Vygotsky’s Inner Speech and Fodor’s Private Language
張欣戊 Oct.22.2010
1. Preliminaries:
A. “Thought & language” or “thinking & speech”?
Speech≠language
Form －mapping→ Meaning Comprehension vs Production
B. Computational models of cognition.
Computation and Turing machine.
Computation, cell assemblies and neural net.
2. Vygotsky’s Inner Speech (private speech):
A. One fundamental theme in VK’s theory may be as follows:
“Every function in the child cultural development appears twice:
first, on the social level, and late, on the individual
level; first between people (interpsycological) and
then inside the child (intrapsycological)” P.57. Mind in Society
B. In case of speech, the above theme becomes:
transition phase
Social speech → egocentric speech → inner speech
(communication (thinking aloud) (thinking for himself)
social level)
C. Fodor’s proposal:
Private language is a prerequisite for
acquiring public language and public speech, so
we have:
Private language → public language and speech.
To understand their differences, we need to look at
3. Several Issues:
A. What is the relationship between public (social) speech & thought.
One traditional view is that thought = public speech – sound.
= soundless speech.
Both Vygotsky and Fodor object this view, because:
Vygotsky believe that thinking & speech have different
genetic roots. Why?
a. Vygotsky cited Köhler’s work with chimp
to support his view that “intellect” can function without speech.
b. Fodor uses very similar argument to show
that long before the appearance of (public) speech
there is thinking in pre-verbal infants and animals.
So there is broad agreement between VK and FD on that
thought precedes social speech in development.
B. The Notion of Inner Speech Is Different form that of Private Language.
a. What is VK’s notion of inner speech?
For a first look, inner speech seems suspiciously “speech for oneself”
like “soundless speech”, but VK characterized inner speech as
i. Predominace of sense over meaning in inner speech.
(difference between sense & meaning)
ii. Agglutination (混連) of words. (例如”這樣”→”醬”)
iii. Infusion of sense: absorbing the sense of preceding &
following words to extend its inner meaning.
例如: 三國, 水滸.
iv. Syntactic abbreviation (preserve predicate & omit
subject) Semantic subject vs syntactic subject.
b. Fodor’s private language:
i. Fofor denies that the language of thought is a form of
natural language simply because prelinguistic child &
animals can think (or have cognitive processes)
ii. Cognitive processes are computational.
iii. A computational system requires a medium to compute.
iv. This medium can be called a private language, and
it must be there at least for animals & pre-verbal children
very likely for man as well.
v. To learn a language, you must first have a private language.
One cannot exercise truth test unless one has a language
in which truth rule can be represented.
4. Some Issues Regarding VK and FD’s Views.
past current future
A. Nature of thinking (recall) (problem solving) (planning)
a. Vygotsky’s “thinking” is an evolving and developing process.
speech inner speech
Practical intelligence －－→ speech guided intelligence －－→ verbal thought
social interaction internalization
b. Fodor’s “thinking” has two parts, modular and central.
Modular is quick, specific and almost reflex like
we call it part of thinking because it does involve problem
solving.
Central is slow, deliberate and far ranging. It is
what we normally called thinking.
Central is definitely verbal, but its associative power seems
Not verbal.
Modular is partly verbal (language comprehension is modular)
partly non-verbal.
B. The why & how of social speech (public language).
Vygotsky’s analysis that inner speech comes from social speech
and his claim that communication is the origin of speech
and based on the pragmatic functional aspect of language.
Fodor’s claim of private language is based on a logical analysis of
what must be there (the necessary condition) for natural language
to be learned.
So Fodor’s private language comes before the learning of
social speech & Vygotsky’s inner speech comes after
the learning of social speech. Yet there is no contradiction
between the two views. They are the “why” and “how”
of social speech learning.
C. Word meaning
(basic unit of analysis)
In VK’s analysis, word meaning is the foundation of
understanding all higher mental functions.
Why? Because:
Thought (without speech)＼
〉→ word meaning (an integration of thought & speech
Speech (without thought)／
／ phonetic plane (vocal)
Word 〈
＼ semantic plane (psychological)
“Word meaning is a phenomenon of thought only in so far as
thought is embodied in speech and of speech only in so far as
speech is connected with thought” (p. 120. T&L 192)
How is word meaning learned?
a. Traditional association: S→R
b. Vygotsky: phonetically it goes from part (one word) to whole (sentence).
Semantically it goes from whole (holophrase) to parts.
c. Fodor’s private language: must be pre-existing, otherwise we would be in an infinite regress.
The content of this private language cannot be pre-existing concept.
It must be something like pre-existing perceptual
category + general rules that allows one to learn concept.
5. What can we say about Vygotsky & his ideas?
