Reading :: Understanding the behaviour of design thinking in complex environments

Understanding the behaviour of design thinking in complex environments
By Stefanie Di Russo

I became aware of Stefanie Di Russo’s dissertation project through a Twitter conversation with some UX professionals. When the dissertation finally became available in early 2016, I downloaded it and read it when I had a chance—and now it’s the middle of 2016 and I’m finally able to review it.

The dissertation asks: how effective is Design Thinking for complex environments? As a design approach, DT has been portrayed as a way to approach wicked problems. Di Russo sought to (a) examine the history and development of DT, (b) conduct empirical work on DT in complex environments in order to generate new evidence; and (c) “explain the underlying mechanisms that enable emergent behaviors to occur in the design process, contributing knowledge and understanding on how to apply design thinking in complex environments.”

The result is really interesting.

Di Russo examines DT from the perspective of critical realism, which “accepts a view of reality that is stratified, generating knowledge through causal analysis”; generates knowledge “by stratifying levels of reality, to ‘dig’ through observable and unobservable events in order to uncover underlying causal mechanisms that influence and affect the object of phenomena”; and “uncover[s] causal mechanisms that allow for explanatory analysis.” This work is done through grounded theory methodology (p.6).

That work begins with the literature review, in which Di Russo traces key moments in design theory as well as the development of DT. This literature review itself is a significant accomplishment, laying out generations of design theory from the 1960s on—and exploring the disagreements and tensions in this field. Participatory design, service design, and human-centered design are briefly discussed as precursors to DT. DT is broken down into commonly discussed characteristics, along with cites to precursors for each characteristic (pp.39-40). Di Russo then synthesizes a typology of DT, striated into large-scale systems, systems and behavior, artifact and experience, and artifact (p.42).

Di Russo notes that DT’s definition has been ambiguous: “Ironically, when attempting to describe the designerly approach, the definition of design thinking becomes a wicked problem in itself, where answers seeking to describe the process, mindset and practice can only ‘satisfy’ rather than definitively resolve” (p.44). But “Design thinking and its core characteristics; multidisciplinary, iterative, rapid prototyping, human-centered, collaborative, visual and divergent thinking, are now seen as suitable for working with problems where the future is tangled and uncertain” (p.50).

But is it? Di Russo notes: “One of the fundamental weaknesses in the publicity that surrounds design thinking today is the lack of evidence supporting claims of its effectiveness” (p.55). Now that she has described DT’s characteristics through the literature review, she can undertake generating such evidence. Her main research question is: “What is the behavior of design thinking in complex environments?” (p.57).

In Chapter 3, Di Russo discusses her research framework, critical realism. I’ll briefly note that it is focused on relationships and (here) explored through grounded theory. Specifically, Di Russo conducted three case studies of DT in complex environments, including participant observation, semistructured interviews, and archival evidence. These data were then coded in Nvivo and clustered in Mural.ly. Data were then explored through constant comparison and triangulated.

Each case study is addressed in a separate chapter: a service design agency doing pro bono work (Chapter 4); the Australian Taxation Office (Chapter 5); and a decentralized open source platform, OpenIDEO (Chapter 6). Di Russo conducts a cross-comparison analysis across the three cases (Chapter 7), finding commonalities: ambiguity and uncertainty; large stakeholder and community networks; and a focus on intangible solutions. Yet themes from Case 3 (the open source platform) were inconsistent with those of the other two cases. Using Case 3 as a benchmark, then, Di Russo compares Case 1 and 2, generating several other commonalities (illustrated throughout with data from the cases). She notes pros and cons of DT for these cases, and adds:

this chapter concludes that design thinking operating externally to the project ecosystem and remotely in an open-source online environment has significant negative effects on the design thinking process. Thus, design thinking may be not readily or successfully translated to a remote online environment in order to design in and for complex environments. (p.253)

Chapter 8 reviews the characteristics of DT and the evidence that Di Russo has collected to support them. She then focuses on the question of implementation: “Many of the most common design thinking models have no implementation phase included as part of the process” (p.269).

Finally, Chapter 9 concludes in a very dissertationly way:

This dissertation is useful for design researchers, practitioners and students of design thinking for it solidifies a clear history and definition of design thinking, highlights potential behaviours unique to third and fourth order design practice, and guides knowledge on how to manage, research and apply design thinking in complex environments.

The dissertation is a solid piece of work, providing DT a more solid, systematic foundation than I’ve seen in other DT literature. And it methodically describes how to advance DT further. If you’re interested in DT or other design methodologies, check it out.

Reading :: Vygotsky's Psychology

Vygotsky's Psychology: A Biography of Ideas
By Alex Kozulin

Another day, another Kozulin book on Russian psychology. This one is, as the title suggests, a biography of Vygotsky. Although I had read many of these details elsewhere, this biography did a nice job of pulling them together.

Kozulin begins, as is customary, with the birth and youth of his subject. Vygotsky was "born in 1896 to a middle-class Jewish family." Kozulin uses the story to discuss pre-Revolutionary Russia, its censorship, and its pogroms against Jews (Vygotsky was Jewish). The year that Vygotsky graduated from high school, the minister of education declared that Jewish students would be selected for Moscow University, not by merit, but by lot; Vygotsky, who had the grades to get in by merit, was convinced that he would not be able to attend, but luck was with him and he was selected by the draw. "One may well wonder whether Vygotsky, like many other young Jewish intellectuals, embraced the new Soviet regime primarily because it promised to end all forms of ethnic discrimination" (p.14).

Young Vygotsky was an avid reader of Hegel, with his dialectical understanding of historical development (p.16), focus on mediation and concepts (pp.16-17), and examination of objectivization, in which "any process is crystallized in certain structures or objects" and can be seen as "moments of self-realization of the process" (p.17). But Vygotsky was also deeply affected by linguist Alexander Potebnya's book Thought and Language (pp.18-19), which sketched out the relationships between the two: "(a) thought coincides with language, (b) language serves as an external envelope of thought, and (c) thought achieves its becoming in language" (p.19). Potebnya championed the third interpretation. (In Vygotsky's own book of the same name, he did as well.)

Skipping a bit, we get to post-Revolutionary Russia, in which the young Vygotsky, teaching at Gomel, writes his textbook Educational Psychology. Kozulin says: "The textbook leaves one with an uneasy feeling that it is a 'chimeric' work. One part of it is hardly compatible with another, and the author seems to be speaking in a number of different voices" (p.67).

But in the next chapter, Kozulin turns to the paper Vygotsky delivered at the 1924 Second Psychoneurological Conference, the one that resulted in his move to Moscow. In this paper, Vygotsky argued that reflexology was not up to addressing more complex forms of behavior; he argued that thought, consciousness, and language should be the focus of psychological study, not introspectively, but empirically, by provoking observable manifestations of mental processes (pp.74-75). This argument made a deep impression on A.R. Luria, who arranged for Vygotsky to join the Institute of Pscyhology in Moscow (p.75).

The Institute, like so many Soviet institutions, was in crisis. As Kozulin explains, many were attempting to transform different sciences into "Marxist" sciences. "The recipe in most cases was very similar: some existing experimental methods were combined with a number of quotes from Marx, Engels or Lenin, and the resultant text was presented as an example of a new science" (p.79). The Institute's new head, Konstantin Kornilov, followed this formula: He took Engels' dialectical laws as the fundamental laws of the new Marxist philosophy, then "used psychological examples to underscore the validity of these laws" (p.79). This approach "resulted in the abandonment of the terminology of mental states and processes" (p.80).

In contrast, Vygotsky wanted to understand what was unique about human behavior, and he proposed doing this by examining "the historical character of human behavior and learning"; "the social nature of human experience"; and human behavior's "twofold nature as a mental activity and as an external action" (pp.81-82). Vygotsky noted that human beings, unlike animals, adapt their environment to themselves, following a changing mental design (p.82; cf. Marx). Although Vygotsky did not cite Mead, their ideas were close (p.83).

Moving along. Vygotsky further explored the issues of a Marxist psychology in his unpublished 1927 book The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology. Among other things, Kozulin argues that if we look at Vygotsky's writings as a whole, he did distinguish between (a) purposive tool mediation and (b) cultural cognition depending on intersubjective communication, investigable through changes in word meanings. "Practice then becomes divided into material production and human cultural production" (p.105). And "the fact that Vygotsky's theoretical program was interpreted differently by various groups of his followers reflects the dissimilarities in their philosophies of practice." One is Leontiev's activity theory, which is "rooted in the classical Marxist interpretation of practice as material production" (p.105). A second reading "—which has been undertaken only recently—focuses on the role of language and other symbolic mediators," mediators that can "become independent of the system" and "create their own symbolic construction of reality" (p.105). More about this later.

In Chapter 4, Kozulin recounts the expansion of the Vygotsky Circle, first the three (Vygotsky, Luria, Leontiev), then eight (adding Bozhovich, Levina, Morozova, Slavina, and Zaprozhets) (pp.110-111). "All of the members accepted Vygotsky's theoretical leadership and each was free to use Vygotsky's ideas in his or her own research" (p.111). Similarly, Vygotsky based some of his works on the studies of others in his Circle (p.111).

Kozulin summarizes Vygotsky's theory in this way:

Vygotsky's theory was based on a number of interlocking concepts, such as the notion of higher mental processes, the notion of mediated activity, and the notion of psychological tools. Human higher mental processes, according to Vygotsky, are functions of mediated activity. (p.112)

Kozulin then examines the "constitutent elements of this theoretical 'formula'" (p.112):

• "Higher mental processes": These are mediated, not simply continuations of lower functions. (p.112)
• "From action to thought": "the higher mental process is a function of socially meaningful activity," illustrated by the infant's attempt to grasp something, which eventually turns into pointing. (pp.113-114)
• "Mediation": Mediation can be through tools, symbols, or the behavior of another. Vygotsky's mediation links "Vygotsky's theory of higher mental functions with the Marxist theory of material praxis." (p.115)
• "Internalization": "What first appears as an external sign-mediator or an interpersonal communication later becomes an internal psychological process" (p.116). 
• "'Primitive' processes": Some intermediate processes can be detected "between" natural functions and higher mental processes. (p.117). 

Kozulin then goes into the problem of mediation. He notes that in Hegel, and later in Marx, work is seen as "a source of universal mediation"; the concept "eventually became a central category in Marxist philosophical anthropology. Work is what creates a universal system of 'communication' based on the exchange of commodities" (p.120). Kozulin warns: 

But whoever accepts material production as a paradigmatic form of human activity must also accept the consequences of such a paradigm. Specifically, it may lead to the identification of human existence as "reified." The phenomenon of reification points to such a mode of human activity when products of this activity are perceived as independent natural "things" rather than as the result of human effort. Moreover, human activity itself becomes reified and perceived as a commodity. The issue of Marxist social theory in general and reification in particular is raised here because Vygotsky's emphasis on tools as mediators creates a possibility for interpreting material production as an explanatory principle of his theory. This very position has ben adopted by some modern students ...

 Moreover, Vygotsky's followers, particularly Leontiev, did develop a theory of psychological activity based on the paradigm of material production as it is interpreted in traditional Marxism. In Leontiev's psychological theory human motives and objects of activity are determined by the division of labor in society, while more concrete actions are related to practical goals. What is problematic in Leontiev's attempt to link the study of psychological activity with Marxist social theory was his reluctance to elaborate on the applicability of the material production paradigm and to face up to the phenomenon of reification. (pp.120-121)

Kozulin notes that Vygotsky's "claim that human mental functions are social in origin and in content," although seemingly grounded in Marxist theory, only had one actual precedent: Durkheim (p.122). Later, after Luria's cross-cultural psychology study of the Uzbeks, Luria and Vygotsky were accused of being a follower of Durkheim, who was regarded as too bourgeois (p.132). Kozulin notes that the political failure of the Uzbek study meant that Vygotsky and his followers were curtailed from using "primitive" people as proxies for understanding changes based in historical changes in social and cultural organization of societies (p.132; Kozulin does not mention that this notion of historical stages of development has been abandoned by current anthropology).

Chapter 5 discusses Vygotsky's Thought and Language, referenced earlier. Like Potebnya, Vygotsky argued that intellect and speech had different genetic roots, developing along different lines, but "at a certain moment these two developmental lines become intertwined, whereupon thought becomes verbal, and speech intellectual. This moment signifies a switch from a natural track of development to a cultural one" (p.153). Egocentric speech develops into (a) inner speech-for-oneself and (b) communicative speech-for-others (p.174).

Along these lines, Kozulin notes that although there is no evidence that Vygotsky and Bakhtin influenced each other, "their positions in the realm of twentieth-century thought bear intriguing signs of similarity": overlap in their sources; overlap in their personal networks (Vygotsky's cousin David and Bakhtin belonged to the same intellectual circle in Leningrad); and their rediscovery in the West at about the same time (p.180). Yet Vygotsky believed that monological thought was superior to dialogical (p.184).

Chapter 7 examines Vygotsky's work with defectology and pedology. In fact, after Vygotsky's death and the banning of pedology, Vygotsky's theory "managed to survive in a subliminal form at the Institute of Defectology," where some of Vygotsky's Circle rode out the stormy 1930s and 1940s (p.207).

Chapter 8 examines what happened to Vygotsky's ideas after his death. Kozulin notes that Leontiev and the Kharkovites refocused away from symbolic psychological tools and toward activities (centered on labor) (p.247). Consequently, symbolic psychological tools and culture were underrepresented in the 1930s-1960s (p.247). Kozulin specifically examines Leontiev's activity theory, noting that the levels of activity involve "two different conceptual languages: one used on the level of activities and the other on the level of actions and operations" (p.251). The level of activities used categories of Marxist social philosophy; "the subject presumed by the use of these categories was the social-historical, and therefore psychologically rather abstractive subject." But "actions and operations were studied with the psychological paradigm," which was roughly Piagetan and did not link firmly to the social categories. As Kozulin notes, Rubinshtein noticed and critiqued this gap. Kozulin concludes: "One may suggest that what was missing from Leontiev's model was precisely the stratum of culture—emphasized by Vygotsky, and neglected by his followers—that could provide a link between individual action and the social systems from which it derives its meaning" (p.251).

(One might also suggest that third-generation activity theory's synthesis with Bakhtinian dialogism is an attempt to retrofit activity theory with this missing component of semiotic mediation.)

Leontiev was in a box here, Kozulin argues:

The Marxists were remarkably unsuccessful at depicting the positive, creative aspects of human action as conditioned by a social system. This lack of success had been explained as a reflection of the true condition prevalent in capitalist society, the condition of alienation. Unalienated, free action was reserved for future socialist life. But Leontiev could not use this line of defense because he was studying people in what was called a "state of accomplished socialism." He chose to avoid the psychological discussion of these issues, delivering instead the standard ideological verbiage about the alienation of the human mind under capitalism vs. its free development under socialism. (p.252)

Critics also noted that "although Leontiev had declared that human psychology should be understood in terms of practical activity, he actually identified it as a system of social meanings. But in Marxist parlance, social meanings belong to the sphere of social consciousness," rather than that of social practice on which Leontiev promised to build his theory" (p.252).

Nevertheless, activity theory prospered from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. Leontiev became (for a time) Vygotsky's official interpreter, even claiming in a 1956 forward to a Vygotsky collection that "the emphasis on semiotic mediation was transitory for Vygotsky and that the activity theory furthered the development of what was authentic in the cultural-historical school" (p.253). But Leontiev's theory began to be scrutinized in the late 1970s. Kozulin notes several possible reasons (omitting one good reason, which is that Leontiev died in 1979). One is that Vygotsky's Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology was circulating in manuscript form and was finally published in 1982; it noted the same trap that AT had fallen into, which was that the same notion was being used as both an explanatory principle and a phenomenon to investigate (p.253). At a 1979 symposium on Vygotsky's theoretical legacy, G.P. Schedrovitsky argued that "the activity theory substantially deviated from Vygotsky's original program" and that "the principle of semiotic mediation is the cornerstone of cultural-historical theory" (p.254).

This book is 272 pages, not including footnotes. But as you can tell, it's full of details that will be interesting to those who want to know more about Vygotsky and his legacy. I highly recommend it.

Reading :: The German Ideology

German Ideology, Part 1 and Selections from Parts 2 and 3
By Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

As we were discussing Leontiev's work on activity theory in my spring seminar, one of my graduate students said that his focus on labor sounded a lot like The German Ideology. I hadn't read the book, so I picked it up. Am I glad I did? Sort of.

As the editor's introduction states, this version is abridged. Much of The German Ideology consists of "detailed line by line polemics against the writings of some of their contemporaries" (p.1), which sounds about as edifying as reading through YouTube comments. Or Lenin. The editors courteously curated the text, leaving what I would consider to be the more interesting stuff.

In this book, Marx and Engels lay out the materialist method to history. They argue that men [sic] began to distinguish themselves from animals when they began to produce their means of subsistence (i.e., labor) (p.42). We are what/how we produce; the mode of production is "a definite form of activity, a definite mode of life" (p.42). And the relations of nations depend on their productive labor and its division (p.43). Marx and Engels review the stages in the development of division of labor (p.43; discussed in Capital and in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State).

Critically for my interest in cultural-historical theory: The production of life is seen as "a double relationship": both natural and social (p.50; cf. Vygotsky). And "language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men, and for that reason alone it really exists for me personally as well; language, like consciousness, only arises from the need, the necessity, of practical intercourse with other men. ... Consciousness is, therefore, from the very beginning a social product, and remains so as long as men exist at all" (p.51). Later in the book, they argue that "language is the immediate actuality of thought" (p.118).

The authors go on to claim that as long as there is a division of labor, there is a sphere of activity from which man cannot escape. But in a communist society, he can do what he wants—he can take on whatever occupation he likes whenever he likes (p.53). The authors do not go into how a person would develop expertise in these different areas, but they do declare later that "private property can be abolished only on condition of an all-round development of individuals" (p.117; cf. Vygotsky's "The Socialist Alteration of Man").

"Empirically," the authors claim, this ideal communist society "is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples 'all at once' and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up in communism" (p.56; recall that this worldwide revolution was considered to be a must in the early days of the Soviet Union, and Stalin only got around to revising this doctrine in 1938, after it became clear that a worldwide revolution was unlikely).

The authors drive home the argument that history is material, progressing due to material results; circumstances make man (p.59). In a communist society, "the original and free development of individuals ... is determined precisely by the connection of individuals" (p.118).

In all, reading through this book helped me to see deep connections with Vygotsky's thought about language, but also Leontiev's focus on labor making man. It wouldn't be my first recommendation if you're new to reading Marx and Engels, but it's worth reading in a supplementary sense.

Reading :: Psychology in Utopia

Psychology in Utopia: Toward a Social History of Soviet Psychology
By Alex Kozulin

You may remember Alex Kozulin as the editor of the 1986 Vygotsky's Thought and Language 2ed. In his introduction of that book, Kozulin demonstrated an intimate knowledge of the Vygotsky Circle and its context. So when I realized he had written a 1984 book (also with MIT Press) on the history of Soviet psychology, I knew I had to pick it up.

Keep in mind that in 1984, when Kozulin published this book, the USSR was still going strong, as was the Cold War. Kozulin's bio on the book jacket doesn't make clear whether he was still a Soviet citizen at the time, but it notes that he had taught at Boston University and Ben-Gurion University.

In any case, the book provides a critical view of the development of Soviet psychology. It starts with a detailed timeline—to which I intend to return. Next is an introduction that lays out the problems of investigating Soviet psychology. "Anyone who has ever approached the study of Soviet psychology knows that the subject is inherently paradoxical," he says, noting that although Soviet psychology is superficially similar to its Western counterpart, concepts

emerge from a social context that is almost utopian. The conceptual systems of Soviet authors turn out to be buried under layers of ideological verbiage. Published papers and official records must not be taken at face value but rather as rough material for subsequent distillation and decoding. The task of a scholar in Soviet research thus takes on an almost hermeneutical character. Like a historian studying a culture remote in time and space, the specialist in Soviet psychology must reconstruct the subject starting with fragments and adopting a mentality that has little in common with his or her own. (p.1)

Kozulin cautions us against two "equally misleading tendencies in the interpretation of Soviet research": (1) explaining Soviet psychological doctrines as a result of conformance with Soviet ideology and (2) explaining it purely in terms of intellectual history (p.2). Rather, Kozulin advocates the "third way" of "a socially informed study of Soviet psychology that would distinguish between the actual conditions of its development and those secondary interpretations that are invented in order to present these conditions in ideologically coherent form" (p.2). And that is what this book attempts to achieve.

Kozulin adds that the "existing" Vygotsky publications in the West were "concocted" from his writings from different periods (p.3) and "analytic comments accompanying the translations have been prepared under the strong influence of Vygotsky's students, Alexei Leontiev and Alexander Luria, who have offered a biased interpretation of Vygotsky's theory, sometimes substituting their own ideas for those of their teacher" (p.4). (Recall that the 1962 version of Thought and Language was much shorter than the 1986 version that Kozulin would later oversee.)

With that introduction, Kozulin moves into the overview of "generations" of Soviet psychologists: the pre-Revolutionary psychologists, the ones that emerged immediately after the Revolution; the ones that emerged in the 1950s, post-Stalin; and those who emerged in the 1970s. I'm specifically interested in the second group, so I'll concentrate on them here.

As Kozulin notes, "the first generation of post-Revolutionary scholars largely shared the utopian program of their time." The Revolution was a "cosmic" and fundamentally transformative event. These scholars shared "a faith that rationalized and fair interpersonal relations would be a hallmark of the coming communist society," one that would be characterized by "a new kind of person—the liberated proletarian, with new morals, culture, and rules of conduct" (p.15).

These scholars generally opposed idealism in favor of materialism. But their interpretation of "materialism" tended to reduce psychology to reflexes and reactions. As Kozulin says, only one group resisted this trend: The Vygotsky Circle (p.18), which argued that higher mental functions could be studied materially, but not through low-level biological phenomena such as reflexes. Unfortunately for the Vygotskians, there was no clear-cut way to identify the Marxist ideal, nor the methods of study that could be considered legitimately Marxist. "Only one thing was certain: that scientific, Marxist psychology must have a single correct methodology" (p.19; compare Leontiev on this point). "The idea of one, and only one, correct methodology was a natural offspring of the intellectual atmosphere of this period" (p.19). Naturally, if there is only one way, but no clear-cut criteria for identifying it, no one can have absolute assurance that they are on the right path—and any school can accuse the others of being on the wrong path. And that is essentially what happened in Soviet psychology over time. "As a result of mutual ideological accusations almost all Soviet psychologists had been found guilty of dangerous deviations from the Party line and therefore became easy prey for Party functionaries (p.21).

So: "If in the 1920s the problem was to develop behavioral science within the framework of Marxist terminology, in the 1930s it was to derive the categories of consciousness and behavior directly from the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin" (p.21). During the Stalinist purges, "A low profile seemed the best strategy for survival" (p.22); two schools that followed this pattern were the Uznade school (discussed further in Ch.4) and the Kharkov school, made up of "former students and colleagues of Lev Vygotsky" and most prominently including Leontiev (p.22-23). The Kharkov school used Vygotsky's concept of internalization, but disagreed with him about "the role of signs in the internalization process":

Vygotsky's emphasis on signs as means of mediation between objects of experience and mental functions was replaced by the thesis that physical action must mediate between a subject and the external world. The work of the Kharkov school established an experimental base for Leontiev's theory of the psychology of activity, which was recognized in the 1960s as an official Soviet psychological doctrine. (p.23, my emphasis). 

Meanwhile, Rubinstein "ventured to derive psychological categories directly from the works of Marx and Lenin," yielding not a methodology but a "highly professional ... presentation of Marxist philosophical anthropology, which he tried to pass off as the theoretical foundation of behavioral science" (p.23). Kozulin notes that Rubinstein chose his moment carefully, launching an impressive career that was later derailed in the 1940s during an outburst of Russian chauvinism and anti-cosmopolitanism (which was operationalized as anti-Semitism). Consequently, Rubinstein "lost all of his administrative positions" and in his place "Leontiev was appointed chairman of the Department of Psychology at Moscow University" (pp.24-25).

The circular firing squad of Soviet psychology continued. Stalin published a 1951 paper on linguistics, and suddenly psychologists had to incorporate these ideas into their studies. During a 1952 All-Union meeting, prominent psychologists (including Leontiev and Luria) "all hastened to accuse each other of the serious 'deviations' from the prescribed scientific ideology" (p.26).

Fortunately, Stalin died in 1953 and Khrushchev "exposed the atrocities of the Stalin era" in 1956 (p.26); "once-forbidden names such as Vygotsky and Shpilrein now reappeared in the pages of books and articles" (p.27). From that point through the 1960s, Soviet psychology experienced a "renaissance" in which suppressed studies now came into public view and "almost every psychologist of the second generation published his magnum opus in these years" (p.27). For instance, Leontiev's Problems of the Development of Mind was published in 1959 and won the Lenin Prize in 1963, and Luria published "dozens of books in neuropsychology" (p.27). Kozulin concludes:

After years of political pressure, forced confessions, and cross-allegations, psychologists of this generation, now in their sixties, at last occupied solid and unshakeable positions in the universities and research centers of Moscow, Leningrad, and Tbisili. One can only imagine how they felt about themselves after all these years. (p.27)

Since my major interest is activity theory, I'll skip much of what Kozulin says about the subsequent two generations. But let me highlight one event:

One peculiarity of this period of Soviet psychology, stemming from the lack of theoretical work in the Stalin period, has been the rediscovery of many studies conducted in the 1920s. The work of Lev Vygotsky has been central to this movement. New light has been shed on the Kharkov school, which not only developed Vygotsky's ideas, but also revised some of his principal theses. The revisionist version established by Alexei Leontiev and his colleagues was for a while considered a genuine continuation of Vygotsky's program. In 1979, however, at a colloquium dedicated to the theoretical legacy of Vygotsky, Georgy Schedrovitsky pointed out a number of discrepancies between Vygotsky's and Leontiev's concepts of the cultural-historical development of the mind. In discussions and publications that followed, Vasili Davydoc and Vladimir Zinchenko offered their own versions of the controversy. (pp.32-33)

This disjuncture between Vygotksy and the Kharkov school is one of Kozulin's major interests, showing up in his introduction to Thought and Language and in other articles.

In Chapter 2, Kozulin discusses Pavlov and Bekhterev. I'll just note one thing here. According to Kozulin, Soviet "Pavlovianization" was due in part to Russian chauvinism and xenophobia. Pavlov was "100 percent Russian"—which is to say, not Jewish (p.49).

Chapter 3 discusses Bernstein's work. Bernstein rejected the Pavlovian doctrine in favor of "a study of feedback mechanisms in the physiology of body movements. This was cybernetics a decade before Norbert Weiner coined the term" (p.62). Leontiev considered building on Bernstein's work in his discussion of levels of activity, but eventually abandoned the idea and reduced his references to Bernstein's work (p.70).

Chapter 4 discusses the problem of the unconscious. Kozulin notes a "growing rivalry" in the 1960s between "Leontiev's theory of activity and Uznadzean set theory"; but "during the 1960s and 1970s Leontiev's theory became virtually the official Soviet psychological doctrine, and all other trends were pressured to admit it as a general theoretical framework" (p.99).

Chapter 5 focuses on the "continuing dialogue" about Lev Vygotsky. Kozulin notes that "Vygotsky had seemingly left behind a cohort of devoted disciples" who took risks to develop his theories when his name was "'blacklisted'". "After Vygotsky had been scientifically rehabilitated," Kozulin notes archly, "they praised him publicly but were still unable or unwilling to publish his manuscripts. In the meantime their own books based on his writings came off press one after another" (p.102).

Kozulin goes into the details of Vygotsky's theory and history (details that are covered in other reviews on this blog). But he notes that Vygotsky and his students largely steered clear from the accusations that characterized other schools of psychology in that era (p.106).

After Vygotsky's death in 1934, the 1936 pedology decree condemned the work of pedologists; since Vygotsky had tried to develop pedology as a field, Kozulin states, "the disciples who wanted to develop Vygotsky's theory had to do so without naming their leader" (p.110). So, Kozulin says, Leontiev completed his Problems of the Development of Mind in 1940 (and publsihed in 1947) (p.110). It was clearly an extension of Vygotsky's work, but it did not mention Vygotsky at all. Was that because Leontiev wanted to see his book published and he thought Vygotsky's name would keep that from happening? Or was he reframing cultural-historical theory as his own, not giving credit to Vygotsky for the early work? "It is impossible" to determine, Kozulin says (p.111).

In any case, Leontiev and the other members of the Kharkov school "developed Vygotsky's theory but also abandoned some of his essential ideas" (p.111). Kozulin quotes Zinchenko from 1939, claiming that Vygotsky's mistake was in reducing the mind's sociohistorical determination to "'the influence of human culture on the individual'," not accounting for "'material interaction between the human subject and reality'" (quoted on p.111). So

Vygotsky's thesis of the psychological tool as a mediating point between objects of action and mental functions was replaced by the thesis that material activity mediates between the subject and the external world. In 1956 Leontiev reiterated this thesis, simultaneously asserting that Vygotsky's emphasis on signs as psychological tools was transitory and that his theory of activity was therefore the authentic development of Vygotsky's ideas. (p.111).

To challenge this viewpoint, Kozulin turns to Vygotsky's unpublished book The Cultural and Historical Crisis in Psychology. Based on this work, he asserts that human praxis is the stone that the builders rejected and that should become the chief cornerstone (p.115). That is, when a concept (such as Pavlov's reflexes) becomes an explanatory principle, "a vicious cycle of object and principle immediately emerges: Reflexes as the objects of study turn out to be explained by reflexes as conceptual units. Vygotsky sought to break the circle by adopting the concept of praxis as an explanatory principle 'external' to the psychological functions under investigation" (p.115).

We see this vicious circle at work in Leontiev's activity theory, Kozulin asserts. "Unwilling to use the categories of culture or praxis as explanatory principles, Leontiev and his colleagues doomed themselves to the vicious circle in which material activity as an object is explained through material activity as an explanatory principle" (p.118). But "Vygotsky, in contrast, suggested focusing on the system of symbolic interaction as the meeting place of society and individual and investigating the symbolic aspects of human praxis. Thus his interest in culture as a mediating point between individual and world can by no means be treated as transient" (p.118).

Kozulin asserts that "Vygotsky's theory of psychological tools developed in three stages":

1. Usage of signs as external means to master the individual's psychological functions.
2. Means as tools for developing speech and intelligence.
3. Inner speech; the relations between meaning and senses of words (pp.118-119)

But Vygotsky's students underplayed the aspect of inner speech (p.119). 

The book has more chapters, but they are not immediately applicable to this discussion on the development of activity theory so I'll leave them out.

In any case, the book is excellent. Kozulin writes lucidly and in great detail. I'm not sure how widely shared his assessment of Vygotsky's disciples is, nor his critique of their adaptation of his work, but I appreciated his careful plotting of the argument. If you're interested in the development of activity theory, Vygotskian thought, or just Soviet psychology in general, I recommend this book highly.

Reading :: The Working Brain

The Working Brain: An Introduction To Neuropsychology
By A.R. Luria

I have no scholarly interest in neuropsychology, but a great deal of interest in cultural-historical psychology, so I picked up this book to see whether it would be helpful for understanding the latter. Luria was, of course, a member of the Vygotsky Circle and his early work was very much in the Vygotsky mode of carrying on small interventions in mediation; later, he earned his medical degree and moved on to neuropsychology. But in various places, Luria has argued that his later work was a continuation of Vygotsky's insights.

This book certainly seems to bear out that argument. Published in English in 1973, it provides an introduction to neuropsychology, but the Vygotskian concepts and vocabulary are clearly there, and Luria credits Vygotsky liberally (as well as Vygotsky's "pupils" Leontev, Zaporozhets, Galperin, and Elkonin) (p.30).

Luria first covers some basic concepts, many of which are familiar to those who have read AT works, such as functional systems (pp.27-30), internalization and mediation (pp.30-31). After giving examples of mediators—tying a knot in a handkerchief, using a multiplication table—he argues that

external aids or historically formed devices are essential elements in the establishment of functional connections between individual parts of the brain, and that by their aid, areas of the brain which previously were independent become the components of a single functional system. This can be expressed more vividly by saying that historically formed measures for the organization of human behavior tie new knots in the activity of main's brain and it is the presence of these functional knots, or as some people call them, 'new functional organs' (Leontiev, 1959), that is one of the most important features distinguishing the functional organization of the human brain from an animal's brain. (p.31).

And he cites Vygotsky in claiming that "all types of human conscious activity are always formed with the support of external auxiliary tools or aids" (p.31).

He adds that higher mental processes are not statically localized; they move around during development and training (p.31). That's because it eventually becomes automatic. His example is writing, which begins with the memorization of letters' graphic forms, then eventually becomes a "kinetic melody" (see also The Man with a Shattered World).

So these functional systems develop over time. But—as Luria demonstrated graphically in The Man with a Shattered World—a brain lesion could unravel an entire functional system; the loss of the system itself (say, the ability to write) doesn't tell us where the lesion is, because the higher mental function isn't localized in a single part of the brain (p.35). Fortunately, this means that the functional system can be reconfigured—one can regain some ability by drawing on strategies that use different, uninjured parts of the brain.

Luria distinguishes action from operations: "Every action consists of a chain of consecutive movements" and "in the formation of a motor skill, this chain of isolated impulses is reduced and the complex movements begin to be performed as a single 'kinetic melody'" (p.36).

Moving on. Luria, in perhaps his most Soviet statement, claims that right-handedness is "associated with work, and ... evidently relates to a very early stage in man's history" (p.77); it has resulted in the left hemisphere of the brain becoming dominant (p.77).

I found Luria's focus on words and speech to be useful, particularly for tying his work to Vygotsky's. Luria echoes (and cites) Vygotsky in declaring that "higher mental processes are formed and take place on the basis of speech activity, which is expanded in the early stages of development, but later becomes increasingly contracted" (pp.93-94). Later, he obliquely addresses Vygotsky's focus on word meaning as a unit of analysis, saying that "we now conceive a word as a complex multi-dimensional matrix of different cues and connections (acoustic, morphological, lexical and semantic) and we know that in different states one of these connections is predominant" (p.306). And "Speech, based on the word, the basic unit of language, and on the sentence (or syntagmata, or combination of words)" becomes "a method of analysis and generalization of incoming information", then "a method of formulating decisions and drawing conclusions" (p.307). Later, he adds, "In the 1930s, the Soviet psychologist Vygotsky first demonstrated that the process of analysis and generalization, which is the basis of the intellectual act, depends on the logical structure of speech, and that word-meaning, the basis of ideas, develops in childhood" (p.325).

There's much more to this book, particularly in terms of brain structure and functions, but I'll leave that for others. For me, the most important and interesting part of the book was in seeing how Luria takes up Vygotsky's concepts and approach, grounding his neuropsychological work in great part in the cultural-historical school. If you're interested in that aspect, you ought to consider reading this book.

Reading :: The Social Mind

The Social Mind: Construction of the Idea
By Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer

The authors of Understanding Vygotsky and editors of The Vygotsky Reader also wrote this book, which is less Vygotsky-centric but still traces the genealogy of his idea of the social mind:

We are interested here in the ways in which new ideas in the social sciences have been made rigid through social means. The basic sociogenetic credo, that human personal-psychological functioning is a social process, has been invented, and has become a popular slogan in the social sciences. Yet slogans do not make science .... We will examine the social processes of construction of ideas in psychology based on the example of sociogenetic concepts. (p.2)

That is, they are not interested in demonstrating or proving the idea of the social mind—they are interested in seeing how the idea developed. In their view, current claims of the sociality of mind perform some function beyond the descriptive—they have a "missionary spirit: to persuade the world that their viewpoint is the 'right' one" (p.4). They are rhetorical (p.4), and indeed "the Soviet system of the 1930s and 1940s attempted to take over the social sciences," and "the result was that for some decades, the knowledge-constructive activities of scientists were replaced by active rhetoric assertions about the 'righteousness of Soviet science' in contrast to its international counterpart" (p.4). (The authors later note that this milieu led to greater opportunities through denouncing one's rivals for scientific resources: "it was the 'next-door neighbor' (or a competing scientific group) who was the initiator and henchman of the 'Stalinist purges' in everyday life and in 'Soviet psychology' of the 1930s" (p.29).

As you may be able to tell, although the authors want to trace the idea of the social mind in psychology, their route goes through the USSR. They have dedicated chapters on Pierre Janet (Ch.3), James Mark Baldwin (Ch.4), the American pragmatists (Ch.5), George Herbert Mead (Ch.6), and Lev Vygotsky (Ch.8), leading to discussions of today's schools based on the idea of the social mind (Ch.9-10). Rather than reviewing these in detail, I'll pick out some of the relatively more important highlights.

In Chapter 3, the authors discuss Pierre Janet, who argued that "all higher, typically human forms of conduct have a social origin: They exist first between people, as social, interpsychological acts, and only afterwards become transformed to private, intrapsychological processes" (p.122). (The authors note that this claim was made popular by Vygotsky.) Janet discussed memory based on material objects, using the example that Vygotsky later used: knots in handkerchiefs (p.126).

Chapter 4 covers Baldwin. Among other things, the authors note that Baldwin considered "phenomena of discontinuity" through persistent imitation: imitating behavior "starts from an external copy, but transforms it in the process of 'trying and trying again.' The original model that set the given developmental process into motion may soon become unrecognizable. Baldwin was well aware of that implication, which later in Vygotsky's texts became known as the 'fossilization of behavior'" (p.154).

(Readers whose entry point into the social mind was Vygotsky will appreciate these orienting statements, although they tend to make this history Vygotsky-centric.)

Baldwin also uses "the same general argument" as Vygotsky: "(i.e., the non-reducibility of the properties of a molecule, say, water, into its atomic components, a defense of the view of 'analysis-into-units') in their methodological claims in favor of the study of psychological synthesis" (p.159). In a footnote, the authors note that this example dates back to J.S. Mill (1843) and was used widely at the beginning of the 20th century. But—my note—Vygotsky also encountered it in Engels' Dialectics of Nature, where it was used to illustrate dialectics.

In Chapter 5, the authors note that William James' emotion theory later became "a target for Lev Vygotsky's intellectual quesst" (p.208). But "given the advent of the behavioralist belief system in American psychology, most of the sociogenetic thinking became 'exiled' into other areas of social sciences where its theoretical sophistication was tolerated" (p.224)—specifically sociology and philosophy. For instance, Dewey's pragmatism and American sociology "became closely intertwined" in the 1890s at the University of Chicago (p.224).

 Chapter 6 focuses on Mead, whose work has some direct influence on Vygotsky. Drawing on Hegel, Mead "tried to make sense of the dialectics of the human self by viewing the internalization process in inherently dialectical terms," that is, terms that involve one system changing into a "chaotic or fuzzy intermediate state" that eventually engenders "a 'break' with the past in the form of the emergence of a qualitatively novel form of the system" (p.259).

In Chapter 8, we finally get to Vygotsky himself. According to the authors,

Vygotsky's fascination with comparative psychology and Gestalt psychology should be seen against the background of what had become his main goal: to formulate a theory that gives an adequate account of the development, function, and structure of specifically human mental processes. ...

Vygotsky's basic idea was that human ontogeny differs from animal ontogeny and human phylogeny in that it combines the two "lines": the lines of natural and cultural development. In his view, phylogeny consisted of two "stages," a stage of slow biological evolution and a stage of accelerated development after the "invention" of tools and language. Biologically, he reasoned, the human species had not changed much during the last few hundred thousand years. Human natural capacities have essentially remained the same. However, the development of tools and language made rapid cultural growth possible, which resulted in radically changed mental processes. The mental processes of modern human beings are fundamentally different from those of hominids who had only the rudiments of speech and tool use. Thus what we observe in human phylogeny is Vagner's and Severtsov's psychological development without gross morphological change. (p.364) 

As the authors point out, "Vygotsky's view of development and his cultural-historical theory at large borrowed many concepts and findings from the investigations of his predecessors and contemporaries. Many things that now seem original and truly innovative were quite commonplace at the time Vygotsky advanced them" (p.373).

Unfortunately, "Vygotsky's view of conceptual development was not received favorably by his Soviet contemporaries"; it was branded "idealism" (p.377).

The authors go on to discuss other elements of Vygotsky's thought. One problem: "the transformation of cultural instruments or means." Vygotsky argued that in internalization, speech gains different and potentially idiosyncratic qualities. The authors note that if this is so, all prediction becomes "hazardous and inconsistent" (p.380)—limiting Vygotsky's theory as a theory of learning.

In their conclusion of this chapter, the authors argue that Vygotsky wanted to formulate a psychology "that was at once truly human and based on sound biology" (p.382); "In sum, he wished to show animal-human continuity in the spirit of Darwinism and human uniqueness in the spirit of Marxism. He wished to show that human beings had somewhere in human history made the dialectical leap from biological necessity to human self-mastery and freedom" (pp.382-383). This optimism undergirds the key features of his work: "his consistent developmental approach, his anti-reductionism, his interest in comparative psychology, his emphasis on dialectical synthesis," and his focus on word meaning (p.383).

In Chapter 9, the authors move on to contemporary understandings of the social mind. They note that cultural psychology is not a new phenomenon, although it is sometimes presented as new (p.389). But it has three current directions:

• dialogical perspectives, which "emphasize the notions of discrepancy, opposition, negotiation, and conflict as productive (rather than destructive, or 'abnormal') aspects of the theoretical constructions"
• socially situated activity, which overlaps the former and which is "the location where human sociality is displayed"
• symbolic construction, which emphasizes how human minds engage in symbolic construction "as the locus for the social being of the person" (p.389)

Dialogical perspectives appropriate Bakhtin, who of course developed the concept theoretically, not empirically (p.390). The authors briefly discuss the work of Markova and Hermans, then argue that 

Thus not all dialogical approaches are dialectical. Rather, some of the dialogical perspectives incorporate into themselves the construct of unity and contradiction of opposites within the same whole. Only these approaches are dialectical in their nature. Furthermore, of these approaches only some may emphasize the process of synthesis (as emerging from contradictions) as a device for emerging of novelty. In the strictest sense, it is only the latter that could be considered dialectical. (p.391)

The authors then discuss Wertsch's work (pp.391-392) before moving on to "activity-based theoretical elaborations" (p.393). The authors characterize US-based AT as opposing cognitivist stances, carrying on a latent continuity with Deweyan pragmatism, and attacking positivism in mainstream psychology. Meanwhile, European AT implies allegiance to French roots (Janet, Wallon) (p.393).

In sum, this thick book does a great job of stepping back and examining the intellectual history of the social mind. I enjoyed seeing the hidden connections among different strands, especially in how they came together in Vygotsky's work. If you're interested in the social mind, Vygotsky, or activity theory, definitely consider picking up this book.

Reading :: Worlds of Written Discourse

Worlds of Written Discourse: A Genre-Based View
By Vijay Bhatia

Vijay Bhatia addresses written genres from the perspective of applied linguistics in the Swales discourse analysis tradition. It's distinct from the rhetorical genre studies tradition in which I work; we'll get into the different focuses in a moment. In this book, Bhatia manages to develop an overall view of how we can understand and investigate genres as well as specific contributions from the applied linguistics tradition.

On the first page, Bhatia lays down his markers. "I am using the term discourse in a general sense to refer to language use in institutional, professional, or more general social contexts. It includes both the written as well as the spoken forms, though I will be mainly concerned with written discourse in this book. Discourse analysis refers to the study of naturally occurring written discourse focusing in particular on its analysis beyond the sentence level" (p.3).

Bhatia reviews how genre theory has been applied to written discourse in three different frameworks: American genre studies (Bazerman; Berkenkotter & Huckin); the Sydney School's systemic-functional approach (Martin, Christy, & Rothery); and the British ESP school (Swales, Bhatia) (p.10). Early on, these applications allowed "the investigation of conventionalized or institutionalized genres in the context of specific institutional and disciplinary practices, procedures and cultures in order to understand how members of specific discourse communities construct, interpret and use these genres to achieve their community goals and why they write them the way they do" (p.10); this led to a greater focus on context, and "this saw a movement in two somewhat overlapping directions: one toward analysing the real world of discourse, which was complex, dynamic, and continually developing, and the other towards the role of broader social factors such as power and ideology, social structures, social identities, etc." (p.10).

Bhatia further discusses these developments, concluding with Diagram 1.3, which lays out different perspectives on written discourse analysis. Rather than trying to draw it, I'll just summarize it. Overlapping spaces are:

• Social space [Discourse as social practice; social and pragmatic knowledge]
• Socio-cognitive space, including 
• professional space [professional expertise; discourse as professional practice]
• tactical space [discourse as genre; genre knowledge]
• Textual space [discourse as text; textual knowledge] (p.19)

Bhatia explains that the analysis of discourse as text is "confined to the surface-level properties of discourse"—formal, functional (p.19). Discourse as genre extends the analysis to incorporate context to understand how the text is constructed, interpreted, used, and exploited. Discourse as social practice extends to the "features of context," accounting for identity, social structure, and professional relations (p.20). These three are complementary (p.21).

Bhatia then summarizes common ground across the three genre schools discussed earlier:

• "Genres are recognizable communicative events"
• "Genres are highly structured and conventionalized constructs"
• "Established members of a particular professional community" know genres better than newer members
• Genres, although conventionalized, can be used to express private and organizational intentions
• Genres focus on social actions within specific communities' practices
• Genres have integrity (p.23). 

Bhatia notes tensions in genre development:

• Genres are conventionalized, but continually change
• Genres are typified, but their users create new patterns from them
• Genres serve typical collective purposes, but are exploited for private or organizational intentions
• Genres are often thought of in pure forms, but deployed in hybrid ones
• "Genres are given typical names," but are interpreted differently by different members
• Genres often cut across disciplinary boundaries, but there are disciplinary variations of them
• "Genre analysis is typically viewed as textual investigation" but we must use non-textual approaches to understand them comprehensively (p.25)

In Chapter 2, Bhatia distinguishes domain-specific genres, disciplinary genres, systems of genres, and genre sets (p.56). 

In Chapter 3, he discusses "genre colonies," which are "super genres" that are actually related genres, sometimes across domains (p.57); one example is that of "promotional genres," which can include blurbs, ads, and job applications (p.59). Bhatia analyzes this genre colony with a set of criteria, including rhetorical act; general communicative purpose; specific communicative purpose; medium; product; and participants (p.59).

In Chapter 4, Bhatia discusses the appropriation of generic resources. He argues that appropriation leads to one genre colonizing another by invading its integrity (p.87). 

There are many useful concepts and analytical approaches in this book. But I was surprised to find that I had trouble keeping interested in it when the author got into specifics. Why was this the case? Ultimately, Bhatia is interested in a broad overview of genre and especially in generally identifiable public genres: ads, commercials, publicly available annual reports. I'm typically more interested in how genres are deployed and used in specific, defined, bounded activities: a given workplace, collaboration, or program. That is, I'm typically working at what Bhatia denotes the "professional space" within the larger "socio-cognitive space," so naturally I have conducted qualitative case studies, bounded by a definable activity. So when Bhatia discusses genres that circulate across broad, less bounded publics, although this question is also important, the purpose is too diffuse to hold my attention. 

If you're in my position—interested in how genres are taken up within bounded cases—should you still read this book? Of course? The framing work that Bhatia does in Ch.1-3, and to some extent the appropriation discussion in Ch.4, is still extremely valuable. The later chapters may be of less interest, but function as a good example of analysis done for different purposes. If you're interested in genre, please do pick it up. 

Reading :: Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child

Speech and the Development of Mental Processes in the Child
By A.R. Luria and F. Ia. Yudovich

I've been trying to catch up with Luria's work lately, especially his early work on behavior (via cultural-historical psychology) rather than his later work in neuropsychology. This book, which was originally published in the USSR in 1956 and in the West in 1959, describes some of this early work. Here, Luria recounts one of his twin studies from the 1930s—although I don't think Luria clearly situates the date of the study. (Recall that psychologists in the USSR kept their heads down during the Stalin years and published their major works after Stalin's death in 1953.)

My version, which is a 1971 reprint, has an admiring introduction by James Britton. Britton economically discusses the principles of cultural-historical psychology; he does not actually cite Vygotsky's Thought and Language, which was published in an abbreviated form in 1963, but this introduction could have just as easily been an introduction to that book.

Luria's book itself also does a nice job of explaining cultural-historical psychology, citing Vygotsky liberally as a central influence. Luria outlines three principles of Soviet materialist psychology:

• Reject any approach to mental activity that postulates "unanalysable 'abilities' which are innate in the organization of the brain" (p.21). Luria cites Sechenov and Pavlov for support and points to Lenin's notion of reflection.
• Introduce the "role of development into study of the formation of mental processes" (p.21). Luria again cites Sechenov and reflex theory, then adds: "Only a clear understanding that, at each particular stage of development, concrete forms of activity present the organism with new problems, new demands, which necessitate the development of new forms of reflex action, only such a conception can ensure the development of scientific research into the basic laws governing the formation of complex aspects of human mental activity" (pp.21-22). He adds: "This is the direction taken by Soviet psychological research" (p.22). Notice that "concrete forms of activity" is not necessarily a focus of Soviet psychology in general, but does neatly summarize the focus of cultural-historical psychology.
• Study the "child's mental activity as the outcome of his life in certain determined social circumstances" (p.22). He adds that animals develop individual experience, but "with the transition to man the basic form of mental development became acquisition of the experiences of other people through joint practice and speech" (p.22). (cf. Vygotsky and Luria.) Indeed, language "incorporates the experience of generations or, more broadly speaking, of mankind" (p.22). 

Thus "Study of the child's mental processes as the product of his intercommunication with the environment, as the acquisition of common experiences transmitted by speech, has, therefore, become the most important principle of Soviet psychology which informs all research" (p.22).

Luria goes on that argue that language "locks a complex system of connections in the child's cortex and becomes a tremendous tool, introducing forms of analysis and synthesis into the child's perception which he would be unable to develop by himself" (p.24). And "by subordinating himself to the adult's verbal orders the child acquires a system of these verbal instructions and gradually begins to utilize them for the regulation of his own behavior" (p.24).

It's about this point that Luria begins to cite Vygotsky, who he portrays as "one of the first to express the view that speech plays a decisive role in the formation of mental processes, and that the basic method of analysing the development of higher psychological functiosn is investigation of that reorganization of mental processes which takes place under the influence of speech" (pp.25-26). Luria discusses Vygotsky's discussion of external speech's role in problem solving and the notion of speech mediating behavior (p. 29).

After some discussion, Luria gets to Ch.3, where he discusses the case under investigation: uniovular twins, the youngest in a large family. These twins did not speak at all until the age of two, and "at four years their speech consisted only in a small number of barely differentiated sounds which they used in play and communication" (p.39). They had developed some "autonomous" speech (that is, private language) (p.40). They did not understand others' speech well, and "speech which did not directly refer to them usually completely passed them by" (p.40). Their play involved "manipulation of objects independently of any other aspect of the play materials provided"—that is, they did not role-play, tell stories, or sequence complex play actions, nor did they show interest in primarily symbolic play, e.g., games such as lotto (p.41). They played primarily with each other and did not show much interest in other children's games (p.41).

How were Luria and his collaborators to help these twins? The cultural-historical principles, set out earlier, suggested that language was an important precursor to more complex activities since it provided the means to symbolically mediate them. It also suggested that mental capacities developed in relation to cultural-historical activities. These insights grounded Luria's interventions: as Luria put it, "The essential moment, which calls forth the development of speech, is undoubtedly the creation of an objective necessity for speech communication" (p.72). The resulting interventions ultimately helped the twins to develop their language, abilities, and participation in play.

In Ch.4, Luria more carefully inventories the challenges the twins faced, focusing specifically on play activity:

The researches of Vigotsky, Elkonin, Fradkina and others have shown that it is precisely during the play of children of pre-school age, when their behavior becomes subordinated to an imaginative pattern, that there appear those peculiar features of activity which give promise of future development, which lay the foundations for a transition to new, more complex forms of mental life. (p.74)

Luria first discusses observations of the twins at play. The twins could take part in primitive play, in which an object was assigned a conditional meaning. But "complex meaningful play, which proceeded from some preliminary project and involved the steady unfolding of this project in a series of play activities, was inaccessible to them" (p.75, their italics).

Luria and colleagues then begin small, targeted interventions such as encouraging the twins to assign conditional meanings; asking them to draw and name their drawings; asking them to construct things with blocks; asking them to imitate patterns of blocks; and classifying items (something that Luria had done in other contexts). He found that "In cases when the situation demanded that the children act in accordance with some project, that they realize this project in some developing constructive activity, their actions did not depass the limits of helpless manipulation of objects and there was failure" (p.80, their emphasis). And "constructive activity in accordance with a verbally formulated task was beyond our twins, who could not themselves formulate the task verbally and so provide a reinforcement when the corresponding activity began" (p.82, their emphasis). The processes of abstraction and generalization are closely connected with language, so the twins' lack of developed language skills meant that they had trouble with these aspects as well. For instance, rather than classifying objects, the twins would range them (p.83). 

How could Luria rectify these deficits? Luria saw an opportunity: Since the two were uniovular twins, he could introduce different interventions for each, demonstrating that the results were not based on genetic heritage but on the interventions themselves. So he did two things:

• First, he separated the twins into two different sections of the kindergarten. Since they could not longer play with each other, they had to learn to play with other children, which meant communicating with them, playing with them, and learning to engage in their activities.
• Second, he identified the weaker twin—the one who lagged developmentally—and gave that twin special activities that amounted to what we would now call speech therapy. The other twin was the "control," receiving no additional intervention.

In Chapter 7, Luria discusses the results of these interventions. He argued, "we have every reason to suppose that the acquisition of language would introduce important new peculiarities in the structure of our children's mental processes" (p.84). And indeed, three months after the interventions described above, the twins had improved their play activity. Luria put them together again to conduct comparative observation, and found that now both twins were using complex speech to orient and analyze their play—play that was now more complex, unfolding in several stages (p.86). Their speech reflected a multistage process in which they singled out an object, fixed the play situation, and planned the succeeding activity. Objects began to take on permanent, not just conditional, significance (p.86). Speech let them detach from the situation, subordinate their activity to a verbally formulated project, and stand in a new relation to the situation (p.87). 

The twins had also improved their constructive activity. Luria cites Marx's famous passage in Capital about the difference between bees and architects (the architect projects his construction in his imagination before making it in reality) (p.87). Before the intervention, the twins were like bees, unable to project the construction and thus unable to undertake any "real constructive activity"; afterwards, they "were in a position not only to exclaim and to apply separate meanings arising during the course of the activity, but also objectively to formulate their projects," and thus "productive activity began to be possible. This took place according to the clear phases of a verbally formulated project" (p.87). Similarly, the twins could model things in plasticine, draw objects, and cut out basic shapes (pp.88-89)—symbolic activities that had been inaccessible just three months earlier.

Beyond that, the children began to undertake more stable productive activities and to actively regard the products of these activities. For instance, Yura built a "metro" out of blocks one evening; the next morning, he returned to this building, still saw it as a "metro," and continued its construction (p.90). This persistence was entirely new.

And this brings us to the differences that began to be seen between the twins' performances. Yura was the twin who had received supplemental training. Up to this point, Yura had been the weaker twin and had customarily followed the lead of his brother Liosha. This relationship continued in physical activities. But in symbolic play, Yura "never let the initiative out of his hands, first formulating the project and then taking the active role, while Twin B [Liosha] only followed him" (p.93). Yura was better equipped to perceive and comprehend speech, but also to understand and repeat symbolic games, assign new meanings to objects, interpret pictures, analyze component parts of drawings, and classify objects according to categories beyond color (pp.94-96). These differences, Luria argues, were all due to the speech training Yura received: abstractions, meaning/functional categories, and logical deductions were all easier for Yura because they all depended on the mediation of speech (p.99).

One more thing. Early on, children do not perceive the word in itself; only in the process of play and (later) school "does the word itself become an object of special perception and special conscious activity." And "It is precisely in this respect that differences between the twins were manifested, one having been specially trained in speech while, in the other, speech arose only as a result of practical activity" (p.100). When, after ten months, "both twins were set problems involving a set of operations with the aid of their own speech, it was demonstrated that an elementary special operation with the aid of speech was accessible to the trained Twin A but remained inaccessible to Twin B who had not undergone special speech training" (pp.100-101). 

One may wonder here why Luria did not begin offering speech therapy to Liosha after three months, when differences were so clearly detected. In fact, Luria never tells us whether Liosha ever gets the speech instruction Yura got. Luria remains a puzzling figure to me, sometimes seeming compassionate and concerned with the individuals he helps, but sometimes seeming oblivious to the suffering of his participants (as in his early experiments with what would become the lie detector). 

Nevertheless, this slim book gave me additional insights into the cultural-historical approach. If you're interested in the Vygotsky Circle and/or activity theory, I highly recommend it.

Reading :: Luria's Legacy in the 21st Century

Luria's Legacy in the 21st Century
Edited by Anne-Lise Christensen, Elkhonon Goldberg, and Dmitri Bougakov

A.R. Luria, one of Lev Vygotsky's closest collaborators, went on to have an illustrious career in neuropsychology (among other specializations he pursued). In this edited collection, neuropsychologists discuss his continuing impact on their work. I'm certainly no neuropsychologist, but this collection helped me to contextualize Luria's contributions. Below, I'll hit some of the highlights.

In Goldberg and Bougakov's chapter, they note that Luria's neuropsychology was an accident of ideology:

It is not widely known that Luria's becoming a neuropsychologist is more bittersweet serendipity than early career planning. Had Luria lived in a country where career choices were less dictated by the ruling party line and more open to personal preference, he would have probably continued pursuing his earlier interests in cultural psychology. ... However, cultural psychology fell out of favor with the Soviet state and, in order to pursue a viable scientific career, Luria was forced to adapt to the increasingly oppressive circumstances. (p.21)

(This is an abbreviated version of the story Cole tells in his afterword to Luria's biography.)

Luria, however, was still influenced by cultural psychology, as Cagigas and Bilder explain in their chapter:

Leontiev, Luria's contemporary and a member of the original "troika," together with Vygotsky and Luria, also developed a theoretical framework that he christened activity theory, which was inclusive of the many layers that influence human activities (Cole and Engestrom 1993; Engestrom 1996). To date, however, this branch of thought has enjoyed little dialogue with the neurosciences but almost certainly influenced Luria's pioneering ideas. In short, Luria and the other two founding members of the cultural-historical school of thought attempted to create a metatheory that could guide research and help resolve what they called the "crisis in psychology" (Leontiev and Luria, 2005) namely the integration of the two psychologies originally proposed by Wundt: experimental psychology and Volkerpsychologie (Cole 1996; Cole, Levitin, and Luria 2006). (pp.26-27)

It's useful to see this side of the story—and, after reading so many books focused on the story of activity theory, to see Vygotsky demoted as just another member of the "troika" rather than described as its leader. AT is here described (of course) as a metatheory, and the crisis in psychology is sourced by a Leontiev and Luria publication rather than Vygotsky's unpublished manuscript by this name.

Luria's work in neuropsychology went on to examine the different subsystems of the brain. This question is endlessly fascinating, but it's not directly applicable to my work, so I won't go into it here. Instead, I'll plan to hunt down some of the citations to Luria and Leontiev that are offered in these two chapters.

Should you read this book? If you have an interest in Luria's legacy, and in neuropsychology in particular, sure. If your interest is more generally in activity theory, you can safely skip it.

(Hardcovers and paperbacks)

If you've been to my Amazon.com author page lately, you may have noticed some changes with my first two books.

Tracing Genres through Organizations (MIT Press, 2003) is no longer available in hardcover—it's out of print. However, it's still available in the Kindle version. And if you want it in paperback, it's now available, both at Amazon and at the MIT Press site.

Network (Cambridge University Press, 2008) is available from Amazon in all three formats. I'm very excited that it's now available in paperback, which is much less expensive than hardback.

I haven't seen the paperback version of either book yet. If you buy one of these in paperback, let me know what you think!

Reading :: The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation

The Historical Meaning of the Crisis in Psychology: A Methodological Investigation
By Lev Vygotsky

Vygotsky never published this manuscript, which fortunately is free to us, courtesy of Marxists.org. Supposedly Leontiev kept a copy and had his graduate students read it.

In Chapter 1, Vygotsky identifies a "crisis" in psychology: although people recognize the need for a psychology, and although various psychological disciplines have developed approaches, "Further advance along a straight line, the simple continuation of the same work, the gradual accumulation of material, are proving fruitless or even impossible. In order to go further we must choose a path." Specifically:

Out of such a methodological crisis, from the conscious need for guidance in different disciplines, from the necessity – on a certain level of knowledge – to critically coordinate heterogeneous data, to order uncoordinated laws into a system, to interpret and verify the results, to cleanse the methods and basic concepts, to create the fundamental principles, in a word, to pull the beginnings and ends of our knowledge together, out of all this, a general science is born.

But where is the methodological starting point? We can't start with pathology, Vygotsky says, because it leads us to look for the extreme, not the normal. We can't start with zoopsychology (e.g., behaviorism or reflexology) because, contrary, "always the highest forms [are] the key to the lower ones" (and here he cites Marx).

And yet, he says, we need a unified methodological basis for psychology. In this book,

We wish to obtain a clear idea of the essence of individual and social psychology as two aspects of a single science, and of their historical fate, not through abstract considerations, but by means of an analysis of scientific reality. From this we will deduce, as a politician does from the analysis of events, the rules for action and the organisation of scientific research. The methodological investigation utilises the historical examination of the concrete forms of the sciences and the theoretical analysis of these forms in order to obtain generalised, verified principles that are suitable for guidance. This is, in our opinion, the core of this general psychology whose concept we will attempt to clarify in this chapter.

 This problem is crucial, since facts are collected and interpreted differently via different methodologies. Worse:

At present psychoanalysis, behaviourism, and subjective psychology are already operating not only with different concepts, but with different facts as well. Facts such as the Oedipus complex, indisputable and real for psychoanalysts, simply do not exist for other psychologists; for many it is wildest phantasy.

Thus "the fundamental concept, the primary abstraction, so to speak, that lies at the basis of a science, determines not only the content, but also predetermines the character of the unity of the different disciplines, and through this, the way to explain the facts, i.e., the main explanatory principle of the science."

Yet different branches of psychology, he notes, have been fighting for supremacy, and this has caused problems.

In Ch.3, Vygotsky notes these problems:

It can be said of any important discovery in any area, when it transcends the boundaries of that particular realm, that it has the tendency to turn into an explanatory principle for all psychological phenomena and lead psychology beyond its proper boundaries into broader realms of knowledge. In the last several decades this tendency has manifested itself with such amazing strictness and consistency, with such regular uniformity in the most diverse areas, that it becomes absolutely possible to predict the course of development of this or that concept, discovery, or idea. At the same time this regular repetition in the development of widely varying ideas evidently – and with a clarity that is seldom observed by the historian of science and methodologist – points to an objective necessity underlying the development of the science, to a necessity which we may observe when we approach the facts of science from an equally scientific point of view. It points to the possibility of a scientific methodology built on a historical foundation.

That is, some branch of psychology attempts to become ascendant in this way:

1. It is applied successfully to a specific problem: "In the beginning there is some factual discovery of more or less great significance which reforms the ordinary conception of the whole area of phenomena to which it refers, and even transcends the boundaries of the given group of phenomena within which it was first observed and formulated."
2. Due to its success, it is applied to adjacent areas: "The idea is stretched out, so to speak, to material that is broader than what it originally covered. The idea itself (or its application) is changed in the process, it becomes formulated in a more abstract way."
3. Eventually, it takes over as the default explanatory framework: "the idea controls more or less the whole discipline in which it originally arose. It has partly changed the structure and size of the discipline and has itself been to some extent changed by them. It has become separated from the facts that engendered it, exists in the form of a more or less abstractly formulated principle, and becomes involved in the struggle between disciplines for supremacy."
4. It keeps expanding beyond its disciplinary bounds, separating from the facts that engendered it, eventually being "formulated as a universal principle or even as a whole world view."
5. It bursts like a soap bubble: "it enters a stage of struggle and negation which it now meets from all sides," and at this point its limitations become apparent and it shrinks to the appropriate size—or disappears.

In Chapter 4, Vygotsky gives us several examples: "psychoanalysis, reflexology, Gestalt psychology, and personalism." For each,

The extension of the concept grows and reaches for infinity and according to the well-known logical law, its content falls just as impetuously to zero. Each of these four ideas is extremely rich, full of meaning and sense, full of value and fruitful in its own place. But elevated to the rank of universal laws they are worthy of each other, they are absolutely equal to each other, like round and empty zeros. Stern's personality is a complex of reflexes according to Bekhterev, a Gestalt according to Wertheimer, sexuality according to Freud.

Yes, Vygotsky, yes. But here Vygotsky holds out hope for a truly universal principle:

Doesn't this tendency of each new idea in psychology to turn into a universal law show that psychology really should rest upon universal laws, that all these ideas wait for a master-idea which comes and puts each different, particular idea in its place and indicates its importance? The regularity of the path covered with amazing constancy by the most diverse ideas testifies, of course, to the fact that this path is predetermined by the objective need for an explanatory principle and it is precisely because such a principle is needed and not available that various special principles occupy its place. Psychology, realising that it is a matter of life or death to find a general explanatory principle, grabs for any idea, albeit an unreliable one.

And here I found myself saying: No, Vygotsky, no! But this is ultimately Vygotsky's goal: to develop a universal methodological principle for psychology, one that can unify it. It's a modernist goal for Vygotsky's modernist psychology.

In Ch.5, Vygotsky freely quotes Engels to substantiate his point that abstractions can and should be based on actual relations—and that dialectics is the way to do so.

Engels [1925/1978, p. 514] has pointed out many times that for dialectical logic the methodology of science is a reflection of the methodology of reality. He says that 

The classification of sciences of which each analyzes a different form of movement, or a number of movements that are connected and merge into each other, is at the same time a classification, an ordering according to the inherent order of these forms of movement themselves and in this resides their importance. 

Can it be said more clearly? In classifying the sciences we establish the hierarchy of reality itself

In Chapter 7, Vygotsky discusses the issue of one school taking on ideas from another. Whether one school "annexes" ideas from the other or whether they become "allied," this process is fraught with difficulties because the ideas have developed within different systems under different premises. Re the latter, it's not hard to read between the lines and see a critique of the young Luria here:

This method is usually applied in the merger of Marxism and Freudian theory. In so doing the author uses a method that by analogy with geometry might be called the method of the logical superposition of concepts. The system of Marxism is defined as being monistic, materialistic, dialectic etc. Then the monism, materialism etc. of Freud’s system is established; the superimposed concepts coincide and the systems are declared to have fused. Very flagrant, sharp contradictions which strike the eye are removed in a very elementary way: they are simply excluded from the system, are declared to be exaggerations, etc. 

And if you didn't see it coming, a few paragraphs later, Vygotsky explicitly makes the case with a cite to Luria's 1925 paper! He goes on to say that such alliances fundamentally disrespect the intended allies—Luria, he says, in trying to reconcile the two systems, is essentially telling Freud that Freud is materialist and monist. He concludes: "By no means do I want to say that everything in psychoanalysis contradicts Marxism. I only want to say that I am in principle not dealing with this question at all. I am only pointing out how we should (methodologically) and should not (uncritically) fuse two systems of ideas."

In Chapter 8, this line of thought reaches its conclusion with this intriguing analogy:

As to the methodological spine that is supporting them there are two scientific systems. Methodology is always like the backbone, the skeleton in the animal’s organism. Very primitive animals, like the snail and the tortoise, carry their skeleton on the outside and they can, like an oyster, be separated from their skeleton. What is left is a poorly differentiated fleshy part. Higher animals carry their skeleton inside and make it into the internal support, the bone of each of their movements. In psychology as well we must distinguish lower and higher types of methodological organization. 

This is the best refutation of the sham empiricism of the natural sciences. It turns out that nothing can be transposed from one theory to another. It would seem that a fact is always a fact. Despite the different points of departure and the different aims one and the same object (a child) and one and the same method (objective observation) should make it possible to transpose the facts of psychology to reflexology. The difference would only be in the interpretation of the same facts. In the end the systems of Ptolemy and Copernicus rested upon the same facts as well. [But] It turns out that facts obtained by means of different principles of knowledge are different facts.

In Ch.9, Vygotsky notes that Chelpanov ridicules psychologists from rival schools who rename the phenomena they study.

Chelpanov is tempted to reduce the whole reform carried out by behaviorism to a play of words. He assumes that in Watson’s writings the word “sensation” or “idea” is replaced by the word “reaction.” In order to show the reader the difference between ordinary psychology and the psychology of the behaviorist, Chelpanov (1925) gives examples of the new way of expressing things: 

"In ordinary psychology it is said: ‘When someone’s optical nerve is stimulated by a mixture of complementary light waves, he will become conscious of the white color.’ According to Watson in this case we must say: ‘He reacts to it as if it were a white color.’" 

The triumphant conclusion of the author is that the matter is not changed by the words used.

But, Vygotsky says, this is the view of someone who is uncritical: "Who has no view of his own about the phenomena and accepts indifferently both Spinoza, Husserl, Marx, and Plato, for such a person a fundamental change of words is an empty pretension." In contrast, Vygotsky says, "We can say in advance that the word that refers to a fact at the same time provides a philosophy of that fact, its theory, its system."

And here he connects the discussion of terminology back to the question of methodology in the previous chapter:

We have seen everywhere that the word, like the sun in a drop of water, fully reflects the processes and tendencies in the development of a science. A certain fundamental unity of knowledge in science comes to light which goes from the highest principles to the selection of a word. What guarantees this unity of the whole scientific system? The fundamental methodological skeleton. The investigator, insofar as he is not a technician, a registrar, an executor, is always a philosopher who during the investigation and description is thinking about the phenomena, and his way of thinking is revealed in the words he uses.

In Chapter 10, Vygotsky summarizes:

From the fragmentary analyses of the separate elements of a science we have learned to view it as a complex whole which develops dynamically and lawfully. In which stage of development is our science at this moment, what is the meaning and nature of the crisis it experiences and what will be its outcome? Let us proceed to the answer to these questions. When one is somewhat acquainted with the methodology (and history) of the sciences, science loses its image of a dead, finished, immobile whole consisting of ready-made statements and becomes a living system which constantly develops and moves forward, and which consists of proven facts, laws, suppositions, structures, and conclusions which are continually being supplemented, criticized, verified, partially rejected, interpreted and organized anew, etc. Science commences to be understood dialectically in its movement, i.e., from the perspective of its dynamics, growth, development, evolution. It is from this point of view that we must evaluate and interpret each stage of development. 

So how is the current crisis in psychology interpreted? Some, like Chelpanov, deny its existence. Others interpret it "subjectively," believing their school is correct and others are simply wrong. Vygotsky warns that psychology will either coalesce around a future unified system or splinter due to mutually exclusive principles of knowledge. He adds something interesting here:

But before we turn to this point we must first quit radically with the misunderstanding that psychology is following the path biology already took and in the end will simply be attached to it as its part. To think about it in this way is to fail to see that sociology edged its way between the biology of man and animals and tore psychology into two parts.

In Chapter 11, Vygotsky adds that psychology cannot be empirical because "empiricism formulates its tasks in such a way as to reveal their impossibility. Indeed, on the basis of empiricism, i.e., completely discarding basic premises, no scientific knowledge whatever is logically and historically possible." This is Chelpanov's dilemma: He "wants psychology to be a natural science about (1) phenomena which are completely different from physical phenomena, and (2) which are conceived in a way that is completely different from the way the objects of the natural sciences are investigated."

In Chapter 12, Vygotsky declares that "the main driving force of the crisis in its final phase is the development of applied psychology as a whole" (his emphasis). He adds: "One can say about applied psychology what can be said about philosophy which was rejected by empirical psychology: 'the stone which the builders rejected is become the head stone of the corner.'" He argues that "the struggle between the two psychologies does not coincide with the struggle between the many conceptions and psychological schools, but stands behind them and determines them" (again, his emphasis).

And he concludes the chapter:

Many psychologists have viewed the introduction of the experiment as a fundamental reform of psychology and have even equated experimental and scientific psychology. They predicted that the future would belong solely to experimental psychology and have viewed this epithet as a most important methodological principle. But in psychology the experiment remained on the level of a technical device, it was not utilised in a fundamental way and it led, in the case of Ach for instance, to its own negation. Nowadays many psychologists see a way out in methodology, in the correct formation of principles. They expect salvation from the other end. But their work is fruitless as well. Only a fundamental rejection of the blind empiricism which is trailing behind immediate introspectional experience and which is internally split into two parts; only the emancipation from introspection, its exclusion just like the exclusion of the eye in physics; only a rupture and the selection of a single psychology will provide the way out of the crisis. The dialectic unity of methodology and practice, applied to psychology from two sides, is the fate and destiny of one of the psychologies. A complete severance from practice and the contemplation of ideal essences is the destiny and fate of the other. A complete rupture and separation is their common destiny and fate. This rupture began, continues, and will be completed along the lines of practice. (His emphasis)

In Ch.13, Vygotsky grounds his proposed psychology in dialectical materialism—but not by simply applying terms to the new domain:

Engels’ formula – not to foist the dialectical principles on nature, but to find them in it – is changed into its opposite here. The principles of dialectics are introduced into psychology from outside. The way of Marxists should be different. The direct application of the theory of dialectical materialism to the problems of natural science and in particular to the group of biological sciences or psychology is impossible, just as it is impossible to apply it directly to history and sociology. In Russia it is thought that the problem of “psychology and Marxism” can be reduced to creating a psychology which is up to Marxism, but in reality it is far more complex. Like history, sociology is in need of the intermediate special theory of historical materialism which explains the concrete meaning, for the given group of phenomena, of the abstract laws of dialectical materialism. In exactly the same way we are in need of an as yet undeveloped but inevitable theory of biological materialism and psychological materialism as an intermediate science which explains the concrete application of the abstract theses of dialectical materialism to the given field of phenomena. 

Dialectics covers nature, thinking, history – it is the most general, maximally universal science. The theory of the psychological materialism or dialectics of psychology is what I call general psychology. 

In order to create such intermediate theories – methodologies, general sciences – we must reveal the essence of the given area of phenomena, the laws of their change, their qualitative and quantitative characteristics, their causality, we must create categories and concepts appropriate to it, in short, we must create our own Das Kapital.  (his emphasis)

And that is the really interesting thing about the book, and perhaps why it lay in Leontiev's desk drawer rather than being published. Vygotsky wanted a revolutionary change in the conception and methodology of psychology, one that was as fundamental as Marx's Das Kapital—one that was not dialectical in the forced, artificial way that Kornilov's "materialist" psychology was, nor an internally contradictory mishmash in the way of Luria's early flirtation with Freudianism, but rather, one that was materialist at the roots and that could seamlessly grow into its connections with dialectical materialism, the logic of nature.

I have been reluctant to believe that Vygotsky took Engels that seriously, but based on this argument, I think he really did. Nevertheless, Vygotsky was a more systematic thinker, one who saw the need for a genuine, organically developed methodology for psychology.

If you're interested in Vygotsky, psychology, or methodology, of course you should read this (free) book.