Communicating | Thinking

Abstract

For the late Vygotsky, there was a unity/identity of body and mind, which expresses itself in the irreducible {speaking | thinking} unit. There is not a preexisting mental structure or already conceived idea that determines what comes out of the speaker’s mouth. Instead, thinking is born in speaking, a suggestion that has not been taken up in current educational psychology. In this chapter, we articulate a late Vygotskian Spinozist approach appropriate for a cultural psychology of education. Thought is born in the process of its articulation for the Other and, in so doing, for the person itself. We expand Vygotsky’s focus from speaking to communicating and develop a monist perspective on its relationship with thinking. In the mature individual, communicative thinking develops in response to and together with the changing situation. In children and adolescents, communicative thinking develops on two planes: a situational and an ontogenetic one. Here, the two lines of development are difficult to tease apart. In this chapter, we provide two types of case studies: the development of thinking and speech in the case of (a) university professors in the course of lecturing and (b) high school students in a physics lesson.