Vygotsky & Piaget

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H um an Development 19%;39:237-242 IJ. |fYrftDevelopment

Vygotsky and Piaget: A Collective MonologueRen van der VeerUnive rs i t y of Leiden, The N e t h e r l a n d s

Key WordsDialogue Egocentric speech History Piaget VygotskyAbstractThis article presents a first and incomplete chronology of publications by Piaget

and Vygotsky in which they criticize each other's ideas. H is shown that a genuinecr i t ical dialogue between the two failed to develop because Piaget did not reply toVygotsky's lengthy criticisms at first. Several reasons for Piaget's initial reticence areconsidered.

It i s not w i t h o u t sadness lha t an author discovers, twenty-five years af te r it s publication, thework of a fellow author who ha s died m t h e m e a n t i m e , when that work contains so many points of im-medi a te interest to him which should have been discussed personally and in detail. Although myf r iend A . Luria k e p t me up to date concerning Vygotsky's sympathetic an d yet critical position withrespect to my own work. I was never able to read his writings nor to meet him. and in reading his worktoday, 1 regret this profoundly, for we could have come to an u n d e r s t a n d i n g on a number of issues[Piaget. 1962/1995. p. 325).

These were the words Piaget used to begin his comments on Vygotsky's [1962] crit-ical remarks concerning Piaget's early ideas about childhood egocentrism. Piaget wenton to discuss Vygotsky's critique in great detail, but rather than following this discussion(which has been analyzed a number of times) I would l ike to reflect on the fac tor s thatprevented a fruitful dialogue between Piaget and Vygotsky.

It is probably no exaggeration to say tha t since th e 1920s, th e agenda and centraldebates of developmental psychology have been dominated by the ideas of Piaget. Hisideas met with both praise and criticism [Parrat-Dayan, 1993a; 1993b], but leadingresearchers in the field, such as Will iam and Clara Stern, Charlotte and K a r l Bhler. HenriWallon, and Pierre Janet, immediately recognized Piaget as a powerful thinker whoseideas deserved careful attention. Piaget's first five books, concerning children's thoughtand language [1923], judgment and reasoning [1924], conception of the world [1926],conception of physical causality [1927], and developing sense of morality [1932a] changed

|XArj/-C|> 0 1996 S. Karger AG , Base! Ren van der VeerIX/'\I\\JCI\ 001R-7l6X"a60395-0237S:0.00/0 University of LeidenE-Mail kargerte-kargerch Department of EducationFax + 41 61 30612 34 PO Box 9555ImpiWwwwkarger c h NL-2300 R B Leiden ( T h e Netherlands)


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the landscape of psychology. Their wealth of detail and subtle argument continue tofascinate us today.Among the many people who followed the work of Piaget with great in terest wasth e R ussian psychologist V ygotsky. then virtu ally u n k n o w n . Despite his c r i ti ca l a t t i tud etoward m any of Piaget's central ideas, Vygotsky realized that P iaget was one of the mostimportant voices in international psychology, and Piaget became the author most fre-quently referred to in his subsequent work [Van der Veer, 1995]. In the 1920s, Vygotskyand his colleagues replicated vir tual ly all of Piaget 's in vest igat ions. Around 1930, Vygot-sky began to organize the tra nsla tion of Piaget 's first tw o books into Russian [Van derVeer and Valsiner, 1991].

If w e consider Piaget's first books as overtures in an at tempted dialogue , th epaper Vygotsky and Luria presented at the Ni nth Inte rn at io na l Congress of Psycho-logy at New Haven in S eptember 1929 ma y be considered their first reply to Piaget.Vygotsky and Luria [1930] argued that the function and fate of what Piaget termed'egocentric speech' and the psychological mechanisms responsible for its evolutionwere still unclear. As to the function of egocentric speech, they found that this form ofbehavior appeared very frequent ly when th e child w as confronted with a difficults i tuat ion. They c laimed that th e verbal reactions were not merely accompaniment tothe child 's m ain a ctivity, but w ere directed toward solution of the problem. Thechild tries first to solve the problem verba lly, in order to organize subsequentactivity. Thus, egocentric speech has a specific organizing function. As to the fate ofegocentric speech, Vygotsky and Luria [1930] claimed that egocentric speech isreplaced by 'specific pauses which have an intel lec tual character and are filled byin te rna l speech. The qual i tat ive analysis of the exteriorized in te rna l speech showsit s resemblance to egocentric speech with respect to its structure, function, andgenesis' [p . 465], The authors concluded, therefore, that egocentric speech becomesinternal in its evolution, and they suggested replacing the sequence of external speechto internal speech by a sequence of external speech to egocentric speech to i n t e r na lspeech.Piaget , who was present in New Haven when Luria presented the paperco-authored with Vygotsky. did not reply to this crit icism and to the proposed m e-diat ion model . One reason may have been that his own think ing had m oved intothe field of moral thinking, the topic on which he himself presented a paper inNew H aven an d abo ut whic h he would sub sequ ently publis h his great book [Piaget,1930a, 1932a], It is l ikely, however, that Luria and Piaget m et at this conferen ce,exchanged their views about the topic of egocentric speech, and agreed to startcorresponding. That Piaget knew of Vygotsky's and Luria's findings is apparen t fromhis preface to the second French edition of The Language and Thought of the Child[Piaget, 1930b], where he men tions that Luria in replicating his study arrived at differentresults. It is l ikely that Lu ria also told Piaget abo ut the R ussia n plans to transla te severalof his books.

W e know fo r sure that some t ime later Piaget gave permission to translate his firsttw o books into Russian and that he knew about th e replications of his research t h a t hisRussian colleagues were busy conducting. This fact we may also infer from Piaget'swords in his preface wr itten especially for the R ussian edition:

It is a great pleasure to m e to have the possibility, given by this preface, to express publicly m ygratefulness to the Soviet psychologists fo r their w illingness to under take th e translation into th e R u s -sian language of my work and especially for the series of investigations they arranged which have as

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W e may now attempt to draw some conclusions from this still very incomplete ac-count of the relationship between Piaget and Vygotsky. One t h i n g appears sure: A gen-u ine dialogue between Piaget and his Russian crit ics migh t have been at tempted some30years before it actually ensued, and the dialogue did not develop because Piaget didnot respond to his Russian critics. To explain this his tor ical fact we can invo ke var iou shypotheses, five of which I briefly consider :(1 ) Language barrier. A langua ge problem def in i te ly ex is ted, as Piaget did not readR uss ian . (Vygotsky and h is co l leagues read F rench. ) How ever , P iaget had the NewH aven paper by V ygotsky and L uria as well as possibly some oth er papers in En g l i sh byLur i a , and above all he wa s in regular contact with L u r i a (to the extent that he calledhim his 'friend' in his 1962 reply). M oreover, if he had real ly wished to do so, Piagetwould cer ta in ly have been capable of finding t r ans la to r s fo r Vygo tsky ' s [ 1932) in t roduc-tory essay, perhaps even among his close collaborators of whom some were of Polishor Russian descent (such as Szeminska, Svetlova, and Katzaroff-Eynard) . We may con-clude, then , that the langu age barrier e x isted but played no decisive role.

(2 ) Lack of knowledge. There can have been no lack of knowledge of the Russianideas on Piaget's side. As I have demonstrated, Piaget was kept informed of the researchof his R ussian colleagues thro ug h various chan nels.

(3 ) Quality of criticism. Piaget did not refra in from responding to the R u s s i a ncriticism because he thought it lacked quality. On the contrary, in his reply to Vygotsky[Piaget, 1962; 1962/1995] he lists the ir po ints of convergence and states that he great lyrespects Vygotsky's position.

(4) Ideology. Ideology played no decisive role for Piaget, who was a sympa-thetic but critical follower of some form of social ism [Vidal , 1994] and who. perhapsnaively, believed th at the R ussian in vestiga tions would co m plem en t his own[Piaget, 1932b]. It played a much more important role for his Russian colleagues, whowere under increasing pressure to criticize all non-marx i s t psychological approaches.Bu t , un l ike Joravsky [1989], I believe t h a t Vygotsky's [1932] crit icism of Piaget 's viewwas still relatively free of ideological bias. Ideology thus seems to have played nooverriding role.

(5 ) Personal style. Piaget said more tha n once [B ringu ier, 1977, p. 37] that research-ers need colleagues who contradict them and that science is a collective enterprise.Yetone cannot help but think tha t for him the role of these scientific in te r locutors wasequiva lent to the role of the social env ir on m en t in Piaget 's conception of cogn itive de-velopment: They are abso lutely indispensable, they fuel th e scientific debate, they canh inde r or facilitate th e development of a system of though t , but in the end it is not theyw ho de te rmine th e direction and form of a scientif ic theory but the l aws of logic appliedto scientific facts and ideas. Such a research philosophy allowed Piaget to devise experi-ments and to interpret their results, and to devise new experiments on the basis of thisin te rpre ta t ion , w i t h o u t paying much at tent ion to the comments or ideas of o ther re -searchers. We may add t h a t Piaget himself a d m i t t e d tha t he del iberate ly ignored m uc hof the contemporary psychological literature [Bringuier, 1977, pp. 83-84) and main lypursued his own course of ideas. This personal strategy enabled Piaget to develop asystem of thought that is both profou nd ly or iginal and relatively isolated in modern de-velopmental psychology. From such a viewpoint, it simply is not worthwhile to respondto critics as long as oneself and the members of one's ow n research group (o r researchparadigm ) are content wi th the progress of the research u nd ertak en. I believe, then, tha tthe main reason for Piaget's silence must be sought in his personal style of doing scien-

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tific research. He did not reply to the criticism of his vir tua l ly unknow n Russian critic, orfo r t h a t m a t t e r , to the crit icism of much be t t e r -known colleagues, because he was stub-born ly fo l lowing hi s own pa th in psychology, pay ing l i t t le a t tent ion to what was happen-in g outside his own reference group.

Final ly, we m a y r e m a r k t h a t an ear ly reply by Piaget would not have savedhim f rom the f a t e tha t even tua l ly befell vir tua l ly a l l foreign autho rs in the S ovietU n i o n . S o m e w h e r e in the 1930s. Piaget came to be seen as one of the m a n y d e c a d e n tbourgeois psychologists whose work needed to be ignored. As recent ly as 1949. hiswork was branded as 'a mil i t an t attempt to depict child intelligence in an absolutelydis tor ted form' [Kozul in . 1984. pp. 25. 28 ] Thus even if both in te r locutors had i n t e n d e dan open an d cont inuous d i a logue , they w o u l d n ot have succeeded because of thepolitical events in the Soviet Union. Yet an early reply by Piaget would have yielded,perhaps , an in t e r es t ing con f ron t a t ion of two theories, one tha t might have s t imu-l a t ed n ew inves t iga t ions . Now we are left with th e i m a g e of two br i l l i an t scientists ,separa ted by bar r i ers of langua ge, ideology, and personal style, locked in their ownf r ames of reference , perhaps, and par t ic ipa t in g in a form of ' col lec t ive monologue'[Piaget. 1923],

AcknowledgmentI am gra teful to Lesl ie Smi t h for hi s insightful c o m m e n t s on a previous vers ion of thi s ar t icle.

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