vygotsky calls a pseudoconcept is the form of generalisation which is called ‘concept’ in the mainstream psychology of concepts. While Vygotsky explains the difference between the development of pseudoconcepts and true concepts, he never clearly defines what he means by ‘concept’. This has to be imputed from what he says about pseudoconcepts and true concepts. To use contemporary terminology, the pseudoconcept corresponds to the true concept in its extension but not in its sense.
The important point is that the pseudoconcept, like all forms of complex, is a concrete form of thinking, tied to the field of perception, and based on the spontaneous and effortless abstraction of the common features of objects guided by the adult use of words. True concepts on the other hand are acquired with conscious effort and awareness by means of formal instruction in an institution of some kind, and originate independently of sensuous contact with the objects concerned. Here the ‘sense’ of the concept and its relation to other concepts in a system of knowledge is emphasised.
“[Pseudoconcepts] may possess all the features of the concept from the perspective of formal logic, but from the perspective of dialectical logic they are nothing more than general representations, nothing more than complexes” (LSVCW v.1, p. 160).
The Psyche is the mind of an individual organism.
In ancient Greek, psyche meant breath or life, the animating principle in man and other living beings, the source of all vital activities, rational or irrational, the soul or spirit, as distinct from its material vehicle, the body, soma. Psyche is by definition the subject matter of Psychology.
In Marxist Psychology, ‘psyche’ is used synonymously with ‘consciousness’, but has the advantage connoting an individual mind rather than a general substance or state. A psyche may also be imputed to simple living organisms without any implication that the organism has awareness, intellect or any other particular psychological faculty.
Actual (or Real) concepts are those which arise in the course of the person’s real life development in contrast to the concepts which are identified in the laboratory.
Vygotsky calls ‘actual concepts’ the concepts which arise in the course of the person’s real life development in contrast to the artificial concepts identified in experimental work such as that of Narziβ Ach and Leonid Sakharov, and in contrast to ‘ideal typical’ concepts. All the various kinds of concept which Vygotsky defines are in fact ideal paths of development for concepts, which do not perfectly describe any real concept, which is always the product of multiple paths of development.
‘Actual’ concepts may also be spoken of as those of mature adults in contrast to the abstract, idealised ‘true’ concepts that a child has been taught at school, but which have not left the classroom and are untouched by experience, and in contrast to the child’s spontaneous concepts, which have not left the home and remain unaffected by contact with the wider world. All our actual concepts owe their origin to some mixture of both instruction and life experience, and their structure demonstrates traces of both origins. ‘Actual’ means concepts which reflect a concrete understanding of the real world.
A scientific concept is a concept developed and transmitted by the institutions of science and thence through formal instruction in the education system.
In Thinking and Speech, Vygotsky devotes one chapter to the artificial development of concepts in children and one chapter to the development of scientific concepts, and no other ‘types’ of concept are given explicit treatment. This has contributed the idea that Vygotsky saw principally two kinds of concept: the spontaneous (or everyday) concept and the scientific concept.
This is mistaken in three ways.
Firstly, the only ‘categorisation’ Vygotsky did in this field was the determination of two ideal-typical paths of development for any concept: the spontaneous path of development, arising effortlessly from everyday practical experience, and the path of development of true concepts, which originate from formal instruction. Spontaneous and true concepts are not categories of concepts but ideal-typical paths of development found in actual concepts from whatever domain of social practice.
Secondly, such ‘true concepts’ include not only scientific concepts, but artistic, religious, professional or whatever concept that are developed and propagated by instruction, and represent forms of activity in some kind of institution or practice.
Thirdly, the concepts dealt with in the chapter on artificial concepts shed light on the spontaneous formation of concepts in childhood, but are not themselves spontaneous concepts, since a kind of instruction is used in the experiment. But the artificial concept and the scientific concept between them allowed Vygotsky to focus his investigations on the two principle roots of concept development.
Vygotsky took scientific concepts, and in particular, the concepts of Marxist social science, as paradigms of the true concept, because these concepts are maximally removed from sensuous contact with objects and the possibility of forming spontaneous concepts of the subject matter. In line with his own methodological principles, he focused his research on well-defined paradigmatic processes rather than vague and broadly-defined phenomena, and thereby produced results which had clear and far-reaching implications.
Vygotsky may well have had a special place in his heart for science, but there is nothing in his theory of concepts which suggests a special status for the concepts of science. It is not the place here to consider the unique character of the scientific enterprise which gives the scientific concept its special status in the Vygotsky’s Soviet Union and modern society generally.
In Engeström’s Activity Theory, secondary contradictions are the contradictions between each of the elements of the System, which appear a new element enters into the activity system from outside.
The social situation of development is the unique set of relationships which meets a child’s needs while limiting its freedom thereby creating the ‘predicament’ which can only be overcome by the child (and its carers) making a development.
This is a concept first elaborated by Vygotsky in The problem of age, which forms the basis for his theory of child development.
Vygotsky proposed this concept in direct opposition to the dominant theory which specified the child’s social position in terms of the various factors: parents’ education, income and social status, number of siblings, sibling position, etc. Instead Vygotsky captured the child’s social situation as a concept, – a unique predicament in which the child’s needs are met according to socially determined concepts such ‘infant’, ‘child’, ‘pre-schooler’ and so on, which determine the expectations which are placed on the child and limit what they are permitted to do. So in order to develop, the child must somehow break out of this trap and define a new role for themselves (generally the socially determined successor role), step into that role and demand that the family treat them in a new way, according to this new role.
This process divides the child’s development into a series of stages in which the child occupied a series of social roles, and each step requires a kind of ‘leap’ in development, with one psychological function taking the leading role in each stage. Each ‘leap’ to the next available stage requires a specific development of the will, culminating in the child achieving physical, biological, psychological, interpersonal and social independence. Accordingly, each stage is divided into three phases of development. The main part of the period is marked by the gradual development of one central psychological function – the leading ‘neoformation'; as this has reached the limits of its development within the social situation, the child becomes aware of its limitation and a critical phase of development takes over, characterised by a further development of the will and often marked by negativity, by means of which the child makes a passage into a new social situation; this is then followed by a further critical phase of development in which the child ‘finds their feet’ in the new role and embarks on a new phase of gradual development.
Collaboration with adult carers is essential for the child to achieve this development, particularly the passage through the critical phases of development which entail adult carers accepting the child in a new role. The roles the child is to fulfill are constituted by the adults, and cannot be achieved without adult recognition.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1934). The Problem of Age.
Blunden, A. (2011). Vygotsky’s theory of child development.
(1) The focus of an experiment, usually the human ‘subject matter’, or (2) the morally responsible, active agent of action.
‘Subject’ comes from the Latin translation, subjectum – ‘that which is thrown under’ – of the Greek term coined by Aristotle, (hypokeimenon). For Aristotle, ‘subject’ meant that which underlies an existing thing, the substratum which makes the thing what it is and to which attributes may be attached. It also meant ‘subject’ in the grammatical sense, in which a predicate is ‘what is said of a subject’. In the sense of what is underneath, in mediaeval England, ‘subject’ came to mean the subject of a king’s power, and in Shakespeare’s time ‘subject’ still meant the subject matter of a poem or a murder plot. It is this sense of ‘subject’ which is continued in today’s usage as the subject of an experiment.
The Aristotlean meaning of ‘subject’ was inverted when Descartes used ‘subject’ to mean the cogito, the thinking mind to which thoughts are ‘attached’. For Kant, the ‘subject’ was “the transcendental subject of thought, which is cognized only by means of the thoughts that are its predicates.” This sense of subject as a cognitive, active and moral agent but which is transcendental¸ remains the dominant meaning in philosophy.
“Psychic reflection, taken in the system of connections and relations of the matter of the subject himself, is only a special state of this matter, a function of his brain; taken in the system of the subject’s links and relations with the world around him, it is an image of this world” (Leontyev 1947).
Leontyev did not develop his idea of a ‘collective subject’, which he broached in The Development of Mind, but such a conception would suggest a Marxist Psychology response to more recent critiques of the subject. When we consider the object of activity in Leontyev’s work, in the context of the Hegelian subject-object relation, then a ‘collective subject’ of some kind is implied.
In Engeström’s Activity Theory, the subject is one of at least 6 elements in the model, and means an individual actor or a group.
Kant, I. (1787). The Critique of Pure Reason.
Subjective is what relates to, depends on or exists in an individual’s mind or standpoint. Objective is what exists outside the mind and may be verified independently of the standpoint from which it is viewed. Subjective and Objective do not form a dichotomy and are relative concepts, as no view is entirely subjective or entirely objective.
Vygotsky used the terms to categorise the two opposing currents of psychology of his time: subjective psychology and objective psychology. Subjective psychology relied for its data on introspection by the researcher and trained subjects, whilst objective psychology relied exclusively on observation of behaviour, rejecting the validity of introspection as a research method.
“Objective” is sometimes used by Leontyev in the sense of “object-oriented activity,” i.e., activity oriented to an object, though activity is also “objective” in the usual sense that it exists outside the mind, in the world.
A substance is a fundamental component of the world as it is represented in some theory.
The Atomists held that the only substances were atoms, Pythagorus thought everything was numbers, but according to Aristotle, there are three kinds of substance: (1) sensible matter, manifested as appearance, composed of Elements, and which form a unitary material substratum; (2) the “Nature” towards which the movement of the thing takes place, that is, natural kinds (e.g., dogs and water); and (3) the individual substances (e.g. Barak Obama), which is composed of these two.
These are the various things which are irreducibly what they are and which have contingent and changing attributes.
Activity is the substance of Activity Theory. The concept of substance differs from unit of analysis however, because “unit of analysis” answer to a specific problem and allows a complex process to be conceived as a whole, whereas “substance” is a more general conception. For example, if we say “the universe is made up of particles and radiation,” particles and radiation would be elements rather than units. Also such a definition of substance tells us nothing about how the universe works.
Stanford University Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Substance.
A syncretic concept, or ‘Heap’, is a collection of objects brought together with no objective sense at all, simply based on what has taken the subject’s attention.
When the child begins to vocalise and tries to make words, they are not at first able to form the words of the adult language and instead utter words like poo-poo and ba-ba and so on. Although adults cannot make sense of what the child is trying to say, this marks the beginning of ‘autonomous speech’ (LSVCW v. 5, p. 249). When a very young child attempts to respond to the researcher’s urging to find all the gur, the result is that the child simply collects blocks at random, just whatever next strikes the child’s eye. The following excerpt appears in the context of a presentation of the ‘double stimulation’ experiment with very young children.
The first stage in the formation of concepts is most frequently manifested in the behaviour of young children. Faced with a task that an adult would generally solve through the formation of a new concept, the child forms an unordered and unformed collection. He isolates an unordered heap of objects. The child’s isolation of these objects, objects that are unified without sufficient internal foundation and without sufficient internal kinship or relationships, presupposes a diffuse, undirected extension of word meaning (or of the sign that substitutes for the meaning of the word) to a series of elements that are externally connected in the impression they have had on the child but not unified internally among themselves.
At this stage of development, word meaning is an incompletely defined, unformed, syncretic coupling of separate objects, objects that are in one way or another combined in a single fused image in the child’s representation and perception. A decisive role is played in the formation of this image by the syncretism of the child’s perception and action. This image is, therefore, extremely unstable (LSVCW v 1, p. 134).
In the second phase of development of syncretic concepts, the spatial relationship between the blocks gathered into a heap comes forward as the determining feature.
Once again, the purely syncretic laws that govern the perception of the visual field and the organization of the child’s perception are critical. The syncretic image or heap of objects may be formed on the basis of the spatial or temporal encounter of isolated elements, the direct contact among these elements, or some more complex relationship arising among them in the direct process of perception. The factor that continues to be basic to this period is the fact that the child is guided not by the objective connections present in the things themselves, but by the subjective connections that are given in his own perception. Objects are brought together in a single series and subordinated to a common meaning not on the basis of general features that are inherent to them and that have been isolated by the child but on the basis of a kind of kinship that has been established between them by the child’s impressions (LSVCW v 1, p. 135).
In the third phase of this earliest stage of concept formation, the child’s entirely unstable and unconscious behaviour is unified and given some stability by the child bringing all the blocks together in a heap and giving them their name. The category of “these ones here” is at least a step towards some kind of stability, albeit entirely subjective. In Vygotsky’s classification scheme, these syncretic concepts are the first major stage of concept formation.
A true concept is a concept which has been acquired with conscious effort and awareness by means of formal instruction in an institution of some kind.
Vygotsky called this type of concept ‘true’ simply because they are true to what ‘concept’ means, that is, they are completely independent of the concrete, sensuous perception of the objects, events and situations indicated by the concept and are essentially objective, a product of cultural and historical development rather than individual experience. True concepts are acquired through instruction in some kind of institution which has made provision for transmitting its concepts to neophytes. In that sense, such a concept must be a true representation of the norms of the relevant social formation. Not all social formations have such formal practices for transmitting concepts to future generations, relying to a greater or lesser extent on informal, effortless learning. In such circumstances, the concepts acquired by newcomers would derive only partly from instruction in the esoteric knowledge of the institution and partly through observation and participation. For Vygotsky, a ‘true’ concept is one acquired solely through instruction or ‘book learning’, where emphasis is on the ‘sense’ of the concept and its relation to other concepts in a system of knowledge.
He took as his paradigm for a true concept, the scientific concept.
True concepts are transmitted in religious organisations, military, political and other professions which induct people into their practices, schools of art, interest groups and sects of all kinds, but (especially in the Soviet Union of Vygotsky’s times) it is science which relies for the acquisition of its concepts entirely on instruction (whether didactic or laboratory-based) and least of all on spontaneous, sensuous acquisition of knowledge.
Furthermore, all children have spontaneous concepts of the operations of basic physics (witness Piaget’s experiments), and the new scientific concepts children acquire in the basic physics classes (conservation of mass, conservation of volume, acceleration under gravity, etc.) intersect with the concepts they have acquired spontaneously through handling objects in everyday life. Thus concepts of this type are never entirely ‘true’ concepts since from the beginning they are complex formations reflecting at least two paths of development. On the other hand, the concepts of Marxist social science owe absolutely nothing to everyday experience; a child who does not understand the meaning of ‘feudalism’ before they are taught the concept in social science classes at school, acquires the concept as pure ‘book learning’, and thus as a ‘true concept’.
It is an essential characteristic of ‘true concepts’ that they are completely independent of sensuous perception and practical experience. Vygotsky found that children are unable to acquire true concepts until adolescence. But even then the true concepts acquired by school children, marked by formalism and situated within the self-enclosed activity of the classroom remain only embryonic until the young adult enters a profession and social life in general where they encounter concepts in the social situations from which they have developed in the first place. What marks the ‘true’ concept is its path of development rather than its form at any given moment in a trajectory which begins with instruction.
It is self-evident that such a ‘true concept’ is at first hardly likely to be ‘true’ to concrete experience in the real world. For that it needs the nuances and complexities spontaneously acquired through life experience. Most actual concepts worthy of the name have their origins in both instruction (whether formal or informal) and experience.
It is worth emphasising that ‘true concept’ refers to an ideal-typical path of concept development, not a category of concept. After all, all Vygotsky’s concepts represent paths of development rather products of development. Further, scientific concepts (and the concepts of Marxist social science in particular) are but one example of concepts which have such a path of development. At early stages in its development, a true concept is marked by abstractness and formalism, and only later acquires the status of a truly concrete concept. But a spontaneous concept can never acquire the same level of development which is ultimately acquired by the true concept. None of the artificial concepts dealt with in Vygotsky and Sakharov’s experiments are true concepts, since in every case they are formed on the basis of concrete perception of the experimental objects.
See chapters 5, 6 and 7 of Thinking and Speech.
The concept of Unit of Analysis in Marxist Psychology was first elaborated by Vygotsky in Chapter 1 of “Thinking and Speech,” (1934) by bringing together the concept of ‘unit of analysis’ used in mainstream social science with the concept from the dialectical tradition variously called the “Urphänomen” (Goethe 1795), the “abstract concept” (Hegel 1812) or “the cell” (Marx 1867 – mentioned by Vygotsky in 1929). In mainstream social science the term was used without any consideration for the relation between the unit and the whole. (See the Wikipedia for an illustration of this conception). In the dialectical tradition, however, the unit of analysis is the simplest unit which can be observed which exhibits the properties which constitute the process as a whole – that is, there is a reciprocal relationship between whole and unit.
The unit of analysis provides an ‘entry point’ for scientific work. It is thw effort to grasp a process holistically in this way which Vygotsky expressed with idea of ‘units’ as opposed to ‘elements’. Vygotsky arrived at a unit of analysis through dialectical criticism of the basic concepts of each sphere of research he approached.
6. By characterising the process as a whole, that is, as a Gestalt, the unit requires the investigator to reconceptualise the whole, now in terms of the unit, even though at first, the whole was approached as a phenomenon, characterised by some common feature, which analysis proves to be inessential. So for example, Marx’s analysis of bourgeois society did not reveal the nature of the family or the state, since these aspects of ‘bourgeois society’ turned out to be inessential, even though they are dominated by the relations of the market, which were essential. ‘Word meaning’, then, is not going to reveal the development of attention or will; it is essential however to understanding the Intellect. However, it turns out that by solving the problem of the relation of thinking and speech, word meaning sheds new light on Attention, Affect, etc., but it is not thereby a unit of Attention, Affect, etc.. In order to build up a concrete science of the human psyche, of consciousness, it will be necessary to discover very many units of analysis, which each encapsulate an aspect of the development of human life, and only by the bringing together of all those insights can a concrete psychology be created – not just with one unit of analysis.
9. Although ‘unit of analysis’ is often spoken of in the sense of being the ‘major entity being studied’ (see the Wikipedia entry), and is thus taken as a self-sufficient whole in itself. On the contrary, ‘unit of analysis’ is only meaningful when the complex process in question manifests a vast number of combinations and interactions of the units of analysis. ‘Unit of analysis’ is not Marxist Psychology jargon for the ‘subject matter’.
10. Vygotsky praised Pavlov for identifying the conditioned reflex as the unit of analysis for understanding animal behaviour (1929), but condemned the Reflexologists because they simply worked on the principle that “everything is a reflex.” (1925) Speech for example is simply named the “speech reflex.” This concept is that of the Substance (Stanford 2004) of the science, not its unit of analysis. In general, the Substance is taken as given by the science and does not yield any scientific insight. To say everything is Matter, for example, does not yield a materialist methodology. On the contrary. A unit of analysis presupposes a precise and empirically verifiable concept of the entity which functions as the unit.
Goethe, J. W. v. (1795). Excerpts from Goethe on Science.
Hegel, G. W. F. (1812). The Concept in General, in Science of Logic.
Stanford (2004) Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Substance.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1925). The Methods of Reflexological and Psychological Investigation, LSVCW, v. 3, pp. 35 – 49.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1929a). Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology, chapter 1, LSVCW, v. 3, pp. 233 – 246.
Wikipedia “Unit of Analysis” .

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