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Celebrating Divergence: Piaget and Vygotsky1
Key Words Culture. Logic. Mental development. Piaget. Vygotsky
Abstract
Contrasting Piaget's emphasis on the invariant logic of growth with Vygotsky's emphasis upon the centrality of culturally patterned dialogue in the enablement of growth, one is led to conclude that their two approaches were incommensurate. This incommensurateness may expresss a deep and possibly irreconcilable difference between two ways of knowing: one seeking to 'explain' and the other to 'interpret' human growth and the human condition. We are blessed to have had such gifted exponents of the two views at the very start of our discipline, for their divergence has alerted us to the deeper puzzles posed by research in human development.
First, let me say explicitly what all of us must have been thinking implicitly while contemplating this double centennial. What great good fortune for us, we students of human development, to have had two such giants, Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky, inspiring our quest. And it is not just their intellectual power that we celebrate, but their greatness of spirit and courage, their willingness to stand up to and to admit the baffling complexities of their subject - the growing mind. They taught us not to oversimplify. For them, mind was never `nothing but'. They bequeathed us a heritage free of reductionism - one truly to be treasured (fig. 1).
But today our task is not only to celebrate the past but to anticipate the future. Before turning to that task, however, let me say just a word more about resistance to oversimplification. Science demystifies not by ignoring mysteries, but by facing up to them. The unique mystery of mind is its privacy, its inherent subjectivity.2 But for all its privacy, mind nonetheless generates a product that is public. It generates worldly, useful knowledge, though that knowledge is constructed and never directly apprehended in the objectivist's sense. If this is so for our knowledge of the natural world, it is even more strikingly so for our knowledge of the social world and, in spite of introspection, even for our knowledge about ourselves. What is unique about us as a species is that we not only adapt to the natural and social worlds through appropriate actions, but we also create theories...