An Experimental Study of Concept Development

Abstract

Until recently, a major impediment to the study of concepts has been a lack of experimental methods that would allow the investigation of their formation and their psychological nature. Traditional methods for studying concepts fall into two basic groups. The first is typified by what is called the method of definition. This method involves the study of fully developed and fully formed concepts through the use of verbal definitions. Despite its wide acceptance, this method suffers from two fundamental inadequacies that make it unreliable for any realistic investigation of concept formation. 1. This method deals with the results of the completed process of concept formation , with the ready-made product of that process. When we use this approach, we are not looking at the dynamics of the process itself, at its development, its course, its beginning and its end. This method is an investigation of the product not of the process that leads to its formation. Consequently, in studying definitions of developed concepts , we are frequently dealing less with the child's thinking than with his reproduction of fully formed knowledge and definitions. Thus, when we study the child's definitions of a particular concept, we are studying his knowledge or experience and the level of his verbal development more than we are studying his thinking in the true sense of the word. 2. The method of definition depends almost exclusively on the word. It overlooks the fact that, for the child in particular, the concept is linked with sensual material , the perception and transformation of which gives rise to the concept itself. This sensual material and the word are both necessary for the concept's development. Divorced from this material, the word transfers the process involved in the concept's definition to a purely verbal plane, a plane that is not characteristic of the child. When this method is used, we therefore rarely succeed in identifying the relationship that exists between the meaning the child attributes to the word in a purely verbal definition and the word's real meaning in the process of its living relationship to the objective reality it designates. 121 R. W. Rieber et al. (eds.), The Collected Works of L. S. Vygotsky