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

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

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

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

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

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

As with any research that seeks to introduce something new into the solution of the problem under study, the question naturally arises with regard to our work, what does it contain in itself that is new and, therefore, controversial, what needs careful analysis and further verification. In a few words we can enumerate the new things that our work introduces into the general doctrine of thought and speech. If we do not stop at a somewhat new formulation of the problem, which we allowed, and in a certain sense, a new research method that we applied, what is new in our research can be reduced to the following points: 1) experimental establishment of the fact that the meanings of words develop in childhood , and the definition of the main steps in their development; 2) revealing the unique path of development of the child's scientific concepts in comparison with his spontaneous concepts and elucidating the basic laws of this development; 3) disclosure of the psychological nature of written speech as an independent function of speech and its relation to thinking; 4) experimental disclosure of the psychological nature of inner speech and its relation to thinking. In this enumeration of the new data contained in our study, we had in mind, first of all, what the present study can contribute to the general theory of thinking and speech in the sense of new, experimentally established psychological facts, and then already those working hypotheses and those theoretical generalizations that inevitably had to arise in the process of interpreting, explaining and comprehending these facts. It is neither the right nor the obligation of the author, of course, to enter into an assessment of the significance and truth of these facts and these theories. This is the business of critics and readers of this book.

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

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

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

Thinking and speech (collection) Lev Vygotsky

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

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

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

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

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

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Quotes from the book Thinking and Speech (collection) by Lev Vygotsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Foreword

1
First Edition: Thinking and Speech. M.; L.: Sotsekgiz, 1934.

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

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

In the course of the study, it was necessary to resort to theoretical analysis twice more. The study of thinking and speech inevitably affects a number of adjacent and borderline areas of scientific knowledge. A comparison of the data of the psychology of speech and linguistics, the experimental study of concepts and the psychological theory of learning turned out to be inevitable. It seemed to us that it was most convenient to resolve all these incidental questions in their purely theoretical formulation, without analyzing independently accumulated factual material. Following this rule, we introduced into the context of the study of the development of scientific concepts a working hypothesis about learning and development that we developed elsewhere and on different material. And, finally, the theoretical generalization, bringing together all the experimental data, turned out to be the last point of application of theoretical analysis to our study.

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

In accordance with this main task, the program of our study and the present work was determined.

We started by posing the problem and looking for research methods.

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

As with any research that seeks to introduce something new into the solution of the problem under study, the question naturally arises with regard to our work, what does it contain in itself that is new and, therefore, controversial, what needs careful analysis and further verification. In a few words we can enumerate the new things that our work introduces into the general doctrine of thought and speech. If we do not stop at a somewhat new formulation of the problem, which we allowed, and in a certain sense, a new research method that we applied, what is new in our research can be reduced to the following points: 1) experimental establishment of the fact that the meanings of words develop in childhood , and the definition of the main steps in their development; 2) revealing the unique path of development of the child's scientific concepts in comparison with his spontaneous concepts and elucidating the basic laws of this development; 3) disclosure of the psychological nature of written speech as an independent function of speech and its relation to thinking; 4) experimental disclosure of the psychological nature of inner speech and its relation to thinking. In this enumeration of the new data contained in our study, we had in mind, first of all, what the present study can contribute to the general theory of thinking and speech in the sense of new, experimentally established psychological facts, and then already those working hypotheses and those theoretical generalizations that inevitably had to arise in the process of interpreting, explaining and comprehending these facts. It is neither the right nor the obligation of the author, of course, to enter into an assessment of the significance and truth of these facts and these theories. This is the business of critics and readers of this book.

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

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

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

Chapter first
Problem and research method

The problem of thinking and speech belongs to the circle of those psychological problems, in which the question of the relationship between various psychological functions comes to the fore, various kinds activity of consciousness. The central point of this whole problem is, of course, the question of the relation of thought to the word. All other questions related to this problem are, as it were, secondary and logically subordinate to this first and main question, without the resolution of which even the correct formulation of each of the further and more particular questions is impossible. Meanwhile, it is precisely the problem of interfunctional connections and relations, oddly enough, that is almost completely undeveloped and undeveloped for modern psychology. new problem. The problem of thinking and speech is as ancient as the science of psychology itself, and it is precisely at this point, in the question of the relation of thought to the word, that it is the least developed and the most obscure. The atomistic and functional analysis that dominated scientific psychology throughout the last decade led to the fact that individual psychological functions were considered in an isolated form, the method of psychological knowledge was developed and improved in relation to the study of these individual, isolated, isolated processes, while the problem of the connection of functions with each other, the problem of their organization in the integral structure of consciousness remained all the time out of the field of attention of researchers.

That consciousness is a single whole and that the individual functions are connected in their activity with each other in an inseparable unity - this idea does not represent anything new for modern psychology. But the unity of consciousness and the connection between separate functions in psychology was usually postulated rather than served as the subject of research. Moreover, postulating the functional unity of consciousness, psychology, along with this indisputable assumption, based its research on the tacitly recognized by all, clearly not formulated, completely false postulate, which consists in recognizing the immutability and constancy of interfunctional connections of consciousness, and it was assumed that perception is always and in the same way is connected with attention, memory is always connected in the same way with perception, thought with memory, etc. From this, of course, it followed that interfunctional connections are something that can be taken out of brackets as a common factor and which may not be taken into account when performing research operations on the individual and isolated functions remaining inside the brackets. Thanks to all this, the problem of relations is, as said, the least developed part in the whole problematic of modern psychology. This could not help but have a most severe effect on the problem of thinking and speech. If you look at the history of the study of this problem, you can easily be convinced that this central point about the relationship of thought to the word has always escaped the attention of the researcher, and the center of gravity of the whole problem has constantly shifted and shifted to some other point, switched to some other point. or another question.

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

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

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

We have given this example only to show how, having decomposed speech thinking as a well-known single psychological formation into its constituent elements, the researcher has no choice but to establish a purely external interaction between these elementary processes, as if it were two heterogeneous, within unrelated activities. This more favorable position, in which the representatives of the second direction find themselves, lies in the fact that for them, in any case, it becomes possible to raise the question of the relationship between thinking and speech. This is their advantage. But their weakness lies in the fact that the very formulation of this problem is wrong in advance and excludes any possibility of a correct solution of the problem, because the method they use of decomposing this single whole into separate elements makes it impossible to study the internal relations between thought and word. Thus, the question rests on the method of research, and we think that if from the very beginning we pose the problem of the relationship between thinking and speech, we must also find out in advance what methods should be applicable in the study of this problem, which could ensure its success. permission.

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

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

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

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

Sound and meaning in a word are not connected in any way. Both of these elements, united in a sign, says one of the most important representatives of modern linguistics, live completely apart. It is not surprising, therefore, that only the saddest results for the study of the phonetic and semantic aspects of language could come from such a view. A sound cut off from thought would lose all the specific properties that alone made it the sound of human speech and singled it out from the rest of the realm of sounds that exist in nature. Therefore, in a meaningless sound, they began to study only its physical and mental properties, that is, what is not specific for this sound, but common with all other sounds that exist in nature, and, consequently, such a study could not explain to us why a sound that has such and such physical and mental properties is the sound of human speech and what makes it so. In the same way, the meaning, torn off from the sound side of the word, would turn into a pure representation, into a pure act of thought, which began to be studied separately as a concept that develops and lives independently of its material carrier. The barrenness of classical semantics and phonetics is largely due to this very gap between sound and meaning, this decomposition of the word into separate elements.

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L.S. Vygotsky: THINKING AND SPEECH

Introduction

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

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

1. PROBLEM AND METHOD OF INVESTIGATION

Vygotsky speech thinking mental

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

If we try to briefly formulate the results of historical work on the problem of thinking and speech in scientific psychology, we can say that the entire solution to this problem, which was proposed by various researchers, has always and constantly fluctuated - from the most ancient times to the present day - between two extreme poles - between identification and complete fusion of thought and word, and between their equally metaphysical, equally absolute, equally complete rupture and separation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In order to convey any experience or content of consciousness to another person, there is no other way than to refer the transmitted content to a certain class of phenomena, and this, as we already know, necessarily requires generalization.

Thus, it turns out that communication necessarily involves the generalization of the development of verbal meaning, i.e. generalization becomes possible with the development of communication. Thus, the highest forms of psychological communication inherent in a person are possible only due to the fact that a person, with the help of thinking, generally reflects reality.

It is worth referring to any example in order to be convinced of this connection between communication and generalization, these two main functions of speech. I want to let someone know that I'm cold.

I can make him understand this with the help of a series of expressive movements, but real understanding and communication will take place only when I can generalize and name what I experience, i.e., relate the feeling of cold I experience to a certain class of states, familiar to my interlocutor. That is why the whole thing is incommunicable for children who do not yet have a known generalization. The point here is not the lack of appropriate words and sounds, but the lack of appropriate concepts and Generalizations, without which understanding is impossible. As Tolstoy says, it is almost always not the word itself that is incomprehensible, but the concept that is expressed by the word.

The word is almost always ready when the concept is ready. Therefore, there is every reason to consider the meaning of a word not only as a unity of thinking and speech, but also as a unity of generalization and communication, communications and thinking. The fundamental significance of such a formulation of the question for all genetic problems of thinking and speech is completely immeasurable. It lies primarily in the fact that only with this assumption does a causal-genetic analysis of thinking and speech become possible for the first time.

2. GENETIC ROOTS OF THINKING AND SPEECH

The main fact that we encounter in the genetic consideration of thinking and speech is that the relationship between these processes is not a constant value, unchanged throughout development, but a variable value. The curves of development repeatedly converge and diverge, intersect, level off in separate periods and run in parallel, even merge in their separate parts, then branch out again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Thinking and speech have different genetic roots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The generally accepted view considered children's speech at this stage of its development as an emotional form of behavior par excellence. The latest research (Sh. Buhler et al. - the first forms of the child's social behavior and inventory of his reactions in the first year, and her collaborators Getzer and Tuder-Hart - the child's early reactions to the human voice) have shown that in the first year of a child's life, t .e. it is at the pre-intellectual stage of the development of his speech that we find a rich development of the social function of speech.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We can briefly formulate our conclusions:

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

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

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

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

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

3. THOUGHT AND WORD

The new and most significant thing that this study introduces into the doctrine of thinking and speech is the revelation that the meanings of words develop. The discovery of the change in the meanings of words and their development is our main discovery, which makes it possible for the first time to finally overcome the postulate of the constancy and immutability of the meaning of a word, which underlies all previous teachings about thinking and speech.

The meaning of the word is non-constant. It changes as the child develops. It also changes when various ways functioning of thought. It is more dynamic than static formation. The establishment of the variability of meanings became possible only when the nature of the meaning itself was correctly determined. Its nature is revealed primarily in generalization, which is contained as the main and central moment in every word, for every word already generalizes.

But since the meaning of a word can change in its inner nature, it means that the relation of thought to the word also changes! In order to understand the dynamics of the relationship of thought to the word, it is necessary to introduce into the genetic scheme of change in meanings developed by us in the main study, as it were, a cross section. It is necessary to clarify the functional role of verbal meaning in the act of thinking.

Let us now try to imagine in general terms the complex structure of any real thought process and its associated complex course from the first, most vague moment of the birth of a thought to its final completion in a verbal formulation. To do this, we must move from the genetic plane to the functional plane and outline not the process of the development of meanings and the change in their structure, but the process of the functioning of meanings in the living course of verbal thinking.

Before proceeding to a schematic description of this process, we, anticipating in advance the results of a further exposition, will say about the main and guiding idea, the development and explanation of which should serve as all subsequent research. This central idea can be expressed in a general formula: the relation of thought to word is, first of all, not a thing, but a process; this relation is a movement from thought to word and vice versa - from word to thought. This relationship appears in the light of psychological analysis as an evolving process. Of course, this is not an age-related development, but a functional one, but the movement of the very process of thinking from thought to word is development. Thought is not expressed in the word, but is accomplished in the word. One could therefore speak of the formation (the unity of being and non-being) of thought in the word. Every thought seeks to connect something with something, to establish a relationship between something and something. Every thought has a movement, a flow, an unfolding, in a word, a thought performs some function, some work, solves some problem. This flow of thought takes place as an internal movement through a whole series of planes, as a transition of thought into word and word into thought. Therefore, the first task of analysis, which wishes to study the relation of thought to word as a movement from thought to word, is to study the phases of which this movement is composed, to distinguish between the series of planes through which the thought, embodied in the word, passes. Here, many things are revealed to the researcher, "which the wise men never dreamed of."

First of all, our analysis leads us to distinguish between two planes in speech itself. The study shows that the internal, semantic, semantic side of speech and the external, sounding phasic side of speech, although they form a true unity, each have their own special laws of motion. The unity of speech is a complex unity, not a homogeneous and uniform one. First of all, the presence of its own movement in the semantic and phasic side of speech is revealed from a whole series of facts relating to the field of the child's speech development. Let us point out only two main facts.

It is known that the external side of speech develops in a child from three words, then to a simple phrase and to a chain of phrases, and even later - to complex sentences and to speech. But it is also known that in its meaning the first word of a child is a whole phrase - a monosyllabic sentence. In the development of the semantic side of speech, the child begins with a sentence, and only later does he move on to mastering private semantic units, the meanings of individual words, dividing his continuous thought expressed in a one-word sentence into a number of separate, interconnected verbal meanings. Thus, if we cover the initial and final moments in the development of the semantic and phasic aspects of speech, one can easily be convinced that this development goes in opposite directions. The semantic side of speech goes in its development from the whole to the part, from the sentence to the word, and the external side of the speech goes from the part to the whole, from the word to the sentence.

Another, no less fundamental fact relates to a later era of development. Piaget found that the child masters a complex structure earlier. subordinate clause with conjunctions: “because”, “despite”, “because”, “although”, than the semantic structures corresponding to these syntactic forms. Grammar in the development of the child goes ahead of his logic. A child who absolutely correctly and adequately uses conjunctions that express causal, temporal, and other dependencies, in his spontaneous speech and in an appropriate situation, does not yet realize the semantic side of these unions and does not know how to use it arbitrarily. This means that the movements of the semantic and phasic sides of the word in mastering complex syntactic structures do not coincide in development.

Less directly, but even more clearly, is the discrepancy between the semantic and phasic sides of speech in the functioning of developed thought.

Of the whole series of facts related to this, the discrepancy between the grammatical and psychological subject and predicate should be put in the first place.

This discrepancy between the grammatical and psychological subject and predicate can be explained by the following example. Let us take the phrase: “The clock has fallen,” in which “the clock” is the subject, “the clock has fallen” is the predicate, and imagine that this phrase is pronounced twice in a different situation and, therefore, expresses two different thoughts in the same form. . I point out that the clock is standing and ask how this happened. They answer me: "The clock has fallen." In this case, in my mind there used to be an idea of ​​a clock, the clock is in this case a psychological subject, what is being said. The second was the idea that they had fallen. "Fell" is in this case psychological predicate, what is said about the subject. In this case, the grammatical and psychological division of the phrase coincides, but it may not coincide.

While working at the table, I hear a noise from a falling object and ask what fell. They answer me with the same phrase: "The clock has fallen." In this case, in the mind there used to be an idea of ​​a fallen person. "Fell" is what this phrase refers to, i.e., the psychological subject. What is said about this subject; what appears second in the mind is the idea - the clock, which in this case will be the psychological predicate. In essence, this thought could be expressed as follows: what has fallen is a clock. In this case, both the psychological and the grammatical predicate would coincide, but in our case they do not. The analysis shows that in a complex phrase any member of the sentence can become a psychological predicate. In this case, it bears a logical emphasis, the semantic function of which lies precisely in highlighting the psychological predicate.

If we try to sum up what we have learned from the analysis of the two planes of speech, we can say that the presence of a second, internal plane of speech behind words makes us see in the simplest speech utterance more than once and for all a given, immovable relationship between the semantic and sound aspects. speech, but movement, the transition from the syntax of meanings to verbal syntax, the transformation of the grammar of thought into the grammar of words, the modification of the semantic structure when it is embodied in words.

But we must take one more step along the path we have outlined and penetrate a little deeper into the inner side of speech. The semantic plane of speech is only the initial of all its inner planes. Behind him, before the study, the plan of inner speech is revealed. Without a correct understanding of the psychological nature of inner speech, there is no and cannot be any possibility of elucidating the relations of thought to word in all their real complexity.

Objectives Our assumption that egocentric speech is an early form of inner speech is credible, then the question of the method of studying inner speech is resolved. The study of the child's egocentric speech is in this case the key to the study of the psychological nature of inner speech.

We can now move on to a concise description of the third of the plans we have outlined for the movement from thought to word - the plane of inner speech.

The first and most important feature of inner speech is its very special syntax. Studying the syntax of inner speech in the child's egocentric speech, we noticed one essential feature that reveals an undoubted dynamic tendency to increase as egocentric speech develops. This feature lies in the apparent fragmentation, fragmentation, abbreviation of internal speech compared to external ...

In the form of a general law, we could say that inner speech, as it develops, reveals not a simple tendency to shorten and omit words] not a simple transition to telegraphic style, but a completely peculiar tendency to shorten phrase and sentence in the direction of preserving the predicate and related to it. parts of a sentence by omitting the subject and related words. Using the method of interpolation, we must assume pure and absolute predicativity as the main syntactic form of inner speech.

A completely similar situation is created in a situation where the subject of the judgment being expressed is known in advance to the interlocutors. Let's imagine that several people are waiting at the tram stop for tram "B" in order to go in a certain direction. Never one of these people, noticing the approaching tram, will say in expanded form: “Tram“ B ”, which we are waiting for in order to go there, is coming”, but the statement will always be reduced to one predicate: “It is coming " or "B". (See the article by L. S. Vygotsky "On the nature of egocentric speech" in this reader.)

We find striking examples of such abbreviations of external speech and its reduction to single predicates in the novels of Tolstoy, who returned more than once to the psychology of understanding. “No one heard what he (the dying Nikolai Levin) said, only Kitty understood. She understood because she kept following with her mind what he needed. We could say that in her thoughts, following the thought of the dying man, there was that subject, to which his word that no one understood belonged. But perhaps the most remarkable example is the explanation of Kitty and Levin by means of the initial letters of words. "I've wanted to ask you one thing for a long time." "Please ask." “Here,” he said, and wrote the initial letters: K, V, M, O, E, N, M, B, 3, L, E, N, I, T. These letters meant: When you told me They answered: this cannot be, whether it meant never or then. There was no chance that she could understand this complex phrase. "I understand," she said, blushing. “What is this word? he said, pointing to the "N" which meant the word never. "That word means 'never'," she said, "but it's not true." He quickly erased what he had written, handed her the chalk and stood up. beamed: he understood. It meant: "Then I could not answer otherwise. "- She wrote the initial letters: "C, W, M, 3, I, P, C, B. "It meant: "So that you can forget and forgive what happened." He grabbed the chalk with tense, trembling fingers and, breaking it, wrote the initial letters of the following: "I have nothing to forget and forgive. I did not stop loving you. "- "I understood," she said in a whisper. "He sat down and wrote a long sentence. She understood everything and, without asking him if it was true, took the chalk and immediately answered. For a long time he could not understand what she had written, and often looked into her eyes. An eclipse came over him from happiness. He could not substitute the words she had in mind, but in her lovely eyes, shining with happiness, he understood everything that he needed to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had not yet finished writing, and she was already reading for his hand and finish it yourself la and wrote the answer: yes. In their conversation, everything was said: it was said that she loved him and that she would tell her father and mother that he would arrive tomorrow morning ”(Anna Karenina, part 4, ch. XIII).

This example has a completely exceptional psychological significance because, like the entire episode of Levin and Kitty's declaration of love, Tolstoy borrowed from his biography. It was in this way that he himself declared his love to S.A. Behrs, to his future wife. With the same thoughts of the interlocutors, with the same direction of their consciousness, the role of speech irritations is reduced to a minimum. But in the meantime, understanding is unmistakable. Tolstoy draws attention in another work to the fact that between people living in very great psychological contact, such an understanding with the help of only an abbreviated speech from a half-word is more the rule than the exception.

Having studied the phenomenon of contraction in external speech on these examples, we can return enriched to the same phenomenon of interest to us in internal speech. Here this phenomenon manifests itself not only in exceptional situations, but always when the functioning of inner speech takes place.

The whole point is that the same circumstances that sometimes create in oral speech the possibility of purely predicative judgments and which are completely absent in written speech are constant and unchanging companions of inner speech, inseparable from it.

Let's take a closer look at these circumstances. Recall once again that in oral speech abbreviations occur when the subject of the judgment being expressed is known in advance to both interlocutors. But this state of affairs is an absolute and permanent law for inner speech. The topic of our internal dialogue is always known to us. The subject of our inner judgment is always present in our thoughts. It is always implied. Piaget somehow notices that we easily take our word for it, and that therefore the need for evidence and the ability to substantiate one’s thought are born only in the process of collision of our thoughts with other people’s thoughts. With the same right, we could say that we especially easily understand ourselves from a half-word, from a hint. Alone with ourselves, we never need to resort to detailed formulations. Here the predicate alone is always necessary and sufficient. The subject always remains in the mind, just as a schoolboy leaves in his mind, when adding, remainders that go beyond ten.

Moreover, in our inner speech we always boldly speak our thought, without bothering to clothe it in precise words. The mental closeness of the interlocutors, as shown above, creates a common apperception among the speakers, which, in turn, is the defining moment for the reduction of speech. But this commonality of apperception when communicating with oneself is complete, integral and absolute, therefore, in inner speech, the laconic and clear, almost without words, communication of the most complex thoughts, which Tolstoy speaks of as a rare exception in oral speech, is the law, when there is a deeply intimate inner closeness between the speakers. In inner speech, we never need to name what is being said, i.e. subject. This leads to the dominance of pure predicativity in inner speech.

But the predicativity of inner speech does not yet exhaust the entire complex of phenomena that finds its external summary expression in the abbreviation of inner speech in comparison with oral speech. We should also mention the reduction of phonetic moments of speech, which we have already encountered in some cases of abbreviation of oral speech. Kitty and Levin's explanation allowed us to conclude that with the same orientation of consciousness, the role of verbal stimuli is reduced to a minimum (initial letters), and understanding occurs without error. But this minimization of the role of verbal stimuli is again carried to the limit and is observed almost in absolute form in inner speech, for here the same direction of consciousness reaches its fullness.

Inner speech is, in the exact sense, speech almost without words. We must take a closer look at the third source of the abbreviation that interests us. We find this third source in a completely unique semantic structure of inner speech. As research shows, the syntax of meanings and the entire structure of the semantic side of speech are no less peculiar than the syntax of words and its sound structure.

In our research, we could establish three main features that are internally interconnected and form the originality of inner speech. The first of these is the predominance of the meaning of the word over the meaning in inner speech. Polan did a great service to the psychological analysis of speech by introducing a distinction between the meaning of a word and its meaning. The meaning of a word, as Paulan showed, is the totality of all psychological facts that arise in our minds thanks to the word. The meaning of the word thus always turns out to be a dynamic, fluid, complex formation that has several zones of varying stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of the meaning that a word acquires in the context of any speech, and, moreover, the most stable, unified and precise zone. The real meaning of the word is non-constant. In one operation the word appears with one meaning, in another it acquires a different meaning. This dynamism of meaning leads us to Paulan's problem, to the question of the relationship between meaning and meaning. The meaning of a word is nothing more than a potential that is realized in living speech, in which this meaning is only a stone in the building of meaning.

We will explain this difference between the meaning and meaning of a word using the example of the final word of Krylov's fable "Dragonfly and Ant". The word "dance", with which this fable ends, has a very definite permanent meaning, the same for any context in which it occurs. But in the context of the fable, it takes on a much broader intellectual and affective meaning. It already means in this context both "rejoice" and "perish". It is this enrichment of the word with the meaning that it absorbs from the entire context that constitutes the basic law of the dynamics of meanings. The word absorbs, absorbs intellectual and affective contents from the whole context in which it is woven, and begins to mean more and less than is contained in its meaning: more - because the circle of its meanings expands, acquiring a whole series of zones filled with new content; less - because the abstract meaning of the word is limited and narrowed by what the word means only in this context. The meaning of the word, says Polan, is a complex, mobile phenomenon, constantly changing to a certain extent in accordance with individual consciousnesses and for one and the same consciousness in accordance with circumstances. In this respect, the meaning of the word is inexhaustible. The word acquires its meaning only in the phrase, but the phrase itself acquires meaning only in the context of a paragraph, a paragraph in the context of a book, a book in the context of the entire work of the author. The real meaning of each word is determined in the final analysis by the whole wealth of the moments existing in the mind, relating to what is expressed by the given word.

But Paulan's main merit lies in the fact that he analyzed the relationship between meaning and word and was able to show that there are much more independent relations between meaning and word than between meaning and word. Words can dissociate from the meaning expressed in them. It has long been known that words can change their meaning. Relatively recently it has been observed that it is also necessary to study how meanings change words, or rather, how concepts change their names. Polan gives many examples of how words remain when the meaning evaporates. He analyzes stereotypical everyday phrases (for example: "how are you"), lies and other manifestations of the independence of words from meaning. Meaning can be separated from the word that expresses it just as easily as it can be fixed in some other word. Just as the meaning of a word, he says, is connected with the whole word as a whole, but not with each of its sounds, so the meaning of a phrase is connected with the whole phrase as a whole, but not with the words that make it up separately. Therefore, it happens that one word takes the place of another. The meaning is separated from the word and thus preserved. But if a word can exist without meaning, meaning can equally exist without words.

In oral speech, as a rule, we go from the most stable and constant element of meaning, from its most constant zone, i.e. from the meaning of the word to its more fluid zones, to its meaning as a whole. In inner speech, on the other hand, that predominance of meaning over meaning, which we observe in oral speech in individual cases as a more or less weakly expressed tendency, is brought to its limit and is presented in absolute form. Here the prevalence of the phrase over the word, of the entire context over the phrase, is not an exception, but a constant rule. Two other features of the semantics of inner speech follow from this circumstance. Both of them concern the process of combining words, combining them and merging them. Of these, the first can be brought closer to agglutination, which is observed in some languages ​​as a basic phenomenon, and in others as a more or less rare way of combining words. AT German, for example, the formation of a single noun from a whole phrase or from several separate words often takes place, which in this case act in the functional meaning of a single word. In other languages, this fusion of words is observed as a constantly operating mechanism.

Two points are remarkable in this: firstly, the fact that the individual words that make up the compound word often undergo reductions from the sound side, so that part of the word enters the compound word, and secondly, that the resulting complex a word that expresses a very complex concept appears from the functional and structural side as a single word, and not as an association of independent words. In American languages, says Wundt, the compound word is treated in exactly the same way as the simple word, and is inflected and conjugated in exactly the same way. We observed something analogous in the child's egocentric speech. As this form of speech approaches inner speech, the child more and more often reveals in his utterances, in parallel with the fall in the coefficient of egocentric speech, a tendency to asyntactic sticking together of words.

The third and last of the features of the semantics of inner speech can again be most easily understood by comparing with a similar phenomenon in oral speech. Its essence lies in the fact that the meanings of words, more dynamic and broader than their meanings, reveal other laws of association and merging with each other than those that can be observed when combining and merging verbal meanings. Meanings, as it were, flow into each other and, as it were, influence each other, so that the previous ones are, as it were, contained in the subsequent one or modify it. Especially often we see this in artistic speech. The word, passing through any work of art, absorbs all the variety of semantic units contained in it and becomes, in its meaning, as if equivalent to the entire work as a whole. This is especially easy to explain on the example of the titles of works of art. Words such as Don Quixote and Hamlet, Eugene Onegin and Anna Karenina express this law of influence of meaning in its purest form. Here, one word contains the semantic content of the whole work. A particularly clear example of this law is the title of Gogol's poem Dead Souls. The original meaning of this word means dead serfs, who are not yet excluded from the audit lists and therefore can be bought and sold, like living peasants. But, passing like a red thread through the entire fabric of the poem, these two words take on a completely new, immeasurably richer meaning and already mean something completely different compared to their original meaning. Dead souls are not serfs who died and are considered alive, but all the heroes of the poem who live, but are spiritually dead.

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Online Library http:// www. koob. en

L. S. VYGOTSKY

THINKING AND SPEECH

Fifth edition, revised

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

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

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

© Publishing house "Labyrinth", editing, textual commentary, index, design, 1999

All rights reserved

ISBN 5-87604-097-5

All-Russian

state library

foreign, literature

them. M I. Rudomino

Preface 5

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

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

Chapter Four Genetic Roots of Thinking and Speech 81

Chapter Five An Experimental Study of the Development of Concepts 109

Chapter six

Study of the development of scientific concepts in childhood 171

Chapter Seven Thought and Word 275

Literature 337

textological commentary 339

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

Name Index 348
FOREWORD

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

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

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

6 foreword

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

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

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

As with any research that seeks to introduce something new into the solution of the problem under study, the question naturally arises with regard to our work, what does it contain in itself that is new and, therefore, controversial, which needs careful analysis and further verification. In a few words we can enumerate the new things that our work introduces into the general doctrine of thought and speech. If we do not stop at a somewhat new formulation of the problem, which we allowed, and in a certain sense, a new research method that we applied, what is new in our research can be reduced to the following points: 1) experimental establishment of the fact that the meanings of words develop in childhood , and the definition of the main steps in their development; 2) revealing the unique path of development of the child's scientific concepts in comparison with his spontaneous concepts and elucidating the basic laws of this development; 3) disclosure of psychological

foreword 7

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

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

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

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

Chapter first

PROBLEM AND METHOD OF RESEARCH

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

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

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

problem and research method 9

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

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

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