On the Social Nature of Human Cognition: An Analysis of the shared intellectual roots of George Herbert Mead and Lev Vygotsky

Valsiner, Jaan; Veer, René van der

doi:10.1111/j.1468-5914.1988.tb00119.x

Cited by 51 publications

(35 citation statements)

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“…Mead (1934), like Vygotsky (1987), gave primacy to the social by accepting that it was a product of human activity and was therefore contingent and subject to individual and collective revision. Where Mead differed from Vygotsky was that he was more concerned with the interaction between self and social roles in changing social contexts than on the development of that interaction and the formation of mind (Valsiner and van der Veer 1988). Mead's (1934, p.177) work, principally the idea that the self was a dynamic between the unpredictable and intentional "I", which gives the 'sense of freedom and initiative', and the "me', which represents 'a definite organisation of the community on our attitudes', served as the primary source of inspiration for Blumer (1969) to formulate the premises of Symbolic Interaction.…”

Section: Interprofessional Working and Learning: Two Current Approachesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Interprofessional Activity in the ‘Space of Reasons’: Thinking, Communicating and Acting

Guile

2011

Vocations and Learning

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The paper analyses a form of interprofessional working and learning (IPWL)-the fleeting spatial and temporal constitution of project teams with little prior history of working together-that is an increasing feature of work in the global economy. The paper argues firstly: (i) this form of working and learning is relatively under-researched in professional, vocational and workplace learning (PVWL); and, (ii) the research traditions-Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) and Cultural Anthropology/Symbolic Interactionist (CA/SI)-that some researchers in PVWL have drawn on to investigate IPWL do not allow them to capture the cognitive and symbolic complexity of this activity. Secondly, it is possible to reveal the nature of this complexity when the concepts and methods associated with CHAT and CA-SI-based approaches are supplemented with the concepts of 'inference', 'space of reasons ', 'restructuring and 'recontextualisation' (Guile, 2010). The paper demonstrates this claim by reinterpreting a classic study of the aforementioned form of working and learning undertaken by Hall, Stevens and Torolba that drew on concepts and methods from CA and SI (2002).

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Section: Interprofessional Working and Learning: Two Current Approachesmentioning

confidence: 97%

Interprofessional Activity in the ‘Space of Reasons’: Thinking, Communicating and Acting

Guile

2011

Vocations and Learning

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“…Environment of learning refers specifically to the relationship between learners, learners' interpretation of instructional content, and the relationship between the learner and the facilitator (Barlas, 2001;Bless, Fiedler, & Strack, 2004;Cain, 2002;Deaux & Martin, 2003;Douglas, 2000;Gauvain, 2001;Merriam & Brockett, 1997;Valsiner & van Der Veer, 1988). In addition, an environment of learning might imply a learner's readiness to learn through relationships cultivated within the learning environment.…”

Section: Condition Of Learningmentioning

confidence: 97%

Positioning in the Context of Adult Learning and Participation

Young

2012

Sage Open

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Positioning dimensions, reflexive and discursive, present a portrait of learning and cognitive processes understood in the context of social participation. Reflexive positioning emphasizes self-identity and resilience for learning; discursive positioning underlines communication necessary for social interaction to bind people in a network. Communication that connects might also disconnect creating a condition for learning. An interpretive biographical study of 11 men and women living in a shelter using an inductive analysis of multiple data sources explored this presumption. One major conclusion suggested that when transitional residents face a gap in cognitive skills and the ability to use what they learned in social networks, the experience creates a condition for learning.

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“…For an answer to this general question we turn to Vygotsky, a writer whose emphasis on the social origins of thought has led to comparisons with Mead's social pragmatism (Valsiner and Van der Veer, 1988; Leudar, 199 I ). Vygotsky worked in Russia during the 1920's and early 1930's to establish a psychology within a revolutionary political framework that was much less constrained by established methodologies than the USA a t the turn of the century.…”

Section: Requirements For a Mutualist Theorymentioning

confidence: 98%

“…applying coding categories when meaning depends upon context), especially Conversation Analysis (West and Zimmerman, 1982), which does the fullest justice to both context and the flow of activity. But we do not exclude the use of content analysis altogether, and it has been used impressively with categories based on Vygotsky's work by Rogoff and Gauvain (1986), Valsiner (1987), Ignjatovic-Savic et a1 (1988) and Reed (1990). The most abstract game theory (Smith, 1982) or sequential analysis (Bakeman and Gottman, 1986) may prove useful ways of articulating the F 124 flow during the dialectical process of theory development described above.…”

Section: )mentioning

confidence: 99%

Mutualism in the Human Sciences: Towards the implementation of a theory

Still¹,

Good²

1992

J Theory Soc Behav

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In his recent review of the 'Ecological perception debate' in this journal, Ginsburg (1990) concluded:The debate dealt with issues and assumptions that go to the heart ofcontemporary psychology and social psyrhology. On the other hand, the debate has not had serious impact on mainstream psychology or social psychology, reflecting in part the fringe status of the journal with respect to those disciplines. But participants in the debate are publishing in their disciplinary media, and to the extent the participants have had their thoughts sharpened by the debate, the disciplines will benefit. (p. 362).A cheerful conclusion, but potentially limiting, as though thejournal were like a yoga class or a game of squash that set one up for the real business of life. That way disciplines may be invigorated and fortified, but are unlikely to be disturbed in their isolation. Ecological Psychologists have always been suspicious of the boundaries that legitimise such conceptual and institutional isolations -between organism and environment, or sensation and perception, and we may add, if we are mutualists, between theoretical discussion and laboratory practice, or between social and mainstream psychology.Mutualism is not new, but has recently become a label and a theme in conference papers (Still, 1987;Good and Still, 1988; Good, 1990, 1991) and in print (Still and Costall, 1989; Leudar, 1991). There is no exact definition ofmutualism. Mutualist concepts, including that ofmutualism itself, are flexible and change over time. Nevertheless, and bearing this in mind, atlempts at a definition may prove a useful starting point. The word 'mutualism' has been in occasional use for over 100 years in politics and in biology. In politics, according to the third edition ofthe Shorter OxfordEnglish Dictionary, it is "the doctrine that individual and collective well-being is attainable only by mutual dependence", while in biology it is "A condition ofsymbiosis in which I 06 two associated organisms contribute mutually to the well being of each other". More recently the word has been used in psychology to refer to an approach stemming from the Ecological Psychology of J. J. Gibson, and centred on the view that organism and environment cannot be treated independently (Leudar, 1991). 'Environment' for human beings includes other people and even the so-called physical environment is dominated by social factors -it is only through sharing the world of others during development in infancy and formal education that we gain knowledge of the environment, physical as well as social. Such a mutualism has more far-reaching implications in psychology than in politics or biology, especially at present, when psychology is still dominated by a cognitivism whose starting point is the study of the mind in isolation from its environment (Fodor, 1980;Still, 1986). There are signs that these implications are being spelt out for psychology in a variety ofcontexts; in dialectical psychology (Buss, I 979; Riegel, 1979); contextualism (Morris, 1991 ; Rosnow and Geo...

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On the Social Nature of Human Cognition: An Analysis of the shared intellectual roots of George Herbert Mead and Lev Vygotsky

Cited by 51 publications

References 50 publications

Interprofessional Activity in the ‘Space of Reasons’: Thinking, Communicating and Acting

Interprofessional Activity in the ‘Space of Reasons’: Thinking, Communicating and Acting

Positioning in the Context of Adult Learning and Participation

Mutualism in the Human Sciences: Towards the implementation of a theory

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