By Andy Blunden
“Concept” is a broadly used and often polysemous term, like “solidarity” or “context.” Sometimes people try to pin these words down with operationalized definitions that make them useful for a specific domain or application. This is what Lev Vygotsky did in Thought and Language, where he explored how children acquire word meaning as unorganized heaps, then complexes, then pseudo-concepts, then eventually concepts, which are developmentally higher and more abstract. In this dialectical account, Vygotsky envisions concepts as the developmental endpoint of word acquisition.
Blunden is a Vygotskian, and in this book, he understands concepts as unifying divergent realizations across disciplines — something that is needed if we are to conduct interdisciplinary research (p.2). The first part of the book examines concepts as they are treated in a range of disciplines, including cognitive psychology, linguistics, and the narrative turn in the humanities; the second part turns to philosophy, focused on Hegel, and then how Hegel’s science of logic was taken up experimentally and materially by Vygotsky (p.2).
To begin this discussion, Blunden defines “concept”: “A concept is generally understood to be a thought form which constitutes a unit of our knowledge of the world” (p.3). Concepts matter, he says, because contemporary life is in crisis due to “the fragmentation of communities and the dissolution of social bonds” (p.8), leading to the abandonment of “the very idea of concept”: interactionism has been conceived without mediation (p.8). This postmodern crisis leads to accepting incommensurability, or as Blunden puts it, “reinforcing the disintegrating social tendencies which led to the error in the first place” (p.8). He adds: “Concepts are the pre-eminent social bond, in fact. Concepts are not just thought-forms but forms of social life. Efforts to reduce concepts to products of face-to-face interactions both reflect and promote a view of social life which is to say the very least poisonous” (p.8).
Interactionism is one of the challenges to concepts that Blunden mentions. Others include the individual/society split, brain-world dualism, and formalism (pp.8-9). To heal these, he offers concepts as units of both consciousness and social formation (p.9).
In Chapter 1, he explores the psychology of concepts. He criticizes psychologists for trying to isolate subjects from normal life and for focusing primarily on concepts of things, especially artificial objects (pp.14-15). “According to Cognitive Psychology,” he charges, “when all the attributes of something are taken away, there is nothing left. This accords with many contemporary philosophies, such as post-structuralism, but not with science and not with Aristotle” (p.20). A theory of concepts, he argues, needs a distinction between essence and appearance (p.28).
He also goes after cognitive psychologists for not thoroughly considering the interplay between organism and environment. For instance, someone’s memory might be improved by systems of memory aids, “but it never seems to occur to them that these systems are an integral part of every person’s normal cultural environment and that the psychological functions which people exhibit in real life reflect the cues embedded in their cultural environment rather than the underlying natural functions” (p.29). The word “never” is awfully strong here, since this seems like classic distributed cognition a la Hutchins and Norman, or situated cognition a la Lave & Wegner, and it’s also been treated in neuropsychology (I’m weaker in my understanding of this area). Blunden does acknowledge Hutchins later in the chapter, conceding that it “did open a window on the need to understand tools and symbols indigenous to a culture as having an important place in cognition, and many other things besides” (p.32). However, he dismisses Hutchins and Latour by claiming that both see concepts as a shorthand for nested subroutines (or “shorthand for long chains of atomistic percepts and set-theoretical relations,” p.32). He does not provide justification for this characterization; I’m unconvinced by it.
He sums up this chapter by claiming that psychologists have not given any thought to a suitable unit of analysis for understanding concepts. “In fact, a simple concept is a unit, and the problem is not to break a simple concept into parts (which always destroys the concept) but rather to determine which concept is analytically primary” (p.33). He charges that “Psychologists study individual actions, while sociologists study group behavior; linguists, on the other hand, study language” (p.33); but “Actually, concepts exist only through the correlation of all these domains, and can be understood through at least a study of psychology, social theory and linguistics, informed by a knowledge of philosophy” (p.33).
A very short Chapter 2 gets into narratives and metaphors. He argues that metaphor theory sees a concept’s meaning as deriving from its place in a larger system, and quotes Lakoff as arguing that concepts are acquired in and through practical activity (p.41).
Chapter 3 turns to conceptual change and linguistics, starting with Piaget’s idea of equilibration: “how an organism (child) develops in the process of adaptation to its environment” (p.47). But Piaget tried to “transpose his conception from ontogenetic (child) development to phylogenetic (historical) development,” This move “does not work” (p.48). Blunden then turns to Kuhn, and at the end of this section, argues that “A concept is … a living, active form of life” (p.57). With this, he turns briefly to Wittgenstein, then to Brandom’s theory of concepts (p.62). According to Brandom, understanding involves being able to use a concept “as both a conclusion and a premise in reasoning” (p.63). That is, “a concept is not a representation of what actually exists, but rather it represents a hypothetical condition, a possible predicate of some object, or the conclusion of some reasoning process. … It is not a reflection of an existing state or perceptual field, but a product of reasoning” (p.63; it’s interesting to set this interpretation in contradistinction to Lenin’s reflection theory, which was credited in Leontiev’s and Luria’s work roughly from the Great Terror to de-Stalinization).
Taking Brandom’s understanding seriously, Blunden says, means that “the use of concepts commits any person who uses a concept to the work of integrating concepts into a single whole, which is the person’s world view; a person must answer for what flows from the concepts they use. When a rational person is presented with a new concept, its ramifications and its interaction with all the other concepts must be worked through. Incompatible concepts cannot be carried side by side with each other. … The unified whole is only the outcome of the integrative role of a rational person” (p.67). Notice that this notion is congruent with Vygotsky’s dialectical understanding of concepts, and is just as monologic. As my dissertation director David R. Russell once pointed out to me, evolutionary biologists still go to church — and as Blunden says on p.78, “it doesn’t matter how weird or contradictory a concept may be, whether it belongs to religious fanaticism, superstitition or a computer game, those thought-forms which are a part of how people organise their own activity within some collective form of life, count as ‘concepts’” (p.78).
Back to Brandom. Where do concepts come from? Nominees include (1) empiricism — originating in experience; (2) pragmatism — originating in their significance for action, and (3) rationalism — originating in capacity for “production of good inferences in reasoning” (p.67). Brandom suggests “an eclectic approach” recognizing all of these as possible origins, and he critiques psychology for restricting concepts to representation (p.68).
Blunden’s problem with Brandom is that Blunden wants a unifying principle to make this theory a whole theory, and Brandom does not offer one (p.72). Yes, “concepts are products and vehicles for reasoning,” but “concepts can only exist as formations of human psyches. … concepts are essentially both psychological and societal theories” (p.72). He concludes the chapter by arguing that pragmatism entails the use of artifacts, which are existing products of society, “the real bearers of culture” (p.76). “Omit these mediating elements and you are left with the atomism which is so characteristic of liberalism and analytic philosophy” (p.76).
He concludes Part I by arguing that “we urgently need an approach which grasps concepts as processes, not things” (p.86).
This brings us to Part II, “Hegel.” Blunden argues that the point of Luria’s Romantic science was to grasp a process as a whole rather than building it up in parts (cf. gestalt psychology), and that the ur-phenomenon is the simplest single example of a phenomenon (which sounds like the Vygotskian idea of the unit of analysis) (p.98). “In any formation of consciousness … there is a simple concept which functions as its Absolute,” or in other words, “when a concept is taken as the Absolute, it constitutes a social formation, in which a way of thinking, a constellation of artefacts and a system of activity mutually constitute each other, with the Absolute at its heart” (p.112). In Hegel’s logic, the Being is the concept-in-itself (pp.121-124). After going through the basics of Hegel’s dialectic, Blunden concludes that “the scientific study of the situation itself means to grasp it as a concept (which a study of its historical origins contributes to but is not equal to) and then to determine what follows from, or unfolds from the concept. The concept is a nodal point in development. To grasp the concept of something, presupposes an historical investigation of it” (p.131).
Side note: Here and elsewhere, Blunden tends to appeal to “science” as both authoritative and monologic, and expects any science to have central monologic concepts to which everyone in the discipline signs on. Science shuts down debate. But (a) that understanding seems to contradict science as a method that focuses on disproving rather than proving, along with the scientific ethos that nothing is sacred (which is why replication studies are lauded, even though they are often not conducted); (b) the understanding also seems to contradict what we see in social studies of science, in which scientists in practice (one might say in a social formation — a way of thinking, a constellation of artifacts, and a system of activity) deal with heterogenous propositions and representations; and (c) different scientific disciplines interact productively even when they are dealing with very different concepts and propositions. That is, I think Blunden is not describing science so much as he is describing his idealized understanding of science.
He ends the chapter by claiming that “the dialectical logic offers the only alternative to categorisation by attributes” (p.133), and says that “only a theory which takes concepts to be a process is going to be able to capture the nature of concepts” (p.133).
Let’s skip a bit. In Ch.11, Blunden argues that
a concept has three distinct developmental processes:
the microgenetic process through which it is manifested in the course of interactions;
the ontogenetic or learning process by which an existing concept is acquired by an individual and subsequently enters into their life activity; and
the cultural-historical process through which a concept is first formulated, developed within some project and then concretised and ultimately merges into the entire way of life. (p.187)
Often these developmental processes are dissonant, yielding contradictions in the concept (p.188).
In Ch.13, we finally get to Vygotsky on concepts. Blunden says “Vygotsky does tell us what a concept is, but he hardly puts it in bold type.” To get there, he invites us to follow Vygotsky’s thinking . Vygotsky distinguishes between concepts in general and true concepts, which only enter consciousness during and after adolescence (p.230). Blunden summarizes: “a ‘true’ concept is a socially fixed and transmitted solution to some problem which has arisen in social practice in the past, not a bundle of attributes or features associated with some object. Such a bundle of attributes Vygotsky calls a ‘pseudoconcept’ and it is the kind of generalisation children acquire until they begin to go out into the world and become involved in the problems of social life and a profession” (p.231). A couple of pages later: “a concept is a mediated relationship of a person to their environment in which a word, acting as a sign for a problem or solution encountered by the community in the past, is used to organise the individual’s actions, but which necessarily also includes immediate sensorimotor interactions with the environment. It is this relationship to one’s activity which is both culturally mediated and immediate, which is essential to concepts” (p.236). Blunden adds that Vygotsky regards scientific concepts as “the purest type of nonspontaneous concept” because
the scientific concept has developed over history so as to distance itself more and more from all traces of appearance and immediate perception, and integrated all its concepts more and more into a single system. Science has increasingly purged itself from cultural prejudice and sectional interests, imperfectly perhaps, but in its essence, in its tendency, science is universal. (p.250)
Blunden attributes this view to Vygotsky, but does not distance himself from it, and it seems consonant with the other statements Blunden makes about science. As mentioned earlier, this view seems highly problematic in light of social studies of science.
A few pages later, Blunden affirms that “the scientific concept offers the purest example of a true concept. But all other concepts which are consciously acquired through deliberate instruction in some institution where the concept is part of a whole system of concepts, reflecting the social practices of the institution in question, must be regarded as true concepts” (p.253).
From here, Blunden takes up Vygotsky’s concern with word meaning: “a word is a sign for a concept” (p.255). He then moves to conscious awareness, which includes this striking claim: “In general, conscious awareness of a psychological function is attained only with a high level of development of the function. It stands to reason, that you must first be able to ride a bicycle before you can be aware of your pedalling, and the same is true of attention, memory, and perception. Conscious awareness of a function is a precondition to voluntary control and thus mastery of the function” (p.264). But the pedaling example is the opposite of what was claimed by the Vygotsky Circle. For instance, Leontiev argues that we first encounter elementary movements as conscious actions, which we eventually turn into unconscious operations so that we can build more complex actions on top of them (one of his examples is learning how to shift gears in a car). Luria similarly draws on Vygotsky’s work to discuss how “higher” functions are built by networking “lower” ones, and he reteaches a brain-injured soldier to write by coaching him to be less conscious of writing individual words. Perhaps “conscious awareness of a function is a precondition to voluntary control,” but this conscious awareness happens earlier in the developmental process, is integrated in a larger system of functions, and can be revisited and reconstructed (e.g., an intermediate golfer might focus on rebuilding their golf swing) only once other functions are operationalized.
Later in the book, Blunden says that “activity theory” usually refers to the works of Leontiev and Engestrom, but not Vygotsky. But, he says, although Vygotsky didn’t use the term to characterize his work, he “was really the originator of Activity Theory” (p.278). Blunden rationalizes this by arguing that word meaning is understood as an action, and “actions find their ultimate rationale … in activity” (p.278). “[C]oncepts are activities which transcend the immediate context in which words are used, just as the actions by means of which any project is realised are meaningful only in the light of the project being realised” (p.279). He adds that “Vygotsky’s Activity Theory” is based on the idea that “concepts arise from predicaments” (p.280).
Frankly, this is a reach. “Activity theory” is a label commonly used to describe a framework emerging from the works of several theorists. Vygotsky is certainly considered one of them, but the category of activity was imported from philosophy to psychology by Rubinshtein and then picked up by Leontiev, who was searching for a way to distinguish his work from Vygotsky’s at a time when Vygotsky’s work was radioactive. For Rubinshtein and Leontiev, “activity” refers to labor activity, from which meaning and consciousness supposedly emerged. Saying that Vygotsky originated AT is a bit like saying that Hegel originated Marxism: there’s a lineage, yes, but the claim omits a fundamental shift.
Blunden goes on to characterize those who are generally associated with activity theory with focusing only on social motive, which Vygotsky did not happen to address, and he points to Meshcherayakov, who he says responded in practice to these criticisms (p.285). He argues that true concepts are only developed by collaboration through an artifact (which includes words), and studying dyads is a good way to study this collaboration, since it’s well-bounded and since Vygotsky demonstrated that he could “unfold the whole of social life, from analysis of the collaborative use of an artefact to complete some task” (p.286; consider that this unfolding was demonstrably unsuccessful in Vygotsky and Luria’s cross-cultural research). Blunden adds, in one of his characteristic absolute statements, that “In fact, nothing can come of interaction between two subjects lacking any means of mediating their interaction, other than a fight to the death or mutual retreat” (p.288).
Finally, Blunden takes a shot at rival approaches to concepts: “Dialogic and interactionist approaches cannot account for the creation and development of concepts, which are essentially societal products, and generally such dialogical theories do not attempt to account for such concepts” (p.289).
He poignantly ends the book by arguing that “a concept is the nearest thing human beings have to eternal life”: it “means a change in social practice” (p.298). This ending brings home to me how much Blunden has staked his notion of concepts on a dialectical process in which Science provides an authoritative word. Without a lasting contribution such as a concept, how can an atheist or agnostic be assured that they have contributed to the world? And without an authority such as Science to settle disputes (and to lend heft to Blunden’s absolute statements), how can such a contribution be concretized and guarded? Ultimately Blunden’s project is modernist, just as the Soviet project was modernist.
Despite my criticisms, I found a lot to like about Blunden’s book. He has ably connected Vygotsky’s book (which is sometimes difficult to read) with Hegel’s works (which I am frankly unwilling to read). He has thought about how concepts arise from developmental processes and stretch across artifacts and practices. And he has surveyed (some) literature on concepts in different fields. I’m not willing to follow him to his modernist conclusions, but I respect the journey.
If you’re interested in concepts, Hegel, or Vygotsky’s Thought and Language, definitely pick this book up.
(2003)
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