Toward an Interpretation of Parallels Between Ontogenesis and the Historical Development of Thinking

Abstract

Both the semiotic analysis of texts from traditional cultures and experimental investigation of thinking in these cultures reveal coincidences between the thinking of adults from traditional groups and the thinking of European children. In many cases, both the former and the later differ equally from the thinking of people who have had a classroom education. These are among the facts that relate to the old problem of the “repetition of phylogenesis in ontogenesis.” While both psychology and ethnology still often point to such parallels, their cause and content have not been explicitly examined for a long time. The lack of research into the relationship between these two forms of mental development make it difficult to effectively apply the experience of child psychology, as an incomparably better developed field of genetic psychology, in investigating the