This week’s Three Minute Read takes a peek at a go-to gizmo of today’s Business of Pleasure that has allegedly been around from the very beginning… The Word
‘You’re sitting at your desk talking to a person who is behind you and who you cannot see.
They leave the room without you noticing it, and you continue to talk, under the illusion that they’re still listening, can still understand what you’re saying. Outwardly you are talking to yourself, but psychologically your speech is social.’
This little thought experiment was posed by Lev Vygotsky, one of the Fathers of Russian Psychology, born 1896. Vygotsky used it to illustrate how, in his opinion, the phenomenon of ‘egocentric speech,’ prevalent in children between the ages of 3 and 7, might also be, at heart, social speech.
Jean Piaget, the Big Daddy of Child Psychology, also born 1896, but in Switzerland, didn’t agree.
Piaget thought egocentric speech was just a temporary detour, a one way street, on the journey of child development.
So Vygotsky and his team set out to prove Piaget wrong.
‘We took as the starting point of our experiment three of Piaget’s own observations:
1) Egocentric speech occurs only in the presence of other children engaged in the same activity, and not when the child is alone, i.e. it is a collective monologue.
2) The child is under the illusion that his egocentric talk, directed to nobody, is understood by those who surround him.
3) Egocentric speech has the character of external speech: It is not inaudible or whispered.’
When Vygotsky’s team sat children alongside others who couldn’t hear or speak, or who spoke a different language, these children’s egocentric speech massively reduced, to zero in most cases.
When they isolated these children from the rest of the group, it also massively reduced, by more than eighty percent on average
When they hired an orchestra to drown out the individual subject child’s voice, and the voices of the rest of the group, it also reduced by around eighty percent.
Now both Vygotsky and Piaget agreed that children generally only engage in egocentric speech between the ages of three* and seven.**
Where they differed, crucially, was around what happened to it next?
Piaget thought that it died out at age seven.
Vygotsky, on the other hand, believed that it became internalized, as ‘inner speech,’ and went on to show how the structures of our inner speech, yours and mine, grew out from, but still resembled, that earlier, abandoned, egocentric speech.
‘Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech -it is a function of itself. It still remains speech, i.e. thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embedded in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought.’
Adding, later:
‘If language is as old as consciousness itself, and if language is a practical conscious-for-others and, consequently, consciousness-for-myself, then not only one particular thought but all consciousness is connected with the development of the word. The word is a thing in our consciousness, as Feuerbach put it, that is absolutely impossible for one person, but that becomes a reality for two. The word is a direct expression of the historical nature of human consciousness. Consciousness is reflected in a word as the sun is in a drop of water. A word relates to consciousness as a living cell relates to a whole organism, as an atom relates to the universe. A word is a microcosm of human consciousness.’
So we’d be wise to choose, and use, our words carefully: professionally, in The Business of Pleasure; personally, as the map, compass and GPS of our consciousness; and interpersonally, as we try to understand the complex, contradictory, and sometimes utterly heart-breaking behaviour of our fellow humans, and be understood by them in return. Those precocious, two-legged, perpetual wordsmiths, jogging alongside us, for the briefest eternity, beautiful, barbaric and (allegedly) big-brained.
Most of the words above were taken from translations of Vygotsky’s work ‘Thought and Language,’ first published in 1934. He died of tuberculosis the same year, aged 37, bowing out, professionally at least, with these words:
“This is the final thing I have done in psychology – and I will, like Moses, die at the summit, having glimpsed the promised land but without setting foot on it. Farewell, dear creations. The rest is silence.”
DT 11-8-24
*Up to the age of three, the child’s speech is believed to be one hundred percent social, and purely for the purposes of communication.
**Beyond the age of seven, and into adulthood, the nearest we get to old-style ‘egocentric speech,’ is when we’re struggling with a task and say to ourselves “Come on, you can do this!”
Jean Piaget died in 1980, aged 84.
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