Comments on Week 3 Reading

One passage that was particularly meaningful to me from Tool and Symbol in Child Development was:

This first thing that attracts our attention and might seem paradoxical is that the process of the forming of higher intellectual activity least of all resembles a developed process of logical transformations. This means that the subject forms, connects and separates the operations following a different law than that which would inter-relate them through logical thought. Very frequently the psychological process of development of a child's thought is presented as being similar to the process of the discovery of logical thought.

While Vygotsky does not, to my knowledge, specify which higher intellectual activities he is referring to, this reminded me of an important point made by Cornu and Tall many years ago within the context of mathematics education. Cornu (1991) writes, "It is now well-established that in the transition to advanced mathematical thinking, a purely logical sequence of topics, in which the mathematical concepts are introduced through definitions and logical deductions, is likely to be insufficient" (p. 165). Tall makes a similar point:

Thus, mathematics teachers might form their classes as a sequence of definitions, theorems and proofs as a skeleton of their course. Following these consequences may be pedagogically wrong since the teaching should take into account the common psychological processes of concept acquisition and logical reasoning (Vinner, 1991, p. 65). 

Vygotsky also writes:

Our records show that from the very earliest stages of the child's development, the factor moving his activities from one level to another is neither repetition nor discovery. The source of development of these activities is to be found in the social environment [emphases added] of the child....

This seems consistent with, at the very least, the trivial constructivist perspective, and perhaps even the radical constructivist perspective. Drawing from notes prepared by Michael Battista, according to von Glasersfeld, there are two basic tenets of (radical) constructivism. First, "knowledge is not passively perceived but actively built up by the cognizing subject" (von Glasersfeld, 1989, p. 182). Second, the function of cognition is adaptive and serves to organize the experiential world, not to discover an independent, pre-existing world outside the mind of the knower (von Glasersfeld, 1989; Kilpatrick, 1987). The second tenet is what separates radical from simple/trivial constructivism; "radical constructivism is radical because it rejects the metaphysical realism on which most empiricism rests. It requires that is adherents forgo all efforts to know the world as it truly is" (Kilpatrick, 1987, p. 7).

So my question is: would Vygotsky agree with the second tenet of (radical) constructivism? Namely that of rejecting the notion of an objective reality (i.e., "Truth" with a capital T), instead looking for viable explanations that are viable until they aren't -- until some phenomenon occurs which causes the cognizing agent to reconsider their understanding of the world.


Cornu, B. (1991). Limits. In D. Tall (Ed.), Advanced mathematical thinking (pp. 153-166), Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Kilpatrick, J. (1987). What constructivism might be in mathematics education. In Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on the Psychology of Mathematics Education (pp. 3-27). Montreal: PME.
Vinner, S. (1991). The role of definitions in the teaching and learning of mathematics. In D. Tall (Ed.), Advanced mathematical thinking (pp. 65-81), Kluwer Academic Publishers.
von Glasersfeld, E. (1989). Constructivism in education. In T. Husen & T. N. Postlethwaite (Eds)., International encyclopedia of education. Oxford, UK: Pergamon Press.