Some notes concerning Dr.

Fodor’s
‘Reflections on L.S. Vygotsky’s Thought and language’

A. N. LEONTIEV
A. R. LURIA

Moscow University

After carefully studying Dr. J. A. Fodor’s ‘Reflections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought

and language’, we decided to reply for two basic reasons: Firstly, as collaborators
and followers of L. S. Vygotsky, we are naturally extremely interested in any article
on this outstanding researcher, who still has a great influence on experimental psy-
chology in our country. Thus we were very attentive to a paper on Vygotsky’s basic
work, especially by such a gifted psychologist as Dr. Fodor.
Secondly, it is quite apparent to us that although Dr. Fodor makes some very
good points when he discusses some of the basic problems in the contemporary
approach to psychology, nevertheless, he makes some statements with which we are
in complete disaccord. Defending truths or discovering mistakes is a much easier
task compared to dealing with half-truths, and these are the most dangerous in
history of science.
Having briefly stated our reasons for replying, we would now like to discuss the
contents of J. A. Fodor’s paper. Dr. Fodor begins his article by saying that towards
the end of the last century, psychology came to an amicable divorce with philosophy,
and began to lead an independent life; a page later, Dr. Fodor takes this statement
up again saying that psychology, however, still remained under the influence of a
bad philosophy, and that this lead to a ‘deplorable state of affairs’. We entirely agree
with both these statements. We have always believed that in order for psychology to
make any real progress, it must develop as an independent field. But nonetheless, we
think that a scientifically based philosophy, which deals with some of the basic con-
cepts and general laws on the development of nature and society, has a decisive and
positive influence on our research. It also provides a guarantee against certain mis-
interpretations of data and loss of progress in the field.
When Dr. Fodor says ‘L. S. Vygotsky started from a priori assumptions more
than from real facts’ (which we do not believe), it seems to us that he himself has
based his views on another set of a priori assumptions, sometimes much more super-
ficial than the ideas of L. S. Vygotsky.
 312 A. N. Leontiev and A. R. Luria

The question of the relation between thought and language was of basic interest
to Vygotsky. (Unfortunately Dr. Fodor’s information is limited, since Thought and
language is the only book of Vygotsky’s to have been translated into English.)
Leaving aside the historical problem (i.e., between the late twenties, when the book
was written, and the early thirties when it was published, the question of the relation
between thought and language was a basic problem to cognitive psychologists at that
time) Dr. Fodor claims that Vygotsky’s basic mistake lies in identifying language
with speech, and thought with problem-solving. His own idea is that the relation
between the ‘deep structures’ or ‘natural’ and ‘inborn’ language and the ‘superficial
language codes’ and their place in thought, has to be the central problem in cognitive
psychology today. At the same time, he assumes that the processes of thinking can
have different relations with speech and problem solving (‘do we really solve a
problem thinking “Sunday will perhaps be warm?” ‘).
We quite agree that thinking can take many different forms and that speech is
not at all identical to language. We also agree that the language in which we integrate
visual and auditory information cannot either be the language of vision or the
language of audition, although it must contain both. But we doubt that the theory
of a ‘natural language’ and ‘innate language codes’ is valid, and we turn to the works
of D. 0. Hebb (1971), who in describing the most complex cognitive basis of
language processes has rendered any hypothesis on its ‘innate’ origin untenable.
We also know that the relation between language and thought can be extremely
variable at different stages of the child’s development, and, consequently, any theory
on the stability of this relation seems out of the question.
An important factor in the works of L. S. Vygotsky is that he totally differs in
his approach to the nature of mental processes from that of classical psychology.
Vygotsky presumed that conscious (or cognitive) processes have a socio-historical
issue, and that language is narrowly related to every conscious reflection of reality:
These forms of conscious reflection undergo a series of deep structural changes
during the child’s development. Thus any theory of a ‘natural’ (ready made) or
‘innate’ language seemed unacceptable to Vygotsky, and it remains unacceptable to
both of us. It seems to us that a contrast between the immediate (natural) evolution of
animal behavior and the social (or language-based) development of the human mind
(of man’s cognitive processes) has a much broader significance. This is why Vygotsky
mentions the social origin of language and its influence on human thought as a
central issue in scientifics psychology. Vygotsky believed (as we do) that to think
‘Sunday will perhaps be warm’ is impossible without the participation of language.
not because Sunday is a verbal concept, but because any conscious thought of the
future is a mental process which needs language as its base, and it is impossible to
deal with the future (as with the past) without the aid of inner speech as a derivation
 Some notes concerning Dr. Fodor 313

of language. Thus Vygotsky accepted that even ‘practical intelligence’, i.e. con-
structing-tasks or problem-solving such as the Link blocks, etc. as well as the com-
plex forms of active attention or memory are not ‘natural’ processes but can be
realized only with the aid of inner speech-which is a specialized derivation of socially
originated behavior.
These statements are not mere philosophical speculations, or ‘a priori ussump-
tions’. Vygotsky himself prepared a long series of articles on his experimental works
which are only partly published in Russian (a six-volume collection of his articles is
now in preparation), as well as publications such as The development of memory
published by A. N. Leontiev in the thirties, and a series of experimental studies
concerning the development of speech and its directive functions, published by
A. R. Luria. Also, many experimental works by such pupils of Vygotsky as A. V.
Zaporozhets, D. B. Elconin, P. Ya. Galperin, and others give evidence that to apply
the term ‘philosophical muddle’ to L. S. Vygotsky’s findings as does Dr. Fodor is
entirely out of place when discussing the heritage of one of the most outstanding
psychologists of our time.
Let us now examine Dr. Fodor’s second ‘reflection’. He says that the idea ‘the
meaning of the words evolve’ is of basic significance in Vygotsky’s theory. But he
himself disagrees with the statement and gives a series of arguments which, according
to him, render this idea untenable. His arguments can appear to be obvious and
convincing at first glance, but a close examination shows how weak they really are:
If the meaning of words were different for children and adults, then they would be
talking different languages and no mutual understanding could be possible. ‘Vygots-
ky’s way of dealing with this objection is simply hopeless’, concludes Dr. Fodor.
This statement can appear to be viable only if it is read at a superficial level without
taking the context into consideration. It is not true that a mutual understanding is
possible only if word meanings are identical. It is well known and accepted by all
psychologists and linguists that the word has a very complex structure - we need
not repeart it to such an outstanding psychologist as Dr. Fodor. A word always
designs an object (quality, action, or relation) and a common designation suffices
for a mutual understanding. But every word is a complex matrix, in which the same
object can form different systems of relations - these matrices of relations constitute
the essence of word meanings.
Thus when a child and an adult use the word ‘shop’, they are relating to the same
object, but the child relates ‘shop’ to a set of empirical (emotional) impressions,
whereas an adult disposes of many more potential systems and can therefore select
from a much wider range of relations than can a child. It is obvious that the word
‘angle’ fundamentally differs in meaning for a pre-school child, a schoolboy, and a
student in geometry - and it is not just a quantitative difference of images and as-
314 A. N. Leontiev and A. R. Luria

sociations. What is really important is that at each stage, the developing word mean-
ing requires a different mental operation. Thus with a small child a basic role is
played by immediate impressions (partly emotional), with a schoolchild this structure
undergoes a deep change, and finally with an adult the mental operations required
to process word meanings involves an extremely complex process of deep psycholog-
ical changes - and to believe, as does Dr. Fodor, that these changes are only quan-
titative, i.e. that an adult ‘knows more’ than a child but uses the same psychological
operations, is an assumption which brings us back to the old times of associationistic
psychology but which hinders the further progress of psychological science. One can
be a good psycholinguist, with excellent empirical works, but, as Dr. Fodor, one
can come under the influence of a bad philosophy. We do not think it worthwhile to
abandon the theories of Vygotsky and Piaget fo rthose of Dr. Fodor. Doing so would
be going right the way back to a kind of psychology which was abandoned at least
two generations ago.
In his third critical remark, Dr. Fodor argues that L. S. Vygotsky had a simplified
notion of the basic essence of an adult’s thought, reducing it to Boolean Logics.
Vygotsky understood the development of the child’s thought as a process of mastering
abstract concepts and of selecting relevant criteria from a confused mass of sounds.
We quite agree with Dr. Fodor’s remark that the processes of thought in an adult
cannot be reduced to simply a process of abstraction and categorization, and that
the flow of an adult’s thought depends to a great extent on his purposes, motives,
and goals. Only a schizophenic selects abstract criteria of a string, instead of using
them for practical purposes: A normal adult will never do so. But the fact is that
a normal adult has various levels of logical thought, and he can use these levels dif-
ferently according to his purposes and environmental requirements; a young child
does not have these different levels of thought, and some theoretical operations are
inaccessible to the child (if he does not acquire them through special forms of in-
struction). Thus a child who is capable of solving one kind of problem - by his own
means - remains unable to solve other abstract problems, so that we have to find
special ways of instructing (but under no circumstance, simply of conditioning) so
as to develop new forms of cognitive processes even in young school children. A series
of works by Vygotsky’s followers in our country (D. B. Elkonin, V. V. Davydov,
P. Y. Galperin, et al.) have shown that the methods of education should not only
follow the steps of a child’s mental development but a psychologically based instruc-
tion could highly stimulate the mental development of the child, permitting younger
children to acquire new forms of thinking. And this is the essence of our discussion
with our friend Jean Piaget, which took place during the XVIII International Psy-
chological Congress in Moscow, as well as in a series of publications.
Vygotsky thought of his method of classifying blocks simply as a model to
 Some notes concerning Dr. Fodor 315

demonstrate the qualitative stages of the basic forms of generalization, which change
during the child’s mental development. This technique brings forward a psycholog-
ical issue of great significance, namely that the acquisition of abstract operations
opens new possibilities to thought and results in an immense enrichment in the
possibility of finding new relations between concrete objects. This is why we do not
believe in the separation of abstract and concrete thinking but - as in Marx’ philo-
sophy - we suppose that a transition from the empirical to the categorical approach
provides a new opening in dealing with concrete objects. There are different ways
open to this development, and Vygotsky himself mentions that the acquisition of
empirical and scientific concepts have a different psychological mechanism. This is
why we can hardly agree with an attempt to describe L. S. Vygotsky as a hard-headed
defender of the idea of the development of thought as a linear approach to Boolean
logics.
We would like to say a few words in connection with some of the points made by
Fodor with which we agree. These have already been developed by Soviet psycholog-
ists during the last decade.
We totally agree with Dr. Fodor’s statement that thinking highly depends on the
purposes which it serves and, we would like to add, on the form of activity (Tatigeit)
it is included in. Thus it would be too dogmatic to say that concepts become accessible
to children at the age of 12 to 14 years. Since Vygotsky’s death nearly forty years
ago, Soviet psychologists have not just been repeating his work: It has been a period
of extremely intensive and creative work. Many of L. S. Vygotsky’s statements were
enriched and elaborated, and a series of significant data were obtained at the same
time that new ideas were formulated. One of the basic steps in the development of
psychology during these years was the elaboration of the general concepts of human
actions and their psychological structures (see a series of publications by A. N. Laon-
tiev, A. V. Zaporozhets, D. B. Elkonin, P. Ya. Galperin, L. I. Bozhowich, et aZ.).
Anoher research project was the study of the relation between instruction and the
mental development of a child, and the methods which could be used to intensify the
course of his development, such as finding a method of teaching young school
children of 7-8 years to master even complex concepts of algebra, linguistics, etc.
(see the works of D. B. Elconin, V. V. Davydov, P. Ya. Galperin, et al.).
It was clearly shown how man’s motives and purposes result in new forms of
activity, how actions and operations - different at various of development - are
acquired, and how the most complex unity of a child’s personality is formed. The
data was preceded by a series of theoretical hypotheses formulated by Vygotsky in
the last period of his life. Later they formed part of a highly elaborated field of
psychology. We are mentioning all this to say that Vygotsky’s contribution to psy-
chology is much greater than what is contained in Thought and language (which,
316 A. N. Leontiev and A. R. Luria

by the way, appeared in a shortened version in English).

So Dr. Fodor’s assumption that the development of the basic forms of thinking
depends, to a great extent, on goals, purposes, and real tasks, fully concords with
all that has been said by Soviet psychologists in the last decades. Thus we called
Dr. Fodor’s ‘Reflections on L. S. Vygotsky’s Thought and language’, a ‘half-
truth’. We wished to point out what seemed to us to be serious mistakes in inter-
pretation, and to frankly express our disagreement. At the same time we wished
to underline what we believe to be true in Dr. Fodor’s article, and with which
points we totally agree.