Thought and Language - Revised Edition
by Lev S. Vygotsky

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Book Reviews of Thought and Language - Revised Edition

Book Review: A landmark...
Summary: 5 Stars

This book gives a brief overview of Vygotsky's life and career. Then it launches into Vygotsky's original manuscript which begins with a critique of some of the central themes of that time; oddly enough those themes are still being pursued by psychologists today. Vygotsky's critique is very interesting and demonstrates a very broad range of understanding of psychological, physical and philosophical knowledge throughout the section.

The second part of the book then advances Vygotsky's theories of thought and language development. And that is the crux of Vygotsky's theory: thought and language each develop in a manner that one might characterize as partially self-catalyzing in addition to behaving as one. Vygotsky also advanced some important ideas about child potential with his "zone of proximal development".

Vygotsky pointed out that development hinges on the social structure surrounding the child and is not similar to the idea of some computer operating system simply requiring some type of "load" instruction. That is, Vygotsky's work seems to dispel some of the hot air surrounding Chomsky's ideas about "deep grammar" structures existing and just waiting for the instructions to start working; instead thought and language develop, sometimes separately and sometimes requiring each other to act as catalysts.

Given recent advances in primate language studies, complex adaptive systems and Wittgenstein's contributions to the philosophy of systems I believe Vygotsky's work becomes all the more important and relevant. We are only just starting to grasp the importance of thinking about development in a systems mode as opposed to the old way of reductionism (and the weird dogmatic offshoot of this: strict materialism).

This is a must-read for anyone interested in learning about how we develop. Other interesting ideas and overviews can be found in Bogdan's "Minding Minds" and Faber's "Objectivity and Human Perception". Then there is the burgeoning field of complexity where a good general overview can be found in "Signs of Life". And for those who really want to get deeper, read some of the recent work done in EEG and meditation to help kids with ADD and other problems.

Summary of Thought and Language - Revised Edition

Since it was introduced to the English-speaking world in 1962, Lev Vygotsky's highly original exploration of human mental development has become recognized as a classic foundational work of cognitive science. Vygotsky analyzes the relationship between words and consciousness, arguing that speech is social in its origins and that only as children develop does it become internalized verbal thought.Now Alex Kozulin has created a new edition of the original MIT Press translation by Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar that restores the work's complete text and adds materials that will help readers better understand Vygotsky's meaning and intentions. Kozulin has also contributed an introductory essay that offers new insight into the author's life, intellectual milieu, and research methods.Lev S. Vygotsky (1896-1934) studied at Moscow University and acquired in his brief lifespan a nearly encyclopedic knowledge of the social sciences, psychology, philosophy, linguistics, literature, and the arts. He began his systematic work in psychology at the age of 28, and within a few years formulated his theory of the development of specifically human higher mental functions. He died of tuberculosis ten years later, and Thought and Language was published posthumously in 1934.Alex Kozulin studied at the Moscow Institute of Medicine and the Moscow Institute of Psychology, where he began his investigation of Vygotsky and the history of Soviet psychology. He emigrated in 1979 and is now Associate Professor of Psychiatry (Psychology) at Boston University. He is the author of Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology (MIT Press 1984).

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