Works of Vygotsky l with thinking and speech. Thinking and speech (collection). The relationship between thinking and speech is not at all constant throughout the entire course of phylogenetic development.

Attic 21.12.2020

Attic

The present work is a psychological study of one of the most difficult, confusing and complex questions of experimental psychology - the question of thinking and speech. As far as we know, a systematic experimental development of this problem has not yet been undertaken by any of the researchers. The solution of the problem before us, at least with a primary approximation, could be carried out only through a series of special 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.

In addition to experimental research, we inevitably had to turn to theoretical and critical research. On the one hand, we had to outline the starting points for solving our problem and develop the initial prerequisites for the independent acquisition of scientific facts in the form of a general doctrine of genetic roots thinking and speaking. On the other hand, it was necessary to subject the most ideologically powerful of modern theories of thought and speech to a critical analysis in order to push off from them, to understand 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, I had 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. Comparison of the data from the psychology of speech and linguistics, the experimental study of concepts and the psychological theory of learning turned out to be inevitable. All these incidentally encountered questions, it seemed to us, is most convenient to resolve 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 the working hypothesis about learning and development that we had developed elsewhere and based on different material. And, finally, theoretical generalization, bringing together all the experimental data turned out to be the last point of application of theoretical analysis to our research.

Thus, our research turned out to be complex and diverse in its composition and structure, but at the same time, each particular task facing individual segments of our work was so subordinated to a common goal, so connected with the previous and subsequent segment that the whole work as a whole was we dare to hope for this - it is, in essence, a unified, albeit divided into parts, research, which in its entirety, in all its parts, is 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 research and this 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. Stern, in order from the very beginning to oppose our problem statement and research method 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 which final point it should lead us. Further, to our two experimental studies of the development of concepts and the main forms of verbal thinking, we had to preface 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 verbal thinking. The central part of the entire book is formed by two experimental studies, one of which is devoted to clarifying the main path of development of the meanings of words in childhood, and the other to a comparative study of the development of scientific and spontaneous concepts of the child. Finally, in the final chapter, we tried to bring together the data of the entire study and present in a coherent and integral form the entire process of verbal thinking, as it is drawn in the light of these data.

As with any research that seeks to introduce something new into the solution of the problem under study, the question naturally arises in relation to our work, what it contains new and, therefore, controversial, that needs careful analysis and further verification. We can enumerate in a few words what is new that our work brings into the general teaching of thinking and speech. If we do not dwell on a somewhat new formulation of the problem that we admitted, and in a certain sense, a new research method used by us, the new in our research can be reduced to the following points: 1) the experimental establishment of the fact that the meanings of words develop in childhood , and determination of the main stages in their development; 2) disclosing a peculiar way of development of the child's scientific concepts in comparison with his spontaneous concepts and clarifying the basic laws of this development; 3) disclosure of the psychological nature of written speech as an independent function of speech and its relationship to thinking; 4) experimental disclosure of the psychological nature of inner speech and its relationship to thinking. In this enumeration of those new data that are contained in our study, we had in mind, first of all, what the present research can introduce into the general doctrine of thinking and speech in the sense of new, experimentally established psychological facts, and then those working hypotheses and those theoretical generalizations that inevitably had to arise in the process of interpreting, explaining and comprehending these facts. It is not the right and not the duty of the author, of course, to enter into an assessment of the meaning and truth of these facts and these theories. It is up to the critic and the readers of this book.

This book is the result of nearly a decade of continuous work by the author and his collaborators on the study of thinking and speech. When this work began, we did not yet understand not only its final results, but also many 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 theses, discard and cut off a lot as it turned out to be wrong, rebuild and deepen others, and finally develop and write completely anew. The main line of our research has been steadily developing 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 correct to exclude from this work as a direct delusion.

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 lectures or prefaces to the works of those authors whose criticism they are devoted (chapters II and IV). The rest of the chapters, like the entire book as a whole, are being published for the first time.

We are perfectly aware of all the inevitable imperfection of that first step in a new direction that we tried to take in this work, but we see its justification in the fact that, in our conviction, it moves us forward in the study of thinking and speech in comparison with that state of this problems that have developed in psychology at the time of the beginning of our work, revealing the problem of thinking and speech as a key problem of the entire human psychology, directly leading 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 speaking (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 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 enough already 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 how a full study of the functions and capabilities of the brain will turn out for a person.

Lev Vygotsky, the famous Soviet psychologist, the founder of the cultural-historical theory in psychology, at one time managed to conduct so much research, to make so many fundamental conclusions and discoveries that, it seems, until now, 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 time he managed to do so much for psychology that today, his work is considered one of the fundamental works in the field of modern psychological science.

Before you is a unique collection, where under one cover are the three most famous works of the great scientist - this "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 complex issues of experimental psychology. And despite the fact that these scientific studies were created in the 20s - 30s of the last century, they are relevant to this day. Thinking and Speaking, for example, is considered the classic work of 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 fiction, but a deep research work, therefore, one should not expect an easily perceived text from this work. The text is wholly and completely 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 everyone who has a desire to get acquainted with the fruits of the activities of the great Soviet scientist Lev Semenovich Vygotsky.

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

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

The point here is not a lack of appropriate words and sounds, but a lack of appropriate concepts and generalizations, without which understanding is impossible. As L. N. Tolstoy says, it is almost always incomprehensible not the word itself, 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 the word not only as a unity of thinking and speech, but also as a unity of generalization and communication, communication and thinking.

The word always refers not to one particular 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 primarily a generalization. But generalization, as it is easy to see, is an extraordinary verbal act of thought, reflecting reality in a completely different way than it is reflected in immediate sensations and perceptions.

With an 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 concept is Piaget's position, which states that the egocentric nature of thought is so necessary internally connected with the very psychological nature of the child that it always manifests itself naturally, inevitably, steadily, regardless of childhood experience. “Even experience,” says Piaget, “cannot deceive children’s minds so set up in this way; things are to blame, children never.

“We called the child's thought egocentric,” Piaget says, “meaning that this thought is still autistic in its structure, but that its interests are no longer directed exclusively towards satisfying organic needs or the needs of play, as in pure autism, but are directed also and 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 consists, 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 divided speech that is understandable to others.

Its essence lies in the fact that the meanings of words, which are more dynamic and broader than their meanings, reveal other laws of unification and merging with each other than those that can be observed when uniting and merging verbal meanings. We called that peculiar way of combining words, which we observed in egocentric speech, the influence of meaning, understanding this word both in its original literal meaning (infusion) and in its figurative, now generally accepted meaning. The meanings seem to merge into each other and, as it were, influence each other, so that the previous ones, as it were, are contained in the subsequent or modify it. As for external speech, we observe similar phenomena especially often in artistic speech. A 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 using the example of the names of works of art. In fiction, the name 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 name of any painting. Words such as “Don Quixote” and “Hamlet”, “Eugene Onegin” and “Anna Karenina” express this law of the 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".

Until now, we have called predicativity and reduction of the phasic aspect of speech as two sources from which the contraction of inner speech originates. But both of these phenomena already indicate that in inner speech we generally meet with a completely different relation to 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 to the fore. Inner speech operates primarily with semantics, but not with phonetics of speech. This relative independence of the meaning of a word from its sound side is extremely prominent in inner speech.

We will begin with this second path - comparing inner speech with oral and written speech, especially since we have already traveled 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 very 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 towards 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 lowering of the subject in oral speech, inner speech is also the polar opposite of oral speech, but only in the opposite respect, since absolute and constant predicativity prevails in it. Oral speech, therefore, occupies a middle place between written speech, on the one hand, and internal speech, on the other.

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Foreword

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

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

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

Chapter one
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 and various types of activity of consciousness comes to the fore. The central point of this whole problem is, of course, the question of the relationship between thought and 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 the problem of interfunctional connections and relationships, oddly enough, is for modern psychology almost completely undeveloped and new problem. 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 most obscure. Atomistic and functional analysis, which 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 cognition 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 outside the field of attention of researchers.

That consciousness is a single whole and that individual functions are linked in their activity with each other into an indissoluble 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 a subject of research. Moreover, postulating the functional unity of consciousness, psychology, along with this indisputable assumption, based its research on the tacitly recognized, 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 associated with attention, memory is always in the same way associated with perception, thought - with memory, etc. From this, of course, it followed that interfunctional connections are something that can be taken out of parentheses as a common factor and that can not taken into account when performing research operations on individual and isolated functions remaining inside the brackets. Thanks to all this, the problem of relationships is, as said, the least developed part in all the problems of modern psychology. This could not but have a grave effect on the problem of thinking and speech. If you look at the history of the study of this problem, you can easily see 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 been constantly shifting and shifting to some other point, switching to some or another question.

If we try to formulate in short words 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, fluctuated always and constantly, from the most ancient times to the present day, between the two extreme poles - between identification, the complete fusion of thought and word and between their equally metaphysical, equally absolute, equally complete rupture and separation. Expressing one of these extremes in its pure form or combining both these extremes in their constructions, occupying, as it were, an intermediate point between them, but all the time moving along the axis located between these polar points, various teachings about thinking and speech rotated in the same a vicious circle, a way out of which has not yet been found. 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 identified in its motor part", passes through a single the line of development of one and the same idea, identifying thinking and speech. Naturally, all the teachings adjoining this line, by the very essence of their views on the nature of thinking and speech, always faced the impossibility not only to solve, but even to pose the question of the relation of thought to the word. If thought and word coincide, if it is one and the same, no relationship between them can arise and cannot serve as an object of study, just as it is impossible to imagine that the object of study can be the relation of a thing to itself. He who merges thought and speech closes his own way to raising the question of the relationship between thought and word and makes this problem insoluble in advance. The problem is not resolved, but simply bypassed.

At first glance, it may seem that the doctrine, which is closer to the opposite pole and develops the idea of \u200b\u200bthe independence of thinking and speech, is in a more favorable position in terms of the questions of interest to us. Those who look at speech as an external expression of thought, as its dress, those who, as representatives of the Würzburg school, strive to free thought from everything sensible, including from the word, and imagine the connection between thought and word as purely external communication, really not only pose, but in their own way try to solve the problem of the relationship of thought to the word. Only such a solution, offered by the most diverse psychological directions, always turns out to be unable not only to solve, but also to pose this problem and if it does not bypass it, like the study of the first group, then cuts the knot instead of untie it. Decomposing verbal thinking into its constituent elements, alien to each other - into thought and word - these researchers then try, having studied the pure properties of thinking as such, regardless of speech, and speech as such, regardless of thinking, to imagine a connection between both as a purely external mechanical relationship between two different processes.

As an example, one could point to the attempts of one of the modern authors to study with the help of such a technique the decomposition of verbal thinking into 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 a large role in contributing to a better course of thinking. They help the processes of understanding by the fact that with difficult complex verbal material, inner speech does work that contributes to better capture and unification of what is understood. Further, these same processes benefit in their course as a well-known form of vigorous activity, if inner speech is added to them, which helps to feel, grasp, separate the important from the unimportant during the movement of thought, finally, inner speech plays the role of a facilitating factor in the transition from thought to loud speech.

We have cited this example only to show how, having decomposed verbal thinking as a well-known unified 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 dissimilar ones, within unrelated forms of activity. This more favorable position, in which representatives of the second direction find themselves, lies in the fact that, in any case, it becomes possible for them to pose 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 incorrect in advance and excludes any possibility of a correct solution of the question, 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 applied in the study of this problem, which could ensure its successful resolution.

We think that we must distinguish between two kinds of analysis used in psychology. The study of all kinds of psychological formations necessarily presupposes analysis. However, this analysis can have two fundamentally different forms, of which one, we think, is to blame for all the failures that researchers have suffered when 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 method 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 foreign 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 happens as would happen to any person who, in search of a scientific explanation of any properties of water, for example, why water extinguishes fire or why to water we will apply Archimedes' law, would have resorted 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 have been able to explain the properties inherent in the whole from the properties of these elements. In the same way, psychology, which decomposes speech thinking in search of an explanation of its most essential properties inherent in it as a whole, into separate elements, will then look in vain for these elements of unity inherent in the whole. In the process of analysis, they evaporated, evaporated, and he has no choice but to search for external mechanical interaction between the elements in order to reconstruct with its help in a purely speculative way the properties that were missing in the process of analysis but 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, analysis in the proper sense of the word. Rather, we have the right to regard it as a method of cognition, opposite to analysis and in a sense opposite to it. After all, the chemical formula of water, which applies equally to all its properties, equally applies to all its types in general, to the same extent to the Great Ocean as well as to a raindrop. Therefore, the decomposition of water into elements cannot be a path that can lead us to an explanation of its specific properties. Rather, it is a path of construction to the general than analysis, that is, dismemberment in the proper sense of the word. Similarly, an analysis of this kind, applied to psychological holistic formations, is also not an analysis capable of elucidating to us all the specific diversity, all the specifics of those relationships between word and thought that we meet in everyday observations, observing the development of verbal thinking in childhood. , behind the functioning of verbal thinking in its various forms.

This analysis also, in essence, in psychology turns into its opposite, and instead of leading us to an explanation of the concrete and specific properties of the whole under study, it elevates this whole to a more general directive, to a directive that is capable of explaining to us only something related to to all speech and thinking in all their abstract universality, beyond the ability to comprehend the specific laws that interest us. Moreover, the 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 dissimilar and alien processes. Nowhere have the results of this analysis been more evident than in the field of teaching about thinking and speech. The word itself, which is a living unity of sound and meaning and contains, like a living cell, in its simplest form, all the basic properties inherent in speech thinking as a whole, as a result of such an analysis, was split into two parts, between which the researchers then tried to establish the external mechanical associative link.

Sound and meaning in a word are not related in any way. Both of these elements, combined in a sign, says one of the most important representatives of modern linguistics, live completely apart. It is not surprising, therefore, that only the most sad results for the study of the phonetic and semantic aspects of the language could have come from such a view. A sound cut off from thought would lose all the specific properties that only made it the sound of human speech and set it apart from the rest of the kingdom of sounds existing in nature. Therefore, in the 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 existing in nature, and, therefore, such a study could not explain to us why a sound possessing such and such physical and mental properties is the sound of human speech and what makes it so. In the same way, meaning, divorced from the sound side of the word, would turn into a pure idea, 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 sterility of classical semantics and phonetics is largely due to precisely this 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 proposition that higher, specifically human mental processes (voluntary attention, logical memory, conceptual thinking, etc.) are carried out like labor processes with the help of special instruments 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" (Moscow, 1934) is also presented in the anthology by three separate articles devoted, respectively, to general theoretical issues, the analysis of the genetic origins of thinking and speech, the structural and semantic features of internal speech (according to Ch. I, IV, VII), research egocentric speech (11 and VII chapters) and the problem of the development of concepts in ontogenesis (V chap.). Works: Educational psychology. M., 1926; Studies on the history of behavior. Moscow - Leningrad, 1930 (with A.R. Luria); The 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 Research. 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 RESEARCH METHOD

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 and various types of activity of consciousness comes to the fore. The central point of this whole problem is, of course, the question of the relation of thought to word.

The whole 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, it is also necessary to find out in advance what methods should be applied in the study of this problem, which could ensure its successful solution.

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

The first method of psychological analysis could be called the decomposition of complex psychological wholes into elements. It could be compared to the chemical analysis of water, decomposing it into hydrogen and oxygen. An essential feature of such an analysis is that as a result of it, products are obtained that are alien 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 happens as would happen to any person who, in search of a scientific explanation of any properties of water, for example, why water extinguishes fire, or why the Archimedes law is applicable 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 have been able to explain the properties inherent in the whole from the properties of these elements.

Nowhere have the results of this analysis been more evident than in the field of teaching about thinking and speech. The word itself, which is a living unity of sound and meaning and contains, like a living cell, in its simplest form, all the basic properties inherent in speech thinking as a whole, as a result of such an analysis, was split into two parts, between which the researchers then tried to establish the external mechanical associative link.

It seems to us that the decisive and turning point in the whole doctrine of thinking and speech further is the transition from this analysis to an analysis of a different kind. This last we could designate as analysis, breaking down a complex whole into units. By a unit we mean a product of analysis which, unlike elements, possesses 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 that retains all the basic properties of life inherent in a living organism is a real unit of biological analysis. A psychology wishing to study complex unities needs to understand this. It must find these indecomposable, preserving properties inherent in a given whole as a unity of a unit, in which these properties are presented in the opposite form, and with the help of such an analysis try to resolve the concrete questions that arise before it. What is such a unit that is further indecomposable and which contains the properties inherent in verbal 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 always knew only one of its external, facing us. Meanwhile, in its other, inner side, it is precisely the possibility of solving the problems of interest to us about the relationship between thinking and speech that is hidden, for it is in the meaning of the word that the knot of that unity is tied, which we call verbal thinking.

The word always refers not to one particular 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 primarily 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 immediate sensations and perceptions. The qualitative difference between 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 kingdom of speech as much as it does to the kingdom of thought. A word without meaning is not a word, but an empty sound. A word devoid of meaning no longer belongs to the kingdom of speech. Therefore, meaning can equally be considered both as a speech phenomenon by its nature, and as a phenomenon related to the field of thinking. It is speech and thinking at the same time, because it is a unit of verbal 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 aspect of speech, the method of studying verbal meaning. Studying the development, functioning, structure, 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 clarify for 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, usually also in the analysis, decomposing it into elements, was separated from the intellectual function of speech, and both functions were attributed to speech, as it were, in parallel and independently of each other. Speech, as it were, combined the functions of communication and the functions of thinking, but in what relation these two functions stand to each other, how their development occurs and how both are structurally united with each other - all this remained and remains to this day not studied. Meanwhile, the meaning of a word is as much a unit of these two functions of speech as it is a unit of thinking. 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 extent. In essence, this communication by means of 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 fear. Communication based on reasonable understanding and on the deliberate transmission of thoughts and experiences certainly requires a well-known system of means, the prototype of which was, is and will always remain 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, certainly 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 turning to any example in order to be convinced of this connection between communication and generalization, these two main functions of speech. I want to tell someone that I'm cold.

I can make him understand this with the help of a series of expressive movements, but real understanding and communication will take place only when I am able to generalize and name what I am experiencing, that is, classify the feeling of coldness I am experiencing to a certain class of states, familiar to my interlocutor. This is why the whole thing is unreported to children who do not yet have a known generalization. The point here is not a lack of appropriate words and sounds, but a lack of appropriate concepts and Generalizations, without which understanding is impossible. As Tolstoy says, it is almost always incomprehensible not the word itself, 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 the word not only as a unity of thinking and speech, but also as a unity of generalization and communication, communication and thinking. The fundamental significance of such a formulation of the question for all genetic problems of thinking and speech is absolutely immeasurable. It consists 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 that is unchanged throughout development, but a variable value. The development curves converge and diverge many times, intersect, align in separate periods and run in parallel, even merge in their separate parts, then branch again.

This is true for both phylogeny and ontogeny. 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 both functions not only has different roots, but also goes along different lines throughout the entire animal kingdom.

Studies of the intelligence and speech of humanoid apes, in particular those of Koehler (1921) and Yerkes (1925), are of decisive importance in establishing this paramount importance of the fact.

In Kohler's experiments we have absolutely clear proof that the rudiments of intelligence, 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 successes. The “inventions” of monkeys, which are 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 pre-speech phase.

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. Kohler 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 rudiments 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 could concisely formulate the main conclusion that can be drawn from Kohler's research on the problem of interest to us.

Koehler showed with the accuracy of experimental analysis that it is precisely the presence of an optically actual situation that is decisive for the behavior of chimpanzees. Two positions can be considered certain in any case. First, the intelligent use of speech is an intellectual function, under no circumstances directly determined by the optical structure. Second: in all tasks that involved not optically actual structures, but structures of a different kind (mechanical, for example), chimpanzees passed from an intellectual type of behavior to a pure method of trial and error. Such a simple operation from a human point of view, as a task: to put one box on top of another and maintain balance or remove the ring from a nail, turns out to be almost inaccessible to the "naive statics" and mechanics of chimpanzees. From these two provisions, it follows logically inevitably that the assumption of the possibility for chimpanzees to master the use of human speech is from the psychological point of view highly unlikely.

But the matter would be solved 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 phonetic) human-like. And the most remarkable thing is that chimpanzee speech and intelligence function independently of each other. Kohler writes about the "speech" of chimpanzees, which he observed for many years at the anthropoid station on the island. Tenerife: “Their phonetic manifestations, without any exception, express only their aspirations and subjective states; hence, they are emotional expressions, but never a sign of something "objective" (Koehler, 1921).

Koehler described the extremely diverse forms of "verbal communication" among chimpanzees. In the first place should be put emotionally expressive movements, very bright and rich in chimpanzees (facial expressions and gestures, sound reactions). This is followed by expressive movements of social emotions (gestures for greeting, etc.). But even "their gestures," says Koehler, "like their expressive sounds, never designate or describe anything objective."

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

We may now be interested in establishing three points in connection with the characteristics of the chimpanzee's speech. First, this connection between speech and expressive emotional movements, which becomes especially clear at 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 trait 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 emotional and especially affective responses completely destroy the chimpanzee's intellectual operation.

And third: the emotional side does not exhaust the function of speech in chimpanzees, and this also does not represent the exclusive property of speech of humanoid apes, it also makes their speech related to the language of many other animal species and also constitutes the undoubted genetic root of the corresponding function of human speech. Speech is not only an expressive-emotional reaction, but also a means of psychological contact with others like you. Both the apes observed by Koehler and the chimpanzees of Yerkes display this speech function with perfect certainty. However, this function of connection or contact is in no way connected with intellectual reaction, that is, with the thinking of the animal. Least of all, this reaction can resemble an intentional, meaningful message of something or the same effect. Essentially, this is an instinctive reaction, or, at any rate, something extremely close to it.

We can summarize. 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 humanoid apes. We can summarize the main findings in a nutshell.

1. Thinking and speaking 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 in any way constant throughout the entire course of phylogenetic development.

4. Anthropoids reveal human-like intelligence in some relationships (the rudiments of using tools) and human-like speech in completely others (emotional phonetics of speech and the rudiments of the social function of speech).

5. Anthropoids do not reveal a characteristic human relationship - a close connection between thinking and speech. The one and the other are not directly related in chimpanzees.

6. In the phylogeny of thinking and speech, we can undoubtedly state the pre-speech phase in the development of intelligence 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 about the parallelism of onto- and phylogenesis or about a different, 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 in its development passes the pre-speech stage. Kohler's experiments on chimpanzees were transferred to a child who still does not speak speech, with appropriate modifications. Kohler himself repeatedly involved a child in the comparison experiment. Buhler systematically investigated the child in this regard.

“These were actions,” he says of his experiments, “quite similar to those of a chimpanzee, and therefore this phase of childhood life can be quite aptly called a chimpanzee-like age; in this child, the latter hugged at 10, 11 and 12 months. “At a chimpanzee-like age, a child makes his first inventions, of course, extremely primitive, but in a 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 was at the beginning of a person's formation; maybe, but before him there is also instrumental thinking, i.e. understanding mechanical connections, and inventing mechanical means for mechanical end-uses. "

The preintellectual roots of speech in child development have been established a long time ago. Shouting, 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 predominantly. The latest studies (S. Buhler et al. - the first forms of social behavior of a child and an inventory of his reactions in the first year, and her collaborators Getzer and Tuder-Hart - early reactions of a child to a human voice) have shown that in the first year of a child's life, i.e. .e. it is at the pre-intellectual stage of the development of his speech that we find the rich development of the social function of speech.

The relatively complex and rich social contact of the child leads to an extremely early development of "means of communication." With no doubt, it was possible to establish unambiguous specific reactions to the human voice in a child already in the third week of life (pre-social reactions) and the first social reaction to a human voice in the second month. Likewise, laughter, babbling, showing, gestures in the very first months of a child's life act as means of social contact.

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

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 on separately, intersect, coincide in their development and give rise to a completely new form of behavior, so characteristic of humans.

V. Stern better and earlier than others described this most important event in the psychological development of a child. He showed how a 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 in his life. He discovers that "every thing has its own name" (Stern, 1922).

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

The first is that a child who has had this fracture begins to actively expand his vocabulary, his vocabulary, ask about each new thing: what is it called. The second point consists in an extremely rapid, leaps and bounds increase in the vocabulary arising from the active expansion of the child's vocabulary.

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

Now the situation is becoming fundamentally completely different. The child himself needs a word and actively seeks to master a sign belonging to an object, a sign that serves for naming and communication. If the first stage in the development of children's speech, as Meiman rightly showed, is in its psychological meaning an affective-volitional one, then from this moment on, speech enters the intellectual phase of its development. The child, as it were, discovers the symbolic function of speech.

Here it is important for us to note one fundamentally important point: only at a known, relatively high stage of development of thinking and speech becomes possible "the greatest discovery in the life of a child." In order to "open" speech, one must think.

We can summarize our findings:

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

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

3. Until a certain moment, both development proceeds along different lines independently of one another.

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

We are approaching the formulation of the main thesis of our entire article, a statement that is of the utmost importance, methodological significance for the whole formulation of the problem. This conclusion follows from a comparison of the development of verbal thinking with the development of speech and intellect, as it went in the animal kingdom and in very early childhood along special, separate lines. This comparison shows that one development is not just 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

That new and most essential thing that this research brings into the teaching of thinking and speech is the disclosure of the fact that the meanings of words are developing. The discovery of the change in the meanings of words and their development is our main discovery, which allows us for the first time to finally overcome the postulate of the constancy and immutability of the meaning of a word, which was the basis of all previous teachings about thinking and speech.

The meaning of the word is not constant. It changes as the child develops. It also changes with different ways of functioning of thought. It is a dynamic rather than a static entity. The establishment of the variability of meanings became possible only when the nature of the meaning itself was correctly determined. Its nature is revealed first of all in the generalization, which is contained as the main and central point 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 attitude of thought to the word also changes! In order to understand the dynamics of the relationship between thought and word, it is necessary to introduce into the genetic scheme of change in meanings that we have developed in our main research, 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 its entirety the complex structure of any real thought process and its associated complex course from the first, most vague moment of the birth of thought to its final completion in a verbal formulation. To do this, we must move from the genetic plane to the functional one and outline not the process of development of meanings and changes in their structure, but the process of functioning of meanings in the living course of verbal thinking.

Before proceeding to a schematic description of this process, we, in advance anticipating the results of further presentation, 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 the word is, first of all, not a thing, but a process, this relation is a movement from thought to word and back - from word to thought. This attitude is presented in the light of psychological analysis as a developing 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 a word, but is accomplished in a word. It would therefore be possible to speak of the formation (unity of being and non-being) of thought in a word. Every thought seeks to connect something with something, to establish a relationship between something and something. Every thought has movement, flow, development, in a word, thought performs some function, some work, solves some problem. This flow of thought occurs as an internal movement through a whole series of planes, as the transition of thought into word and words into thought. Therefore, the first task of an analysis that wants to study the relation of thought to word as a movement from thought to word is to study the phases that make up this movement, to distinguish a number of planes through which thought, embodied in a word, passes. Here a lot of 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 homogeneous one. First of all, the presence of one's own movement in the semantic and phasic aspects of speech is revealed from a whole series of facts related to the field of the child's speech development. We will 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 the concatenation of phrases, 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 particular semantic units, the meanings of individual words, dismembering his coherent thought, expressed in a one-word sentence, into a number of separate, interconnected verbal meanings. Thus, if we cover the initial and final moment in the development of the semantic and phasic aspects of speech, one can easily make sure that this development is going in opposite directions. The semantic side of speech proceeds in its development from whole to part, from sentence to word, and the outer side of speech goes from part to whole, from word to sentence.

Another, no less fundamental fact refers to a later era of development. Piaget established that the child earlier masters the complex structure of the relative clause with conjunctions: "because", "in spite of", "since", "although" than the semantic structures corresponding to these syntactic forms. Grammar in the development of a child goes ahead of his logic. A child who completely correctly and adequately uses conjunctions expressing cause-and-effect, time and other dependencies, in his spontaneous speech and in the corresponding 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 aspects of the word in mastering complex syntactic structures do not coincide in development.

Less directly, but even more vividly, appears the discrepancy between the semantic and phasic aspects of speech in the functioning of developed thought.

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

This discrepancy between the grammatical and psychological subject and predicate can be explained by the following example. Let's take the phrase: “The clock fell”, in which “the clock” is the subject, “fell” 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 pay attention to the fact that the clock is standing and ask how it happened. They answer me: "The clock has fallen." In this case, in my mind, there used to be an idea of \u200b\u200bthe clock, the clock is in this case a psychological subject, what is being said. The second was the idea that they fell. "Upali" is in this case a 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 desk, I hear the noise of a falling object and ask what fell. They answer me with the same phrase: "The clock has fallen." In this case, the mind used to have the idea of \u200b\u200bthe fallen. “Fell” is what is said in this phrase, that is, the psychological subject. What is said about this subject; that the second that arises in consciousness is the idea - the clock, which in this case will be a psychological predicate. In essence, this thought could be expressed as follows: what has fallen is a clock. In this case, the psychological and grammatical predicate would coincide, but in our case they do not coincide. Analysis shows that in a complex phrase, any member of the sentence can become a psychological predicate. In this case, it bears on itself a logical stress, the semantic function of which lies precisely in the selection of a psychological predicate.

If we try to summarize 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 a not once and for all fixed, immovable relationship between the semantic and sound sides speech, but movement, the transition from the syntax of meanings to the 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 even deeper into the inner side of speech. The semantic plane of speech is only the initial of all its internal planes. Behind it, 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 clarifying the relationship between thought and word in all their real complexity.

The objectives of our assumption that egocentric speech is an early form of inner speech, is trustworthy, then this solves the question of the method of researching inner speech. The study of the egocentric speech of the child is in this case the key to the study of the psychological nature of inner speech.

We can now move on to a succinct description of the third of our outlined plans of 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 egocentric speech of a child, we noticed one essential feature that reveals an undoubted dynamic tendency to increase with the development of egocentric speech. This feature lies in the apparent fragmentary, fragmented, contracted 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 the telegraph style, but a completely peculiar tendency to shorten a phrase and a sentence in the direction of preserving the predicate and related to it parts of the sentence due to the omission of 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 analogous situation is created in a situation where the subject of the expressed judgment is known in advance by the interlocutors. Imagine that several people are waiting at the tram stop for tram “B” to travel in a certain direction. Never any of these people, noticing an approaching tram, will not say in unfolded form: "Tram B, which we expect, in order to go there, is going", but the statement will always be reduced to one predicate: "There is "Or" B. "(See the article by LS Vygotsky" On the nature of egocentric speech "in this anthology.)

We find vivid examples of such abbreviations of external speech and its reduction to one predicate in the novels of Tolstoy, who more than once returned to the psychology of understanding. “No one heard what he (the dying Nikolai Levin) said, only Kitty understood. She understood because she was not ceasing to follow the thought of what he needed. " We could say that in her thoughts, following the thought of the dying man, there was the subject to which his word, which no one understood, referred to. But perhaps the most remarkable example is Kitty and Levin's explanation by means of the initial letters of words. "I have long wanted to ask you one thing." - "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 answered: it cannot be, whether it meant never or then. " There was no chance that she could understand this difficult phrase. “I get it,” she said, blushing. “What is this word? - he said, pointing to the "N", which meant the word never. “This word means never,” she said, “but it’s not true.” He quickly erased what he had written, handed her the chalk and stood up. She wrote: “T, I, N, M, I, O.” He suddenly beamed: he understood. It meant: “Then I could not answer otherwise.” - She wrote the initial letters: “H, V, M, 3, I, P, B, 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 to forgive. I never stopped loving you. ”“ I understand, ”she said in a whisper. He sat down and wrote a long phrase. She understood everything and, without asking him if it was so, took the chalk and immediately answered. For a long time he could not understand what she had written, and often looked into her eyes. He was eclipsed by He could not substitute the words which she understood, but in her lovely eyes shining with happiness he understood everything he needed to know. And he wrote three letters. But he had not finished writing yet, and she was already reading for finish it with his hand 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 come tomorrow morning ”(Anna Karenina, part 4, ch. XIII).

This example is of absolutely exceptional psychological significance because, like the entire episode of Levin and Kitty's declaration of love, Tolstoy borrowed it from his biography. It was in this way that he himself declared his love to S.A. Beers, to his future wife. With the same thoughts of the interlocutors, with the same orientation of their consciousness, the role of speech stimuli 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 using only abbreviated speech from a half-word is more the rule than the exception.

Having studied the phenomenon of abbreviated speech in external speech using 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 only 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. Let us recall again that in oral speech, contractions occur when the subject of the expressed judgment is known in advance by both interlocutors. But this state of affairs is an absolute and constant 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 notes that we ourselves easily believe at our word and that therefore the need for evidence and the ability to substantiate our 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 ourselves are especially easily understood at a glance, at a hint. Alone with ourselves, we never need to resort to detailed formulations. Here only the predicate is always necessary and sufficient. The subject always remains in the mind, just as a schoolchild leaves in his mind, when adding up, the remainder of the tens.

Moreover, in our inner speech, we always boldly speak our thought, not 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 contraction of speech. But this commonality of apperception when communicating with oneself is complete, complete and absolute, therefore in inner speech it is a law that laconic and clear, almost without words, the communication of the most complex thoughts, which Tolstoy speaks of as a rare exception in oral speech, possible only then, when there is a deeply intimate inner closeness between the speakers. In inner speech, we never need to name what we are talking about, i.e. subject. This leads to the dominance of pure predicativity in inner speech.

But the predicative nature of internal speech does not yet exhaust the entire complex of phenomena that finds its external summary expression in the contraction of internal speech in comparison with oral speech. We should also mention the reduction of phonetic moments of speech, which we have already encountered, and in some cases of contraction of oral speech. The explanation of Kitty and Levin allowed us to conclude that with the same orientation of consciousness, the role of speech stimuli is reduced to a minimum (initial letters), and understanding occurs unmistakably. But this minimization of the role of speech stimuli is again brought to the limit and is observed in an almost absolute form in inner speech, for the same direction of consciousness here reaches its fullness.

Inner speech is, in the precise sense, speech almost without words. We must take a closer look at the third source of the abbreviation we are interested in. We find this third source in a completely peculiar semantic structure of inner speech. As the study shows, the syntax of meanings and the entire structure of the semantic side of speech are no less original than the syntax of words and its sound structure.

In our research, we could establish three main features that are internally related to each other and form the originality of internal speech. The first of them consists in 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 Polan showed, is the sum total of all psychological facts that arise in our minds due to the word. The meaning of a word thus turns out to be always a dynamic, fluid, complex formation, which has several zones of different stability. Meaning is only one of the zones of the meaning that a word acquires in the context of any speech, and, moreover, the zone that is the most stable, unified and accurate. The real meaning of the word is not constant. In one operation, a word appears with one meaning, in another it acquires a different meaning. This dynamism of meaning leads us to Polan's problem, to the question of the relationship between meaning and meaning. The meaning of a word is nothing more than a potency that is realized in living speech, in which this meaning is only a stone in the building of meaning.

We will clarify this difference between the meaning and the meaning of the word using the example of the final word of the Krylov fable "Dragonfly and the Ant". The word "dance", which ends this fable, has a very definite constant 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 "be merry" and "perish". This enrichment of the word with meaning, which it takes into itself from the entire context, constitutes the basic law of the dynamics of meanings. The word absorbs, absorbs from the entire context into which it is woven, intellectual and affective content and begins to mean more and less than is contained in its meaning: more - because the range 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 a 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. A word acquires its meaning only in a 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 all the author's work. The actual meaning of each word is ultimately determined by all the wealth of moments existing in the mind that relate to what is expressed by the given word.

But the main merit of Polan lies in the fact that he analyzed the relationship between meaning and the word and was able to show that there is a much more independent relationship between meaning and the word than between meaning and the word. Words can be disassociated from the meaning expressed in them. It has long been known that words can change their meaning. Relatively recently, it was noticed that one should also study how meanings change words, or rather, how concepts change their names. Polan gives many examples of how words remain when meaning evaporates. He analyzes stereotypical everyday phrases (for example: "how are you doing"), lies and other manifestations of the independence of words from meaning. The meaning can be separated from the word expressing it, just as it can easily be fixed in any other word. Similarly, he says, how the meaning of a word is associated with the whole word as a whole, but not with each of its sounds, so the meaning of a phrase is associated 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 a word to its more fluid zones, to its meaning in general. In inner speech, on the contrary, the predominance of meaning over meaning, which we observe in oral speech in some cases as a more or less weakly expressed tendency, is brought to its limit and presented in absolute form. Here the prevalence of the phrase over the word, 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 relate to the process of combining words, combining and merging them. Of these, the first can be approximated with agglutination, which is observed in some languages \u200b\u200bas the main phenomenon, and in others - as a more or less rare way of combining words. In 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 appear in the functional meaning of a single word. In other languages, this fusion of words is seen as a permanent mechanism.

Two points are remarkable in this: firstly, the fact that the individual words that make up a complex word often undergo contractions from the sound side, so that part of the word is included in the complex word, and secondly, that the complex word that arises in this way a word expressing a very complex concept appears from the functional and structural side as a single word, and not as a union of independent words. In American languages, Wundt says, a compound word is treated in exactly the same way as a simple one, and in the same way it is inflected and conjugated. We observed something similar in egocentric speech in a child. As this form of speech approaches inner speech, the child in his utterances more and more often discovers, parallel to the fall in the coefficient of egocentric speech, a tendency towards asyntactic cohesion 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, which are more dynamic and broader than their meanings, reveal other laws of unification and merging with each other than those that can be observed when uniting and merging verbal meanings. The meanings seem to merge into each other and, as it were, influence each other, so that the previous ones, as it were, are contained in the subsequent or modify it. We see this especially often in artistic speech. A 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 with the example of the names of works of art. Words like Don Quixote and Hamlet, Eugene Onegin and Anna Karenina express this law of the influence of meaning in its purest form. Here, one word contains the semantic content of an entire work. A particularly clear example of this law is the title of Gogol's poem "Dead Souls". The original meaning of this word means deceased serfs, who have not yet been excluded from the revision 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 absorb a completely new, immeasurably richer meaning and already mean something completely different from their original meaning. Dead souls are not serfs who have died and are considered alive, but all the heroes of the poem who live, but are spiritually dead.

L. S. VYGOTSKY

THINKING AND SPEAKING

Fifth edition, revised

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

Editor: G.N. Shelogurova Artist: I.E.Smirnova Computer set: N.E. Eremin

The fifth edition of the main book of LSVygotsky (1896-1934) ", which brought him posthumous world fame, reproduces the first (1934) edition. The bills made in the second (1956) and third (1982) editions have been restored, some typos and inaccuracies in the fourth (1996) editions have been corrected, and the original unity of the author's concept and style has been restored.

ISBN 5-87604-097-5

All-Russian

state library

foreign literature

them. M I. Rudomino

Foreword 5

Chapter two The problem of speech and thinking of a child in learning to live 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 Concept Development 109

Chapter six

Research into the development of scientific concepts in childhood 171

Chapter Seven Thought and Word 275

Literature 337

textual commentary 339

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

Author Index 348
FOREWORD

The present work is a psychological study of one of the most difficult, confusing and complex questions of experimental psychology - the question of thinking and speech. As far as we know, a systematic experimental development of this problem has not yet been undertaken by any of the researchers. The solution of the problem before us, at least with a primary approximation, could be carried out only through a number of special 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 the large accumulated factual material in psychology, by comparison, comparison of the data of phylogenesis and ontogenesis, outline the starting points of the day for solving our problem and to develop the initial prerequisites for the independent acquisition of 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 to critical analysis the most ideologically powerful of modern theories of thinking and speech in order to push off from them, to understand their own ways searches, to draw up preliminary working hypotheses and oppose from the very beginning the theoretical path of our research to the path that led to the construction of the 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. Comparison of the data from the psychology of speech and linguistics, the experimental study of concepts and the psychological theory of learning turned out to be inevitable. All these incidentally encountered questions, it seemed to us, is most convenient to resolve 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 the working hypothesis about learning and development developed by us elsewhere and on other material. And, finally, theoretical generalization, bringing together all experimental data turned out to be the last point of application of theoretical analysis to our ) "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 individual segments of our work was so subordinated to a common goal, so connected with the previous and subsequent segment, that all the work as a whole - we we dare to hope for this - it is essentially a single, albeit 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 research and this 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. Stzrn, in order from the very beginning to oppose our problem statement and research method 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 which final point it should lead us. Further, to our two experimental studies of the development of concepts and the basic forms of verbal thinking, we had to precede 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 verbal thinking. The central part of the entire book is formed by two experimental studies, one of which is devoted to clarifying the main path of development of the meanings of words in childhood, and the other to a comparative study of the development of scientific and spontaneous concepts of the child. Finally, in the final chapter, we tried to bring together the data of the entire study and present in a coherent and integral form the entire process of verbal thinking, as it is drawn in the light of these data.

As with any research that seeks to introduce something new into the solution of the problem under study, the question naturally arises in relation to our work, what is new and, therefore, controversial, that needs careful analysis and further verification. We can enumerate in a few words what is new that our work brings into the general teaching of thinking and speech. If we do not dwell on a somewhat new formulation of the problem that we admitted, and in a certain sense, a new research method used by us, the new in our research can be reduced to the following points: 1) the experimental establishment of the fact that the meanings of words develop in childhood , and determination of the main stages in their development; 2) the disclosure of a peculiar way of development of the child's scientific concepts in comparison with his spontaneous concepts and the clarification of 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 relationship to thinking; 4) experimental disclosure of the psychological nature of inner speech and its relationship to thinking. In this enumeration of those new data that are contained in our study, we had in mind, first of all, what the present research can introduce into the general doctrine of thinking and speech in the sense of new, experimentally established psychological facts, and then those working hypotheses and those theoretical generalizations that inevitably had to arise in the process of interpreting, explaining and understanding these facts. It is not the right and not the duty of the author, of course, to enter into an assessment of the meaning and truth of these facts and these theories. It is up to the critic and the readers of this book.

This book is the result of nearly a decade of continuous work by the author and his collaborators on the study of thinking and speech. When this work began, we were not yet clear not only its final results, but also many 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 theses, discard and cut off a lot as it turned out to be wrong, 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 this work as a direct error.

Chapter one

PROBLEM and RESEARCH METHOD

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

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 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 cognition 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 outside the field of attention of researchers.

That consciousness is a single whole and that individual functions are connected in their activity with each other into an indissoluble 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, 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 cross-functional connections are something that can be taken out of the brackets as a common factor

problem and research method 9

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

This could not but have a grave effect on the problem of thinking and speech. If you look at the history of the study of this problem, you can easily see 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 been constantly shifting and shifting to some other point, switching to some or another question.

If we try to formulate in brief words 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, fluctuated always and constantly - from the most ancient times to the present day - between the two extreme poles - between identification, the complete fusion of thought and word and between their equally metaphysical, equally absolute, equally complete rupture and separation. Expressing one of these extremes in its pure form or combining both these extremes in their constructions, occupying, as it were, an intermediate point between them, but all the time moving along the axis located between these polar points, various teachings about thinking and speech rotated in the same a vicious circle, a way out of which has not yet been found. 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 identified in its motor part", passes through a single the line of development of one and the same idea, identifying thinking and speech. Naturally, all the teachings adjoining this line, by the very essence of their views on the nature of thinking and speech, always faced the impossibility not only to solve, but even to pose the question of the relation of thought to the word. If thought and word coincide, if it is one and the same, no relationship between them can arise and cannot serve as an object of study, just as it is impossible to imagine that the object of study can be the relation of a thing to itself. He who merges thought and speech closes his own way to raising the question of the relationship between thought and word and makes this problem insoluble in advance. The problem is not resolved, but simply bypassed.

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Foreword

Chapter one Problem and research method

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L.S. Vygotsky: THINKING AND SPEECH

Introduction

1. PROBLEM AND RESEARCH METHOD

vygotsky speech thinking mental

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, certainly requires generalization.

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

2. GENETIC ROOTS OF THINKING AND SPEECH

Studies of the intelligence and speech of humanoid apes, in particular those of Koehler (1921) and Yerkes (1925), are of decisive importance in establishing this paramount importance of the fact.

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 could concisely formulate the main conclusion that can be drawn from Kohler's research on the problem of interest to us.

1. Thinking and speaking 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 in any way constant throughout the entire course of phylogenetic development.

4. Anthropoids reveal human-like intelligence in some relationships (the rudiments of using tools) and human-like speech in completely others (emotional phonetics of speech and the rudiments of the social function of speech).

5. Anthropoids do not reveal a characteristic human relationship - a close connection between thinking and speech. The one and the other are not directly related in chimpanzees.

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

The preintellectual roots of speech in child development have been established a long time ago. Shouting, 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.

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

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

Here it is important for us to note one fundamentally important point: only at a known, relatively high stage of development of thinking and speech becomes possible "the greatest discovery in the life of a child." In order to "open" speech, one must think.

We can summarize our findings:

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

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

3. Until a certain moment, both development proceeds along different lines independently of one another.

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

3. THOUGHT AND WORD

Less directly, but even more vividly, appears the discrepancy between the semantic and phasic aspects of speech in the functioning of developed thought.

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

We can now move on to a succinct description of the third of our outlined plans of movement from thought to word - the plane of inner speech.

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.

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THINKING AND SPEAKING

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Chapter one
Problem and research method