Theoretical Thought and the Method of Idealization: Revealing the Epistemological Potential of Activity Theory
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Authors
Arencibia, Rogney P.
Date
Type
thesis
Language
eng
Keyword
Activity Theory , Marxist Philosophy , Evald V. Ilyenkov , Lev S. Vygotsky , Idealizations
Alternative Title
Abstract
Activity theory is a tradition of thought founded by prominent Soviet psychologists, such as L.S. Vygotsky, A.R. Luria, S.L. Rubinstein, and A.N. Leontiev. The very emergence of the activity approach was linked to the necessity, felt by these Soviet scholars, of reforming the philosophical foundations of psychology to overcome the methodological crisis affecting that science in the early 20th century. These methodological concerns led them to appropriate Marxist philosophy as their epistemology. From that standpoint, they developed an original understanding of human nature, the origin of our distinctive faculties, the character of (human) ideal activity and its relations with practical (material) activity.
Such a methodological reading of Marxism defines philosophy as a particular science with theoretical thought as its subject matter. Understood thus as epistemology, activity theory’s philosophy nonetheless assumes a series of ontological premises internally related to its epistemological and methodological principles and, through them, to its psychological, anthropological, and political claims. Activity theory takes a historical-cultural approach to science as an activity influenced by social practice. Still, it rejects relativism by advocating for a universal and necessary scientific method for substantiating theoretical knowledge.
The crucial aspect of activity theory’s philosophy is its methodological conception of theoretical generalization. According to this conception, generalization in science involves two main stages. The first is the isolation, through theoretical analysis, of the genetically universal simplest possible form of the analyzed object, its ‘germ cell.’ This theoretical analysis is accomplished using idealizations, i.e., counterfactual assumptions representing the object in its pure, essential form. Second, from the dynamic nature of such a germ cell, a complex ideal model of the object is deduced through the historic-logical (dialectical) derivation of its development’s necessary milestones. Such a method of the idealization of the object through analysis—and its concretization by a dialectical synthesis of determinations that follows the ‘methodology’ of the object’s real development through the resolution of its objective contradictions—is the core aspect of the epistemological conception assumed and developed by activity theory psychologists and philosophers to overcome the (methodological) ‘crisis’ in psychology and, in general, the scientific thought of their epoch.
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