VYGOTSKY: THE SOCIAL NEGOTIATION OF SEMIOTIC

MEDIATION
JOHN SHOTTER
Department of Communication, University of New Hampshire, Durham,
NH 03824-3586, U.S.A.

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 communi-
cation, 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.

INTRODUCTION

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. l-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).t I want to

*Vygotsky distinguishes tools from signs: tools are externally directed, toward changes in the
nonsocial, material world, while signs are used internally, within a social group. Below I distinguish
within signs themselves a ‘tool’ (hence the scare quotes) from a symbolic aspect: for, although what
one has said specifies what one’s position ‘is’ (a meaning), the activity of speaking functions as a tool-
like means to specify it further, their use makes a difference in the lives of speakers.
tAll references given by citing only the year are by Vygotsky.

61
62 ,I. Shotte1

sound hth a responsive or rhetorical, as well as an ethica1 note.:+ First, I want to

show that the cievelopmentd relation between thought ailtl speech has a
\~ariatde, socially negotiated quality to it. Indeecl, it develops within a rhetoric;d
context of criticism and justification, ;md as such, not only takes into account
one’s responsibilities and‘ entitlements according to one’s ‘position’ in social Ml,
hut also imports ;I clegree ot‘ tension and conflict into the nature of‘ mediation.
Kext, I shall argue that although linguistic signs are arbitrary, thq are sustained
in existence as stable forms or ‘devices in the mediation of’ social relations, lq
transgressions in their correct possihlr uses being both s~mc.tioneci and repaired.
Thus, interrializ~ttion 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 iis
;I proper member of one’s society: fin- it is both constraining and enaIding in onr
properly dealing with and sensing the nature of‘ one’s ‘situation’ in so&ill)
intelligible terms. ‘l‘hus I claim, f’ollowing Wittgenstein and Baklltirl-Volosiilo~,
that although WOI-ds cm be usecl in a ‘tool-like’ way, as ;I tw~~m in the ‘shaping’ of
meaningf’ul speech and action, they cannot .just be used as we please; these
enablements are also constraints upon our forms of being. ‘Ilie? exert an
ontological 21s well as an epistemological influence upon us.
I&interpreting inter-nali/.atiotl in this way leads to a rather strange new G3v of
it: that it is not as the term may seem to suggest, ;I process in which what is at first
outside us simply comes to be incorporated within us. Nor does it simply UPU~P an
internal “plane of‘ consciousness” within the indi\;idual, 2s Leont’ev ( 19X 1)
claims, for that woulcl imply that wc al1 already possessed ;I well-tleV~loped
indiGduality;, and faced only the task ot‘selt-control. Instead, it suggests that we
must learn how to /)P properly thoughtf’u1 and autonomous members of‘ out
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 (pI-actical-mol-ali) knowledge+)t‘ how to be an individual of‘ a
certain socio-culture kinci-that is a major part of‘what is in\,olved ill this version
of‘ ‘iriternalizatio~i (Shatter, 19X4). ‘I’his is why an ontological rather than an
epistemologic~tl issue is at stake.
Thus in this view, people’s pri\.ate ‘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 t‘unctioning mechanically and systematically,
they reflect in their f’unctioning essentially the salle ethical and rhetorical
(responsive) c-onsidel-~ltiorls influencing the transactions between people. out in
the warId.
 Vygotsky: Social negotiation of semiotic mediation 63

OUR ‘INNER’ LIFE AS AN ETHICO-RHETORICAL PHENOMENON

In the view here, then, the expression
explored 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 our 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 indi-
viduals, 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

*I mean here to honor Vygotsky’s (1988, p. 10) concern with a “dynamic system of meaning within
which the affective and the intellectual unite,” and in which “every idea contains a transmntcd
affective attitude toward the bit of reality to which it refers.”
64 J. Shatter

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 ethd and a d~etoricul
(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, 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 then- 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 systrm 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 ppr,~uasi~le and not have to use force in imposing
their judgments, must adapt their behavior to an audience, they must function,
as Billig puts it, within an argumentative context of justification and criticism. ‘1‘0

considerations relevant to their application is still necessary amongst those who must use then). Fat
example. those using a set of coding procedures to select cases tar treatment in a clinic, it was “not the
caw that the ‘necessary and suf’ficient’ criteria are procedurally defined by the coding instt-uctions.
 Vygotsky: Social negotiation of semiotic mediation 65

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 sponta-
neously 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 being
able to perform it consciously rather than unconsciously,* thus focusing 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 tq 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, that is 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 the
word ‘internalize’ to characterize something not essentially spatial or geographi-
cal 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

*Rather than marking this distinction in terms of. the comparison between unconsciously and
consciously, I shall talk in terms of the child coming to act self-consciously-the reasons for this will
become aDDarent
.. later.
tThe contrast, as we shall see, is with an onM@al process, where, merely cognitive processes
affect the content of people’s ‘minds’, while ontological ones affect people in their ethical being, that
is, they determine the kind of world to which people are responsive.
66 J. Shottel

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 conside
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”~onlplerely
artificial aids or devices of our own invention-which we can put to use tirst as
external intermediaries, to redirect our lower, organic capacities toward new,
humanly created ends. The major psychological tool for influencing people’s
behavior 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). ‘I’hus, what at first appears
on the social plane as something between people (an interpersonal process), late1
appears as something psychological within the child alone (as an intral~ersonal
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 realrn 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 Vygo’sky 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 .tk, the
task is usually too difficult. Yet within the context of a familiar word-such as
Moscour--the child finds the task easy. But through learning to write,

[the child] may not acquire new grammaticat or syntactic forms in school but,
thanks to instruction in grammar and writing, he does become aware ot \vhat
he is doing and learns to use his skills consciously. ,Just as rhe child reati/es for
the first time in learning to write that the word Mmcozc~consists of‘tlle sountts
m-o-.-k-oul and learns to pronounce each one separately, he also learns to
consmuct sentences, to do consciously what he has been doiug unconsciously
in speaking. ( 1988, 11. 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 he
‘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

*M’har the child learns, 0f.course, are written ‘grammatical forms, ’ hcnc-c\‘yptskj’s (196”. ,>.9X)
claim that: “In learning to write, the child must disengage himself tram the sensor\’ aspect o!‘spccc h
and replace words by images of words.” It is this which makes it possible, of COIII‘SC.to think about
linguistic- forms dicorrrd from their (so&-ethic-al) functions.
 Vygotsky: Social negotiation of semiotic mediation 67

means to bring their speech under their own control; to speak as they rather
than their circumstances demand. What in detail is actually 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 color questions, (e.g., “What color; is . . .?“),
where there were rules as to what colors 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 colors, 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 so&-cultural, 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. 4.5).
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) throuC$ 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 reincorpo-
rated into their being, that is, embodied. Thus people come again to react to
their circumstances in a spontaneous and unthinking manner, but now in ways
tix ,I. Shottel

that nlake sense within the terms of’ their culture. ‘l‘hey 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 tlwir situation and
no one else’s; they cannot wish it away; they must themselves respond to it and
ac1 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 inventecl, mediational means, and enabled, in the
development of’ various intrr.funrtionr~l relations between them, to develop
capacities in which mediated and nonmediated functions are interwoven.
Indeed, he claims, the interf’unctional relations involved in learning mediated
remembering reverse their direction:

For- llrr yuug thild, 10 /kink vw~~u.~ to 1w111; Out /or tlrr adulrscr~~~, lo uw11l trwom to
/hick. Her memory is so ‘logicdized that renlernbeting is reduced to
establishing arid finding logical relations; recognizing cottsisrs in discovering
tha( elemrttr whic.h //w /mk i)d/cof~.\ [my etnphasts] has to be f’ound. When a
~tttmtn being ties a knot in her handkerchief as a remittder, she is, in essence,
cottslt~ucting the process of. tnentoriAng by forcing an external object to
retttittd her of sotiiethittg; she transfortns t~ctrienibering it110 an external
;icTivity. It1 the elementary form something is remembered; in the higher
f’ornt humans remembet- something. In the first case a tetttpot-q link is
f’ormed owing to the simultaneous occurrence of rwo stimuli tttac affect the
organism; in the set-and case humans personally create ;I temporary link
rhrough the artif‘ici;rl cotnhittatiott ot stimuli. (1958, p. 3 I)

.l‘his is a very insightf‘ul account of the nature of ‘instruction’ leading to mediated

remembering. However, there is still not only something missing from it, there is
also something \vrong with it.

What is missing from it, is what I alluded to above: that when Vygotsky says
that human beings create a temporary link /~rsonull~, he fails to explicate what it
means to do things ‘personally,’ that is, what it is to be and to act as a person
within a particular culture. Further, \vhat is wrong, is that he claims that the
child, in discovering what he or she must do, discovers like the adults 1
mentioned above, what “the task” demands. How should we react to these
deficiencies?
Clea1-ly, what Vygotsky means in saying that people come to remembel~
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 clone-
where an important part of‘ what it is to be responsible for something is, as Winch
( 1958) fi)llowing Wittgenstein points out, knowing how to correct oneself’ if’ one
goes wrong. In other worcls, what Vygotsky does not make clear is how the child
learns i7~ 7~4~1 u~n$l a task mu.~/ be done, and in what way mistakes must be
corrected. For the task taced by the children in the cards-experiment is notjust
 Vygotsky: Social negotiation of semiotic mediation 69

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 leaching 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 ones 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 colored 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,’ that is, it is perhaps this which prevents him
from writing the word logical without the scare quotes. But it leads him 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 us if being according to 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 third-person ‘outside’ observer is no guarantee that the person
themselves, as a first-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, that is, 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
behavior 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 to give the reasons for such judgments.*
Indeed, if one had to state the major change wrought in recent years by the
work of Austin (1962), Ryle (1949), and Wittgenstein (1953) in the philosophy of

*Conditions which are not themselves specified in the rules. Attempting to specify them in a
further set of rules fails because the application of those rules remains unspecified.
70 .I. Sl1orte1

human action, it is the recognition of the fact that a11 OLII- talk about human
conduct is uormuti~w, that is, that in anything intelligible we say about it, we
presuppose jucipmt.c as to whether it is right or WI-ong, 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 con~e to embody the ability to make such
judgments can he accounted full and proper members of‘ their culture. ‘l‘hus, 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, hot h how to ‘make something OCCLI~
according to cotn111011 ways anti means, md, if necessary, to indicate to others the
b2iys and means used. Thus our task in learning how to act personally, as an
autonomous rnembel- of’ our culture, is in learning how to do all the thiugs in 0~11’
culture, like measur-ing, inferring, remembering, perceiving, listening, speaking,
etc., we must learn how to do them as the others around LIS do then-we must
learn how to br as they are. Indeed, if we do not, then they will sanction LIS anti
not accord us the right to act freely.
But to be able to do this, to make our conduct appropriate precisely to the
variability in the occasion of‘ its perf’ornlance, we must be able ourselves to check
out its changing appropriateness, moment by nlonlent, on-the-spot, so to speak.
It is this that makes it impossible to plan nlany of our performances ahead ot
time, and to execute them unaware of‘ the circumstances of their production. But
what is the nature of‘ this awareness, the nature of tlrt. ‘~,ra~ti~al-liior~il’
knowledge, as Bernstein (1983) calls it, that makes the performance of‘ the
“higher fi~rrns” of‘ human behavior within ;I culture possible? “‘1‘0 explain the
higher forms of‘ human behavior,” says Vygotsky (1988, p. 102), “we must
~incovet- the means by which man learns to organize anti direct his behavior”-
we must explore what it is in the ‘nlems’ we use that makes it possible for us to
act in this way.

PSY<:HOLOGI(:AL INSTKLJMENTS: PKOSTHESES, TOOLS. :ZND INI>I~:/\~I‘OKS

In analyzing the nature of the mems, the psychological instruments used in
the mediation of‘ ‘higher f’orms’ f‘urther, it is important, as I have argued
elsewhere (Shotter, 1989). to distinguish prdwtic f‘rom idim~i7~p f‘unctions:
‘l‘hey may function either, as a blind person LISTSa stick, as an instrument thro~$
which we can investigate our circumstances in ways which otherwise wo~dd be
inaccessible to us; or, they may f‘unction like the pointers on dials, which indicate
to 11s some remote state of‘ the world. Of these two functions, it is the prosthetic
function which is most untanliliar to LJSand which is thus worth further analysis
here.
Such adjuncts or extensions of‘ OLII- organs of‘ sense and action are, as I’olanyi
(1958) puts it, “not objects of our attention, but instrunlents of‘ it” (p. 55).
Vygotsky (1988, pp. 100-102) turnself also hints at such a distinction when, in
 Vygotsky: Social negotiation of semiotic mediation 71

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. 223-234). 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 ljoined 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 two-
dimensional views given by the movements of our two eyes over a visual scene to a
unified three-dimensional 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, 1
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
behavior. 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)
72 j. Shottel

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’
function,? 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 so&-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, that is, 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 suying 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. Ketrospectively, 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 interlocu-
tors, 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, so&-historical, intralinguistic, textual context. And it is this context, as
it is temporally developed* by what is said, that everyone contributing to its

*Here Bakhtin’s (1984) influcncc is at work. III what he calls ciouhlr-~wrcrd d~wurcrw, a person’s
utterances are “directed both toward the referential object of speech, as in ordinal-y disc-ourse, and
toward nwthw’c d~mur.w. toward .wvwo~~c rlsr’.$ cprwh” (1). 1X5),as when one speaks with a sideways
glance at one’s potential rritics.
tlinguistically. the ‘tool’ f’utlctiotl of language extends out- instrumental cjpacities to act. while the
‘prosthetic’ function of language extends our ontological skills at brag a pemon of this or that kind,
for example, at being a listener, a speaker, a disinterested observer. a storytellet-, a thinkcI, etc.
$Bakhtin (198 1, pp. 84-258) gives the name C/rwuoto/~t (literally ‘timespa<-es’) to the ditterent
structuring structures which are developed within different fbr-ms of literature and discoul-w.
ALcording the different so&l realities they construct, differrnt temporal trajectories withirl
different chronotopes open up dif.ferent spaces of possibility, that is, different possible forms of
interaction and of. fitting rextions.
 Vygotsky: Social negotiation of semiotic mediation 73

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 a 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, 1967), 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 @hotter, 1990). But yet more
74 ,J. Shottet

than this is involved in learning how properly to ‘position oneself within

particular speech genres than the ways of sense-making they entail, f’or speech
genres can be characterized by the ‘themes’ or ‘topics’ they embody, the sources
in terms of‘which utterances belonging to the geure are formulated. If’ this is so,
then the character of‘ our ‘inwardness’-the way we appear (or tee1 we should
appear) to ourselves-will depend upon the speech genres within which we
account for ourselves (Gel-gen. 1989). Where, as Hillig ( 198T) and Hillig,
Condor, Edwards, Gane, Middleton, and Radley (198X) argue, many of‘ the
‘topics’ within a genre are diltmmatic, that is. they are two-sided. Hence, even
within a genre, different argumentative positions may be fi)rmulatetl. ‘I‘hus, O~I
account of internalimtion as an ethico-I-tietol-i~~il phetion~enon clearI?, has ;I
number of‘ tiirther strands to it worth investigating. ‘Iliese will he explored in
a subsequent article.
 Vygotsky: Social negotiation of semiotic mediation 75

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