In New Ideas in Psychology, 11, 61-75, 1993.

VYGOTSKY: THE SOCIAL NEGOTIATION OF

SEMIOTIC MEDIATION

John Shotter

Vakgroep Ontwikkeling en Socialisatie,

Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht,

3584 CS Utrecht,

The Netherlands.

Abstract: Instead of assuming the relation between thought and language to be constant and unvarying, Vygotsky's novelty was to see it as presenting a number of developmental problems, problems not only to do with communication, but also with a 'semiotic-instrumental' self-control of behavior. It is to this second aspect of his views that this paper is addressed. Two new themes are introduced into Vygotsky's account of semiotic mediation: a rhetorical-responsive and an ethical theme. The nature of what is said to be our 'inner' lives is explored, and it is argued that they are neither so private, nor so inner, nor so systematic and logical as has been assumed. Instead, people's higher mental processes originate in their feelings of how, semiotically, they are 'positioned' in relation to the others around them. And rather than functioning mechanically and systematically, they reflect in their functioning essentially the same rhetorical and ethical considerations influencing the transactions between people, out in the world.

Vygotsky opens his discussion in Thought and Language by pointing out that the problem of development is to do with an understanding of the changing relations between different mental functions - especially the relation between thought and word. He claimed that interfunctional relations had been ignored because everyone took it for granted that they are constant and fixed: that perception is always connected with attention, memory with perception, thought with memory, affect and idea, and so on, in ways which are unchanging (Vygotsky, 1988, pp.1-2). In other words, like Wittgenstein and other antifoundationalists now, he opened up a 'gap' between words and the world, and raised the question of what the character of the 'link' or 'hook up' between the two might be. And the answer he gave was, that they are "mediated" by temporary, artificially created, semiotic links, by signs that are at first used like 'tools' to control the behavior of others, but which later, can be used to control one's own behavior.

               Here, I want to explore two new and hitherto ignored themes in the Vygotskian study of the process in which these links are developed - the process he calls the internalization of higher psychological functions (1978, p.52) . I want to sound both a responsive or rhetorical, as well as an ethical note . First, I want to show that the developmental relation between thought and speech has a variable, socially negotiated quality to it. Indeed, it develops within a rhetorical context of criticism and justification, and as such, not only takes into account one's responsibilities and entitlements according to one's 'position' in social life, but also imports a degree of tension and conflict into the nature of mediation. Next, I shall argue that although linguistic signs are arbitrary, they are sustained in existence as stable forms or 'devices' in the mediation of social relations, by transgressions in their correct possible uses being both sanctioned and repaired.

              Thus, internalization of knowledge of this kind cannot be just to do with effective action, it must also be concerned with the development of one's being as a proper member of one's society: for it is both constraining and enabling in one properly dealing with and sensing the nature one's 'situation' in socially intelligible terms. Thus I claim, following Wittgenstein and Bakhtin/Volosinov, that although words can be used in a 'tool-like' way, as a means in the 'shaping' of meaningful speech and action, they cannot just be used as we please; these enablements are also constraints upon our forms of being. They exert an ontological as well as an epistemological influence upon us.

              Reinterpreting internalization in this way leads to a rather strange new view of it: that it is not as the term may seem to suggest, a process in which what is at first outside us simply comes to be incorporated within us. Nor does it simply create an internal "plane of consciousness" within the individual, as Leont'ev (1981) claims, for that would imply that we all already possessed a well-developed individuality, and faced only the task of self-control. Instead, it suggests that we must learn how to be properly thoughtful and autonomous members of our society, how to see and to hear things as others do, how to link our actions to theirs in acting in a socially intelligible and legitimate way. It is the development of this kind of (practical-moral ) knowledge - of how to be an individual of a certain socio-culture kind - that is a major part of what is involved in this version of 'internalization' (Shotter, 1984). This is why an ontological rather than an epistemological issue is at stake.

              Thus in this view, people's private 'inner' lives are neither so private and inner, nor are they as logical or as systematic as has been assumed. Indeed, the claim here is that the mental processes 'within' us are similar to the transactions we conduct 'between' us. Rather than functioning mechanically and systematically, they reflect in their functioning essentially the same ethical and rhetorical (responsive) considerations influencing the transactions between people, out in the world.

Our 'inner' life as an ethico-rhetorical phenomenon

In the view explored here, then, the expression of a thought or an intention, the saying of a sentence or the doing of a deed, does not issue from already well-formed and orderly cognitions at the centre of out being, but originates in a person's vague, diffuse and unordered feelings - their sense of how, semiotically, they are 'positioned' in relation to the others around them . And the appropriate orderly expression of such feelings is 'developed' in a complex set of temporally conducted transactions between themselves (or their selves), the feelings, and those to whom such expressions must be addressed. Within such transactions, orderly expressions are negotiated in a back and forth process between the people involved, where each tests the other as to the social appropriateness of their attempted expressions, tests which of course evoke sanctions if failed.

              If this seems a strange proposal, then we must say straightaway that Vygotsky's psychology is a strange and surprising psychology, for this is precisely the relation between thought and word that he proposes:

A speaker often takes several minutes to disclose one thought. In his mind the whole thought is present at once, but in speech it has to be developed successively. A thought may be compared with a cloud shedding a shower of words. Precisely because thought does not have its automatic counterpart in words, the transition of thought to word leads through meaning. In our speech, there is always the hidden thought, the subtext (1988, p.251).

There is a 'subtext' because every utterance constitutes only an attempt (which is hardly ever completely satisfactory) at a thought's expression. There is always a gap between what we try to say and what we are understood as meaning; often, the two are at odds with each other. Hence the necessity for the expression of a thought to be 'successively developed' (and argued for, with others and oneself), and for the transition - of thought to word - to be through the negotiation or the social construction of a meaning.

              In this communicational view of ourselves then, the current view we have of persons, as all equal, self-enclosed, (essentially indistinguishable) atomic individuals, possessing an inner sovereignty, each living their separate lives, all in isolation from each other - the supposed experience of the modern self - is an illusion, maintained by the institution between us of certain special forms of communication. It is an illusion that, besides misleading us about our own nature as human beings, also misleads us about the nature of thought and of language. We have come to think about both as if they are like the closed, unitary systems of signs in mathematics rather than as a heterogeneous set of means or devices for use in us negotiating links between ourselves and our surroundings . Treating the relation between thoughts and words as still open to a negotiated development, leads to the introduction both of an ethical and a rhetorical (justificatory) note into accounts of how people organize and direct their mental activities, and it is to that which I now turn.

Language and thinking: rhetoric, dialogue, and ethics

To show why dialogical and rhetorical matters might play an important part in understanding thinking as a process, let me first refer to the work of Billig (1987). In discussing the nature of thought, he criticizes the model of thinking currently central in cognitive psychology, of it as a mechanical process conducted according to a set of rules-of-procedure. It is not that it is in itself incorrect - after all, people often do work in ways similar to logicians or bureaucrats, following formal rules in deciding what in differing circumstances to do. But, he says, it is an extremely monological, one-sided, and in fact essentially thoughtless image of thought. For, as we all know, even bureaucrats, rather than being unimaginative rule-followers, they are often ingenious rule-appliers , or rule-benders, as well as sometimes imaginative rule-creators. In acting creatively, they must think about how the people around them, and those with whom they must deal, might react to what they do: whether they will understand how to implement the instructions they receive; whether they will feel pleased and aided, or insulted and impeded; whether they will seek redress or be silenced; and so on. They must even have some contingency plans ready to save their skins if none of their expected plans work.

              In other words, bureaucrats must try to be dialogically responsive in their thoughts and actions both to their clients and their bosses. Unlike logicians, who only have the task of choosing their rules and symbols to avoid creating doubt and ambiguity amongst those already committed to a particular system of reasoning, when it is a question of using ordinary discourse to influence an audience's actions or beliefs, the task is different. For it is no longer possible to neglect as irrelevant the psychological and social conditions, in the absence of which argumentation would be pointless and without result. Thus even bureaucrats, if they are to be persuasive and not have to use force in imposing their judgments, must adapt their behaviour to an audience, they must function, as Billig puts it, within an argumentative context of justification and criticism. To know how to make appropriate 'moves' within such a context, they must understand the structure of motivation and desire, so to speak, to which such a context gives rise, as well as their position and the position of others within it.

              In such processes, though, more than just rhetorical matters are at stake, ethical issues are important too. Vygotsky himself, in his own talk about internalization, makes a central distinction between things people do spontaneously and those they do deliberately. Indeed, he claims that "the general law of development says that awareness and deliberate control appear only during a very advanced stage in the development of a mental function, after it has been used and practiced unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual and volitional control, we must first possess it," (1988, p.168). Clearly, for him, a central criterion in our mastery of a function is us being able to perform it consciously rather than unconsciously , thus focussing his concern, if only implicitly, upon the distinction between those activities for which people themselves can be held responsible and those which are beyond their own agency to control. A concern connected with what was said above about us learning how to be a proper member of our society.

              The consequences of conceptualizing human activities in moral terms have not yet been fully recognized and explored. If we were to treat social relationships ethically rather than causally (which we do not at the moment do in social theory), this would change their character entirely. They would have to be seen as involving in their proper conduct, a socially negotiated or negotiable, dialogically structured process of formation. A process which, in its moment by moment conduct or 'management', must be morally sensitive to the social being of the other people involved in it. In other words, those involved in it, in assessing their continually changing 'semiotic positions' within the process, must be aware of what, morally, their positions allow or permit. Indeed, even moves within fully 'internalized' (cognitive) processes 'within' single individuals, if they are to be accounted as appropriate, i.e., as both intelligible and legitimate moves, they must 'fit into' the changing moral privileges and obligations in operation from moment to moment within the process.

Responsibility and internalization.

The special nature of this ethical concern becomes more apparent if, in exploring what Vygotsky actually means when he talks of the process of internalization, we ask: Is he talking about it as a physical, or a psychological movement inwards? In other words, is he talking about how what is 'outside' us geometrically or geographically, so to speak, gets 'inside' us; or, is he using to word 'internalize' to characterize something not essentially spatial or geographical at all, but to do with a transformation in our responsibility for things? To put it yet another way, is he talking about a merely cognitive process, in which what was at first inside only the adult's head is transferred into the child's head, or is he talking about a process in which things that at first a child only does spontaneously and unselfconsciously, under the control of an adult, come under the control of their own personal agency?

              Clearly, as we have already seen, he means the latter; although, as I said above, Vygotsky never explicitly made this distinction in ethical terms. But consider what is actually involved in what he calls 'internalization': Our higher mental functions are developed, he suggests, not by more fully developing any 'natural' potentials we may contain within ourselves organically, but by discovering how to make use of what he calls "psychological tools or instruments" - completly artificial aids or devices of our own invention - which we can put to use first as external intermediaries, to redirect our lower, organic capacities toward new, humanly created ends. The major psychological tool for influencing people's behaviour is, of course, language. And this is his central and most important notion: In the development of behavior, says Vygotsky (1966), "the child begins to practice with respect to himself the same forms of behavior that others formerly practiced with respect to him" (pp.39-40). Thus, what at first appears on the social plane as something between people (an interpersonal process), later appears as something psychological within the child alone (as an intrapersonal process) (1978, p.57). Where, to repeat, the same ethical concerns that held in the social realm are still of importance in the new 'inner', psychological realm of the individual has now incorporated or embodied.

              As an example of such a process, he discusses the development of the child's ability to pronounce individual speech sounds upon request as a result of the child learning the grammar of his or her native tongue as they learn to write in school. As Vygotsky points out, before the young pre-school child learns to write, if you ask him or her to produce an isolated speech sound, for example sk, the task is usually too difficult. Yet within the context of a familiar word - such as Moscow - the child finds the task easy. But through learning to write,

"[the child] may not acquire new grammatical or syntactic forms in school but, thanks to instruction in grammar and writing, he does become aware of what he is doing and learns to use his skills consciously. Just as the child realizes for the first time in learning to write that the word Moscow consists of the sounds m-o-s-k-ow and learns to pronounce each one separately, he also learns to construct sentences, to do consciously what he has been doing unconsciously in speaking" (1988, p.184).

We have here then a process of 'instruction' in which certain invented devices - in this case, certain written forms of language, whose formal significance can be 'visualized' - are made use of, as Vygotsky says, not necessarily to teach the child any new speech skills, but which do nonetheless function to transform a child's own relation to his or her own acts of speaking: to furnish the child with the means to bring their speech under their own control; to speak as they rather than their circumstances demand. What in detail is actually is happening here?

The cultural use of artificial signs in the control

of mental functions

Of assistance here, is a study of the use of artificial signs in the development of self-controlled remembering (1978, pp.38-51). Here, he discusses a game where children had to answer a number of irrelevant questions, among which were interspersed a series of relevant colour-questions, (e.g., 'What colour is...?'), where there were rules as to what colours they were allowed to use in their answers (certain colors being completely forbidden, while others could not be used more than once). The artificial 'signs' made available to the children were simply a set of cards colored upon one side, cards that the children could, of course use (by turning them over as they said the colours, to indicate to themselves the 'answers' still left available to them at any point in the game). Without going into the details of the different ways in which the cards were actually used (or not), the following comments are relevant.

              First Vygotsky notes what we have mentioned above, that there are two forms of remembering, 'elementary' and 'higher' forms: elementary forms are unmediated and direct - there are some things we do just simply remember - while other, higher forms make use of mediatory aids serving as reminders. Second, these two qualitatively different lines of development, one which is biological in origin and the other which is sociocultural, are interwoven: we can make use of what we just-remember to control what we in our culture must remember. Whilst third, the process of interweaving is not in any way a 'natural' process - "the child does not suddenly and irrevocably deduce the relation between the sign and the method for using it" (1978, p.45). A number of 'stages' of development seem to be involved.

              At first, with pre-school children, the performance with and without the cards is the same, they perform badly. The cards do not seem to have any kind of 'instrumental' function at all; only older children are able to use the cards as external aids, as a means for the control of their remembering; without the cards though, they still perform badly. With adults, however, a stage is reached where the performance with or without the cards is similarly high, the presence of the actual cards themselves is unnecessary; now it seems that "the external sign that school children require has been transformed into an internal sign produced by the adult as a means of remembering" (1978, p.45).

              Indeed, we might go a step further and claim that the external signs 'mastered' by the child have, in the adult, become embodied as prostheses (as 'mental organs' - see below) through which to sense, that is, to perceive, the nature of the problem. Thus as socially competent adults, they act as "the task" seems to require. Having, as the children of a particular culture learnt to appropriate capacities, both from Nature and from the culture's socio-cultural history appropriate to life in that culture, as adults, these capacities become reincorporated into their being, i.e., embodied. Thus people come again to react to their circumstances in a spontaneous and unthinking manner, but now in ways that make sense within the terms of their culture. They find themselves confronting a 'given' but unique situation, a situation which, given who and what they are (as members of and as individuals in their culture), is their situation and no one else's; they cannot wish it away; they must themselves respond to it and act upon it personally.

              What changes as the child grows up, then, according to Vygotsky, is not just a matter of the child being simply able to remember more things, along with a larger number of connections between them. But the child is 'instructed' in the use of various, culturally invented, mediational means, and enabled, in the development of various interfunctional relations between them, to develop capacities in which mediated and nonmediated functions are interwoven. Indeed, he claims, the interfunctional relations involved in learning mediated remembering reverse their direction:

"For the young child, to think means to recall; but for the adolescent, to recall means to think. Her memory is so 'logicalized' that remembering is reduced to establishing and finding logical relations; recognizing consists in discovering that element which the task indicates [my emphasis] has to be found... When a human being ties a knot in her handkerchief as a reminder, she is, in essence, constructing the process of memorizing by forcing an external object to remind her of something; she transforms remembering into an external activity... In the elementary form something is remembered; in the higher form humans remember something. In the first case a temporary link is formed owing to the simultaneous occurrence of two stimuli that affect the organism; in the second case humans personally create a temporary link through the artificial combination of stimuli" (1978, p.51).

This is a very insightful account of the nature of 'instruction' leading to mediated remembering. However, there is still not only something missing from it, there is also something wrong with it.

Becoming a person: embodying sensitivities

What is missing from it, is what I alluded to above: that when Vygotsky says that human beings create a temporary link personally, he fails to explicate what it means to do things 'personally', i.e., what it is to be and to act as a person within a particular culture. Further, what is wrong, is that he claims that the child, in discovering what he or she must do, discovers like the adults I mentioned above, what "the task" demands. How should we react to these deficiencies?

              Clearly, what Vygotsky means in saying that people come to remember something 'personally' is that, as their skill at using mediational devices develops, they become able to subject remembering to intellectual and volitional control; they become able to be themselves responsible for the way in which it is done - where an important part of what it is to be responsible for something is, as Winch (1958) following Wittgenstein points out, knowing how to correct oneself if one goes wrong. In other words, what Vygotsky does not make clear is how the child learns in what way a task must be done, and in what way mistakes must be corrected. For the task faced by the children in the cards-experiment is not just to learn a way of using the cards, but to make use of them in the right way at the right time, according to how the adults (who are teaching them) have arranged the task. Thus at first, it is not "the task" itself that indicates what children have to do, and which corrects them if they go wrong, but the adults around them to whom they are responsible. They are the one's who can and do judge whether the child is acting correctly or not. They are the 'keepers', so to speak, of the culture that the child must acquire.

              Thus, in learning how to make appropriate use of the coloured cards, children do not simply learn the 'logical' relations between the cards and the questions, in general - for indeed, there are no such relations in general and none as such are taught to the child. Different cards must be used in different ways in different situations, and the children themselves must work out how to apply the cards to the task. It is this that Vygotsky perhaps means when he talks of the child's memory becoming 'logicalized', i.e., it is perhaps this which prevents him from writing the word logical without the scare quotes. But it leads hm to miss the importance of the fact that the children's initial grasp of what the task 'is', is not in itself immediately obvious - it is something culturally defined. The children only gain a grasp of it in their conversations with their adult teachers; and both at the start of the experiment and right the way through it, the adults continue to correct the children in their attempts to do the task, until a point comes at which (presumably) no further corrections are necessary. At that point, the children do not just know how 'personally' to create an appropriate 'temporary link', but also how to 'see' what the problem 'is' for which they must create a solution. It is the development of this 'way of seeing' the problem situation that is almost more important than the development of the personal ability to solve it - it is a paradigm of the kind of 'embodied' learning (mentioned above) involved in becoming the right kind of being to be a member of a culture.

              The distinction I am drawing here is that drawn some time ago by Winch (1958), between interpreting someone's actions as if being according rules, and their action actually being a genuine attempt by them to apply a rule. For the fact that a person's actions can be 'seen as if' being due to the application of a rule by a 3rd-person 'outside' observer is no guarantee that the person themselves, as a 1st-person actor, is doing any such thing. For the actor to be self-consciously acting according to a rule, the actor must not only know the rule, but he or she must be reflexively knowledgeable about its nature, i.e., they must (like even the bureaucrat discussed above) know how to justify their application of it if challenged by others to do so, and how to correct their behaviour to accord with it if shown by others to be wrong. They must possess (embody) certain sensitivities, and be able to make judgments about whether the conditions are such that it is socially acceptable to apply the rule or not, and to be able give the reasons for such judgments .

              Indeed, if one had to state the major change wrought in recent years by the work of Ryle (1949), Austin (1965), and Wittgenstein (1953) in the philosophy of human action, it is the recognition of the fact that all our talk about human conduct is normative, i.e., that in anything intelligible we say about it, we presuppose judgments as to whether it is right or wrong, fitting or unfitting, appropriate or inappropriate, successful or unsuccessful, etc., judgments which themselves may be grounded in reasons that in turn may be evaluated as good or bad reasons. And only those who have come to embody the ability to make such judgments can be accounted full and proper members of their culture. Thus, as Winch (1958, p.57) points out, just as in learning how properly to make logical inferences we are learning how to do something, a morally regulated social practice, so also, in learning how properly to speak, perceive, and act we are also learning how to do something: literally, both how to 'make' something occur according to common ways and means, and, if necessary, to indicate to others the ways and means used. Thus our task in learning how to act personally, as an autonomous member of our culture, is in learning how to do all the things in our culture, like measuring, inferring, remembering, perceiving, listening, speaking, etc., we must learn how to do them as the others around us do them - we must learn how to be as they are. Indeed, if we do not, then they will sanction us and not accord us the right to act freely.

              But to be able to this, to make our conduct appropriate precisely to the variability in the occasion of its performance, we must be able ourselves to check out its changing appropriateness, moment by moment, on-the-spot, so to speak. It is this that makes it impossible to plan many of our performances ahead of time, and to execute them unaware of the circumstances of their production. But what is the nature of this awareness, the nature of the 'practical-moral' knowledge, as Bernstein (1983) calls it, that makes the performance of the 'higher forms' of human behaviour within a culture possible? "To explain the higher forms of human behaviour," says Vygotsky (1988, p.102), "we must uncover the means by which man learns to organize and direct his behaviour" - we must explore what it is in the 'means' we use that makes it possible for us to act in this way.

Psychological instruments: prostheses, tools, and indicators.

In analyzing the nature of the means, the psychological instruments used in the mediation of 'higher forms' further, it is important, as I have argued elsewhere (Shotter, 1989), to distinguish prosthetic from indicative functions: They may function either, as a blind person uses a stick, as an instrument through which we can investigate our circumstances in ways which otherwise would be inaccessible to us; or, they may function like the pointers on dials, which indicate to us some remote state of the world. Of these two functions, it is the prosthetic function which is most unfamiliar to us and which is thus worth further analysis here.

              Such adjuncts or extensions of our organs of sense and action are, as Polanyi (1958) puts it, "... not objects of our attention, but instruments of it" (p.55). Vygotsky (1988, pp.100-102) himself also hints at such a distinction when, in criticizing Ach's experiments on concept formation, points out his failure to grasp that a word, which later takes on a meaning, at first plays the role of means in the forming of a concept.

               To explore the nature of the prosthetic further: Such devices, we might say, are 'transparent': just as a carpenter 'feels' the hardness of the wood, and adjusts the blows of the hammer accordingly as she or he hammers home a nail, so blind people do not feel their sticks vibrating in the palms of their hands, but experience the terrain ahead of them directly as rough or smooth, according to their stick-assisted 'way' of investigating it in their movement through it. The process of sense-making involved seems to consist in two distinct moments: In one, following Bohm (1965), we can note that in actively probing or acting upon one's surroundings through an instrument, there is always a response to one's testing and acting, and "it is the relationship of variations in this response to the known variations in the state of the instruments that constitutes the relevant information in what is observed (just as happens directly with the sense organs)," he says (pp.223-4). It is in the relation between the outflow of activity for which one is oneself responsible, and the inflow for which one is not, that one makes available information about 'the other' to oneself - with each blow of the hammer, each sweep of the stick, each test, more information is revealed. But how is it all 'joined up' into a totality?

              Here, we must turn to a second moment in the process: As Polanyi (1958, pp.55-57) describes it, we attend in such activities from an ongoing and changing "subsidiary awareness" of the information(s) provided us by the instruments we use, to a "focal awareness" of their organized result - for example, from the felt movement of the nail in hammer blows to the hardness of the wood; from the vibrations occasioned by our movements of a stick to the roughness or smoothness of the surfaces over which it is moved; from the disparate 2-D views given by the movements of our two eyes over a visual scene to a unified 3-D view; from a speaking specifying a 'position' to what has been said about what one's position 'is'; and so on.

              It is now necessary to point out that, so far, in discussing mediational devices, I have not yet made any clear distinction between 'tools', 'prostheses', and linguistic 'signs'. Here again, we shall find it useful to refer to Vygotsky's account before suggesting modifications to it. In discussing the development of two different lines of mediated activity, he distinguishes between signs and tools, saying:

"A most essential difference between a sign and a tool, and the basis for a real divergence of the two lines, is the different ways that they orient human behaviour. The tool's function is to serve as the conductor of human influence on the object of activity; it is externally oriented; it must lead to change in objects. It is a means by which human external activity is aimed at mastering, and triumphing over, nature. The sign, on the other hand, changes nothing in the object of a psychological operation. it is a means of internal activity aimed at mastering oneself; the sign is internally oriented" (1978, p.57).

Now as I have already intimated, what we must add to Vygotsky's account is, that linguistic signs themselves can also have both a 'tool' and a 'prosthetic' functions , as well as sign functions (in the sense of these terms outlined above). At first, the child may be influenced by the externally oriented language of others; they can use it in an 'inner-tool' like way to influence his or her activity, to 'move' the child to certain actions. Later, this interpersonal function of language can be transformed into an intrapersonal one: children may come to use the words used by others to control them, to control themselves. What they learn in the course of being 'instructed' by adults becomes incorporated into their very being as members of their society; they incorporate in the socio-cultural nature of their being certain 'mental organs, certain mental prostheses, through which they act upon and understand 'their' culture.

              It is this prosthetic aspect of our being I particularly want to emphasize. Usually, if asked to reflect upon the process of speaking, we 'see through' the speech we use, i.e., we see 'from' what we say 'to' either its effects, or 'to' its meanings; its prosthetic functioning remains 'invisible' to us. We fail to notice it because, in speaking, we act 'through' our utterances in 'making sense'. But clearly, if this account is correct, as a very special form of "psychological instrument", linguistic signs possess what might be called, a 'prosthetic-(tool)/text ambiguity', the three different aspects each becoming visible according to the different 'direction' of our view: Acting towards the future, prospectively and creatively, in the saying of an utterance, we attempt to use it both prosthetically, as a device 'through' which to begin to express our own being in the world, and, as a tool-like means to 'move' other people. Indeed, we can go so far here as to say that this prosthetic-(tool) function of speech works on one's surroundings formatively, to specify them further. Retrospectively, however, what we (and others) have already said remains 'on hand', so to speak, as like a 'text', constituting a given aspect of the situation between oneself and one's interlocutors, into which they (as well as oneself) must direct their speech. Indeed, it is in the tensions between the retrospective and the prospective, the given and the created, between 'finding' and 'making', in the expression of an utterance, that the 'movement of mind' is at work.

              Acts of speaking and the reactions of others to them, develop, then, a socio-cultural, socio-historical, intralinguistic, textual context. And it is this context, as it is temporally developed by what is said, that everyone contributing to its development must take into account. They must be knowledgeable about their continuously changing 'semiotic/ethical positions' within it. If, that is, their actions are to be judged as appropriate to it. A certain ontological skill is involved in being a proper participant in communication. It involves the realization that, as one speaks, due to the grammar of one's speech, a temporal-spatial network of intralinguistic references is constructed into which one's future speech must be directed, a network that carries in it the traces of one's socio-cultural history. It is this which is the key to a fully socio-cultural and historical understanding of the nature of our mental processes.

Conclusions: a negotiated 'inner life'

What I have argued then, is that people's 'inner' lives are neither so private, nor so inner, nor so merely orderly or logical, as has been assumed. What I have claimed is that, in the 'movement of the mind', our thoughts are not first organized at the inner centre of our being (in a nonmaterial 'soul', or a physiological 'lingua mentis'), thus later to be given (or not as the case may be) an orderly expression in words; but that they become ordered in a moment by moment, back and forth, formative or developmental process at the boundaries of our being, involving similar linguistically mediated ethical and rhetorical negotiations' as those we conduct in our everyday dialogues with others. To repeat a comment of Vygotsky's (1966) noted above, I have been arguing that "reflection is the transfer of argumentation within..." (p.41). This does not mean, however, that the process of internalization involved is a simple transference of an already existing process from an external to an inner plane of activity, nor merely the creation of an inner plane of consciousness within a child already existing in social life as an individual, but the constitution of a distinctly socio-ethical, historical mode of psychological being. In learning how to be a responsible member of certain social group, one must learn how to do certain things in the right kind of way: how to perceive, think, talk, act, and to experience one's surroundings in ways that make sense to the others around one in ways considered legitimate. Thus on this view, what one has in common with other members of one's social group is not so much a set of shared beliefs of values as such, but a set of shared semiotic procedures or 'ethnomethods' (Garfinkel), ways of making sense - and a certain set of already ordered forms of communication, or speech genres (Bakhtin, 1986). Thus internalization is not a special geographical movement inwards, from a realm of bodily activity into nonmaterial realm of 'the mind', but a socio-practical-ethical movement, in which "children grow into the intellectual life of those around them" (1978, p.88). And the child, not only learns how "to practice with respect to himself the same forms of behavior that others formerly practiced with respect to him," but also learns the socio-practical means to bring other people (and their mental resources) within his or her own personal agency to control. Hence, in becoming an autonomous adult within a group, one learns a grasp of what might be called the 'ethical logistics' involved in the management of personal transactions within that group, the means to coordinate the different responsibilities involved in negotiating the social construction of meanings (Shotter, 1990).         But yet more than this is involved in learning how properly to 'position' oneself within particular speech genres than the ways of sense-making they entail, for speech genres can be characterized by the 'themes' or 'topics' they embody, the sources in terms of which utterances belonging to the genre are formulated. If this is so, then the character of our 'inwardness' - the way we appear (or feel we should appear) to ourselves - will depend upon the speech genres within which we account for ourselves (Gergen, 1989). Where, as Billig (1987; Billig et al, 1988) argue, many of the 'topics' within a genre are dilemmatic, i.e., they are two-sided. Hence, even within a genre, different argumentative positions may be formulated. Thus, our account of internalization as an ethico-rhetorical phenomenon clearly has a number of further strands to it worth investigating. And I shall study Bakhtin's (1981, 1984, 1986, and Volosinov, 1973) contributions in more detail in a following article.

References:

Austin, J. (1962) How to do Things with Words. London: Oxford.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogical Imagination. Edited by M.Holquist, trans. by C. Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1984) Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics. Edited and trans. by Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Bakhtin, M.M. (1986) Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans.by Vern W. McGee. Austin, Tx: University of Texas Press.

Bernstein, R.J. (1983) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism. Oxford:Blackwell.

Billig, M. (1987) Arguing and Thinking: a Rhetorical Approach to Social Psychology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Billig, M., Condor, S., Edwards, D., Gane, M., Middleton, D and Radley, R. (1988) Ideological Dilemmas, London: Sage Publications.

Bohm, D. (1965) The Special Theory of Relativity. New York: Benjamin.

Garfinkel, H. (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.

Gergen, K.J. (1989) Warranting voice and the elaboration of self. In J. Shotter and K.J. Gergen (Eds.) Texts of Identity. London: Sage.

Harre', R. (1983) Personal Being: a Theory for Individual Psychology. Oxford: Blackwell.

Leont'ev, A.N. (1981) The problem of activity in psychology. In J.V. Wertsch (Ed.) The Concept of Activity in Soviet Psychology. Armonk, NY: Sharpe.

Polanyi, M. (1958) Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, also New York:Harper and Row Torchbook, 1962.

Ryle, G. (1949) The Concept of Mind. London: Methuen.

Shotter, J. (1974) The development of personal powers. In M.P.M.Richards (Ed.) The Integration of a Child into a Social World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shotter, J. (1975) Images of Man in Psychological Research. London: Methuen.

Shotter, J. (1989) Vygotsky's psychology: joint activity in a developmental zone. New Ideas in Psychology, 7,. 185-204.

Shotter, J. (1990) Rom Harre': realism and the turn to social constructionism. In R. Bhaskar (Ed.) Harre' and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell.

Simons, H.A. (1989) Rhetoric in the Human Sciences. London: Sage.

Volosinov, V.N. (1986) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. by L. Matejka and I.R. Titunik. Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1966) Development of the higher mental functions.In A.N. Leont'ev, A.R. Luria and A. Smirnov (Eds.) Psychological Research in the USSR . Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1978) Mind in Society: the Development of Higher Psychological Processes. M. Cole, V. John-Steiner, S. Scribner, and E. Souberman (Eds.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Vygotsky, L.S. (1988) Thought and Language, translated and newly revised by Alex Kozulin. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Winch, P. (1958) The Idea of a Social Science and its Relations to Philosophy. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.

Wittgenstein, L. (1981) Zettel, (2nd. Ed.), G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H.V. Wright (Eds.). Oxford: Blackwell.