Tomasello, Wittgenstein, and Vygotsky: The Problem of the Intermental

Abstract

The subject of this article is the early mental development of children in the light of research by two classical scholars from the last century and several of our contemporaries. L.S. Vygotsky contended that before the higher mental functions are mastered by a child, they are in a state distributed between the child and an adult “as an intermental category.” However, he subsequently developed this productive notion in a very narrow sense, and the intermental was concretized as it was expressed in language. L. Wittgenstein persuasively showed that mastery of language is impossible without a practical “demonstration” of the meanings of words as part of “language games” within practical activities. At the same time, he argued that there could be no theory regarding this process. M. Tomasello, in works written already in this century, shows that “language games” are learned by the child long before mastering spoken language, based on gestures that in turn rely on joint intentions and joint attention—i.e. on the intermental in the sense in which one can interpret Vygotsky’s comments. The article clarifies the principal difficulties of exploring the topic of the intermental in psychology. A function distributed between an adult and a child cannot be objectified (it was an attempt to objectify that resulted in a narrowing of Vygotsky’s topic). Moreover, the interpretation of the intersubjective status of some forms of the psychic leads to the notion that any mental function remains intermental throughout one’s lifetime. In the view of the author of the article, such an interpretation is essential, but requires serious advances in the philosophical-methodological development of the subject under study.