Vygotsky’s Immanent Critique of Reflexology

VYGOTSKY came to psychology by way of aesthetics. At the time, in the wake of the Russian Revolution, aesthetics was the scene of intense ideological struggles between Symbolists and Formalists and Phenomenologists. Vygotsky claimed that aesthetics had to be based on psychology and this is how he came to Psychology, more in tune with semiotics than medicine. This was not the usual training for the psychology of the time, dominated by reflexology and other variants of physiological behaviourism.

But in his first speech to the Congress of Psychoneurology in 1924, Vygotsky spoke in the language of reflexology, building up to a point where he declared:

“Consciousness is only the reflex of reflexes. If to claim that consciousness too has to be understood as a reaction of the organism to its own reactions, one has to be a bigger reflexologist than Pavlov himself. So be it” (1997).

The conventional wisdom about this speech is that it represents the reflexologist stage in Vygotsky‟s development, that is, that he was at this time a reflexologist, and later he became a reactologist and then … But if we take account of Vygotsky‟s background, this is really not believable.

Vygotsky began by declaring that „the methods of the reflexological investigation of man have now reached a turning point …‟ explaining that „outside the domain of the elementary and primitive, reflexology was left only with its general bare claim – equally well applicable to all forms of behaviour – that they constitute systems of conditional reflexes.‟ Continuing with this damning characterization of the poverty of reflexological research, Vygotsky claimed that if reflexology was to become a general science of behaviour then its methods would have to merge with those of its opponent, „subjective psychology‟ whose methods hinged on dialogue with the experimental subject.

He established this with a beautiful line of immanent critique: he quotes an eminent reflexologist to the effect that the most sensitive reflexes should be used in experiments; the most sensitive reflex is the „speech reflex‟, therefore, instead of poking pins into someone‟s foot and measuring how long it took the person to withdraw their foot, reflexology should focus on the „speech reflex‟.

He then points out that in fact without acknowledging it, reflexologists continuously use speech interaction with experimental subjects: “Please sit down,” “Did you feel that?” and so on. But they do so unscientifically, whereas in fact it is essential to recognize speech interaction between the researcher and the subject as part of the whole experiment and examine it scientifically.

The reflexologists held that self-observation – asking subjects about their own state of mind – is an inherently unscientific method of investigating consciousness, because it is subjective. But Vygotsky pointed out that an experimental subject‟s responses to questions are simply experimental data to be subject to scientific analysis like everything else that takes place within the experiment.

According to reflexology, thought was a speech reflex which has been inhibited before it becomes manifest, and so Vygotsky asked „why it is allowed to study complete speech reflexes … [but] forbidden to take account of these same reflexes when they are inhibited?‟ If manifest reflexes are objective, then inhibited reflexes, i.e., thoughts, are also objective. The question is only the methods to be applied to study thought.

VYGOTSKY then goes on to talk about „the capacity of the reflex to be a stimulus for a new reflex – this mechanism of awareness is the mechanism of the transmission of reflexes from one system to another‟, and makes a reflexological definition of consciousness:

“the act of thought, the act of consciousness is in our opinion not a reflex, that is, it cannot also be a stimulus, but it is the transmission mechanism between systems of reflexes.”

This definition avoids both reductionism and dualism, allowing Vygotsky to ask rhetorically:

“Is a scientific explanation of human behaviour possible without the mind?” In fact, even the most extreme reflexologists, Pavlov and Bekhterev, accepted that consciousness exists and that it forms an essential component of human behaviour. They simply refused to admit the study of thought into „objective‟ science on the basis of the unsustainable claim that the study of thought is possible only by self-observation, which is by definition unscientific. This locks them into an inflexible dualism: reflexology which is able to make only the most banal claims, and psychology, which is unscientific. „Two sciences with the same subject of investigation – the behaviour of man‟. The reflexologists could only conceive of consciousness as subjective states understood in a dualistic way, excluded in principle from interaction with the material world. Vygotsky concludes with the paradox:

“Psychology has to state and solve the problem of consciousness by saying that it is the interaction, the reflection, the mutual stimulation of various systems of reflexes. It is what is transmitted in the form of a stimulus to other systems and elicits a response in them. Consciousness is a response apparatus. … Consciousness is only the reflex of reflexes. … to study the behaviour of man without mind as reflexology wishes to do is as impossible as to study mind without behaviour.”

Finally, to the supposed inaccessibility of subjective states to scientific investigation, Vygotsky points out that the geologist, the historian, … all scientists in fact, face the problem that the object of their science is not open to „direct‟ unmediated observation. In every case, methods must be worked out to reconstruct the relevant facts from observation and experiment. These facts include the mind and the methods for reconstructing the facts include talking with the experimental subject whilst participating with them in the experimental activity.

Paper: Vygotsky & the Concept of Consciousness

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Fuente: http://home.mira.net/~andy/