Thinking and speech can exist separately from each other. So, a small child can have both speech (chatter) without thinking, and visual-effective thinking without relying on speech. Once upon a time, adults also chat without turning on their heads, and scientists solve some of the most difficult problems with the help of thinking first of all, only later shaping the already found solution into speech - everything happens ... Nevertheless, in its developed form in adults and thinking people, speech is meaningful, and thinking relies primarily on speech. is born with the help of language, develops with the help of language and is expressed in speech. Thinking and speech mutually support each other.
Thanks to the formulation and consolidation in the word, the thought does not disappear and does not fade away, having barely had time to arise. It is firmly fixed in the speech formulation - oral or even written. Therefore, there is always the opportunity to return to this thought again, to think it over even more deeply, to check it and, in the course of reasoning, to correlate it with other thoughts.
However, men also use telling their thoughts aloud to someone to clarify their thoughts and wording. Speech helps self-understanding: understanding the expressed meaning. By formulating his thoughts aloud, for others, a person thereby formulates them for himself. Such a formulation, consolidation, fixation of thought in words means the division of thought, helps to keep attention on various moments and parts of this thought and contributes to a deeper understanding. Thanks to this, a detailed, consistent, systematic reasoning becomes possible, i.e. a clear and correct comparison with each other of all the main thoughts that arise in the process of thinking.
In addition, speech helps build correct thinking and problem solving. Speaking (at first speaking out loud, then to yourself, in inner speech) is a common technique for helping thinking, for its correct alignment. Some schoolchildren and even adults often experience difficulties in the process of solving a problem until they formulate their own aloud. Clear pronunciation, formulating aloud definitions, rules and steps to be taken makes it easier to solve problems.
Speech helps and thought. To remember a thought that has come, it is very useful to say it out loud. When you say it and hear it from yourself, it will be easier to remember its essence and basic formulations.
The word is a means of communication, therefore it is part of speech. Being devoid of meaning, the word no longer refers to either thought or speech; acquiring its meaning, it immediately becomes an organic part of both. It is in the meaning of the word, says L. S. Vygotsky, that the knot of that unity, which is called verbal thinking, is tied.
However, thinking and speech have different genetic roots. Initially, they performed different functions and developed separately. The original function of speech was the communicative function. Speech itself as a means of communication arose due to the need to separate and coordinate the actions of people in the process of joint work. At the same time, in verbal communication, the content conveyed by speech belongs to a certain class of phenomena and, consequently, already by this presupposes their generalized reflection, i.e., the fact of thinking. At the same time, such a method of communication as a pointing gesture does not carry any generalization in itself and therefore does not apply to thought.
In turn, there are types of thinking that are not associated with speech, for example, visual-effective, or practical, thinking in animals. In small children and in higher animals, peculiar means of communication are found that are not connected with thinking. These are expressive movements, gestures, facial expressions that reflect the internal states of a living being, but are not a sign or generalization. In the phylogenesis of thinking and speech, a pre-speech phase in the development of thinking and a pre-intellectual phase in the development of speech clearly emerge.
L. S. Vygotsky believed that at the age of about 2 years, that is, in that. which J. Piaget designated as the beginning of the stage of preoperative thinking following the sensorimotor intellect, a critical, turning point occurs in the relationship between thinking and speech: speech begins to become intellectualized, and thinking becomes verbal.
Signs of the onset of this turning point in the development of both functions are the rapid and active expansion of the child's vocabulary(he begins to often ask adults the question: what is it called?) and an equally rapid, spasmodic increase in the communicative vocabulary. The child, as it were, for the first time discovers for himself the symbolic function of speech and discovers an understanding that the word as a means of communication is actually a generalization, and uses it both for communication and for solving problems. With the same word, he begins to name different objects, and this is direct evidence that the child is assimilating concepts. Solving any intellectual problems, he begins to reason aloud, and this, in turn, is a sign that he already uses speech as a means of thinking, and not just communication. The meaning of the word as such becomes practically accessible to the child.
But these facts are signs of only the beginning of a real assimilation of concepts and their use in the process of thinking and in speech. Further, this process, deepening, continues for quite a long time, up to adolescence. The real assimilation of scientific concepts by a child occurs relatively late, approximately by the time by which J. Piaget has left the stage of formal operations, that is, by the average age from 11-12 to 14-15 years. Consequently, the entire period of development of conceptual thinking takes about 10 years in a person's life. All these years of intensive mental work and study sessions are spent on mastering by the child the most important category for the development of both the intellect and all other mental functions and the personality as a whole, the category of the concept.
“The first word of a child is like a whole phrase in its meaning. What an adult would express in a detailed sentence, the child conveys in one word. In the development of the semantic (semantic) side of speech, the child begins with a whole sentence and only then proceeds to the use of frequent semantic units, as well as separate words. At the initial and final moments, the development of the semantic and physical (sounding) aspects of speech goes in different, as it were, opposite ways. The semantic side of speech is developed from the whole to the part, while its physical side develops from the part to the whole, from the word to the sentence.
Grammar in the development of a child's speech is somewhat ahead of logic. He masters the unions “because”, “despite”, “because”, “although” in speech earlier than the semantic statements corresponding to them. This means, wrote L. S. Vygotsky, that the movement of semantics and the sound of a word in mastering complex syntactic structures do not coincide in development. semantic thinking speech statement
This discrepancy appears even more clearly in the functioning of a developed thought: the grammatical and logical content of a sentence is by no means always identical. Even at the highest level of development of thinking and speech, when the child masters concepts, only a partial merger occurs.
The main stages in the development of meanings, functional equivalents of concepts: syncretes, complexes, pseudo-concepts, potential concept
SPEECH AS A TOOL OF THINKING
The main function of speech in humans, however, is that it is an instrument of thinking. A word as a concept contains much more information than a simple combination of sounds can carry.
The fact that human thinking is inextricably linked with speech is first of all proved by psychophysiological studies of the participation of the vocal apparatus in solving mental problems. An electromyographic study of the work of the vocal apparatus in connection with mental activity showed that in the most difficult and intense moments of thinking, a person has increased activity of the vocal cords. This activity appears in two forms: phasic and tonic. The first is recorded in the form of high-amplitude and irregular flashes speech motor potentials, and the second - in the form of a gradual increase in the amplitude of the electromyogram.It has been experimentally proven that the phasic form of speech motor potentials is associated with the hidden pronunciation of words to oneself, while the tonic form is associated with a general increase in speech motor activity,
It turned out that all types of human thinking, associated with the need to use more or less detailed reasoning, are accompanied by an increase in motor speech impulses, and habitual and repeated mental actions are accompanied by its reduction. There is, apparently, some optimal level of variation in the intensity of human speech-motor reactions, at which mental operations are performed most successfully, as quickly and accurately as possible.
Correlation of thinking and speech
During the whole history psychological research thinking and speech, the problem of the connection between them attracted increased attention. Its proposed solutions were very different - from the complete separation of speech and thinking and considering them as completely independent functions from each other to their equally unambiguous and unconditional connection, up to absolute identification.
Many modern scientists adhere to a compromise point of view, believing that, although thinking and speech are inextricably linked, they are, both in genesis and in functioning, relatively independent realities. The main question that is now being discussed in connection with this problem is the question of the nature of the real connection between thinking and speech, of their genetic roots and the transformations that they undergo in the process of their separate and joint development.
L. S. Vygotsky made a significant contribution to the solution of this problem. The word, he wrote, is just as relevant to speech as it is to thought. It is a living cell containing simple form the main properties inherent in speech thinking in general. A word is not a label affixed as an individual name to a separate object. It always characterizes the object or phenomenon denoted by it in a generalized way and, therefore, acts as an act of thinking.
But the word is also a means of communication, so it is part of speech. Being devoid of meaning, the word no longer refers to either thought or speech; acquiring its meaning, it immediately becomes an organic part of both. It is in the meaning of the word, says L. S. Vygotsky, that the knot of that unity, which is called verbal thinking, is tied.
However, thinking and speech have different genetic roots. Initially, they performed different functions and developed separately. The original function of speech was the communicative function. Speech itself as a means of communication arose due to the need to separate and coordinate the actions of people in the process of joint work. At the same time, in verbal communication, the content conveyed by speech belongs to a certain class of phenomena and, consequently, already by this presupposes their generalized reflection, i.e., the fact of thinking. At the same time, for example, such a method of communication as a pointing gesture does not carry any generalization in itself and therefore does not apply to thought.
In turn, there are types of thinking that are not associated with speech, for example, visual-effective, or practical, thinking in animals. In small children and in higher animals, peculiar means of communication are found that are not connected with thinking. These are expressive movements, gestures, facial expressions that reflect the internal states of a living being, but are not a sign or generalization. In the phylogenesis of thinking and speech, a pre-speech phase in the development of intellect and a pre-intellectual phase in the development of speech clearly emerge.
L. S. Vygotsky believed that at the age of about 2 years, i.e., at the age that J. Piaget designated as the beginning of the stage of preoperative thinking following sensorimotor intelligence, a critical turning point occurs in the relationship between thinking and speech: speech begins become intellectualized, and thinking - verbal.
Signs of the onset of this turning point in the development of both functions are the rapid and active expansion of the child's vocabulary (he often begins to ask adults the question: what is it called?) And the equally rapid, spasmodic increase in the communicative vocabulary. The child, as it were, for the first time discovers for himself the symbolic function of speech and discovers an understanding that the word as a means of communication is actually a generalization, and uses it both for communication and for solving problems. With the same word, he begins to name different objects, and this is direct evidence that the child is assimilating concepts. Solving any intellectual problems, he begins to reason aloud, and this, in turn, is a sign that he already uses speech as a means of thinking, and not just communication. The meaning of the word as such becomes practically accessible to the child.
But these facts are signs of only the beginning of a real assimilation of concepts and their use in the process of thinking and in speech. Further, this process, deepening, continues for quite a long time, up to adolescence. The real assimilation of scientific concepts by a child occurs relative. but late, approximately by the time to which Piaget attributed the j stage of formal operations, i.e., to the average age from II-12 to] 14-15 years. Consequently, the entire period of development of conceptual thinking takes about 10 years in a person's life. All these years of intensive mental work and study sessions are spent on the assimilation by the child of the most important category for the development of both the intellect and all other mental functions and the personality as a whole - the concept.
The first word of the child in its meaning is like a whole phrase. What an adult would express in a detailed sentence, the child conveys in one word. In the development of the semantic (semantic) side of speech, the child begins with a whole sentence and only then proceeds to the use of frequent semantic units, such as individual words. At the initial and final moments, the development of the semantic and physical (sounding) aspects of speech proceeds in different, as it were, opposite ways. The semantic side of speech is developed from the whole to the part, while its physical side develops from the part to the whole, from the word to the sentence.
Grammar in the development of a child's speech is somewhat ahead of logic. In speech, he masters the unions "because", "despite", "because", "although" earlier than the semantic statements corresponding to them. This means, wrote L. S. Vygotsky, that the movement of semantics and the sound of a word in mastering complex syntactic structures do not coincide in development.
This discrepancy appears even more clearly in the functioning of a developed thought: the grammatical and logical content of a sentence is by no means always identical. Even at the highest level of development of thinking and speech, when the child masters concepts, only a partial merger occurs.
Inner speech is very important for understanding the relationship of thought to word. It, unlike external speech, has a special syntax, is characterized by fragmentation, fragmentation, and abbreviation. The transformation of external speech into internal occurs according to a certain law: in it, first of all, the subject is reduced and the predicate remains with the parts of the sentence related to it.
The main syntactic characteristic of inner speech is predicativity. Its examples are found in the dialogues of people who know each other well, who "without words" understand what is being discussed in their "conversation". For such people, for example, there is no need to sometimes exchange words at all, to name the subject of conversation, to indicate the subject in each sentence or phrase they utter: in most cases they already know it well. A person, thinking in an internal dialogue, which is probably carried out through internal speech, communicates with himself, as it were. Naturally, for himself, he does not even need to designate the subject of conversation.
The basic law of the development of the meanings of the words used by the child in communication lies in their enrichment with vital individual meaning. Functioning and developing in practical thinking and speech, the word, as it were, absorbs all new meanings. As a result of such an operation, the meaning of the used word is enriched with a variety of cognitive, emotional and other associations. In inner speech, and this is its main distinguishing feature— the predominance of meaning over meaning has been brought to highest point. We can say that inner speech, unlike outer speech, has a folded predicative form and a detailed, deep semantic content.
Another feature of the semantics of inner speech is agglutination, i.e., a kind of merging of words into one with their significant reduction. The resulting word, as it were, is enriched with a double or even triple meaning, taken separately from each of the two or three words combined in it. So, in the limit, one can reach a word that absorbs the meaning of the whole statement, and it becomes, as L. S. Vygotsky said, "a concentrated clot of meaning." In order to completely translate this meaning into the plane of external speech, one would probably have to use more than one sentence. Inner speech, apparently, consists of words of this kind, completely different in structure and use from those words that we use in our written and oral speech. Such speech, by virtue of its named features, can be considered as an internal plane of speech thinking. Inner speech is the process of thinking with "pure meanings".
A. N. Sokolov showed that in the process of thinking, inner speech is an active articulatory, unconscious process, the unhindered course of which is very important for the implementation of those psychological functions in which inner speech takes part. "As a result of his experiments with adults, where in the process When they were asked to read well-learned verses aloud or to pronounce the same simple syllables (for example, “ba-ba” or “la-la”), it was found that both the perception of texts and the solution of mental tasks are seriously hampered in the absence of inner speech.In the perception of texts in this case, only individual words were remembered, and their meaning was not captured.This means that thinking during reading is present and necessarily involves the internal work of the articulatory apparatus, hidden from consciousness, translating the perceived meanings into meanings, of which, in fact, inner speech consists.
Even more revealing than with adult subjects were similar experiments conducted with younger students. For them, even a simple mechanical delay in articulation in the process of mental work (clamping the tongue with their teeth) caused serious difficulties in reading and understanding the text and led to gross errors in writing.
A written text is the most detailed speech statement, involving a very long and difficult path of mental work to translate meaning into meaning. In practice, this translation, as A. N. Sokolov showed, is also carried out with the help of an active process hidden from conscious control, connected with the work of the articulatory apparatus.
An intermediate position between external and internal speech is occupied by egocentric speech. This is a speech directed not at a communication partner, but at oneself, not calculated and not implying any feedback from another person who is present at the moment and who is next to the speaker. This speech is especially noticeable in middle-aged children. preschool age when they play and as if talking to themselves during the game.
Elements of this speech can also be found in an adult who, while solving a complex intellectual problem, thinking aloud, utters some phrases in the process of work that are understandable only to himself, apparently addressed to another, but not requiring an obligatory answer on his part. Egocentric speech is a speech-thinking that serves not so much communication as thinking itself. It acts as external in form and internal in its psychological function. Having its initial roots in external dialogical speech, it eventually develops into internal speech. If difficulties arise in a person's activity, the activity of his egocentric speech increases.
With the transition of external speech into internal egocentric speech gradually disappears. Vygotsky believed that the decrease in its external manifestations should be viewed as an increasing abstraction of thought from the sound side of speech, which is characteristic of inner speech. J. Piaget objected to him, who believed that egocentric speech is a rudimentary, surviving form of speech that develops from internal to external. In such speech itself, he saw a manifestation of the unsocialization, autism of the child's thought. The gradual disappearance of egocentric speech was for him a sign of the acquisition by the child's thought of those qualities that the logical thinking of an adult possesses. Many years later, having become acquainted with the counterarguments of L. S. Vygotsky, J. Piaget recognized the correctness of his position.
So far, we have been talking about the development of speech thinking, that is, that form of intellectualized speech, which sooner or later
Eventually it turns into a thought. We have seen that thinking in its development has its own sources, independent of speech, and follows its own laws for a long period of time, until thought flows into speech, and the latter becomes intellectualized, i.e. understandable. We also know that even at the most high levels development of speech and thinking do not coincide completely. This means that speech must also have its own roots and laws of ontogenetic development. Let's consider some of them.
Process research experience speech development in children belonging to different peoples, countries, cultures and nations, shows that, despite the fact that the differences in the structure and content of modern languages are striking, in general, the process of assimilation by a child of his native speech everywhere follows general laws. So, for example, children of all countries and peoples acquire language and speech with surprising ease in childhood, and this process begins and ends at about the same time, passing through the same stages. By the age of about 1 year, all children begin to pronounce single words. At about 2 years of age, the child already speaks in two or three word sentences. By about 4 years of age, all children are able to speak fairly freely.
One-year-old children usually already have a fairly rich experience of interacting with the surrounding reality. They have clear ideas about their parents, about the environment, about food, about the toys they play with. Long before children practically begin to use speech, their figurative world already has representations that correspond to the words they are learning. In such conditions, prepared by previous experience of socialization, for mastering speech, the child does not have much to do: mentally connect his ideas and images of reality with combinations of sounds corresponding to individual words. By the age of one, these sound combinations themselves are also already quite well known to the child: after all, he has repeatedly heard them from an adult.
The next stage of speech development falls on the age of approximately 1.5-2.5 years. At this stage, children learn to combine words, combine them into small phrases (two or three words), and from using such phrases to making whole sentences, they progress quite quickly.
After two or three word phrases, the child proceeds to the use of other parts of speech, to the construction of sentences in accordance with the rules of grammar. On the previous and this stage speech development, there are three ways to learn the language and further improve speech on this basis: imitation of adults and other people around; the formation of conditioned reflex, associative in nature links between images of objects, actions, perceived phenomena and the corresponding words or phrases; setting and testing hypotheses about the relationship between the word and the image in an empirical way (the so-called operant conditioning). To this should be added a kind of children's verbal ingenuity, manifested in the fact that the child suddenly, completely independently, on his own initiative, begins to invent new words, pronounce phrases that he has never heard from an adult.
Pseudo-concepts
But we have already said that, while coinciding with the concept in its external form, in the achieved result of thinking, in its final product, the child does not at all coincide with the adult in the way of thinking, in the type of intellectual operations by which he arrives at the pseudo-concept. It is precisely because of this that the enormous functional significance of the pseudo-concept arises as a special, dual, internally contradictory form of children's thinking. If the pseudo-concept were not the dominant form of children's thinking, children's complexes, as is the case in experimental practice, where the child is not bound by the given meaning of the word, would diverge from the adult's concepts in completely different directions.
Mutual understanding through words, verbal communication between an adult and a child would be impossible. This communication turns out to be possible only because, in fact, children's complexes coincide with the concepts of adults, meet with them. Concepts and the mental drawing of concepts turn out to be functionally equivalent, and thanks to this, an extremely important circumstance arises that determines, as already mentioned, the greatest functional significance of a pseudo-concept: a child who thinks in complexes and an adult who thinks in concepts establish mutual understanding and verbal communication, since their thinking actually occurs in coinciding complexes-concepts.
We said already at the beginning of this chapter that the whole difficulty of the genetic problem of the concept lies in childhood is to understand this internal contradiction, which lies in children's concepts. The word from the very first days of its development is a means of communication and mutual understanding between a child and an adult. It is thanks to this functional moment of mutual understanding with the help of words, as Ach showed, that a certain meaning of the word arises and it becomes the carrier of the concept. Without this functional moment of mutual understanding, as Uznadze says, no sound complex could become the bearer of any meaning, and no concepts could arise.
But, as is known, speech understanding between an adult and a child, speech contact, arises extremely early, and this, as already mentioned, gives reason to many researchers to believe that concepts develop just as early. Meanwhile, as we have said above, citing the opinion of Uznadze, full-fledged concepts develop in children's thinking relatively late, while mutual speech understanding of the child and adult is established very early.
“It is quite clear,” says Uznadze, “that words, not yet reaching the stage of fully developed concepts, take on the function of these latter and can serve as a means of understanding between speaking people.” The researcher is faced with the task of revealing the development of those forms of thinking that should be considered not as concepts, but as their functional equivalents. This is a contradiction between the late development of the concept and early development speech understanding finds its real resolution in the pseudo-concept as in such a form of complex thinking that makes possible a coincidence in thinking and understanding between a child and an adult.
We have thus revealed both the causes and the significance of this exceptionally important form of complex thinking in children. It remains for us to say something about the genetic significance of this final stage in the development of children's thinking. It is quite understandable that due to the dual functional nature of the pseudo-concept, which we have described above, this stage in the development of children's thinking acquires a completely exceptional genetic significance.
It serves as a connecting link between complex thinking and thinking in concepts. It combines these two great steps in the development of children's thinking. It reveals to us the process of formation of children's concepts. By virtue of the contradiction inherent in it, being a complex, it already contains the seed of the future concept that grows in it. Verbal communication with adults thus becomes a powerful engine, a powerful factor in the development of children's concepts. The transition from complex thinking to thinking in concepts takes place imperceptibly for the child, because in practice he coincides in his pseudo-concepts with the concepts of adults.
Thus, a peculiar genetic position is created, representing rather a general rule than an exception in everything. intellectual development child. This peculiar position lies in the fact that the child first begins to apply in practice and operate with concepts, rather than realizes them. The concept of "in oneself" and "for others" develops in the child before the concept of "for oneself". The concept of “in oneself” and “for others”, already contained in the pseudo-concept, is the main genetic prerequisite for the development of the concept in true sense this word.
Thus, the pseudo-concept, considered as a special phase in the development of children's complex thinking, completes the entire second stage and opens the third stage in the development of children's thinking, serving as a connecting link between them. This is a bridge thrown between concrete, visual-figurative and abstract thinking.
The second phase in the same process of concept development is what might be called the stage of potential concepts. Under experimental conditions, a child who is in this phase of his development usually singles out a group of objects that he generalizes, united according to one common feature.
Before us is again a picture that at first glance very closely resembles a pseudo-concept and which, according to appearance can be, like a pseudo-concept, taken as a complete concept in the proper sense of the word. Exactly the same product could be obtained as a result of the thinking of an adult, operating with concepts.
This deceptive appearance, this outward resemblance to the true concept, makes the potential concept related to the pseudo-concept. But their nature is essentially different.
The difference between a true and a potential concept was introduced into psychology by Groos, who made this difference the starting point of his analysis of concepts. “A potential concept,” says Groos, “may be nothing more than an act of habit. In this case, in its most elementary form, it consists in the fact that we expect, or, better, set ourselves on the fact that similar occasions cause similar general impressions. “If the “potential concept” is really such as we have just described it as an attitude towards the habitual, then in any case it appears very early in the child ...” “I think that it is a necessary condition preceding the appearance of intellectual evaluations, but in itself has nothing intellectual "(33, p. 196). Thus, this potential concept is a pre-intellectual formation that appears extremely early in the history of the development of thinking.
In this regard, most modern psychologists agree that the potential concept, as we have just described it, is already inherent in the thinking of the animal. In this sense, we think, Kro is absolutely right when he objects to the generally accepted assertion that abstraction appears for the first time in adolescence. "The isolating abstraction," he said, "can already be established in animals."
Indeed, special experiments on the abstraction of form and color in domestic chickens have shown that, if not a potential concept in the proper sense of the word, then something extremely close to it, consisting in isolating or isolating individual characters, has its place at extremely early stages of development. behavior in the animal series.
From this point of view, Groos is absolutely right, who, implying by a potential concept an orientation towards a usual reaction, refuses to see in it a sign of the development of children's thinking and classifies it from a genetic point of view as pre-intellectual processes. "Our original potential concepts," he says, "are pre-intellectual. The operation of these potential concepts can be elucidated without the assumption of logical processes." In this case, "the relationship between a word and what we call its meaning can sometimes be a simple association that does not contain a real meaning-catch" (33, p. 201 et seq.).
If we turn to the first words of the child, we will see that they really approach these potential concepts in their meaning. These concepts are potential, firstly, in their practical relation to a certain range of objects, and secondly, in terms of the process of isolating abstraction underlying them. They are concepts in a capability that have not yet actualized that capability. It is not a concept, but it is something that can become one.
In this sense, Buhler draws a perfectly legitimate analogy between the way a child uses one of the usual words at the sight of a new object, and yet how a monkey recognizes in many things that at another time would not have reminded him of a stick, the resemblance to a stick, if it is in such circumstances in which the stick is useful to her. Koehler's experiments with the use of tools in chimpanzees showed that a monkey, once using a stick as a tool to master a target, only then extends this meaning of a tool to all other objects that have something in common with a stick and can perform the functions of a stick.
The external resemblance to our concept is striking. And such a phenomenon really deserves the name of a potential concept. Koehler formulates the results of his observations on chimpanzees in this regard as follows. “If we say,” he said, “that a stick that catches our eye has received a certain functional meaning for certain positions, that this meaning applies to all other objects, whatever they may be in general, but having objectively known common features in the sense of form and density, then we arrive directly at a single view that coincides with the observed behavior of animals.
These experiments showed that the monkey begins to use straw hat fields, shoes, wire, a straw, a towel as a stick, i.e. a wide variety of objects that have an oblong shape and can serve as a substitute for a stick in appearance. We see, therefore, that there is also a generalization of a whole series of concrete subjects in a certain respect.
And the whole difference with the potential concept of Groos lies only in the fact that there we are talking about similar impressions, and here - about a similar functional meaning. There, the potential concept is worked out in the realm of visual thinking; here, in the realm of practical, active thinking. Such motor concepts, or dynamic concepts, according to Werner's expression, such functional meanings, according to Köhler's expression, as is well known, exist in children's thinking for quite a long time, right up to the onset of school age. As is known, the children's definition of concepts is of such a functional nature. For a child, to define an object or concept is equivalent to naming what this object does or, more often, what can be done with this object.
When it comes to the definition of abstract concepts, all the same, when they are defined, a specific, usually effective situation comes to the fore, which is the equivalent of the childish meaning of the word. Messer, in his study of thinking and speech, gives an extremely typical definition of an abstract concept in this respect, given by one of the students of the first year of study. "Mind," says the child, "is when I'm hot and I don't drink water." This kind of concrete and functional meaning constitutes the only psychological basis of a potential concept.
We might recall that already in complex thinking such potential concepts play an extremely important role, often being combined with the construction of complexes. So, for example, in an associative complex and in many other types of a complex, as we saw above, the construction of a complex involves the selection known feature common to various elements.
True, it is characteristic of pure complex thinking that this feature is highly unstable, that it gives way to another feature, and that it is not in any way privileged over all the others. This is not characteristic of a potential concept. Here, the given attribute, which serves as the basis for the inclusion of an object in a known general group, is a privileged attribute, abstracted from the specific group of attributes with which it is actually associated.
Recall that in the history of the development of our words, such potential concepts play an extremely important role. We have given above many examples of how any new word arises on the basis of the selection of one of some features that catches the eye and serves as the basis for constructing a generalization of a number of objects called or denoted by the same word. These potential concepts often remain at the given stage of their development, without turning into true concepts.
In any case, they play an extremely important role in the development of children's concepts. This role consists in the fact that here, for the first time, by means of abstracting individual signs, the child destroys the concrete situation, the concrete connection of signs, and thereby creates the necessary prerequisite for a new combination of these signs on a new basis. Only the mastery of the process of abstraction, together with the development of complex thinking, can lead the child to the formation of true concepts. This formation of true concepts constitutes the fourth and last phase in the development of the child's thinking.
The concept arises when a number of abstract features are synthesized again and when the abstract synthesis obtained in this way becomes the main form of thinking, with the help of which the child comprehends and comprehends the reality around him. At the same time, as we have said above, the experiment shows that the decisive role in the formation of a true concept belongs to the word. It is with the help of the word that the child arbitrarily directs his attention to some signs, with the help of the word he synthesizes them, with the help of the word he symbolizes an abstract concept and operates with it as the highest sign of all that human thinking has created.
True, even in complex thinking the role of the word clearly appears. Complex thinking in the sense as we described it above is impossible without a word that acts as a family name that unites groups of objects that are related in impression. In this sense, unlike a number of authors, we distinguish complex thinking as a certain stage in the development of verbal thinking from that wordless visual thinking that characterizes the representations of animals and which other authors, like Werner, also call complex because of its inherent tendency to merge individual impressions.
In this sense, these authors are inclined to equate the processes of condensation and movement, as they appear in the dream, and between the complex thinking of primitive peoples, which is one of the highest forms of verbal thinking, the product of the long historical evolution of the human intellect and the inevitable precursor of thinking in concepts. Some authorities, like Volkelt, go even further and tend to identify the emotionally similar complex thinking of spiders with the primitive verbal thinking of a child.
From our point of view, there is a fundamental difference between the two, which separates the product of biological evolution, the natural form of thinking, from the historically emerged form of human intellect. However, the recognition that the word plays a decisive role in complex thinking in no way forces us to identify this role of the word in thinking in complexes and in thinking in concepts.
On the contrary, the very difference between a complex and a concept we see primarily in that one generalization is the result of one functional use of a word, while another arises as a result of a completely different functional use of this word. The word is a sign. This sign can be used in different ways, it can be used in a different way. It can serve as a means for various intellectual operations, and it is precisely the various intellectual operations performed with the help of the word that lead to the main difference between the complex and the concept.
It remains to summarize what the consideration of inner speech has given us. It again comes up against a number of hypotheses. Whether the development of inner speech occurs through a whisper or through an egocentric re, whether it occurs simultaneously with the development of external speech or occurs at a relatively high level of it, whether inner speech and the thinking associated with it can be considered as a certain stage in the development of any cultural form of behavior - regardless of whether As these highly important questions in themselves are resolved in the process of actual research, the main conclusion remains the same. This conclusion states that inner speech develops through the accumulation of long-term functional and structural changes, that it branches off from the child's external speech along with the differentiation of the social and egocentric functions of speech, and that, finally, the speech structures assimilated by the child become the main structures of his thinking.
At the same time, a basic, undoubted and decisive fact is revealed - the dependence of the development of thinking on speech, on the means of thinking, and on the socio-cultural experience of the child. The development of inner speech is determined mainly from the outside, the development of the child's logic, as Piaget's studies have shown, is a direct function of his socialized speech. The child's thinking - this is how one could formulate this position - develops depending on the mastery of social means of thinking, i.e. depending on speech.
At the same time, we are approaching the formulation of the main proposition of our entire work, a proposition of the highest methodological significance for the entire formulation of the problem. This conclusion follows from a comparison of the development of inner speech and verbal thinking with the development of speech and intellect, as it proceeded in the animal world and in the earliest childhood along separate, separate lines. This comparison shows that one development is not just a direct continuation of another, but that the very type of development has also changed - from biological to socio-historical.
We think that the previous parts have shown with sufficient clarity that verbal 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. . But the main thing is that, with the recognition of the historical nature of speech thinking, we must extend to this form of behavior all those methodological provisions that historical materialism establishes in relation to all historical phenomena in human society. Finally, we must expect in advance that, in its main features, the very type of historical development of behavior will turn out to be directly dependent on the general laws of the historical development of human society.
But by this very fact the problem of thinking and speech outgrows the methodological boundaries of natural science and turns into the central problem of the historical psychology of man, i.e. social psychology; at the same time, the methodological formulation of the problem also changes. Without touching on this problem in its entirety, it seemed necessary to us to dwell on the key points of this problem, points that are most methodologically difficult, but most central and important in the analysis of human behavior, which is built on the basis of dialectical and historical materialism.
This second problem of thinking and speech itself, as well as many particular aspects of the functional and structural analysis of the relationship between the two processes that we touched upon in passing, should be the subject of a special study.
Chapter five. Experimental study of the development of concepts.
I
Until recently, the main difficulty in the study of concepts was the lack of development of an experimental technique with the help of which it would be possible to penetrate into the depths of the process of formation of concepts and to investigate its psychological nature.
All traditional methods of studying concepts fall into two main groups. A typical representative of the first group of these methods is the so-called method of determination and all its indirect variations. The main thing for this method is the study of ready-made, already formed concepts in the child with the help of a verbal definition of their content. It is this method that has been included in most of the test studies.
Despite its wide distribution, it suffers from two significant shortcomings that do not allow relying on it for a truly in-depth study of this process.
1. He deals with the result of an already completed process of concept formation, with a finished product, without capturing the very dynamics of the process, its development, course, its beginning and end. It is more a study of a product than of the process leading to the formation of a given product. Depending on this, when defining ready-made concepts, we very often deal not so much with the child's thinking as with the reproduction of ready-made knowledge, ready-made, perceived definitions. In studying the definitions given by the child to one or another concept, we often study to a much greater extent the knowledge, experience of the child, the degree of his speech development, than thinking in the proper sense of the word.
2. The method of definition operates almost exclusively with the word, forgetting that the concept, especially for the child, is associated with that sensory material from the perception and processing of which it is born; sensory material and the word are both necessary moments in the process of concept formation, and the word, torn from this material, translates the entire process of defining the concept into a purely verbal plane, which is not characteristic of the child. Therefore, with the help of this method, it is almost never possible to establish the relationship that exists between the meaning attached by the child to the word in a purely verbal definition, and the actual real meaning corresponding to the word in the process of its living correlation with the objective reality it denotes.
What is most essential for a concept—its relation to reality—remains unexplored; we try to approach the meaning of a word through another word, and what we reveal with the help of this operation should rather be attributed to the relations that exist between the individual assimilated verbal clusters than to the actual reflection of children's concepts.
The second group of methods is the methods of studying abstraction, which try to overcome the shortcomings of the purely verbal method of definition and which try to study the psychological functions and processes that underlie the process of concept formation, at the basis of the processing of that visual experience from which the concept is born. All of them confront the child with the task of isolating some common feature in a number of concrete impressions, of abstracting this feature or this feature from a number of others merged with it in the process of perception, of generalizing this feature common to a number of impressions.
The disadvantage of this second group of methods is that they substitute the elementary process that forms part of it for the complex synthetic process and ignore the role of the word, the role of the sign in the process of concept formation, thereby infinitely simplifying the process of abstraction itself, taking it beyond that specific, characteristic for the formation of concepts of relationship with the word, which is the central distinguishing feature of the whole process as a whole. Thus, the traditional methods of studying concepts are equally characterized by the separation of the word from the objective material; they operate either with words without objective material, or with objective material without words.
A huge step forward in the study of concepts was the creation of such an experimental technique that tried to adequately reflect the process of concept formation, which includes both of these moments: the material on the basis of which the concept is developed, and the word with which it arises.
We will not now dwell on the complex history of the development of this new method of studying concepts; let's just say that with its introduction, an entirely new plan opened up before the researchers; they began to study not ready-made concepts, but the very process of their formation. In particular, the method in the form in which it was used by N.Akh is rightly called the synthetic-genetic method, since it studies the process of building a concept, synthesizing a number of features that form a concept, the process of developing a concept.
The main principle of this method is the introduction into the experiment of artificial, at first meaningless words for the subject, which are not related to the child’s previous experience, and artificial concepts that are specially composed for experimental purposes by combining a number of features that are not found in such a combination in the world of our usual concepts. denoted by speech. For example, in the experiments of Axa, the word "gatsun", initially meaningless for the subject, in the process of experience is comprehended, acquires meaning, becomes the carrier of the concept, denoting something large and heavy; or the word "fal" begins to mean small and light.
In the process of experience, the researcher unfolds the whole process of comprehending a meaningless word, acquiring meaning by a word and developing a concept. Thanks to this introduction of artificial words and artificial concepts, this method is freed from one of the most essential shortcomings of a number of methods; namely, in order to solve the problem facing the subject in the experiment, it does not require any previous experience, any previous knowledge, it equalizes the child in this respect early age and adult.
N.Akh applied his method equally to a five-year-old child and to an adult, equalizing both in relation to their knowledge. Thus, his method is potentiated in relation to age, it allows the study of the process of concept formation in its pure form.
One of the main shortcomings of the method of definition is the circumstance that there the concept is torn out of its natural connection, taken in a frozen, static form, out of connection with the real processes of thinking in which it occurs, is born and lives. The experimenter takes an isolated word, the child must define it, but this definition of a torn out, isolated word, taken in a frozen form, does not in the least tell us what this concept is in action, how the child operates with it in the living process of solving a problem, how he uses it when there is a living need for it.
This ignoring of the functional moment is in essence, as N.Akh says about it, a failure to take into account the fact that the concept does not live an isolated life and that it does not represent a frozen, immovable formation, but, on the contrary, is always found in a living, more or less less complex process of thinking, always performs one or another function of communication, comprehension, understanding, solving some problem.
This shortcoming is devoid of new method, in which the functional conditions for the emergence of the concept are put forward at the center of the study. He takes the concept in connection with a particular task or need that arises in thinking, in connection with understanding or communication, in connection with the fulfillment of this or that task, this or that instruction, the implementation of which is impossible without the formation of a concept. All this taken together makes the new method of research an extremely important and valuable tool in understanding the development of concepts. And although N.Akh himself did not devote much research to the formation of concepts in adolescence, nevertheless, relying on the results of his research, he could not fail to note that dual - covering both the content and form of thinking - a revolution that occurs in the intellectual development of a teenager and marked by the transition to thinking in concepts.
Rimat devoted a special, very detailed study to the process of concept formation in adolescents, which he studied with the help of a somewhat revised Axa method. The main conclusion of this study is that the formation of concepts occurs only with the onset of adolescence and is inaccessible to the child before this period.
“We can firmly establish,” says this author, “that only after the end of the 12th year of life is there a sharp increase in the ability to independently form general objective ideas. It seems to me that it is extremely important to pay attention to this fact. Thinking in concepts, detached from visual moments, makes demands on the child that exceed his mental capabilities until the twelfth year of life” (30, p. 112).
We will not dwell on the method of conducting this study, nor on other theoretical conclusions and results to which it leads the author. We will confine ourselves to emphasizing the main result that, contrary to the assertion of some psychologists who deny the emergence of any new intellectual function during adolescence and assert that every child of 3 years old has all the intellectual operations that make up the thinking of a teenager. - Contrary to this statement, special studies show that only after 12 years, i.e. with the onset of adolescence, at the end of the first school age, the child begins to develop processes that lead to the formation of concepts and abstract thinking.
DEVELOPMENT OF SPEECH AND THINKING
The subject to which this chapter is devoted - the development of speech and thinking, especially the development of higher forms of thinking in childhood - is difficult and complex. Therefore, I will allow myself to start with the simplest - with the most well-known concrete facts, so elementary that I am afraid to deserve a reproach for extreme simplification. big problem. But I don't see any other way to approach a huge and complex issue at once from a theoretical side.
I want to start with a well-known experience - with an attempt to determine the main stages in the development of a child's thinking according to his story from a picture. It is known that the technique proposed by A. Binet and widely used by V. Stern is extremely simple and clear. They take a simple picture, which depicts, for example, an urban or peasant family or prisoners in prison, show the picture to a child of 3.7, 12 years old and find out how each of them describes the same plot. At the same time, researchers say: since all children are given the same object of thinking, therefore, we have the right to say that thinking develops at the early most important stages in the way that is revealed in the child's story.
It is also known what conclusions are drawn from such an experiment. By the way, these are the conclusions on which much is built in the psychology of thinking. It turns out that children of early preschool age tell a picture, naming individual objects, hence the conclusion is drawn: a preschooler thinks of the world as a system of separate things and objects. The schoolchild already establishes some simple actions that are produced by the depicted objects or faces, from which the conclusion is drawn: the schoolchild conceives the world as a system of acting objects and people. Finally, we know that the older student moves to the stage of signs, and then to the stage of relations and perceives complex relationships between individual objects. Hence the conclusion is drawn: an older student perceives the world as a system of complex relationships in which people and things are with each other.
The central fact, which is of fundamental importance for the psychology of thought, is the revision of the propositions we have just indicated. Doubts about the meaning of the data that were obtained in the experiment with a story from pictures arose a long time ago, and it was necessary to instill these doubts in people who approach the question extremely simply. Indeed, what does experience say? First, the child perceives objects, then actions, then relationships, that is, the connection of things. Does this really sound like what we know about child development in general? Let's try to continue this row down, consider how the child will perceive the picture or the world at an even earlier age. Obviously, he must perceive not only objects or things, but the smallest properties and qualities of things, because the thing itself is already a rather complex connection of individual features and relationships.
It can be said directly: everything that we know about the child contradicts this idea. Everything we know about the child says that a child of early and preschool age perceives things as a segment of reality in an extremely concrete connection of these things. The initial perception of individual objects, which we attributed to the child on the basis of the experience with the picture, is in reality a later stage, arising in the further development of the child, and everything known to us in the development of thinking in a young child speaks in favor of the fact that this experience, when it continue, leads by some miracle to misconceptions, i.e., just in time to the reverse process of the development of thinking in the child.
The child thinks earlier in whole coherent blocks. This moment is called syncretism. Syncretism is a feature of children's thinking that enables the child to think in whole blocks, without dismembering and separating one object from another. The syncretic character of children's thinking, i.e., thinking in whole situations, in whole connected parts, is so strong that it still remains in the field of verbal thinking in the schoolchild and is a transforming form of thinking in a child of preschool age. It is precisely the inability to isolate a single thing, to name it, that is particularly striking in the two examples that I borrow from J. Piaget.
The child is asked: “Why is the sun warm?” He replies: "Because it is yellow, because it is high, it holds itself high." To “explain” for such a child means to bring a number of other facts and properties, impressions and observations that are directly related to one impression, one image. That the sun holds on and does not fall, that it is yellow, hot, that there are clouds around it - everything that the child sees is connected together, he does not separate one from the other.
In an older child, syncretism causes confusion, that is, the combination of everything with everything that is only combined in an external impression. This remains with the child of school age in speech: the child moves in such syncretic wholes. P. P. Blonsky correctly calls this property the incoherent coherence of thinking. “Incoherent” is understandable: after all, a child thinks by pointing out that the sun does not fall because it is hot. A lot of things here seem incoherent. At the same time, this is correctly called "connectivity", because the child connects what we - adults - necessarily dissect. For him, the fact that the sun is yellow and that it does not fall is merged into one impression that we share.
Thus, syncretism consists in the incoherent connectedness of thinking, i.e., in the predominance of the subjective connection, the connection arising from an immediate impression, over the objective connection. This results in objective incoherence and subjective universal coherence. The child perceives in such a way that everything is connected with everything. From the objective side, this means that the child takes the connection of impressions for the connection of things. What appears in the child as a connection of impressions, he perceives as a connection of things. What happens in this case in the child’s brain from the physiological side is relatively known: this is well reflected in I. P. Pavlov’s interesting position on irradiation, i.e., the initially spilled, diffuse stage of excitation, which accompanies the first impressions that bring to life a whole complex associated with this impression.
How did the psychologists of the old time, the psychologists-subjectivists, imagine the development of thinking? They pointed out that the state of a newborn child can be imagined as a chaos of some sensations, primarily a chaos of incoherent things, because where can connections come from when there is no experience? The child has never seen objects, say a bed, a person, a table, a chair. If only the sense organs are functioning, then, naturally, the child should have a chaos of ideas, a mixture of warm and sweet, black and yellow, various incoherent sensations and properties of objects. Gradually, sensations accumulate, groups are formed from individual sensations. From here things are obtained, then things are put into groups, and, finally, the child proceeds to the perception of the world.
Experimental studies show, however, that the opposite is true. A young child perceives the world syncretically - in whole large groups or situations. Another physiological consideration speaks in favor of this.
IP Pavlov studied the properties of the so-called complex of stimuli and showed that a complex of known stimuli causes a different effect than each stimulus taken separately, individual stimuli or taken next to each other. First, in Pavlov's laboratory, they began to work with individual stimuli, then they moved on to the complex. Thus, in laboratory practice, an experiment is first performed with individual stimuli, then with a complex. What happens in a child's life? I think that at first the child deals with a complex of impressions and objects, with the situation as a whole. The mother feeds the child, which means that the irritant is the mother, her clothes, face, voice;
the fact that the child is picked up, put in a certain position; satiety when feeding;
then the child is put to bed. This is the whole situation that unfolds before the child. Therefore, Pavlov says: if we later came to a complex of stimuli in the laboratory, then in life, genetically, the complex of stimuli for the child is primary, the child first thinks in a complex, then in separate things.
However, it is easy to see that experience with understanding pictures says otherwise.
Another factual consideration.
Experience with the use of pictures says that a child of 3 years old sees individual objects, and an older child thinks of the world as a system of actions. It turns out that if one and the same picture (suppose, “Prisoner in Prison”) is shown to a three-year-old child, then it will be: “A person, another person, a window, a mug, a bench”, and for a preschooler it will be: “A person is sitting, another person is looking through the window, the mug is on the bench. But we know that both a three-year-old child and a young child, on the contrary, determine all placed figures, all objects by their functions, that is, they determine them through actions. For a child, they are the primary. And when we search for the initial, primary word, we find that this is the name of an action, and not of an object;
the child names a word denoting an action earlier than a word denoting an object.
Summing up the material, we come to the conclusion: a fatal contradiction has been created between the development of thinking, which draws a story from a picture, and everything that we know about the development of thinking in life. In both cases, the relationship appears to be inverted. It is curious that all these considerations are verified by experiments and facts. You can take a thousand children and prove once again that this is how things happen with a picture. This is indeed an indisputable fact, but it must be interpreted differently.
Let us make one of the simplest observations, which we shall be able to explain, and which will point the way to a new interpretation.
