Existing psychological approaches to the ideals and universals that children learn as part of their schooling experience tend to theorize the outcomes in terms of thing- like concepts and meanings that might exist in connection with other concepts to form conceptual frameworks. There existed attempts, however, to focus on concept formation as process – but nevertheless focusing on the concept and the meaning of the associated word-thing. In this section, I briefly sketch these approaches before describing and analyzing in transactional terms a classroom event in which a clas- sification develops.
The Classical Approach to Concept Learning
One of the important and best-known classical approaches to concept learning pres- ents children with objects among which they are to isolate, abstract, and generalize some perceptual feature that is common to all. For example, experimenters used cards with drawings that included borders and figures. In the classical case, the observations (facts) are clear, as there are only small, limited numbers of attributes;
and the concept can be given in an unambiguous manner, such as “two figures and a boundary or two boundaries and a figure” (Fig. 7.1). It is apparent that in this situ- ation, “concept” means a recurrence across percipient events related to the different drawings. This is an example of a conjunctive concept, because two types of fea- tures had to be combined to describe the class as a whole. Because the features common to those cards within a concept tended not to be visible on first sight, this paradigm was also used to study the formation of hypotheses. The children (sub- jects) were told to identify/discover the concept given instances and non-instances
Fig. 7.1 The classical concept-learning paradigm consists of tasks where the child is asked to perceptually isolate and identify those features that make the concept, here two (borders or figures) and one (figure or border)
thereof. The same types of materials were included in the early science curricula that emphasized “hands-on” approaches, because doing these tasks were thought to develop the ability to generate and test hypotheses and, thereby, also develop the ability to form concepts.
The Genetic Approach
Although reigning in the 1950s and 1960s, this classical concept-learning paradigm had already been rejected much earlier. Because the approach focuses on the per- ceptual process, it was held to ignore the function of signs generally and words more specifically in the concept formation process (Vygotsky 1987). The descrip- tions of concept formation thereby come to be overly simplistic, failing to make visible the determining role of signs (language). It is but the reversal of an older idea of concept formation that had been concerned entirely with the learning of defini- tions. Both approaches fall short of presenting good theories of concept learning, for the concept-learning-by-definition approach begins by isolating language from the objective material, whereas the concept-learning-by-extraction-of-perceptual-fea- tures approach begins by isolating the perceived material objects from the use of language and non-language signs (i.e. Vygotsky uses the term sign where we should be using the term signifier, because sign is a relation not a single thing). Vygotsky then presents a better method for studying the development of concepts. In this method, both the words and the concepts are new. During the learning period, the participants manipulate a number of objects provided to them and for which artifi- cial names are provided. The features of the concepts are not describable by means of everyday language. Vygotsky, however, did not critically interrogate the fact that the subjects even in this improved paradigm were not operating outside of their own life history. Indeed, he approvingly states: “the subject’s resolution of the task that faces him in the experiment presupposes no previous experience or knowledge”
(Vygotsky 1987, 122).
In the text on the development of concepts, Vygotsky does recognize at times that word-meanings and concepts are alive; but once a concept has formed, it is treated as a thing. In presenting concept formation, he fails to take into account the function of language in the relation between humans. That is, in his discussion, he only focuses what is represented in Fig. 5.7 as the relation between the plasticine form and the mystery object. The text does not consider the double relation of per- son to another person – e.g. the experimenter, to whom the child participants responded and for whom they performed – and the relation of persons to things.
Vygotsky does note however that some goal that orients the activity is required, though the goal does not explain the work (event) but that instead, just as tools in the context of labor, the use of concepts needs to be explained in terms of language.
Crucially, he considers signs (i.e. signifiers) generally and language specifically as mediators of higher psychological processes – which points to his ontology of doing psychology in terms of self-identical things. The sign (signifier) is a means to mas-
ter and direct psychological processes. The word specifically is described as the means to concept formation, and subsequently shifts its function to become the symbol for the concept.
On a game board divided up into fields, about 20–30 wooden figures resembling draughts- men are placed in one field. These figures are differentiated as follows: (1) by colour (yel- low, red, green, black, white), (2) by shape (triangle, pyramid, rectangle, parallelepiped, cylinder), (3) by height (short and tall), (4) by planar dimensions (small and large). A test word is written on the bottom of each figure. There are four different test words: “bat” writ- ten on all the figures small and short, regardless of their colour and shape; “dek,” small and tall; “rots,” large and short; “mup,” large and tall. The figures are arranged in random order.
The number of figures of each colour, shape and of each of the other attributes varies. The experimenter turns over one figure – a red, small, short parallelepiped – and asks the child to read the word “bat” written on its exposed underside. Then the figure is placed in a spe- cial field on the board. The experimenter tells the child that he has before him toys that belong to children from some foreign country. Some toys are called “bat” in the language of this people, for example, the upturned figure; others have a different name. There are other toys on the board that are also called “bat.” If the child guesses after thinking carefully where there are other toys called “bat” and picks them up and places them on a special field of the board, he receives the prize lying on this field. The prize may be a sweet, a pencil, etc.
… The experimenter asks why the child picks up these toys and what toys were called “bat”
in the language of the foreign people. Then he has the child turn over one of the figures not removed and finds that “bat” is written on it. “Here, you see, you made a mistake; the prize isn’t yours yet.” For example, if the child picks up all the parallelepipeds regardless of their colour and size on the basis of the fact that the model is a parallelepiped, the experimenter has him expose the unremoved small short red circle “bat” similar to the model in colour.
The overturned figure is placed with the inscription up alongside the recumbent model, the figures removed by the child are taken back, and he is asked again to try to win the prize by picking all the “bat” toys on the basis of the two toys known to him. … The game continues until the child picks up all the figures correctly and gives a correct definition of the concept
“bat.” (Sakharov 1994, 94–95)
From this experiment with subjects of a range of ages (children, adolescents, and adults), it was concluded that only participants after the transition into adolescence exhibited mastery of the process of concept formation. In that phase of their life, participants made “functional use of the words for the purpose of directing atten- tion, partitioning and isolating attributes, abstracting these attributes, and synthesiz- ing them” (Vygotsky 1987, 130). As a result of a complex activity, during which the participant operates on the word or sign (signifier), the researchers observed con- cept formation and the “acquisition” of word meaning. On one level, the events in the second-grade mathematics classroom described in Chap. 5 can be understood in terms of Vygotsky’s approach to concept learning, which he denotes by the term dual stimulation. In dual stimulation, the subject is presented with tasks that involve two sets of stimuli, one functioning as the material object – the mystery object in the case of the three girls – the other functioning as signifiers to facilitate the organiza- tion of this activity.
It is quite apparent that in this presentation, the word and its meaning obtain thing-like quality. There is a transitive relation between subjects and the words or signifiers that they operate on, and word meaning is acquired as children acquire a toy, download a piece of music, or purchase a piece of furniture. Of particular inter-
est here is also that Vygotsky does not write about the experimenter and the experi- ment or about the subjects participating in a particular form of activity, which is research (i.e. a societal activity) on the learning of recurrences. And yet, he does employ process terms, pointing out that the process of the formation of concept is irreducible to other processes, including “association, attention, representation, judgment, or determining tendencies” (Vygotsky 1987, 131); but then again, he writes about these same as function-things. The key aspect for Vygotsky is media- tion that begins to occur in the transition from childhood to adolescence. The basic difference between the forms of thinking and intellectual activity before and after concept formation “consists in the transition from unmediated intellectual processes to operations that are mediated by signs” (133). In this statement is expressed pre- cisely the situation represented in diagrammatic form in Chap. 5 (see Fig. 5.1).
Vygotsky thereby focuses on a purely transitive relation between the person and the environment, which includes the task (objects), the signs written on them, and the relationship to the experimenter. He does not actually provide a description that would have been consistent with the sociogenetic approach noted elsewhere; and he fails to attend to the intransitive dimensions of life that can be understood only in the evental terms of a transactional approach. In his work on concept formation, he does not address what he stated to be the essence of all learning and development:
every higher psychological function was a social relation with another person (Vygotsky 1989). In the experiments, concept development and the signifier use are made out to be accomplishments of the children working on their own. All reference to the cultural-historical determinants in development is absent.
In the transactional approach developed here, processes would be thought of as events, that is, in categories that have the quality of events rather than things; and, as the attentive reader may have sensed, the concept formation process is conceived as an ensemble effect in which the lifelines corresponding to the different constitu- tive processes are brought into an active relation, into intersection. Vygotsky does however point out that the motive of the activity – task, goal, or need – emerges for the adolescent subject in the social setting of the experiment. It is in this way that thinking develops to operate with words and to form concepts. That motive, there- fore, is not inside the individual but outside and concretely available: it is social.
Vygotsky, however, was not conceiving of the relation of events as events, and how two separate events come to be related in an event that intersects and thus is com- mon to both. During this event, each of the originally separate events come to be immanent in each other; and the event that intersected both comes to be part of their common history (cf. Whitehead 1919). The concept formation Vygotsky describes is something that has to be attributed to the experimental occasion as a whole; and there are likely other forms of occasions where such a development can occur and is initiated.2 Thus, one important form of occasion is schooling, which leads to very different categorization and category formations than when people have not attended
2 Development is another phenomenon that Vygotsky did not theorize in evental terms. He has the child as the subject of the phrase, who develops – “the child develops …” – whereas operating with evental concepts would take development to be the subject: “There is development of the child …”
schools, as seen in the different ways in which Russian peasants categorized colors (Luria 1976).
Whatever Vygotsky may have had in mind, or whatever development there was in his thinking, his descriptions lend themselves to the individualist and (social) constructivist readings characteristic of interpretive psychology (as distinct from scientific, physiology-oriented psychology). The living, social-material environ- ment is a condition for the adolescent to evolve the particular forms of thinking.
Piaget might have said that there are processes of accommodation and assimilation that lead to an equilibration. Vygotsky does not at all talk about the relations between participant subjects, experimenter, and other aspects of the environment making it as if the participants developed something internally. The English translation of the work – which consistently uses the adjective “mental” rather than psychological that better renders the adjective that the psychologist used in his native Russian (i.e.
psikhicheskij) – contributes to the mentalist take on development that manifests itself in the work.