Vygotsky and Cognitive Science: Language and the Unification of the Social and Computational Mind

William Frawley's original and wide-ranging new book embraces linguistics, artificial intelligence, philosophy, and psychology in seeking a reconciliation between contemporary cognitive science and Vygotskian psychology. Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (1896--1934) was a Russian psychologist who founded the sociocultural school of psychology, which is based upon the general law of cultural development. This states that "Every function in the child's cultural development appears twice: first on the social level and later, on the individual level: first, between people (interpsychological), and then inside the child (intrapsychological)" (Vygotsky 1978, p. 57). The proposed link between the external interpsychological activity and the intrapsychological processes within the mind allows the internalization of the higher mental processes from their social origins. This process of internalization is central to Vygotsky's work and is focused upon within Frawley's book. Internalization is not a simple "transfer" or "copying" process; the structure and functions of the process change during its internalization and lead to the formation of an "internal plane of consciousness" (Leont'ev 1979). The individual's psychological functioning that emerges from this process reflects the nature of the culture from which he or she was derived (Rogoff and Wertsch 1984). The processes of social interaction that are the point of contact between the intraand the interpsychological activity are mediated by sign systems such as language. Vygotsky places particular emphasis upon "inner speech," which is described as "thinking in pure meanings" (Vygotsky 1986), as opposed to the embodiment of external speech in words. He describes it as a "distinct plane of verbal thought," the "next plane" being thought itself (Vygotsky 1986). This process of inner speech is also of central importance to the arguments presented in Frawley's work. In order to understand the direction of Vygotsky's approach, it is also important to recognize that sociocultural psychology is developmental. Children interact with adults in a society within which a sign system is available and it is through this mediated social interaction that internalization takes place. The emphasis upon the internalization of culture via semiotic mediation suggests that the nature of the relationship between learning and development is particularly interesting. Vygotsky introduced his own approach to this relationship in the shape of the zone of proximal development. This represents the crystallization of the internalization process, with particular reference to the school-aged child, and describes the most fertile interactions that occur between members of an educational culture and a learner. In addition to its influence upon sociocultural psychology, Vygotsky's work is also at the heart of the theoretical framework that has been built around the concept of activity in Soviet psychology. This concept has subsequently been clarified and expanded by Leont'ev (in