CFP: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio (RIFL): Vygostkij and Language

RIFL – Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del linguaggio

Issue 6, July 2012: Vygostkij and Language

Edited by: Felice Cimatti and Luciano Mecacci

At the beginning there were Cognitive Sciences, which promise to solve once and for all the so-called mind-body problem. Mind, this was the core of the promise, is to software such as body is to hardware. This proportion is the power of an image and an extraordinary research project: human mind is a function of neural circuits. It seemed that the mind-body dualism was overcome. But the result was the creation of new - and at the beginning unnoticed -dualisms: internal vs. external, thought vs. action, mind vs. environment. Perhaps the most serious of all dualisms created by Cognitive Sciences is the individual mind vs. community dualism. If mind coincides with the activity of a single brain, then mind doesn’t need society and social relations to exist and function. This is the reason why, for a long time, Cognitivism embraced Chomsky’s innatist thesis: if mind has an innate structure, it doesn’t need relationship with external environment.

Chomsky’s innatism, that spread out in Cognitivism in 60s and 70s, now come up again through the reductionist ideas of contemporary Neurosciences, and it has a long story: as the same Chomsky clarified in Cartesian linguistics (1966) this setting of human mind, which is provided with faculties whose functioning is unconnected with historical and cultural context, dates back to Descartes and philosophers and linguists of XVII century.

There was no more than one answer to solve these problems, that is to try to widen individual mind’s tight boundary. It was born this way that which seemed a new model of mind: the theory of extended mind. The mind extends up to include external instruments, scaffolds that complete and widen the internal capacities of our mind. This paradigm, genuinely, is not new at all, on the contrary it is but the incomplete and unaware resumption (aware in some psychologist as Jerome S. Bruner and Donald Norman) of the theory of one of the most important psychologists of XX century, the Russian Lev Semënovi? Vygotskij (1896-1934). Vygotskij has been the first psychologist to suggest an overall description of human mind as social and historical entity. Vygotskij’s anti-dualism is more radical than the anti-dualism of extended mind, for which human mind is a natural entity, and it cannot be understood if we abstract from the social and historical relationships in which it is necessarily and naturally involved in.

On the contrary, Vygotskij’s thesis is radical: human nature is not closed into individual body, because in reality it coincides with the set of historical and social relationships that the body keeps up with its environment. This is a complete overturning of Cognitivist paradigm. We think that there isn’t, to this day, a naturalistic description of psychology of human animal more consistent than that of Vygotskij. In effect, cognitive scientists that recognize and appreciate the heritage of Vygotskij (for example Andy Clark and Michael Tomasello) were wholly unable to exceed the dualistic prejudice (between mind and body and between individual mind and society) that is the trademark of Cognitive Sciences. According to us, the point is not how much we are disposed to extend the boundary of individual mind, rather than how we intend to outline a research project that put at the first place the naturalistic notion of social relation. The thesis (unequivocally inspired by Marxism) of Vygotskij’s cultural-historical school is: in order tounderstand human animal we have to begin from social context.

The proposal of this issue of Rivista Italiana di Filosofia del Linguaggio devoted to Vygotskij and language starts from the idea that this is the only approach that allow us to describe human mind in a naturalistic way.

In particular, this issue will focus on the following topics:

• What are the relations between human mind and languages?
• How much are emotions universal and how much are they socially and historically determined?
• How much does the mind of a non human animal change if it has learned a system of communication like a language?
• How much of absolutely individual is there in human mind?
• Is there a radically non linguistic thought in human mind?
• What does it happen when a linguistic mind loses language, as the case of aphasia?
• Is language the natural environment of the Homo Sapiens species?
• What is the relationship between speech and other languages (mathematical, musical, etc) used by human species?

Manuscripts should have a theoretical rather than an experimental focus. Papers from the following areas are accepted: philosophy of language, semiotics, and history of philosophy, anthropology, sociology and social sciences, psychology, neuroscience.

Submissions may be in Italian, English, French, German, Spanish and Russian. All submissions must be prepared for blind review. The author's name, the institutional affiliation and the title’s paper must be placed in a separate file.  Papers must be sent as Microsoft Word file (.doc or .rtf) to: [email protected]

Instructions for authors:

Max length:
40000 characters (including spaces) for articles (including the references) and reviews;
20000 characters (including spaces) for interviews;
10000 characters (including spaces) for specific paper review.

Submission deadline: April 25, 2012
Notification of acceptance: May 20, 2012
Final version: June 20, 2012
Issue publication: July 2012

For further informations: [email protected]