Jean Piaget 1962
Comments on Vygotsky’s critical remarks concerning The Language and Thought of the Child, and Judgment and Reasoning in the Child, by Jean Piaget
Comments
It is not without sadness that an author discovers, twenty-five years after its publication, the work of a colleague who has died in the meantime, when that work contains so many points of immediate interest to him which should have been discussed personally and in detail. Although my friend A. Luria kept me up to date concerning Vygotsky’s sympathetic and yet critical position with respect to my work, I was never able to read his writings or to meet him in person, and in reading his book today, I regret this profoundly, for we could have come to an understanding on a number of points.
Miss E. Hanfmann, who is one of Vygotsky’s closest followers, has kindly asked me to comment on the reflections of this distinguished psychologist concerning my early work. I should like to thank her, but also confess embarrassment, for while Vygotsky’s book appeared in 1934, those of mine he discusses date back to 1923 and 1924. On thinking over the question of how to carry out such a discussion in retrospect, I have, however, found a solution that is both simple and instructive (at least for me), namely, to try and see whether or not Vygotsky’s criticisms seem justified in the light of my later work. The answer is both yes and no: on certain points I find myself more in agreement with Vygotsky than I would have been in 1934, while on other points I believe I now have better arguments for answering him.
We can begin with two separate issues raised by Vygotsky’s book: the question of egocentrism in general and the more specific question of egocentric speech. If I have understood him well, Vygotsky’s own position And action, I said – egocentrism and pointed out that the unconscious egocentrism of thought to which I referred was quite unrelated to the common meaning of the term, hypertrophy of the consciousness of self. Cognitive egocentrism, as I have tried to make clear, stems from a lack of differentiation between one’s own point of view and the other possible ones, and not at all from an individualism that precedes relations with others (as in the conception of Rousseau, which has been occasionally imputed to me, a surprising misapprehension, which Vygotsky to be sure did not share).
Once this point is clarified, it becomes evident that egocentrism thus defined goes way beyond the social egocentrism which we shall take up later, in connection with egocentric speech. Its scope is shown in particular by my research on the child’s conception of reality, which uncovered fairly pervasive egocentrism operating at the sensory-motor level. For example, the sensory-motor space consists initially of a plurality of spaces (buccal, tactile-kinesthetic, etc.) centered on one’s own body; at about eighteen months, through a shift of perspective (décentration) truly comparable to the Copernican revolution, space becomes a single homogeneous container in which all objects are situated, including one’s own body.
Let us turn to what most troubles Vygotsky in my conception of egocentrism: its relationship to Bleuler’s concept of autism and to Freud’s “pleasure principle.” On the first point, Vygotsky, who is a specialist on schizophrenia, does not deny, as some of my French critics do, that a certain amount of autism is normal for all people – which my teacher Bleuler also admitted. He finds only that I have overemphasized the resemblances between egocentrism and autism without bringing out the differences sufficiently – and in this he is certainly right. I emphasized the resemblances, whose existence Vygotsky does not deny, because they seemed to me to throw light on the genesis of symbolic games in children (see Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood). In them one can often see the “nondirected and autistic thought” which Bleuler speaks of and which I have tried to explain in terms of a predominance of assimilation over accommodation in the child’s early play.
As for the “pleasure principle,” which Freud sees as genetically prior to the “reality principle,” Vygotsky is again right when he reproaches me for having accepted this oversimplified sequence too uncritically. The fact that all behavior is adaptive and that adaptation is always some form of equilibrium (stable or unstable) between assimilation and accommodation, permits us (1) to account for the early manifestation of the pleasure principle by the affective aspect of the frequently predominating assimilation, and (2) to agree with Vygotsky’s point that adaptation to reality goes hand in hand with need and pleasure, because even when assimilation predominates it is always accompanied by some accommodation.
On the other hand, I cannot follow Vygotsky when he assumes that once having separated need and pleasure from their adaptive functions (which I do not believe I ever did, or at least if I did I quickly corrected this error: see The Origins of Intelligence in Children), I found myself obliged to conceive of realistic or objective thought as independent of concrete needs, as a kind of pure thought which looks for proof solely for its own satisfaction. On this point, all of my subsequent work on the development of intellectual operations out of action and on the development of logical structures from the co-ordination of actions shows that I do not separate thought from behavior. It took me some time to see, it is true, that the roots of logical operations lie deeper than the linguistic connections, and that my early study of thinking was centered too much on its linguistic aspects. This leads us to the second point.
Egocentric speech
There is no reason to believe that cognitive egocentrism, marked by unconscious preferential focusing, or by a lack of differentiation of viewpoints, has no application to the field of interpersonal relations, in particular those which are expressed in language. To take an example from adult life, every beginning instructor discovers sooner or later that his first lectures were incomprehensible because he was talking to himself, so to say, mindful only of his own point of view. He realizes only gradually and with difficulty that it is not easy to place oneself in the shoes of students who do not yet know what he knows about the subject matter of his course. As a second example we can take the art of discussion, which consists principally in knowing how to place oneself at the point of view of one’s partner in order to try to convince him on his own ground. Without this capacity, discussion is useless – as indeed it often is, even among psychologists!
It is for this reason that in trying to study the relationships between language and thought from the standpoint of cognitive shifts of centering (centrations et décentrations), I have tried to see whether or not there is a special egocentric speech which can be distinguished from co-operative speech. In my first book on language and thought in the child I devoted three chapters to this problem. (I have since regretted publishing this book first, for I would have been better understood had I begun with The Child’s Conception of the World, which was then in progress.) In the second of these chapters I studied conversations and especially arguments between children in order to bring to light the difficulties which they experience in getting beyond their own points of view. The third dealt with the results of a little experiment concerning children’s mutual understanding in attempting causal explanation, which I conducted to verify my observations. To explain these facts, which to me seemed most important, I then presented in the first chapter an inventory of children’s spontaneous speech, trying to distinguish the monologues and “collective monologues” from the adaptive communications and cherishing the hope of finding in this way a kind of measure of verbal egocentrism.
But the startling result, which I could not foresee, was that all the adversaries of the notion of egocentrism (and they are legion!) chose for their attacks the first chapter alone, without attaching any significance to the other two and therefore, as I have increasingly come to believe, without understanding the real meaning of the concept. One critic even went so far as to take for a measure of egocentric speech the number of sentences in which the child talks of himself, as if one could not talk of oneself in a way that is not egocentric! In an otherwise excellent essay on language (which appeared in L. Carmichael’s Manual of Child Psychology) D. McCarthy concluded that the long debates on this subject have been useless, but without giving any explanation of the real meaning and scope of the concept of verbal egocentrism.
Before returning to Vygotsky, I should like to set forth myself what seems to me to remain significant in the positive and negative evidence gathered by my few followers and my many opponents.
1. The measurement of egocentric speech has shown that there are very great environmental and situational variations, so that contrary to my initial hopes we do not possess in these measures a valid gauge of intellectual egocentrism or even of verbal egocentrism.
2. The phenomenon itself, whose relative frequency at different developmental levels we had wanted to test, as well as its decline with age, has never been disputed because it has seldom been understood. When viewed in terms of a distorting centering on one’s own action and of subsequent decentering, this phenomenon proved much more significant in the study of actions themselves and of their interiorization in the form of mental operations than in the field of language. It still remains possible, however, that a more systematic study of children’s discussions, and especially of behavior directed at verification and proof (and accompanied by speech), may furnish valid metric indices.
This long preamble has seemed necessary to bring out how much I respect Vygotsky’s position on the issue of egocentric speech, even though I cannot agree with him on all points. First, Vygotsky did realize that a real problem was involved, and not merely a question of statistics. Second, he himself verified the facts in question, instead of suppressing them through the artifices of measuring; and his observations on the frequency of egocentric speech in children when their activity is blocked and on the decrease of such speech during the period when inner speech begins to form are of very great interest. In the third place, he proposed a new hypothesis: that egocentric speech is the point of departure for the development of inner speech, which is found at a later stage of development, and that this interiorized language can serve both autistic ends and logical thinking. I find myself in complete agreement with these hypotheses.
On the other hand, what I think Vygotsky still failed to appreciate fully is egocentrism itself as the main obstacle to the co-ordination of viewpoints and to co-operation. Vygotsky reproaches me correctly for not emphasizing sufficiently from the start the functional aspect of these questions. Granted, but I did emphasize it later on. In The Moral Judgment of the Child, I studied children’s group games (marbles, etc.) and noted that before the age of seven they do not know how to co-ordinate the rules during a game, so that each one plays for himself, and all win, without understanding that the point is competition. R. F. Nielsen, who has studied collaborative activities (building together, etc.) found in the field of action itself all the characteristics which I have emphasized with respect to speech. [R. F. Nielsen,
In brief, when Vygotsky concludes that the early function of language must be that of global communication and that later speech becomes differentiated into egocentric and communicative proper, I believe I agree with him. But when he maintains that these two linguistic forms are equally socialized and differ only in function, I cannot go along with him because the word socialization becomes ambiguous in this context: if an individual A mistakenly believes that an individual B thinks the way A does, and if he does not manage to understand the difference between the two points of view, this is, to be sure, social behavior in the sense that there is contact between the two, but I call such behavior unadapted from the point of view of intellectual co-operation. This point of view is the only aspect of the problem which has concerned me but which does not seem to have interested Vygotsky.
In his excellent work on twins, R. Zazzo formulates the problem clearly. [R. Zazzo, Les Jumeaux, le Couple et
