Social Learning Theory

Albert Bandura’s book, “Social Learning Theory” is the concise overview of the recent theoretical and experimental advances in the field of social learning.

A comprehensive theory of behavior must explain how patterns of behavior are acquired and how their expression is continuously regulated by the interplay of self-generated and external sources of influence. From a social learning perspective, human nature is characterized as a vast potentiality that can be fashioned by direct and vicarious experience into a variety of forms within biological limits. The level of psychological and physiological development, of course, restricts what can be acquired at any given time. (page 13)

Nature of social learning process

According to the author, nature of social learning process is (1) vicarious, (2) symbolic, and (3) self-regulatory. I will explain the meaning further.

First, the social learning process is vicarious, i.e. we learn not only from our own experience, but also from the others’ experience. One possible reason of this ability is that making mistake is sometimes very costly and even fatal. For instance, if you make mistake in driving a car, that could bring about a disastrous result.

Second, the process is symbolic. Symbols are powerful tools to deal with environment. We use symbols to represent and think about the event. Using symbols, we can solve problems without enacting all alternatives and foresee probable consequences. For instance, we use mathematics to calculate a company’s future profit and can predict what will happen under the circumstances.

Third, social learning is a self-regulatory process. By arranging environmental inducements, generating cognitive supports, and producing consequences for their actions, people are able to exercise some measure of control over their own behavior. Human being is able to determine how to react the stimulus.

Albert Bandura argues the reciprocal determinism, i.e. not only human being is influenced by the environment in which one is situated, but also human being can influence the environment through one’s own behavior. There certainly is the decision not totally depending upon one’s environment.

We are not the slaves of the environment, and have the right to exercise the number of choices. As we can see, every superior accomplishment requires self-disciplined application.

Social learning model

Prof. Bandura introduced the concept of model to explain the social learning process. The model represents our vicarious and symbolic learning ability. The model goes like the following:

1. Modeled events

2. Attentional process

In this process, human beings select information to observe. The selection is driven by one’s capability of managing information. As an individual becomes matured, he or she will be able to manage and process more information.

3. Retention Process

In this process, one remembers the information using symbolic coding. The symbols are either visual or verbal, but verbal symbols play significant role in the social learning process. One can conduct rehearsal for their future actions in mind or imitate the behaviors.

4. Motor reproduction process

In this process, one converts symbolic representation into actions. The behavior to be taken relies on skills and physical capability. The person undergoes trial and error process to acquire the behavior.

5. Motivational process

The process needs to be continued for the further learning. For the continuity, we need reinforcement mechanism. The mechanism could be external, vicarious and self-generating.

6. Matching performances

Motivation and reinforcement

The social learning process is driven by motivation. More motivated people would run the learning model more quickly and frequently, thus develop one’s thought and behavior furthermore.

There are three sorts of reinforcement mechanism. First, one’s behavior is reinforced through the consequences. The consequences are either natural or man-made, and the causal relationship between consequences and reasons are either obvious or subtle. By observing two events, one recognizes the causal relationship and is reinforced.

Second, one can learn from the other’s experience. Even if one does not experience the consequences, he or she can use his or her vicarious learning ability and have expectation on the future result of one’s own behavior. This expectation works as reinforcement mechanism.

The two mechanisms above are based on external factors, but the third reinforcement mechanism, the self-reinforcement mechanism depends on one’s own. It works in the following way:

(1) To track performance of one’s behavior using various factors, such as quality, quantity, rate, originality, authenticity, ethicalness, etc.

(2) To judge the result through comparison or one’s own standard

(3) To respond to oneself: evaluate if the result was positive or negative; and sometimes provide tangible self-applied consequences

Here, the point is how the self-set standard is created. Among the three processes, (1) and (3) depend on one’s cognitive ability to the certain extent, but the process (2) requires something more than cognitive power, one’s own standard to judge the things.

According to the studies, the most stringent standards of all were adopted by children for whom all three conditions prevailed (page 136):

• - They observed social recognition bestowed upon adult models for maintaining high standards
• - They were not exposed to conflicting peer norms
• - They were not treated indulgently by the adult models

Also, the reinforcement mechanisms rely on one’s cognitive capability. Without the cognitive power, one cannot realize the relationship between the paired experiences - deeds and their consequences, and thus reinforcement does not work. This cognitive ability heavily depends on one’s language acquisition.

Modeling and Innovation

The modeling process is not just about learning, but the generative and innovative process as well. Through a process of abstract modeling, observers derive the principles underlying specific performances for generating behavior that goes beyond what they have seen or heard.

The process of innovation is divided into two steps. The first step is the acquisition of innovative behavior, helped by symbolic modeling. The second step is the execution. To know and to do is totally different, and the second step is highly susceptible to reinforcement influences. In other words, the more innovative people have been reinforced to take actions through their lives.

Remarks

First, the book was overview of recent progress of the social leaning studies. This helps me to understand the other books I have read so far, namely: “Thought and Language”, “Metaphors We Live by”, “Minds in Society”, “Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, etc. Now things seem to be more connected to me.

Second, it was interesting to see that motivation in the modeling process. Motivation is the driving power of the leaning process, making it dynamic and dialectic process. Regarding that part, this book reminds me of my parents. I tend to impose a high standard on me, and now I think that this is thanks to my parents. The parental education gave me the reinforcement mechanism to go further.

The third thing I found interesting was the author’s argument on reciprocal determinism. The idea that we are not entirely susceptible to the environment gave us some hope, especially because I often go to foster homes in Japan and see that children are heavily influenced by the environment.

Finally, the vicarious learning process gave me to understand some facts. Napoleon was a geek of history, and he has gone through the vicarious learning process through the history study. Thanks to it, when he managed his troops, he could behave as if he was a veteran commander. Maybe my next task after this one is to read through world’s history.

Reference:

Albert Bandura,"Social Learning Theory, Prentice Hall; 1st edition (1976/11/1)

The Brown Book

Wittgenstein made his students to dictate another book, which is later called “The Brown Book” because of the color of the book. In this book, he tries to re-shape the problems of philosophy and make a turning point to solve the problem.

The problem he raised was, as shown in The Blue Book, as follows: because our words don’t have ostensive meaning and our usage of grammars are not always correct, it is not possible for philosophy to describe the objects perfectly (according to Wittgenstein, philosophy is purely descriptive).

In this book, he additionally introduces the concept of transitive and intransitive usages of words. According to Wittgenstein, a word has double usage. For example, let’s think about the word “peculiar”.

One usage is “transitive”, in which the word is used preliminary to as specification, description, and comparison. In transitive usage, we say, for instance, “This soap has a peculiar smell: it is the kind we used as children.”. Using the word in this way implies the other smells in his or her mind. Transitive usage is like “relative” usage of the word.

Another usage is “intransitive”, in which the word is used to describe as an emphasis. For instance, when we say “This soap has a peculiar smell!”, we use the word as intransitive one. Intransitive usage is something like “absolute” usage of the word.

Wittgenstein claims that these double usages are where the philosophical problems are coming from. He says:

“Now this is a characteristic situation to find ourselves in when thinking about philosophical problems. There are many troubles which arise in this way, that a word has a transitive and an intransitive use, and that we regard the latter as a particular case of the former, explaining the word when it is used intransitively by a reflexive construction.” (Reflexive word is the word to refer oneself, such as “yourself”, “oneself”, etc.) (page 160)

To resolve the problem, he came up with the concept of language game. The game goes like this:

#1 There are two people, A and B. A says “brick!” or “slab!”. B hears that order and bring the brick or slab.

#2 A says not only name of the object but also the number, like “five slabs!”. B hears that order and bring five slabs.

#3 Add the concept of “proper name”. When A orders that name, B brings about “the” object.

#4 A orders “this slab!”, and then B brings the slab to which A points.

#5 A asks “how many slabs?”, and B counts them and answers.

... (this game is continued until #75)

Wittgenstein called these systems of communication “language games”. The games describe the usage of the language of those who are in the game. He says his method is “purely descriptive; the descriptions we give are not hints of explanations”. (page 125) This descriptive tool helps us to understand how the confusion comes when we use languages.

Using the concept of language games, he tries to fix the problem. He clams:

“What is the relation between a name and the object named, say, the house and its name? I suppose we could give either of two answers. The one is that the relation consists in certain strokes having been painted on the door of the house. The second answer I meant is that the relation we are concerned with is established, not just by painting these strokes on the door, but by the particular role which they play in the practice of our language as we have been sketching it. -Again, the relation of the name of a person to the person here consists in the person having been trained to un up to someone who calls out the name; or again, we might say that it consists in this and the whole of the usage of the name in the language game.” (page 172)

Thus, according to him, understanding the sentence is like understanding a musical theme. The sentence is composed of words which have multiple usages, and the individual factors of music also bring about multiple impression to us. “There must be a paradigm somewhere in our mind, and that we have adjusted the tempo to conform to that paradigm.” Every naming and the usage of the language represents the paradigm.

He did not mention what the paradigm is all about, but I think this is the turning point of his philosophy. Wittgenstein destroyed philosophy, pointing out the incompleteness or multiple meanings of language system. Then he tries to reconstruct the philosophy by coming up with the paradigm which people conform to understand the language.

Remarks

It is sad that he died before he finalize his work of philosophical investigation, but I guess his work has tremendous influence on structuralism. I sense what structuralists argue is about the “paradigm” Wittgenstein mentioned.

His way of shaping the issues is remarkable. Even making summary is such a difficult task to me, as the object he describes is something like we can sense but we seldom describe using the language. The most difficult task in thought is to describe something that is invisible and not verbalized. That is why in Japanese blog I began to write only about what is ambiguous.

Reference:

Ludwig Wittgenstein, "The Blue and Brown Books", Wiley-Blackwell, 1991/1/16

The Blue Book

Ludwig Wittgenstein made his students dictate a lecture series he gave to them. The book was covered in blue and thus is called “The Blue Book”. In this book, Wittgenstein treated the essential problem of language and thinking.

There is the fundamental gap between the language and the object that the language is trying to identify. For instance, if one says “Please take the pencil there” to his or her mother, how the mother can make sure that the pencil she took is definitely the object, i.e. “the pencil there”? Take another example. Let’s say that your friend says she feels pain. How can you know that?

There are two reasons of the problem, according to Wittgenstein.

One is the usage of word. We don’t have ostensive meaning in words. Most of the words have various meaning, and it is not possible to let one word to identify a specific object, or in other words, no fixed definition can exist. According to Wittgenstein, objects of thought are not the facts, but shadows of facts. We have certain sensations not referring to the object. Thus, he says: “We are unable clearly to circumscribe the concepts we use; not because we don’t know their real definition, but because there is no real definition to them.” (page 25)

Only what we can do is to set the context and to make the gap narrower. As Bertrand Russell wrote in his book “The Problems of Philosophy“, to collect more sense data could help to fill the gap between the cognition and the object. However, the gap will never be eliminated. What I see cannot be exactly equals to what she sees.

Regarding this point, he quotes what Saint Augustine said: “How is it possible that one should measure time? For the past can’t be measured, as it is gone by; and the future can’t be measured because it has not yet come, and the present can’t be measured for it has no extension.”

Another reason of the problem is the usage of grammar. Here, Wittgenstein seems to use the word “grammar” as something like logical correctness. He claims that we often misuse the grammar and understand the things metaphorically. For instance, we say “The sun rises from the east sea”, but it is not grammatically correct, as the reality is that the earth rotate around the sun.

Take another example. We think thinking as an activity. However, an activity needs to have the location where it takes place. Where is the locality of the activity? In fact, thinking is operating with signs, and not the activity. Thus Wittgenstein argues that: “By misunderstanding the grammar of our expressions, we are led to think of one in particular of these statements as giving the real seat of the activity of thinking.” (page 16)

After pointing our the problem in our thinking, he tries to fix it.

“The scrutiny of the grammar of a word weakens the position of certain fixed standards of our expression which had prevented us from seeing facts with unbiased eyes. Our investigation tried to remove this bias, which forces us to think that the facts must confirm to certain pictures embedded in our language.” (page 43)

To fix the problem, he introduces the concept of “Language Game”, which is the form of language with which a child begins to make use of words. The concept is described in “The Brown Book”.

Remarks

I was just surprised by how smart he is. When I read great books, what I mainly feel is the authors’ belief, perspectives, passion etc, all of which move me pretty much. However, I do not often sense the smartness of the authors. I think it is a book of the genius. Though a bit redundant, his line of reasoning is elegant, and I wish if I could do the same in the future.

Another remark is that, ironically, it is quite difficult to find remarks. He just forces us to face the fundamental problem in our thinking. As we often lose our words when we face unfavorable or surprising truth, I was just overwhelmed by the book.

Reference:

Ludwig Wittgenstein, "The Blue and Brown Books", Wiley-Blackwell, 1991/1/16

Bertrand Russell, "The Problems of Philosophy", Dover Publications, 1999/1/26

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life

Everyone wants to give a good impression to the others. There are two ways an individual can express oneself; one is verbal communication and another is non-verbal communication. Among the two communication styles, nonverbal communication plays a critical role in forming one’s own impression. Then, how we can manage our impression through non-verbal communication?

Erving Goffman gives us some implications through his book, “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, in which he gives us the implication on how the character of the situation and self image is made, using metaphor of dramaturgy.

In a drama, a performer plays a role of someone who is not him/herself in the fictional situation. Let’s say a performer plays Caesar in Rome. The performer is not Caesar in reality, and it’s been 2000 years since Rome era, but audiences feel that the performer is Caesar and the stage is Rome. Why? It is because in the drama, all factors collectively create coherent images of the role and the situation. Performers, attires, teams, stages etc are all harmonized and create consistent image of the world.

This dramaturgical approach gives us some important implications.

First, an image in the society is composed of various but coherent factors, and if even one of the factors is disruptively damaged, it would be very difficult to fix the images. For instance, if you pick up a cellphone while you play the role of Caesar, everything in the drama is destroyed, because existence of the cellphone cannot be consistent with coherent images of the situation and the roles.

The coherence also represents the cultures and values of specific era. It is historical, social, political and cultural product, and that is why prof. Goffman limits his discussion in the realm of western society.

Second implication is about the situation. Situation has significant influence toward the people in it, as once the situation is defined, all performers will follow it. For instance, you cannot wear jeans in Rome era to keep your image as a civil in Rome. Moreover, once the situation is defined, individuals in it, as a team, collaborate to maintain the situation. The team works as if it is a secret society to keep the situation unchanged, Goffman mentioned:

“A team, then may be defined as a set of individuals whose intimate co-operation is required if a given projected definition of the situation is to be maintained. A team is a grouping, but it is a grouping not in relation to a social structure or social organization but rather in relation to an interaction or series of interactions in which the relevant definition of the situation is maintained.

We have seen, and will see further, that if a performance is to be effective, it will be likely that the extent and character of the co-operation that makes this possible will be concealed and kept secret. A team, then, has something of the character of a secret society. … Thus a team, as used herein, is the kind of secret society whose members may be known by non-members to constitute a society, even an exclusive one, but the society these individuals are known to constitute is not the one they constitute by virtue of acting as a team.” (page 104)

This implies that in any social interactions, when you want to give favorable impressions to others, the first thing you have to do is to define the situation and let every participant accept it. Prof. Goffman says that that exactly is the social technique that we usually use to maintain one’s own impression.

From the different perspective, the fact explains why dress codes are critical in some situations. Attire is one of the tools to preserve the situation.

Third is the role of the back stage. No one shows the back stage of a drama to the audience, because it should not belong to the situation. Instead, the front stage belongs to the situation. This implies that the front stage is where one plays his or her social life, and the back stage is where one leads his or her private life. This may explain why we often differentiate “on” and “off” in our everyday life.

Remarks

I was surprised to see that this book covers the idea of “atmosphere”, since the Japanese often talk of the atmosphere and often misunderstand as if the atmosphere is unique to them. It is not. Wherever society exists, there could be the atmosphere (the “situation”) which force the participants to follow, regardless of the intensiveness of it.

The second thing I found interesting is the requirements to give the intended impression. If you want to be like someone else, you need to keep consistency in every action you take. It is a hard task, as only one dissonance will ruin the whole image.

The third is the methodology. The author used a drama to analyze our social interaction. I don’t know deeply why he came up with the idea, but, to me, implication is clear: analyze gimmicks or fictions to analyze our society. Gimmicks, fictions, or something work, because there are fundamental rule or common sense of the society behind the gimmicks and fictions. That is, as prof. Goffman did, when you analyze a currently popular gimmick very deeply (maybe facebook?), you may be able to find out fundamental social values dominant in this era.

Finally, the book showed us the power of metaphor. As "Metaphor We Live by" argued, our conception is in many cases metaphorical.

Reference:

Erving Goffman, "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life", Anchor Books, 1959

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, "Metaphors We Live by", University of Chicago Press (2nd edition)

Metaphors We Live by

The essence of metaphor is to understand and experience one concept in terms of one another. For example, when we say, “argument is war”, we understand the concept of argument such that it has many similarities with war.

We often use metaphor, but we may have underestimated the value and influence of it. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, the authors of “Metaphors We Live by”, argued that our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.

Types of metaphor

According to the authors, there are four types of metaphor.

The first is structural metaphor, in which one concept is metaphorically structured in terms of another. Example: time is money.

The second is orientational metaphor, by which one organizes a whole system of concepts with respect to one another. Example: happy is up / sad is down. The characteristic of orientational metaphor is that way of the orientation represents the culture. For instance, “happy is up” is based on the culture in which people associate “up” with something good.

The third is ontological metaphor. In this metaphor, a concept is understood as entity or human beings. For instance, when we say “this recession is killing me”, we are personifying the recession.

The fourth is new metaphor. This is a metaphor that we personally find particularly forceful, insightful, and appropriate, given our experiences as members of our generation and our culture. For instance “love is a collaborative work of art” is the one. Many maxims are new metaphor.

Metaphor and our conceptual system

Every conceptual system has grounding, structure, relation among concepts, and definition. The authors claim that our conceptual system is based on metaphorical reasoning. Let me show how it goes.

In Prof. Lakoff and Johnson’s perspective, experience is the ground. Every understanding and reasoning starts with it.

Through experience, for example when we experience a conversation, we see many aspects in the experience: participants, parts, stages, causation, purpose, linear sequence, etc. These multidimensional structures of experience characterize “experiential gestalts”, which are ways of organizing experiences into structured whole (page 81). (Gestalt is the German word meaning “wholeness”)

These gestalts play important role in coming up with metaphor. When we make a metaphor, we use some elements in gestalts of our experience. For instance, in the “argument is war” metaphor, the gestalt for conversation is structured further by means of correspondences with selected elements of the gestalt for war. In this way, by using elements of the gestalts as a bridge, we understand one concept using our experience, and that is the metaphorical process of concept structuring.

Thus, according to the authors, the concept of definition is more vague than we usually think. They argued that we can only define and understand a concept metaphorically, i.e. we understand it primarily in terms of concepts for other natural kinds of experiences.

“On our account, individual concepts are not defined in an isolated fashion, but rather in terms of their roles in natural kinds of experiences. Concepts are not defined solely in terms of inherent properties; instead, they are defined primarily in terms of interactional properties. Finally, definition is not a matter of giving some fixed set of necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of a concept; instead, concepts are defined by prototypes and by types of relations to prototypes. Rather than being rigidly defined, concepts arising from our experience are open-ended. Metaphors and hedges are systematic devices for further defining a concept and for changing its range of applicability.” (page125)

Remarks

Objectivity and universality

Logical conclusion of the authors’ argument is to deny the universal truth or concept. They say, “ we do not believe that there is such a thing as objective truth, though it has been a long-standing theme in Western culture that there is.” (page 159) In their perspective, reasoning is based on one’s experience, which is very specific and varied among individuals. Everyone has different experience, and especially in the case that we communicate with those who have totally different background, it is extremely difficult to share objective and universal principle.

Although the authors deny the objectivism and spent a lot of pages attacking the notion, I still believe that there could be a few universal and objective values that all human beings can share as a common sense. Granted, the scope of the common sense could be very narrow, but such fundamental things as valuing life and love could form the basis of universal principles.

Experience and knowledge

Their argument reminds me of what my father had done for me when I was a child. Although I was raised in a financially challenged family, my father took my brothers and me to many places, seas, mountains, museums, etc. Those experiences may have expanded elements of the gestalts, thus leading to development of my intelligence.

The theory also makes me to understand why people understand one situation very differently. That difference may be coming from the difference of experiences, and the way to expand and develop understanding of others, the key would be experience the things as much as one can.

Reference: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, "Metaphors We Live by", University of Chicago Press (2nd edition)

Thougt and Language

Another book of Vygotsky is Thought and Language, which studies the relationship between thought development and language.

Thought development and language

Since available technologies are limited in the early 20th century, he started with the analysis of apes’ language to study human mind development. Vygotsky reviews experiments of apes speech in which apes do have a relatively well-developed “language”, but it lacks intellect. That is, apes’ language is entirely subjective – can only express emotions, never designate or describe objects or express thought. On the other hand, apes have thought process thanks to its usage of tools at primary level.

Given the facts, Vygotsky claimed that thought and speech have different genetic roots, and two functions develop along different lines and independently of each other up to a certain point in time. Apes and infants do not go beyond that point, and their actions have only a subjective meaning. However, human beings, at the very young age, they exceeds the point, and then thought becomes verbal, and speech rational. (page 79 to 83) The transformation that the child experiences after exceeding the point is essential and qualitative; it is not the continuation of the development made so far. After that point, the nature of the development itself changes, from biological one to socio-historical. That is, when thought and language become intertwined in their development, the driving force of the development is the socio-cultural factors that one experiences in his or her life.

Vygotsky thus concludes that thought development is determined by language, i.e. by the linguistic tools of thought and by the sociocultural experience of the child. Thanks to language, children can develop inner speech, which is essential to enhance intelligence of the human beings.

In more detail, Vygotsky thought that human being’s mental operations generally develop in four stages. In the first stage, speech lacks intelligence and thought lacks language. The second stage is called “naïve psychology”, in which a child begins to use tools as the application of experience. In the third stage, a child counts on his fingers, resorts to mnemonic aids, and so on. In speech development it is characterized by egocentric speech. The fourth stage comes at the end, and the child begins to count in his head, to use “logical memory” to operate with inherent relations and inner signs, i.e. external experience is internalized in the child’s sign system. (page 86 to 87)

Development of concept

Another question was how people develop conceptual thinking, which is vital part to build the sign system within human beings. Vygotsky argued that the first phase of concept formation is complex formation, i.e. the child unites diverse objects in groups under a common “family name”, the formation process that goes through several stages. The second phase is the formation of “potential concepts”, which is formed by singling out certain common attributes in complexes. In both, the use of the word is an integral part of the developing processes, and the word maintains its guiding function in the formation of genuine concepts, to which these process lead.

Vygotsky thought that the development process which enable concept formation begins very early stage at childhood, but it takes time until the intellectual functions form the psychological basis of the process of concept formation ripen, take shape, and develop. The development by which one can achieve concept formation is not the quantitative growth from the earlier stage, but it is the qualitative new leap.

In the first stage, word meaning denotes nothing more to the child than a “vague syncretic conglomeration of individual objects” (page 110). Then during the next stage, word meaning is about the organization of the child’s visual field. In the next stage, one’s syncretic image is composed of elements taken from different groups or heaps that have already been formed by the child.

Having gone through the process above, the child will undergo “thinking in complexes”. Complex is composed of many concepts (e.g. an apple is composed of such concepts as red, sweet, juicy, etc). According to Vygotsky, there are five types of complex: associative type, collections, chain complex, diffuse complex and pseudo-concept (phenotypically resembling the adult concept, but psychologically very different one).

The principal function of complexes is to establish bonds and relations. Complex thinking begins the unification of scattered impressions; by organizing discrete elements of experience into groups, it creates a basis for later generalizations (concept formation).

Upon complex thinking, one can attain concept formation, which requires abstract thinking, i.e. single out elements from a complex. Concept formation is not that easy. When we see one complex, say, an apple, we find many concept in this complex – sweet, red, juicy, etc. That is why the concept formation should follow the many stages mentioned above. In the beginning, one starts with the “potential concepts”, or the elements chosen as having common natures, and after then one can finally form concepts in his or her mind.

Thought and word

In the final part of this book, Vygotsky tried to explain the relation between thought and word. For the more sophisticated analysis, he divided word into phonetic word (voice) and semantic word (meaning), speech into external speech and inner speech, and thought into verbal thought and non-verbal one.

According to Vygotsky, speech and thought collectively create dynamic process. They are delicate, changeable relations between processes, which arise during the development of verbal thought (page 254).

Vygotsky argued that thought is engendered by motivation (desires, needs, interests, and emotions). Then, the thought generates inner speech, then in meanings of words (semantic), and finally in words (phonetic). The process is very complex, and since a direct transition from thought to word is impossible, there is always the hidden thought, the subtext. This dynamic process creates and leads evolution of thought and speech, or the inner sign system of human beings.

Remarks

The book was a bit verbose (frequently digress from the main line and jump into analyses of other’s studies), and it took time for me to fathom what the author mentions. Moreover, even without digression, the concept mentioned in this book was not easy to me.

The implication is tremendous. The book brought me about more profound understanding of words and speech. It also gave me the opportunities to think about the value of writing blog: as the outer speech (writing as well) is deeply interconnected with my thought, blog writing is the process to verbalize my inner speech, and lead to the evolution of my mind and thought. If I succeeded in verbalizing my thought, I would be able to initiate the deeper conversation with myself (by seeing this blog), and that would bring about the further evolution of my mind. Empirically, that is what happened when I wrote my Japanese blog, and hope the same in this blog.

Reference: Lev Vygotsky, "Thought and Language", The MIT Press (revised edition), 1986/Aug/28