Inquire about purchasing the book | Table of Contents | Annotated Bibliography | Class on Nature of Mind
These are excerpts and elaborations from my book "The Nature of Consciousness"
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This view was inspired by
the theory of the mediating language advanced in the 1920s by the Russian
psychologist Lev Vygotsky: that language provides a
semiotic mediation of knowledge and therefore guides the child's cognitive
growth. Cognitive faculties are internalized versions of social processes. This
implies that cognition develops in different ways in different cultures. Your
mind depends on the cultural conditions of the community that raised you. The individual is the result
of a dialectical cooperation between nature and history, between the biological
sphere and the social sphere. An individual is a product of culture (nurture)
as well as a product of nature. Children develop under the influence of both
biology and society. Vygotskyinsisted on the concept of
"zone of proximal development": the difference between the unguided
(independent) problem solving skills and the guided (coached) problem solving
skills. Language is a way to
organize (internally) the world. But language is also a way to transmit mind to
less mentally-able individuals and across generations: the by-products of
this process of "coaching" are the arts and sciences. The acquisition of language
itself is such a process of transmission of mind: teaching a child to speak is
a way of coaching the mind of the child. Humans solve problems by
speaking as well as by using their body and tools. Vygotskyalso realized that the process
of "learning" from a coach is mostly unconscious (just like the child
is not conscious that s/he is learning to speak). He thought it was a general
phenomenon: we become conscious of a function only after we have mastered it by
practicing it unconsciously. Back to the beginning of the chapter "Language: Minds Speak" | Back to the index of all chapters |
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