The best way to understand the meaning of concepts is to trace their origin and history. However, even this method does not help us generate alternative viewpoints to the theoretical difficulties and contradictions we have encountered while tracing the development of a concept. The history of representation is a powerful example. It has experienced many transformations since the Aristotelian formulation of forms that are taken in without matter (in-formation). Yet the theoretical contradictions that it creates have remained unsolved in cognitive science to this day.
So how about empirical research? We expect that putting the concept into a rigorous experimental test will lead us forward. In the case of representations, no empirical research (as Cummins has concluded) has been able to account for the gap between sensory input and meaningful representations that Fodor postulated in his Language of Thought hypothesis.
Ptolemaic astronomy illustrates this problem. No empirical observation that could be made by naked eye undermined the basic theory. Aristarchus of Samos had proposed a heliocentric alternative in the third century BCE, but the geocentric understanding prevailed well over a millennium.
In a way, we are in a hermeneutic impasse. Our theories dictate what we expect to observe and contradictory observations tend to remain meaningless and neglected.
Ptolemaic astronomy illustrates this problem. No empirical observation that could be made by naked eye undermined the basic theory. Aristarchus of Samos had proposed a heliocentric alternative in the third century BCE, but the geocentric understanding prevailed well over a millennium.
In a way, we are in a hermeneutic impasse. Our theories dictate what we expect to observe and contradictory observations tend to remain meaningless and neglected.
Yet, laboratories are useful because they help generate varying series of observations. The repeated patterns in this continuous variation may, eventually, show the limits of our current explanatory concepts unless we interpret them to be meaningless noise. Thus, laboratories have a potential, even if the power of our ways of thinking may, initially, mute the alternative signs that are experimentally generated.
My personal experience of exploring the concept of sign makes a good case. Having become excited by Vygotsky’s idea of semiotic mediation as the explanatory principle of mental processes, I wanted to explore its potential for clinical psychology. Psychotherapy was my laboratory.
In the early 1970’s we formed a study group that tried the idea in individual counseling and clinical assessment. At the time, we were completely ignorant of the conceptual gap that had developed within the Vygotskyan tradition during the Stalin era.
Vygotsky’s understending of semiotic mediation had been discarded in favor of Leontiev’s activity theory. We adopted his tripartite conceptualization of activity, action, and operation as our point of departure.
Afer a few years, it became clear that Leontiev's conceptualization did not help understanding the interactive events that we encountered in the consulting rooms. They were far too general.
Leontiev’s concepts of object and tool had been developed in studying distributed work activities, but we were involved in verbal exchange with the client whose “objects” were accounts of personal experiences. Much later, I perceived that Leontiev's concept of activity included mediation, but he had no clear concept of semiotic mediation. Consequently, instrumental and communicative activities remained separate fields of research, as Radzhikowskii noticed in his 1984 paper.
What was even more disappointing was Leontiev's complete inability to account for internal actions. He only stated that they share the structure of mediated instrumental actions.
So, in order to understand we went to train ourselves in psycho-dynamic and cognitive therapies that appeared to have much more adequate conceptual tools.
The psychotherapy lab quickly demonstrated that activity theory did not work, but neither it did point out any alternative that might have involved semiotic mediation. Thus, we had to give up our hopes and go back to the existing traditions in the field.
An adequate concept of sign that would serve both communication and psychic activity called for theoretical work.
In the early 1970’s we formed a study group that tried the idea in individual counseling and clinical assessment. At the time, we were completely ignorant of the conceptual gap that had developed within the Vygotskyan tradition during the Stalin era.
Vygotsky’s understending of semiotic mediation had been discarded in favor of Leontiev’s activity theory. We adopted his tripartite conceptualization of activity, action, and operation as our point of departure.
Afer a few years, it became clear that Leontiev's conceptualization did not help understanding the interactive events that we encountered in the consulting rooms. They were far too general.
Leontiev’s concepts of object and tool had been developed in studying distributed work activities, but we were involved in verbal exchange with the client whose “objects” were accounts of personal experiences. Much later, I perceived that Leontiev's concept of activity included mediation, but he had no clear concept of semiotic mediation. Consequently, instrumental and communicative activities remained separate fields of research, as Radzhikowskii noticed in his 1984 paper.
What was even more disappointing was Leontiev's complete inability to account for internal actions. He only stated that they share the structure of mediated instrumental actions.
So, in order to understand we went to train ourselves in psycho-dynamic and cognitive therapies that appeared to have much more adequate conceptual tools.
The psychotherapy lab quickly demonstrated that activity theory did not work, but neither it did point out any alternative that might have involved semiotic mediation. Thus, we had to give up our hopes and go back to the existing traditions in the field.
An adequate concept of sign that would serve both communication and psychic activity called for theoretical work.
