In his investigation of problems of the sociohistorical determinants of human consciousness, Vygotsky concentrated his attention mainly on study of the genesis, functions, and structure of the " higher mental functions " —verbal thought, voluntary regulation of actions, logical memory, creative imagination, and so forth, which together constitute man's specific identity as a social being. It wa...

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....

Around the end of the 1920s, Vygotsky introduced his integrative framework for psycho-logical research to the Soviet Union. This framework was not abandoned and forgotten until its rediscovery in Russia and America in the 1950s, as some claim. In fact, even after his untimely death in 1934, Vygotsky remained the spiritual leader of a group of his for-mer students and collaborators, who became k...

Contrary to the assumptions of those who pair Dewey and Piaget based on progressivism’s recent history, Dewey shared broader concerns with Vygotsky (whose work he never read). Both Dewey and Vygotsky emphasized the role of cultural forms and meanings in perpetuating higher forms of human thought, whereas Piaget focused on the role played by logical and mathematical reasoning. On the other hand,...

The concept of ‘social situatedness’, i.e. the idea that the development of individual intelligence requires a social (and cultural) embedding, has recently received much attention in cognitive science and artificial intelligence research. The work of Lev Vygotsky who put forward this view already in the 1920s has influenced the discussion to some degree, but still remains far from well known. ...

This article argues that Vygotsky’s choice of word meaning as the basic unit of analysis for cultural psychology connects him to a German psycholinguistic tradition—exemplified in the work of G. W. F. Hegel and J. G. Herder—distinct from the Marxist tradition. While later commentators criticize Vygotsky’s reliance on word meaning, arguing that it cannot explain the formation of consciousness, t...