ABSTRACT
As we have seen in previous chapters, organicists such as Piaget viewed development as arising from children’s own actions as they experiment with the world, while mechanists saw the child as a passive recipient of environmental influences. In stark contrast, Vygotsky, Rubinstein and Riegel developed dialectical theories, based on the notion that development occurs as a result of a tension and interaction between internal and external influences. The most influential of these theorists is Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. He was a Soviet psychologist who developed his ideas over just ten years between the two world wars before he died at an early age from tuberculosis, leaving many unpublished manuscripts. He thus had a very short time in which to elaborate his theoretical framework, in contrast with the long-lived Piaget, who spent decades revising his theory.Vygotsky’s focus was upon the development of cognition under social influence. In this chapter, we outline the dialectical approach to development (especially Vygotsky’s) and some ways in which it has influenced recent theorizing in development and education.
The German philosopher Hegel, born in 1770, adopted Socrates’ notion of the ‘dialectic’ (Feibleman, 1973).This is when two people arrive at the truth through a process of debate. Hegel proposed that reality is arrived at through a dialectic between three components: a beginning position is the ‘thesis’, its opposite the ‘antithesis’, and the position arrived at in resolving the discrepancy is the ‘synthesis’. The synthesis in turn becomes the next thesis, and so the process continues. Thus Hegel’s philosophy concerned circular processes, with the whole greater than the sum of the parts. We will see these ideas reflected in the developmental theories of Vygotsky, Rubinstein and Riegel.
