Thought and Language by L. S. Vygotsky (review)

174 Books Thought and Language. L. S. Vygotsky. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar, eds. and trs., with an introduction by Jerome S. Bruner. M.I.T. Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1962. 168pp. $2.45. Reviewed by: Martin Steinmann, Jr.* Vygotsky is probably best known in England and America for Vygotskyblocks, used to study concept formation in children; for, apart from two articles published in the 1930’s (one of them Chapter 7 of this book), his work has hitherto been unavailable in English. But this book (first published in the Soviet Union in 1934and suppressed from 1936 to 1956)shows him to have been far ahead of his time in hisinsights,not only into developmental psychology and education but into the nature of language. According to the Translators’ Preface, Vygotsky, a dyingman at onlythirty-eight,hastily prepared the book, partly from earlier essays, some published, partly by dictation; and the result was poor organization , much repetition, some irrelevant polemics and a difficultstyle. Thetranslators are editors as well and they deserve great credit for correcting thesedeficienciesand alsofor usefullyexpandingthe bibliography. In Vygotsky’s words,his ‘centraltask‘ in the book is ‘the genetic analysis of the relationship between thought and the spoken word’ (p. xx). Perhaps his most significant achievement is not the analysis itself but the theoretical and the methodological presuppositions that guide it. He quite rejects the stimulus-response behaviorism that excised the psyche from psychology and meaning from linguistics . He also rejects both the view that thought and language are identical and the view that they are completely segregated. His view, briefly, is that, both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, they are related but that they have different origins and ‘their relationship undergoes many changes. Progress in thought and speech are not parallel. They may straighten out and run side by side, even merge for a time, but they always diverge again’ (p. 33). In methodology, he rejects analysis of ‘complexpsychological wholes into elements’ (p. 3) and accepts their ‘analysis into units’ (p. 4). An element does not share the basic properties of the whole; aunit does. Thus, hefindsclassicalphonetics ‘barren’because its soleconcern is elements, sounds The unit of verbal thought is, he believes, word meaning; and, for me, his most remarkable insights are the ones to which American linguistics at least was largely blind until the advent of Noam Chomsky’s ‘Syntactic Structures’ (1957) and, more recently, J. L. Austin’s ‘How to Do Things with Words’ (1962) and John R. Searl’s ‘Speech Acts’ (1969). He recognizes that meaning, unclear as its nature may be, is a matter of convention, not of association between sound and experience. He also recognizes that linguistic communication always depends upon an intentional act of the * Department of English, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minn. 55455, U.S.A. (P. 4). communicator and conventional signs that owe their very existence to man’s ability to generalize, abstract, conceptualize. He does not seem to suspect , however, that the chief difference between human speech and the ‘speech‘of apes may well be that apes communicate both unintentionally and unconventionally. Perhaps Vygotsky’sbook is too theoretical: some of his conclusions have no experimental support and he gives few details of those that do. But his theory is often well confirmed by what every human knows about thought and language; and it is always informed by his extensive observations of children learning to talk and to solve problems. Culture and Commitment: A Study of the Generation Gap. Margaret Mead. Natural History Press, Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1970. pp. xi, 113. $5.00. Reviewed by: Otto Klineberg* Thisbook, smallin sizebut rich inideas,isbased on a series of lectures given by Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, in 1969. It has already aroused so much attention and been cited so frequently that I shall content myself with a brief, and necessarily inadequate, summary of its central thesis. This will be followed by a few questions that seem to me to be in need of further analysis and one of which may possibly be of special interest to readers of Leonardo. The central problem is presented as one of commitment: to what past, present or future can the...