ABSTRACT

Under the infl uence of sociolinguists (e.g., Halliday), philosophers (e.g., Wittgenstein), psychoanalysts (e.g., Lacan), poststructuralists (e.g., Foucault), cultural psychologists (e.g., Vygotsky), cultural studies (e.g., Barthes), and others, the last (at least) 60 years of intellectual thought have witnessed a linguistic turn. By this is meant a view of cognition, affect, culture, knowledge, and its acquisition as being mediated by language. Sfard (2007a) uses the term ‘commognition’ as a device to distract readers from slipping into fragmenting language from knowing as two distinct but connected processes or aspects of consciousness and, instead, to see cognition, indeed consciousness as a whole, as identical with language and communication. Language precedes us, and we learn what things signify from parents, peers, teachers, and texts. Because language is culturally and temporally relative, as well as multiple across the communities within which an individual develops (gender, class, ethnicity, religion, race, physical location, sexual orientation, etc.), any individual is a unique collection of subjectivities. One can call this a strong linguistic turn, in that consciousness is seen to be constituted in and framed by language. Seeing language as affecting thought or as a tool to express thoughts might be called a weak role for language. One could refer to this shift also as a discursive turn. I take discourse to be more than language, whilst paradoxically it can only be carried in language (where else?). Discourse carries with it notions of regulation, of the power/knowledge duality of Foucault, and it is important to retain the connection, rather than view language as rather benign and neutral, a conveyor of thought that is somehow prior to and more essential than language.