Rethinking Vygotskian Cultural-Historical Theory in Light of Pepperian Root Metaphor Theory: Dynamic Interplay of Organicism and Contextualism

This article examines Vygotskian cultural-historical theory by putting it into dialogue with Stephen Pepper’s root metaphor theory. I focus on Vygotsky’s insistence on the dialectical unity of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic domains in ontogenesis, which he articulated in his account of how the natural-psychological and cultural-psychological lines of development merge with the emergence of speeching in ontogenesis. I compare Vygotsky’s two genetic domains and Pepper’s world hypotheses of organicism and contextualism. I argue that Vygotsky transcended what is often thought of as a fundamental dichotomy between organicism and contextualism. In accomplishing this effective reconciliation, Vygotsky demonstrated that it is possible both to traverse the ontological schism between subjective psychology and objective psychology, and to foreground the integrative, complex, dynamic, emergent, and mediated nature of human consciousness. © 2017 S. Karger AG, Basel The aim of this paper is to make explicit some features of Vygotskian culturalhistorical theory (CHT) that have previously been overpassed. In pursuing this objective I will draw on a comparison between Vygotsky’s two genetic domains (i.e., the natural and the cultural) and Stephen Pepper’s [1942] world hypotheses – conceptual systems that describe several alternative ontological worldviews. The argument to be pursued is that by employing a dialectical method Vygotsky was able to synthesize ostensibly contradictory tenants of the contextualism and organicism world hySaeed Karimi-Aghdam 204 Fennicum, Department of Languages University of Jyväskylä, PO Box 35 FI–40014 Jyväskylä (Finland) E-Mail saeed.karimi-aghdam @ jyu.fi © 2017 S. Karger AG, Basel 0018–716X/17/0595–0251$39.50/0 www.karger.com/hde E-Mail [email protected] D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 252 Karimi-Aghdam potheses into a dynamic unified and relational whole. Panoramic perspectives of the ultimate nature of the empirical reality and ways of looking at the world have profound implications for every aspect of research from data collection to theory construction and hypothesis testing. Therefore, developmental psychologists have been engaged in highlighting the influence of world hypotheses and their associated underpinnings and presuppositions on theory construction and the methodological apparatus of their theoretical models [e.g., Overton, 1984, 1998; Overton & Reese, 1973; Reese & Overton, 1970]. Although Vygotsky’s CHT is one of the most fruitful and productive developmental theories in the latter part of the past century, it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that it has not received the attention that it deserves to be subjected to a coherent and in-depth discussion of its ontological and epistemological assumptions employing Pepper’s world hypotheses [see also Stetsenko, 2009]. There are, however, some minor suggestions in the literature and some disagreements as to which of Pepper’s world hypotheses is most consistent with Vygotsky’s CHT. For example, Overton [2012] suggested Vygotsky’s CHT is representative of the “organicism” metaphysical school of thought; however, in a recent publication [Overton, 2015] he argues that Vygotsky’s CHT is a quintessential example of a “process-relational” philosophical position (a worldview derived from a coherent synthesis of organicism and contextualism world hypotheses). On the other hand, Rogoff [1982] has emphasized that Vygotsky’s CHT falls squarely into a contextual event (transactional) approach or Pepper’s contextualism world hypothesis. Rogoff [1982] has averred that, “consistent with the contextual event approach, these theorists [Gibsons, Vygotsky and Leont’ev] emphasize that cognitive activity cannot ultimately be conceived of as characteristic of the person separate from the context in which the person thinks” (p. 134). Likewise, Moshman [1982] maintains that Vygotskian CHT is lodged in the contextualism world hypothesis. To reach a conceptualization of context as a “process of weaving together,” Cole [1996] made use of Pepper’s contextualism world hypothesis. Cole [1997] further pointed out that cultural-historical psychology is a fusion of two Pepperian world hypotheses, i.e., organicism and contexualism, “because humans just are hybrids of the two principles of development” (p. 247, italics in original). In this paper I argue that Vygotsky’s CHT has self-consciously drawn upon a dialectical movement and relational epistemology to undermine the dualistic clash of contextualist (i.e., the social-historical) and organismic (i.e., the individual-biological) thinking about human development. The application of dialectical and historical materialism to a psychological subject matter is one of the keystones of Vygotsky’s CHT of higher mental processes (i.e., uniquely human-centered processes) [Vygotsky, 1978, 1998]. In a nutshell, by invoking a dialectical epistemology, this article suggests, Vygotsky offers a developmental theory which eschews the pitfalls of reducing human development and consciousness to a maturation of a biological “organism” or reducing human consciousness to an epiphenomenon of extrasomatic influences of the social-historical umwelt. The central thesis to be sustained is that Vygotsky’s CHT is an example, par excellence, of a developmental theory which has translated a synthetic fusion of the assumptions and basic categories of the organicism and contextualism world hypotheses into a coherent and comprehensive frame of reference for understanding, describing, explaining, and optimizing human developmental processes and consciousness. Vygotsky’s CHT maintains that a dynamic interfusion of “cultural-hisD ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Rethinking Vygotsky with Root Metaphor Theory 253 Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 torical context” with “the biological-natural aspect of an organism” transforms a human being from being a passive “biological animal” with lower-level functions into an active “cultured human” with higher-level functions. This does not warrant any conclusion as to prior disparate montage, or sundered existence, of the biological and the cultural processes of human development. Instead, the cultural and the biological processes exist for one another but also by means of one another being “merged in ontogenesis and actually form a single, although complex process” [Vygotsky, 1997e, p. 15]. Vygotsky’s CHT indicates that the genetic roots of the human higher-level functions and processes emerge out of the interpenetrating coactions of four nested systems, i.e., phylogeny, cultural history, ontogeny, and microgenesis [Vygotsky, 1987, 1993]. Of particular concern in this article is Vygotsky’s affirmation of the relational synthesis of the phylogenetic and ontogenetic domains in the process of ontogenesis, the central concern of developmental science [Vygotsky, 1987, 1993; Vygotsky & Luria, 1994], which he arti culated in his account of how the biological and the historical-cultural trajectories coalesce with the emergence of speeching (i.e., language). By integrating the organicism and contextualism world hypotheses into a unified and coherent metatheoretical edifice, I therefore propose to argue that Vygotsky has overcome the traditional dichotomy between subjective-objective psychology, offering an integrative CHT without ontologically divorcing, and positing an independent existence for, the subjective mind (an experiencing and knowing individual) and objective world (spatial and temporal ascriptions and entifications that are independent of the experiencing individual). In the following section Pepper’s root metaphor theory (RMT) is introduced [Pepper, 1935, 1942, 1943a]. The next section addresses the legitimacy of integrating Pepperian world hypotheses and, more importantly, contextualism and organicism with particular reference to the developmental science literature. The third section of the paper details the perennial dichotomous debate vacillating between the subjective psychology vis-à-vis objective psychology and shows how Vygotsky’s CHT closes the ontological gap between these two polarized camps. Then, the desideratum of the dialectical synthesis of two out of four world hypotheses delineated upon by RMT, i.e., organicism and contextualism in the construction of Vygotskian CHT, is discussed. The paper also examines features of the dialectical logic in Vygotskian CHT that are employed to expound human consciousness as an emergent, integrative, complex, mediated and dynamic phenomenon. Finally, some broad conceptual conclusions will be drawn about CHT. Examining Pepperian RMT Stephen C. Pepper (1891–1972), an American philosopher, introduced RMT based on a systematic categorization and typological conceptualization of what he believed to be four equally and relatively adequate “world hypotheses.” A world hypothesis is a comprehensive, coherent, corroborated, and conducting set of categories with an unrestricted evidential scope that is about the world itself. In particular, a world hypothesis seeks out to organize the totality of evidence in conformity with (a) embracing unlimitedly any available range of facts proposed for description and (b) subjecting adequately all evidential items to corroboration [e.g., Pepper, 1943b]. Drawing upon basic and concrete evidential sources as the building blocks of rational D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 254 Karimi-Aghdam construction of world hypotheses, Pepper [1942, 1943a] argues that there are only four relatively adequate unrestricted world hypotheses which in turn are anchored on four pivotal root metaphors (i.e., selected sets of common-sense facts and areas of empirical observation): formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism (for the fifth world hypothesis, “selectivism,” see Pepper [1966]) . The first world hypothesis, formism, is based on the root metaphor of similarity between different objects and events, that is, “the identity of a single form in a multiplicity of particular exemplifications” [Pepper, 1973, p. 198]. The root metaphor of mechanism is the machine, that is, “material push and pull, or attraction and repulsion culminating in the conception of a machine or an electromagnetic-gravitational field” [Pepper, 1973, p. 198]. The root metaphor of Pepper’s third hypothesis of contextualism is an ongoing act of change (i.e., a historic event), that is, “a transitory historical situation and its biological tensions as exhibited by Dewey and his followers” [Pepper, 1973, p. 198]. The root metaphor for the fourth hypothesis of organicism is process of harmonious unity (i.e., an organized whole), that is, “a dynamic organic whole as elaborated by Hegel and his followers” [Pepper, 1973, p. 198]. As the diagrammatic representation in Table 1 plainly shows, Pepper [1942] grouped four world hypotheses into two different categories. Organicism and contextualism are synthetic world hypotheses whereas formism and mechanism are analytical world hypotheses. Moreover, formism and contextualism are dispersive world hypotheses while on the contrary mechanism and organicism are integrative world hypotheses. To clarify how and in what respects Vygotskian CHT, a dialectical tertium quid, cuts across organicism and contextualism world hypotheses explicating these two world theories which are “species of the same theory” [Pepper, 1942, p. 280] in more detail seems imperative. Root metaphor of contextualism as a synthetic world hypothesis is “an act in its context” (i.e., a historic event) [Pepper, 1942, p. 232]. Historic events do not primarily characterize past events but are relational and interpenetrated activities and incidents whose patterns are changing dynamically based on the contingencies and particularities of the present now ; therefore, historic events are ongoing and interconnected acts in their surrounding context constantly concatenating and re-presenting an attentive past (i.e., no longer present) and future (i.e., not yet present) [Pepper, 1942, p. 233]. Organicism is also a synthetic world hypothesis with integration (i.e., an organic whole) as its root metaphor. Organicism is on a par with contextualism with respect to being a synthetic world hypothesis. The basic guiding facts and categories of synthetic world hypotheses are complexes or contexts rather than the intrinsic nature and permanency of the elements per se, thus analysis is considered a derivative precipitate of synthesis [Pepper, 1942]. For a synthetic world hypothesis, a whole is more than a mereological sum of its elements, is categorically prior to and inclusive of the individual parts, and provides a basis for the existence of, and grants liabilities to, its differentiated but internally related elements. Tabl e 1. A schematic taxonomy of world hypotheses adopted from Pepper [1942] Dispersive Integrative Analytical formism mechanism Synthetic contextualism organicism D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Rethinking Vygotsky with Root Metaphor Theory 255 Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 Contextualism, on the other hand, is a “dispersive” world hypothesis. That is to say, a posteriori observational evidence and reasoning are adduced in this world hypothesis, and chance, more or less, is deemed acceptable. Hence scope is more adequate than precision for contextualism. For contextualism, the basic universal structural features are novelty and change of a historic event as it is actually taking place in our present epoch [Pepper, 1942, p. 235]. Any sort of fact is easily real for contextualism without concern for past events; hence, fluid change and novelty are presuppositions of contextualism. Inasmuch as contextualism takes in facts independently of other facts more often than not, unpredictability is in line with its not highly systematic agglomeration whose order is not unwavering [Pepper, 1935, 1942]. For a contextualist, the dispositional properties of interactive historical events within an organism per se are not enough to explain particular details of dynamic processes of change and motion in concrete tempospatial contexts. Moreover, for a contextualist, the historical properties of an organism are to a considerable degree independent of each other. Subsequently, the structure of the organism is not imposing a preordained pattern or a prewired design; in effect, for contextualism, disorder is a categorical attribute [Pepper, 1928, 1942]. Organicism is an “integrative” world hypothesis. In other words, justifications and assumptive axioms and postulates which are used in organicism are a priori. As such, in the organicism world hypothesis, chance is eschewed and consequently precision is considered more important than scope. There are two sides to the categories in organicism. Internal factual contradictions of the progressive steps of organic processes (i.e., the appearance) and the ideal organic structure to be achieved (i.e., the reality), spontaneously transcend the bounds of all experiential fragments and become integrated. Consequently, an “absolutely concrete coherent organic whole” inevitably emerges [Pepper, 1942]. Consistent with the categories of organicism, in order to emphasize both of its integrative and synthetic properties I use the term “teleotropism”. By the term teleotropism, I mean the property by which an organism qua a holistic system-cum-interrelations maintains its dynamic equilibrium despite erratic environmental perturbations exerted “here and now” across space and timescales, not least because various system-wide substructures and constituent parts have a dispositional property of moving towards some goal. A formal causality – the essential nature of a thing which distinguishes a form from all other things [Bunge, 1962; Overton, 1998] and contributes “the essence, idea, or quality of the thing concerned” [Bunge, 1962, p. 32] – is drawn upon to explain actual but not yet integrated fragments of experience and is invoked to investigate the nature of being . For organicism, the structural progression of a coherent whole (i.e., an organic system) prefigures the pathway for the dialectical integration and harmonization of isolated data into an organic ensemble. As such, a teleotropic system such as an organism prospectively targets an ideal endpoint subordinating differentiation and difference to integration and unity. Progressively moving toward an absolute reality, according to organicism, is implicative of a telos (i.e., an ultimate future and guiding reference in the developmental process) and, by implication, brings final causality into causal chains of explanation. The final cause is the purpose, goal or “the end of every generative or motive process” [Bunge, 1962, p. 32] for which something is done or made and is invoked to examine and describe the process of becoming . The number and order of developmental paths towards an organic structure are not finite nor are they preexisting niches or innate D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 256 Karimi-Aghdam dispositional structures. That is, “the goal [is] predetermined in the structure of the facts, but not the particular path to the goal” [Pepper, 1942, p. 295]. Therefore, all micropathways conduce to, and are productive of, the same organic whole. It may not be an undue overstatement to claim that for organicism emergence of new appearances in developmental trajectories can be ascribed exclusively to neither material nor efficient causal explanatory conceptualizations. Taking this further, it can be argued that emergent properties are irreducible to, and unpredictable in advance of the fact from, their constituent parts. This is, one may argue, because an organism – while maintaining its unity in terms of formal consistency and material coherence – draws upon organizing dispositions to progress towards “the absolute.” For organicism with its focus on the final terminus, integration of changes in the process of development gains towering importance whereas the temporal enduring process is demoted to a subsidiary position. For contextualism, on the contrary, commensurate with its focus pivoted on the constantly changing present, admittance of examining development as it is constructed in the creative multiplicity and temporal immediacy of the present stream of experience – or what William James [1890, p. 609] called “the specious present” – gains credence. In a move toward articulating one of the main differences between organicism and contexualism, Pepper [1942] offers a similar perspective: “... organicism has to deal mainly with historic processes even while it consistently explains time away, whereas contextualism has to admit integrative structures surrounding and extending through given events even though these structures endanger its categories” (p. 280). I tend to stress that the decontextualized investigation of development, based on the organicism world hypothesis, falls short of addressing the actual behaviors of an organism which are embedded and embodied in immediate space and time as well as in its mediate local and temporal historicity. Explaining away efficient (a cause of becoming ) and material (a cause of being ) causal chains in the development process and endeavoring to explain how categories fit into the underlying abstract ideal structures is still another repercussion of preconceiving, by presupposition, a phenomenal existence rather than a real existence for development. Yet, interpenetrated past and present times nexus from the organicism’s vantage point are not given due attention and are treated as inconsequential for shaping a prospective unified and harmonious organic whole. Simply and briefly stated, on the other hand, contextualism deregiments analytically, concordant with minutiae of the immediate context, the organized totality of human development into monadic elements and independent properties as parts of a structured whole. Moreover, contextualism divests its explanatory discourses of formal (i.e., a cause of being) and final (i.e., a cause of becoming) causalities seeing development to devolve toward a continually greater dispersion and disorder rather than to evolve toward a harmonious integration and synthetic unity. Since chance has ontological reality for contextualism, and disorder and change are categorical (i.e., nonderivative) features of it [Pepper, 1942], the patterns of development are constantly changing giving rise to possible creative and genuine novelties rather than to determinate explicative and maturational variations. Formal and final causalities that are invoked in organicism render the self-evolving and progressive process of development regulative, meaningful, orderly, and apprehensible both in terms of its current dynamic constellations and its end-directed processual trajectory. Attributing development en bloc by virtue of observation to material and efficient causes – determinable antecedents and specifiable conditions for temporally D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Rethinking Vygotsky with Root Metaphor Theory 257 Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 and contextually embedded effects that are subsequent in time – as is the case in contextualism implicates that inference and interpretation as well as complete and coherent organizing, systematizing, and synthesizing of the conceivable developmental changes by dint of final and formal causalities, unlike organicism, are given short shrift. Simultaneous and bidirectional influence of cause and effect on one another, in consonance with organicism, implies constant reversal of temporal precedence of cause over effect and casts doubt on the permanency and univocality of cause-effect correspondence in germinating development. Hence, bringing final causality into play in explanation of development – not predictive in function but ex post facto – is warranted and in turn leads to obviating the need for confining explanatory arguments, mandated by contextualism, to unidirectional and efficient causal relations that are external to organism in which development occurs. Given its attention riveted on particularizing the relation between a dynamic organism and changing environing context per se, contextualism, sitting at variance with organicism, eschews employment of “universalistic and thus constantly applicable principles of development” [Lerner, 1986, p. 67]. Equally, a lack of systematic and comprehensive account of nexus of development which is sliced off by a differential epistemology attests to the effect that contextualism “cannot form the basis for scientifically viable research programs – unless science were to abandon its attempt to establish an organized and systematic body of knowledge, which is unlikely” [Overton, 1984, p. 218]. As stated above, efficient and final causalities, according to Aristotle’s doctrine of the four causes, are causes of becoming while formal and material causalities are causes of being. Since dispersiveness and novelty are among categorical attributes of contextualism, invoking upward causality – efficient causality from basal lower-level functions to higher-level functions – is not enough for explaining emergent properties of human development at different integrative levels and so for its ordered and patterned totality. Efficient causality, which is the all-pervasive cause in scientific explanations in the modern natural sciences, is premised on decomposability and additivity of discrete elements and corpuscular constituents of a whole system. Moreover, in efficient causality, cause has temporal priority to effect (i.e., temporal contiguity and succession of antecedent and consequent), and is linear and unidirectional. It follows that efficient and final causalities may be used for explaining human development and its analysis at different strata and across multiple levels of organization which enjoy multidirectional, complex, and reciprocal influences on one another across multitudinous temporal imbrications. To account for differences among theories and to adjudicate on different levels of explanation, it should be noted that final and formal causalities are conceived to be pivotal for understanding human developmental theories which are primarily affiliated with organicism while material and efficient causalities may be invoked to explain phenomena within ambit of developmental theories that are yoked with contextualism and mechanism. The controversy surrounding the role of the final level of causality – teleological in character and an inversion of efficient causality in time without juxtaposition of cause and effect – in scientifically robust and uncompromisingly empiricist understandings of human development has resulted in nonadmission of this type of causality in contextualism-governed theories which set out to come to terms with an unorganized complicacy which is incoherent and dispersive rather than an organized complexity which is coherent and integrative. Both organicism and contextualism are nonreductionist and holistic world hypotheses; hence, D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 258 Karimi-Aghdam avoid reducing constitutive and relational heterochronic levels of a syncretized whole which are nested and perpetually mutating and reciprocating. Therefore, theories which register affinities with these world hypotheses and address developmental issues at different levels of organization, by the same token, cannot be reduced ontologically to, and explained properly in terms of, the foundational axioms, bedrock laws, philosophical bases and constituent entities of another theory. It stands to reason to submit that any single developmental theory which puts claims to adequacy in terms of scope and precision should pay attention to drawbacks of opting for a pure world hypothesis as its foundational point of departure. Moreover, underscoring the generative tenets of an associated world hypothesis of a developmental theory on an exhaustive interpretation consists in the retrenchment of different levels of explanation to which a “radical” (pure) world hypothesis in and of itself appeals. The next section briefly debates tenability of synthesizing two world hypotheses, namely organicism and contextualism, with particular reference to developmental science. World Hypothesis Synthesis: Defensible or Indefensible? Weltanschauung (i.e., worldview) analysis à la Pepper’s [1942] RMT conceptual and evaluative schemes remains current and has been widely used to guide theorizations, develop conceptual frameworks, and unearth pertinent assumptions and undergirding premises of theoretical architectures in various subdisciplines of psychology and developmental science in particular [e.g., Morris, 1988; Overton, 1984, 1998; Overton & Ennis, 2006; Witherington, 2007]. As discussed above, organicism and contextualism both are synthetic world hypotheses. In other words, for these two world hypotheses, wholes are basic facts from which elements and parts are derived; therefore, wholes have ontological priority over uncompounded elements and parts, coordinating the component parts. On the other hand, whereas organicism is an integrative world hypothesis, contextualism is a dispersive world hypothesis. Contextualism treats synthesis dispersively while organicism handles it integratively [Pepper, 1942, 1943a]. If anything, then, these world hypotheses are interlocked but also divergent along specific categorical lines, so as to be properly enunciated as two related but distinct world theories, or more prosaically “contextualism is simply dispersive organicism” [Pepper, 1942. p. 280] and organicism is simply integrative contextualism. I would argue that Pepper also drives a time wedge to cleave organicism and contextualism into two autonomous but congenial world hypotheses. Organicism belittles time whereas contextualism espouses time and temporality as a linchpin of the situated interpretation of dynamic present events. For organicism, integration and synthesis in the process of development are regarded as its focal point while time-locked duration of the process takes a back seat [Pepper, 1942]. Pepper [1942, 1943b] claimed that eclectic merging and overstepping the boundaries of world hypotheses results in numerous paradoxes and confusions since each autonomous matrix of presuppositions and postulates about the ultimate nature of reality (i.e., world hypothesis) operates of necessity consistently with its own distinct and incontrovertible truth criteria. Hence, mixing world hypotheses ineluctably, it is proposed, leads to utterly vicious and illegitimate “structural corroboration,” i.e., corD ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Rethinking Vygotsky with Root Metaphor Theory 259 Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 roboration of the factuality of fact with fact [Pepper, 1942; see also Reese & Overton, 1970]; this is a deep and has proved to be a contentious issue at stake, and thus ipso facto provokes continuing discussion in developmental science. Notwithstanding Pepper’s [1942] admonitory remarks regarding the pitfalls of hybridization of world hypotheses or what he terms “irrational eclecticism” (p. 341), there have been some psychologists who, one way or another, have tried to interdigitate Pepperian world hypotheses to arrive at a more comprehensive and rigorous paradigmatic framework to predicate human developmental theories on. For instance, Overton [2006] invoking Pepper’s RMT argues for two expansive families of worldviews which are engendered by wedding two world hypotheses. For instance, combining mechanism and contextualism, Overton [2006] suggests, gives rise to a “split worldview” while integrating organicism and contextualism yields a “relational worldview.” Contra the main thesis of this paper, Vygotskian CHT on the face of it appears to belong to a pure contextualism or a split worldview (mechanism-contextualism integration). For example, in accord with Overton’s discussion [2006, 2015], evidenced by a construal of CHT grounded on a Marxism doctrine and spearheaded by some influential CHT scholars [e.g., Cole, 1996; Rogoff, 1982; Wertsch, 1985a, 1991], Vygotskian CHT is aligned with a split worldview. Conceivably one of the main reasons because of which the contextualism chameleon tends to be merged with mechanism or organicism – being susceptible to transmutability of its identity as an autonomous world hypothesis with an idiosyncratic criterion of truth – is that “pure contextualism” generates nonviable and otiose research programs which lack systematicity and a unifying organization to be pursued scientifically [Overton, 1984]. Pepper [1942] himself has remarked that contextualism is an inconstant world hypothesis “constantly on the verge of falling back upon underlying mechanistic structures, or of resolving into the overarching implicit integrations of organicism” (p. 235). Overton [2007] similarly affiliates himself to this stance: “Contextualism is an unstable worldview, at one moment sliding over into mechanism, at another moment sliding into organicism” (p. 154). According to Lerner and Kauffman [1985, p. 312] in the extant literature there are two main objections to bringing the contextualism vantage point into congruence with “a concept of development which stresses ideas such as normative progression, universality, irreversibility, and final end state.” First, development as an idealized process and reference point toward which evolutive and propagative variations move is different from adventitious change, and second, all developmental theories mutatis mutandis premise that context is an immanent part of the temporal process of development. In view of such considerations, foregrounding context may not be regarded a novel contribution but is conceived of a secondary matter-of-fact assertion and that as such, still one may claim that some contextual developmental theories can be reduced to the basic discrete precepts and techniques of conditioning [Lerner & Kauffman, 1985, pp. 312–313]. Likewise, contextualism “which stresses only the dispersive, chaotic, and disorganized character of life would not readily lend itself to the derivation of a theory of development” [Lerner & Kauffman, 1985, p. 318]. Yet, that a deeper understanding of development entirely in terms of a “pure” world hypothesis such as contextualism can be gained appears an unsustainable argument. Development is a multidimensional, multilayered, nested, time-locked and processual system with “integrative levels of organization” [e.g., Feibleman, 1954]. All levels in development are emergents with novel properties in and over anisochronous D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 260 Karimi-Aghdam (i.e., taking place in or occupying unequal times and durations) scales. Each emergent level of development (e.g., the biological, the psychological, the sociocultural) is indescribable and unexplainable with reference to the processual and material properties of multiple components and processes comprising its attentive sublevels, which in turn are harmonized into a transcending totality. Further, due to dynamic, complex, organized and interpenetrated rhizomaticity of the entire scale of development, every component and process presupposes and constitutes and so too is presupposed and constituted by its internal relations of a dialectical kind to other components or processes at sub-, meso-, or supralevels of increasing complexity. In this view every change generates multiplicative changes at multiple levels of development making every subtle variation integrated and appropriated into a whole system rather than being added piecemeal to nothing but an unorganized and chance-medley aggregate. Dialectical materialism likewise endorses emergence of novel qualities at enveloping and divers levels of high organization and complexity. For example, Shirokov [1937] points out: If we subject it [a living organism] to a purely external analysis into its elements we shall find nothing except physico-chemical processes. But this by no means denotes that life amounts to a simple aggregate of these physico-chemical elements. The particular physico-chemical processes are connected in the organism by a new form of movement , and it is in this that the quality of the living thing lies. The new in a living organism, not being attributable to physics and chemistry, arises as the result of the new synthesis , of the new connection of physical and chemical movements. This synthetic process whereby out of the old we proceed to the emergence of the new was understood neither by the mechanists nor the vitalists.... The task of each particular science is to study the unique forms of movement characteristic of that particular level of the development of matter. (p. 341, original emphasis) It may be therefore contended that for investigating more adequately different levels and dimensions of development from biology, psychology through culture and history without ontological reduction of one level to another or making untenable interlevel extrapolations and due to qualitative discontinuity between levels and therefore variation in the pertaining factors, mechanisms, processes, principles, and even laws operative at each level, we need conceptual differentiations and developmental theories which are built upon, or at least attentive to, different world hypotheses or their principled synthesis. As a result of considerable skepticism about the adequacy of invoking a pure world hypothesis to understand, describe, explain, and optimize development with veridical precision and adequate ambit coupled with acknowledgement of “dynamic interactions” (i.e., correlative coupling) among all integrative levels [Lerner, 1978], many developmental psychologists have argued that a new synthetic framework is requisite. They conclude that both pure contextualism and pure organicism have limitations on both methodological and conceptual grounds in their capacity to address the phenomenon of development adequately and coherently. In line with Overton [1984] and in accord with “integrative levels of organization,” Lerner and Kauffman [1985], for example, contended for a principled integration of two world hypotheses, namely contextualism and organicism without committing the fallacy of eclecticism. Synthesis of contextualism and organicism entails seeing an organism coupled with context and a dynamic, bidirectional, and fluent coordination or “reciprocal determination” [Overton & Reese, 1973] between them as the fundamental process of development. Based on the resultant synthetic worldview, every temporal level with D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Rethinking Vygotsky with Root Metaphor Theory 261 Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 its unique laws and generative mechanisms of change is accounted for by drawing upon relevant positings, presuppositions, and appropriate laws. For instance, examining the philosophical and axiological substrates of Pepper’s [1942] RMT and Dewey and Bentley’s [1949] three philosophical approaches to the “knowings and knowns,” Altman and Rogoff [1987] proffer their own worldviews while advocating synthesizing some complementary aspects of the different worldviews. Framing the issue differently, Cole [1997] goes so far as to suggest that fusing organicism and contextualism is necessary to describe and explain human development, albeit that he notes it is analytically confusing. Recently, the debate over RMT and its implications for developmental science along with world hypotheses prosynthesis discussions have gained new ascendancy. In order to chart out the current conceptual landscape of dynamic systems perspective, Witherington [2007] capitalizes mainly on Pepper’s [1942] green light to “postrational eclecticism” (i.e., eclecticism after the fact) rather than “irrational eclecticism” (i.e., eclecticism before the fact) (p. 341). He advocates an integrative rapprochement between organicism and contextualism world hypotheses as the most viable reading of dynamic systems perspective of human development [see also Karimi-Aghdam, 2016a; Overton, 2007]. Along similar lines Overton and colleagues [Overton, 2015; Overton & Ennis, 2006] have demonstrated that it is possible to offer a coherent and principled synthesis of organicism and contextualism. Refashioning seeming incompatibilities of the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the contextualist behavior-analytic theories and the organismic cognitive-developmental theories into a synthetic complementarity and relational metatheoretical framework yields what Overton [2013, 2015] refers to as a “process-relational” worldview or scientific paradigm. The ontology of process-relational worldview includes “process, activity, dialectic change, emergence, and necessary organization as fundamental defining categories, but it does not exclude categories of substance, stability, fixity, additivity, and contingent organization” [Overton, 2013, p. 42]. Drawing upon a dialectical logic Overton [2015] has persuasively argued that in process-relational architectonic matrix in sharp contrast with the Cartesian-split-mechanistic scientific paradigm false dichotomies of pure forms which are conceived to be exclusive hard cores of certainty (e.g., bodymind, culture-biology, individual-culture, nature-nurture) are considered different and inclusive moments of the same temporal process. Process-relational metatheory [Overton, 2015] for analysis (two moments) and synthesis (one moment) of development envisages three fundamental principles or multiple moments of a unitary process: (a) the identity of opposites, (b) the opposites of identity, and (c) the synthesis of wholes. The first principle frames parts of a whole not as mutually exclusive either/ors but as complementary oppositions and differentiated relations. In this way, person, culture, and biology, which operate in opposite directions, are cast into internally interpenetrated and continuous relations of a unified whole. The opposite of identity moment paves the way for scientific scrutiny of development by reasserting the principle of contradiction leading to relative exclusion (i.e., negation) of unified categories by one another. Consequently, parts of the unified whole differentiate their characteristics and establish their own identity by setting their own boundaries. This in turn gives rise to looking at development from different lines of sight without ontologically divorcing the person-culture-biology integrated totality. The third moment – the synthesis of wholes – fuses two moments D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 262 Karimi-Aghdam into an integrative standpoint and resolves bipolarization into a centripetal emergent that coordinates two of the centrifugal systems [Overton, 2015; Overton & Ennis, 2006]. From its inception, however, psychology has been concerned with and attentive to Cartesian ontological and psychophysical bifurcation of human consciousness between “res extensa” (extended substance) and “res cogitans” (thinking substance). This dualism is also epitomized by severing of the inner, psychical, and subjective meaning-saturated system of an individual from the outer, physical, and objective world of the extended material reality, branching out psychology into two equipollent camps, namely subjective and objective psychology, and exerting a great influence on various aspects of the discipline. The next section proposes that a major source of impetus for Vygotskian CHT was to transcend the objective-subjective impasse in the psychology and human consciousness in particular: that is, to synthesize organicism and contextualism world hypotheses dialectically. To Subjectivize or to Objectivize Psychology: Is There a Middle Way Out? Vygotsky [2012] catalogues the science of psychology into two paradigmatic schools, i.e., the “natural scientific, materialistic, and objective psychology” versus the “metaphysical, idealistic, and subjective psychology” (p. 87). Perhaps the most important line of inquiry for Vygotsky’s CHT was a systematic quest for getting to grips with the intractable problem of consciousness without falling prey to neither behavioristic nor idealistic theories of consciousness [Leont’ev and Luria, 1968]. Vygotsky [1986, p. 2] also implicates these broad-gauged camps in psychology in another way: “All theories offered from antiquity to our time range between identification , or fusion , of thought and speech on the one hand, and their equally absolute, almost metaphysical disjunction and segregation on the other” (original emphasis). Consistent with this general view, Leont’ev and Luria [1956] couch Vygotsky’s central premise of arguments in the manner of “freeing oneself on the one hand from vulgar behaviorism and, on the other hand, from the subjective understanding of mental phenomenon as exclusively internal subjective states that can only be investigated through introspection” (p. 6, cited in Wertsch [1985b]). Subjective psychology or “science of the spirit” [Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 110] dematerializes and abstracts mental phenomena (mental existence) and inner experiences (mental processes) from their concrete here and now and objective mediations, individuating human consciousness and scrutinizing it from a first person (i.e., inner perception or subject consciousness) perspective. Moreover, subjective psychology decontextualizes human consciousness from the spatiotemporal and changing exigencies (i.e., the outer physical reality), backgrounding the impact of spatial and diachronic and synchronic scales underpinning and being enacted by human consciousness. Subjective psychology or descriptive psychology as is used interchangeably in Vygotsky’s works puts itself to the task of trying “to analyze, classify, and describe the phenomenon of mental life without any appeal to questions of physiology and behavior” [Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 109]. Subjective psychology also assumes directionality to development and, thus, understands the human mind as a purposive, conative, and agential system. D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Rethinking Vygotsky with Root Metaphor Theory 263 Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 Subjective psychology, crudely put, sees development as an idealized, design-guided, and introspective phenomenon [Vygotsky, 1997a]. It represents an idealistic scientific research program that seeks to measure essentially interrelated and sequential qualitative changes which are contingent on the totality of an organism; thus, it invokes formal and final (teleological) causes to explain human development [see also Lerner & Kauffman, 1985; Overton, 2006; Witherington, 2007]. It should be acknowledged, as well, that final causality is not the same as efficient causality producing anything, but is a directional, predispositional, immanent, and adaptive factor that makes a connection between a state of affairs and function in a system, with its presumed engendering object and process, intelligible. Having posteriority relative to its effect, final causality tendentially generates order and coherence in a system by continual integration of changes. It must also be noted that final causality within human-centered phenomena such as consciousness is primarily engendered from intentionality and purposivity of the human being and its intensive quale (an experienced, temporal, and qualitative process) whereas efficient causality is generated from and operative by extensive quantum (an objective, atemporal, and quantitative thing) [Karimi-Aghdam, 2016b]. The subjective psychology is idealistic, being predicated “on the basis of the idealistic philosophical assumption of the independence and primordial nature of the spirit on an equal footing with matter” [Vygotsky, 1997a, p. 110], bracketing causal influence of the ongoing coconstructed contingencies and the microlevel experiential affordances. The subjective psychology posits that the developmental trajectory of an organism (in our case a human being) evolves teleologically and projectively toward a proleptic and susceptible tendency, i.e., a telos as a contingent, provisional, directional and synthesizing goal, rather than toward a preordained, monolithic, and deterministic endpoint and design, not yet in existence but a potential possibility that thereby grants order and stability to an organism’s structural organization and brings directedness out of randomness through umwelt idiosyncrasies. This explains in part why Vygotsky [1993] admits that “essentially, the ultimate character of all psychological acts – their future-oriented directedness – becomes apparent in the most elementary forms of behavior” (p. 60). Hofstadter [1941] functionally – not ontologically – distinguishes between subjective and objective teleology, chalking out subjective teleology to be “a matter of direct experience, of the experience of purposing, striving, valuing, regulating by norm” and being “experienced immanently, from a vantage point within the teleological process, by the agent who forms and has purposes, seeks and uses means, and enjoys or suffers outcomes” whilst objective teleology is depicted to be “a matter of movement or process discovered in subject-matter which is functionally distinct from the agent of discovery qua discoverer” and is “discovered extrinsically, from a vantage point outside the teleological process, by the inquirer after truths about that process” (p. 29). I should here parenthetically emphasize that organicism is teleological or teleotropic, and the teleology involved is objective (extrinsic and predetermined) teleology not subjective (i.e., intrinsic and adaptive) teleology. In a similar vein, change within organicism is teleological (i.e., teleotropic), and the final cause brings order and goal-directedness to changes throughout variegated pathways canalizing, by a dialectic process, all changes unidirectionally to a final end. Such a view is reminiscent of a principle which von Bertalanffy [1968] dubbed equifinality: “... the same final state may be reached from different initial conditions and in different ways” (p. 40). According to Ayala [1970]: D ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 264 Karimi-Aghdam ... [human] actions can be seen to be purposefully or teleologically ordained towards the obtention of the goal. In this sense the concept of teleology can be extended, and has been extended, to describe actions, objects or processes which exhibit an orientation towards a certain goal or end-state. No requirement is necessarily implied that the objects or processes tend consciously towards their specific goals, nor that there is any external agent directing the process or the object towards its end-state or goal. In this generic sense, teleological explanations are those explanations where the presence of an object or a process in a system is explained by exhibiting its connection with a specific state or property of the system to whose existence or maintenance the object or process contributes. (p. 8) In this line, Bernstein [1971], while holding that Marx’s materialism is a synthesis of traditional materialism and idealism, argues that “Marx’s materialism is essentially teleological, not in the sense that teleology commits us to the fantastic notion that a final cause precedes in time an actual event and somehow directs it, but in the empirical sense of teleology where we want to distinguish goal-directed activity from the mechanical regularity of matter in motion” (pp. 42–43). Vygotsky [1998] argues that it is bound to be misguided “to consider the development of separate psychological functions and processes only from the formal aspect, in an isolated form, without regard for their direction and independently of the driving force that these psychological mechanisms bring into play” (p. 3). There is also some need for clarification on the distinction between goal-directedness and futuristic purpose across multiple spatial and temporal scales, whether proximate or remote, which directs and harmonizes the present state of affairs into a coherent and organized system and at the same time is regulated and directed by the attentive state of affairs and a univocally deterministic quiddity and preprogrammed essence that mechanistically defines, actuates and effectuates an endpoint irrespective of the preceding set of paths and processes involved. Objective psychology or what Vygotsky sometimes termed “natural scientific psychology” [e.g., Vygotsky, 1997c, p. 302] mechanistically and atomistically weds human consciousness wholesale to discrete and disparate concrete circumstances, fetishizing external idiosyncrasies of time and space. With its passion for wertfreiheit , objective psychology looks at human consciousness from a disengaged third person (object-consciousness) perspective, embeds it within an atomized matrix of actualized social acts and tries, by invoking cause-effect ascriptions, purely objective and quantitative experimental studies and formation of causal hypotheses, to explain a multiplicity of mechanisms and mental states and constituents. In fact, in practicing objective psychology, as Vygotsky [2012] says: We may view mental processes as one among all other phenomena, in close association with them, study them using general scientific methods, strive to represent their workings as an objectively determined chain of causes and effects, identify the laws that govern them, and set as the ultimate goal of scientific knowledge the prediction and mastery of the mechanism of these processes. (p. 87) Objective psychology offers a perspective from which human development is viewed as a probabilistic, contextually susceptible, contingent and interorganism phenomenon. Grounded upon an atomistic and reductionist world outlook, objective psychology is epitomized by its exclusive focus on piecemeal and situated quantitative changes in real time characterized by the immediacy and actuality of here and now contexts. These quantitative and essentially homogeneous changes are continD ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Rethinking Vygotsky with Root Metaphor Theory 265 Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 gent upon immediate context and circumambient conditions, consequently giving disorder and fluidity to an organism’s development. Objective psychology, Vygotsky [1997d] argues, aims at “a complete explanation of correlative activity without mind, and then mind is made into a superfluous, unnecessary phenomenon” (p. 45). Drawing upon efficient and material causalities and drifting formal and final causalities to the periphery, objective psychology purports to account for the changes constituted by mutual conditioning between an organism and its changing context (i.e., accommodatory adaptation). An organism can take and reconfigure alternative future developmental trajectories over time solely based on the concrete and observable actions and analytically well-determined and externally related elements which are encompassed within empirical contexts. In this context, it is also worth noting two points: first, as noted above, organicism and contextualism have a propensity to be colligated with mechanisms, bringing a degree of versatility to identification and adumbration of the fundamental premises which are translated, either explicitly or implicitly, into developmental theories. Second, organicism and contextualism have been subject to capricious interpretations primarily in terms of invoking different levels of explanation (i.e., efficient, material, formal, final). In view of these points, it does seem that drawing a conspicuous parallel between subjective psychology and “expurgated organicism,” on the one hand, and objective psychology and “expurgated contextualism,” on the other hand, is injudicious. I argue that dialectical Vygotskian CHT bridges a fundamental and apparently irresolvable dichotomy between the subjective and objective psychological inquiries of human consciousness or in Vygotsky’s [1979] words between dualistic psychology of “mind (i.e., psyche) without behavior” and psychology of “behavior without mind.” According to Vygotsky [1925] “... exclusion of consciousness from the sphere of scientific psychology perpetuates to a certain extent the dualism and spiritualism of the early subjective psychology” [cited in Leont’ev and Luria, 1968, p. 341, italics added]. Thus, adopting an integrative-constitutive perspective, Vygotsky [1997a] contends: “Mind without behavior is as impossible as behavior without mind” (p. 46). Vygotskian CHT endeavors to lay an integrative vestibule to a unified psychology, which describes and explains human consciousness and mental states as actualized in, and for the sake of, the purposive and intentional praxis. Praxis or practical social activity [Leont’ev, 1981] epitomizes “humans making history through action, human activity as the process, or the reality, of history” [Glassman, 2000, p. 11] and is imbued with intentionality. It further humanizes the sociophysical ambients and at the same time is transformed by sociocultural and mind-independent, but human-generated contingencies that are created, realized, and revealed historically. This point is echoed in the following quote from Leont’ev [1981]: “... if we removed human activity from the system of social relationships and social life, it would not exist.... the human individual’s activity is a system in the system of social relations. It does not exist without these relations” (pp. 46–47). Praxis, within the framework of this view, is a psychosocially constructed, human-oriented, purposive, emergent, and dynamic activity that is materialized so as to come to grips with the outer reality primarily mediated with dialogical and collective communal social practices and at the same time is actualized to appropriate, control and form the social reality and human subjectivity over time [e.g., Stetsenko, 2009]. Praxis, then, could be conceived as both the medium and the outcome of human consciousness as an integrative system. Human consciousness does not exist independently of concretely situated praxis, and this existential interD ow nl oa de d by : Jy vä sk yl än Y lio pi st o 13 0. 23 4. 76 .1 94 3 /2 /2 01 7 7: 08 :0 7 A M Human Development 2016;59:251–282 DOI: 10.1159/000452719 266 Karimi-Aghdam dependence does not mean that consciousness is reducible to praxis. For instance, Fedoseyev [1977] says that “the interaction of the subject and object in the process of practical activity” (p. 15) comprises the steadfast core of human cognition. According to Leont’ev and Luria [1968] Vygotsky “rightly rejects simplified attempts to infer man’s consciousness directly from his practical activity. But in his own psychological theory of consciousness, he [Vygotsky] illegitimately deduced the purely cognitive relationship of man to the world from man’s practical activities and relations” (p. 355). Vygotsky [1997c] provides a strong defense of this view when he concludes that “only dialectical psychology, by claiming that the subject matter of psychology is the psycho-physiological unitary integral phenomenon” (p. 120). According to Valsiner and van der Veer [2000], Vygotskian CHT, broadly conceived, seeks to sanction “an account of phylogeny and ontogeny which stresses both continuity in development (evolution) and the emergence of qualitative changes (revolution)” (p. 349). In the following section, the general outlines of Vygotsky’s CHT are examined through the lens of the Pepperian RMT. Vygotskian CHT: A Dialectical Synthesis of Contextualism and Organicism