The following is the first two paragraphs of an assignment that I wrote for a class this week. I am using
this to point out a few points about academic style in social science writing. In other words, how to be
dull, dry, precise and clear.
Vygotsky’s demons.
David Bakhurst (2007) considers Vygotsky’s theory in light of the argument that Vygotsky was not a
post-modernist. While post-modernists hold that truth and reality were no more than contingent
constructions of human social interaction, Vygotsky was a rationalist. Vygotsky held that mankind was
moving towards a clearer conception of a reality that existed independently of our understanding of
that reality.
Bakhurst (2007) begins with a brief outline of Vygotsky’s vision. Vygotsky believed that the diverse
schools of psychology ranging from behaviourism to pyshoanalysis maintained internally coherent but
mutually incommensurable views of human psychology. Moreover understanding consciousness was a
central issue in understanding psychology, but it was an issue that had been neglected or deliberately
bypassed within many schools of psychology. For Vygotsky, consciousness was the awareness we have
of our own perceptions and the control that such brings to our conduct. According to Bakhurst,
Vygotsky’s approach to consciousness was functional, seeking to identify the capacities of control that
constituted consciousness. While humans are born with modular capacities to function in the
environment, they develop higher mental functions of thought, intellectual speech, logical memory and
voluntary attention. The higher mental functions are not modular structures but “a holistic system of
interfunctionally related capacities” (p. 52). Understanding consciousness and human psychology
depends on understanding the development of these higher mental functions.