Maria Helena Fávero
Instituto de Psicologia at the Universidade de Brasilia
Abstract
This article proposes the integration of the subjective, developmental and cognitive aspects of the semiotic processes in a psychological context, and the historical, institutional and ideological fundamentals of sign systems in a sociocultural context. It revisits certain arguments for the rejection of the mind-body dichotomy, investigates the implications of this rejection in terms of the relations thought / language, individual / collective and cognition / emotion, and establishes relations between the process of semiotic mediation and the theory of social representations. It proposes, both theoretically and methodologically, a psychosocial synthesis for human psychological development, forming the basis for psychological intervention in social interaction situations, based on three main points. The focus group is used not simply in order to treat and develop a particular object through conversation, but as a procedure for psychological intervention and a locus of change, presupposing a sequence of group situations, each based on what was produced the previous time. The analysis of the speech acts produced in this sequence of focused conversations reveals participants’ personal paradigms and allows their foundation to be studied. In addition, the Piagetian focus on the grasp of consciousness reveals both the cognitive and metacognitive regulations that occur during the sequence of conversations together with their role in the reelaboration of the premises that form the basis for the personal paradigms and in the grasp of consciousness regarding the possibility of transformation.
Keywords: Semiotic mediation, social representations, personal paradigms, focus group speech acts.
In the pioneering work Psychology: a study of a science, edited by Koch between 1959 and 1963, it was argued that psychology was at least twenty years behind crucial issues formulated by the philosophy of science. Wallon (1963) defended similar ideas in the same period and, in 1981, Koch himself challenged researchers to accept that psychology involved important objects of investigation that may require methods other than those of the natural sciences (see Manicas & Secord, 1983).
Since the 1970s and 1980s, as in other areas of science, (see, for example, Kolakowski, 1976; Gutting, 1980; Cohen, 1981; Haberman, 1987; Castoriadis, 1987; Jacquard, 1987; Janicaud, 1987; Kuhn, 1989; Feyerabend, 1991; Asch, 1992) psychology has seen the growth of an epistemological debate which we see as decisive for developmental psychology and which has clearly stated a theoretical and methodological challenge: the integration of psychological and sociological data (see, for example, Sinha, 1988; Wertsch, 1985; Greeno, 1989; Bruner, 1990; Cole, 1997). At the end of the 20th century, Wertsch was clearly still uneasy about this challenge: The need to integrate psychological analyses into a larger whole has come to be widely discussed, if not accepted, in theoretical discussions in the social sciences. However, it has proven to be quite difficult to translate into concrete practice. I am often struck by the tendency among psychologists (including myself!) to claim that we need to overcome the tendency to isolate the individual and the individual’s psychological processes from other dimensions of the sociocultural setting and then to turn right around and do just that in concrete research. This tendency is so strong and so pervasive – even among those who profess views to the contrary – that it would seem time to recognize it as a part of something that goes deeper than disciplinary orientation, paradigm loyalty or some other such issue in our professional lives alone (1995, p. 82).
Without losing sight of this ongoing challenge, we propose a theoretical and methodological integration, especially in situations that demand psychological intervention which, although based on different fields of knowledge, seeks to focus on what they have in common: the need to go beyond the isolated individual in order to understand human behaviour, including communicative and mental activities (see, for example, Hilgard, 1980a; Hilgard, 1980b; Farr, 1981; Koch, 1981; Wartofsky, 1982; Kimble, 1984; Manicas & Secord, 1983; Braun & Baribeau, 1985; Doise, 1985; Asch, 1992, Rogoff & Chavajay, 1995, Wertsch, 1995). As stated by Bruner (1990), the aim is “to bring ‘mind’ back into the human sciences after a long winter of objectivism” (p. 1).
For this reason, this text aims to establish the rejection of the mind-body dichotomy and, by implication, of the dichotomies between individual and society, between thought and language and between cognition and emotion, on the psychosocial basis derived from the late 19th and early 20th century authors and revisited since the 1980s. Accepting the importance of semiotic mediation in the process of psychological development, which this theoretical basis assumes, we then propose an integration with the theory of social representations and present an alternative methodology.
Rejection of the dichotomies
According to Nuttin (1992), despite the huge diversity of tendencies that characterised the “science of mental life” at the end of the 19th century, the dualism of mind and body was the strongest feature of the first two International Congress of Psychology: the Paris Congrès International de Psychologie Physiologique of 1889, and the London International Congress of Experimental Psychology of 1892. At the same time, their titles demonstrate the desire to construct a fully scientific field of knowledge, which resulted in the rejection of a significant number of thinkers who sought to establish a connection between psychological and spiritual phenomena (see also, Fodor, 1981).
In this context, Wundt is one researcher seen to have unquestionable mastery of the scientific progress of his era, creating the Institute of Psychology and establishing the Psychological Research Laboratory in Leipzig, Germany. In addition to confronting Kant’s ideas about the impossibility of a scientific psychology, this laboratory trained the first great German psychologists and influenced major figures in both psychology and philosophy, including Durkheim, Mead, Thomas and Malinowski (Forgas, 1981; Diriwächter, 2004). For this reason, it is through Wundt that we will introduce the discussion of the rejection of the duality of mind and body, implicitly and explicitly present in the defence of the relation between individual and collective and, by implication, between thought and language and between reason and emotion. The aim is to reaffirm the relevance of semiotic mediation in the processes of psychological development and to integrate it, both theoretically and methodologically, with social representations.
The return to Wundt’s theses occurred precisely in the context of the discussions related to the possibility of integrating psychological and sociological data, and they were discussed primarily in books dealing with social psychology (Doise & Mugny, 1981), social cognition (Forgas, 1981; Farr, 1981) and social representations (Farr, 1984), with emphasis on his Völkerpsychologie. It was clear that this work, consisting of ten volumes published between 1900 and 1920, had been rejected for decades as a result of what Danziger (1979) called the positivist repudiation. For example, the historian of psychology Boring (1929), while devoting around 700 pages to Wundt’s work, wrote just ten lines on the Völkerpsychologie, which Wundt himself defined as “the natural history of man”, apt to provide scientific answers to questions regarding the higher mental processes, including reason, beliefs, myths, thought and language. According to Wundt, these belong to a sphere that cannot be reduced to intra-individual processes (Mueller, 1979, p. 13).
For this reason, Farr (1981) considers Wundt to be a forerunner of the theses of George Mead and Vygotsky, which will guide us towards a multi- and interdisciplinary approach to the theses of other authors such as Bahktin and Lotman and to social representations theory.
George Herbert Mead, an American philosopher who frequented Wundt’s laboratory between 1889 and 1890, is regarded as one of the most significant thinkers of the 20th century in relations to the integration of individual and collective phenomena. His arguments clearly reflect the influence of Darwin, Dewey and the Volkerpsychologie, although he regarded Wundt’s theory of gesture to be inadequate because it began with the individual as a unit of analysis, explaining sociability as something added on to that individual identity (see Feffer, 1990). Arguing that the reflexive consciousness implies a social situation which has been its precondition, Mead proposes a thesis according to which the mind emerges in the course of interaction with others such that the person’s self awareness is developed in social experience, gestures being “the early stages in the overt social act to which other forms involved in the same act respond”, and the vocal gesture being “the medium of social organization in human society” (2002, p. 193).
Mead proposed a broad definition of gesture, referring to “that part of the act or attitude of one individual engaged in a social act which serves as the stimulus to another individual to carry out his part of the whole act”, and illustrating this definition by means of: attitudes and movements of others to which we respond in passing them in a crowd, in the turning of the head toward the glance of another’s eye, in the hostile attitude assumed over against a threatening gesture, in the thousand and one attitudes which we assume toward different modulations of the human voice, or in the attitudes and suggestions of movements in boxers or fencers, to which responses are so nicely adjusted. … and include expressions of countenance, positions of the body, changes in breathing rhythm, outward evidence of circulatory changes, and vocal sounds (Mead, 2002, p. 192).
He therefore defends a dialectical relationship between individual and society (see Feffer, 1990), such that the classical dichotomies of mind / body, individual / collective, thought / language and cognition / emotion lose their meaning: Human society as we known it could not exist without minds and selves, since all its most characteristic features presuppose the possession of minds and selves by its individual members; but its individuals members would not possess mind and selves if these had not arisen within or emerged out of human social process in its lower stage of development – those stages at which it was merely a resultant of, and wholly dependent upon, the physiological differentiation and demands of individual organisms implicated in it (Mead, 1992, p. 227)
We can therefore say that Mead’s position, first expressed at the beginning of the 20th century, is compatible with what Bruner (1986) called the profound revolution in the definition of human culture, superseding structuralism through the adoption of the idea of culture as “implicit and only semiconnected knowledge of the world from which, through negotiation with others, we arrive at satisfactory ways of acting in given contexts” (Bruner, 1986, p. 17). This endorses the anthropological theses of Geertz (1973), according to which culture and meaning are described as processes of interpretative apprehension by individuals of symbolic models. These models are both ‘of’ the world in which we live and ‘for’ the organization of activities, responses, perceptions and experiences by the conscious self. For Geertz, meaning is a fact of public life, and the cultural patterns – social facts – provide the template for all human action, growth and understanding. As Rosaldo (1980) states, “culture so construed is, furthermore, a matter less of artifacts and propositions, rules, schematic programs, or beliefs, than of associative chains and images that tell what can be reasonably linked up with what; we come to know it through collective stories that suggest the nature of coherence, probability and sense within the actor’s world” (p. 6).
From the point of view of psychological analysis, it is this vision of culture that permeates the thesis of Bruner (1986, 1990) when he defends that “it is precisely in the negotiation of intended meaning that the self is formed in such a way that we can relate ourselves not only to the others immediately around us – particularly to the family (and its myths about social reality) – but also to the broader culture into which we must eventually move. It is in this process that we create the internal scripts with which we interpret the transactional world in which we move as socialized human beings” (1986, p.14). It is also present in the thesis of Wertsch: “mental functioning and socialcultural setting are to be understood as terms referring to dialectically interacting moments, or aspects of human action” (1995, p. 88). For this author, action can be either external or internal, produced by groups, large or small, or by individuals: “this is not to say that action does not have a psychological moment, or dimension. It clearly does. The point instead is that we should think of this as a moment of action rather than as a separate process or object that somehow exists in isolation” (Ibid, p. 89).
By revisiting these authors, we are therefore affirming the importance of semiotic mediation in psychological development, preliminarily defined by Wertsch (1995) as human action, carried out by an individual or group, that employs a cultural tool or mediational means and is implicit, as we see in Mead.
Semiotic mediation and social representations
From an epistemological point of view, we defend the position that the comprehension of mediated activity presupposes an active subject and recovers the cognisant subject, in the sense of Habermas (1987), without losing sight of the sociocultural context. In other words, “it is in man’s participation in culture and the realization of his mental powers through culture that make it impossible to construct a human psychology on the basis of individual alone” (Bruner, 1990, p. 12).
To admit that human activity is mediated is not, however, something trivial, given that, as Werstch (1995) demonstrates, mediation presupposes that we are never free from the difficulties imposed by cultural instruments or, as we prefer to express it, by their implicit or explicit meanings. We concur with Werstch (1995) that it is a change in these meanings that transforms the organisation of the cultural instruments, which in turn alters the meaning of the difficulty itself. If we accept the idea that the difficulties are altered, we admit that the human activity itself is transformed. This is compatible with the proposal of Lawrence and Valsiner (1993), which defends internalisation as transformation, that is, as a phenomenon inherent to the active subject (see also von Glasserfeld, 1985; 1996). Once again, it is clear that there is no room in this perspective for the classical dichotomies mentioned above.
In other words, we could state, as does Lotman (1990), that experience is entirely a construct of the individual intellectual world of human beings, developed in constant interaction with the functioning of the semiotic space or intellectual world within which humanity and human society exist. Within this semiotic or cultural space are generated different means of mediation for communication within human interactions, such that the interaction between the form of each type of means of mediation and the mediated content constitutes “a text within a text” (Lotman, 1988, p. 32).
In his last works, Lotman proposed the concept of the semiosphere, analogous to the concept of the biosphere. As we shall see below, this brings him very close to Bahktin, as regards the analysis of the processes of semiotic mediation. We will cite his work here as did Umberto Eco (1990), when he prefaced one of his books: imagine a museum hall where exhibits from different periods are on display, along with inscriptions in known and unknown languages, and instructions for decoding them; there are also the explanations composed by the museum staff, plans for tours and rules for behaviour of the visitors. Imagine also in this hall tour-leaders and visitors and imagine all this as a single mechanism (which in a certain sense is it). This is an image of the semiosphere. Then we have to remember that all elements of the semiosphere are in dynamic, not static, correlations whose terms are constantly changing. We notice this specially at traditional moments which have come down to us from the past (Lotman, 1990, cited by Eco, 1990, p. xii).
For Lotman, therefore, conscious human life, that is, cultural life, also demands a special spatio-temporal structure so that the culture can organise itself in the form of a space and a time, without which it cannot exist. This organisation is realised in the form of a semiosphere, given that the individual human intellect does not have a monopoly in the work of thinking and that the semiotic systems, both separately and together as a integrated unit of semiosphere, both synchronically and in all the depths of historical memory, carry out intellectual operations, preserve, rework and increase the store of information: “the same with thought: it is both something engendered by the human brain and something surrounding us without which intellectual generation would be impossible” (Lotman, 1990, p. 273).
In our view, Lotman’s theses is compatible with the concept of social representations as defended by Moscovici (1988), provided the active human subject is not lost.
Social representations, as I have already mentioned, concern the contents of everyday thinking and the stock of ideas that gives coherence to our religious beliefs, political ideas and the connections we create as spontaneously as we breathe. They make it possible for us to classify persons and objects, to compare and explain behaviours and to objectify them as parts of our social setting. While representations are often to be located in the minds of men and women, they can just as often be found ‘in the world’, and as such examined separately. ….Representations that shape our relations with society are in turn a component of social organization (p. 214).
We can, therefore – and this is the position which we defend –, take the semiosphere, or the functioning of the semiotic space, as the contents of social representations, which, in turn, mediate our relationship with the world.
The concept of semiotic mediation has a strong and important intellectual tradition, as shown by Mertz (1985), who proposes that it be studied in terms of a special emphasis on the distinct paths by means of which signs acquire and, more specifically, mediate meanings. This author thus defends the sign as a point of departure for the analysis of semiotic mediation, given that it exists in the creation of a representation relation, which can be understood as a connection established by the sign vehicle (or representamen) between a certain object (that which the sign represents) and an interpretation (the “mental cognition” or mental representation created by the sign in its representation of the object). The idea of mediation is therefore inherent to the notion of the sign and presupposes an active human subject in interaction with it.
Mediated activity and human development
From the point of view of developmental psychology, this leads to the consensus that sees human interaction as an exchange of meanings, a consensus that is compatible with the semiotics of Barthes (1992) and Lotman (1990) and, as we will see, with the linguistics of Vion (2000). This consensus leads us to consider the effects of sign systems in developmental psychology and in the cognition of individual communications. This was, evidently, the great contribution of Vygotsky, who defended the thesis that semiotic mediation is the instrument that creates the types of activity that are truly human. These differ from animal activity because of the human consciousness of a plan of actions based on means of production that are historically transmitted and socially constructed (Cole, 1985; 1997).
We are therefore proposing the compatibility of the notion of semiotic mediation with the theory of social representations, which in turn is compatible with the amplification proposed by Wertsch (1985) of the notion of semiotic mediation defended by Vygotsky (1978). By means of the reflections of Bakhtin (1977, 1981, 1984, 1986) on the nature of discourse and the structure of social institutions, Wertsch (1985) suggested the need to consider how social institutions interact with the mental functioning of the individual (see also Wertsch, 1985b).
As we know from Bakhtin, there are utterances and voices, each with its own ideological perspective, which are sociologically defined and are realised – and, up to a point, created – by discourse. In this way, it is possible to classify the different types of social language in broad categories based on the stratification of professions, social groups, generations, eras, and so on. It seems that this was exactly what Moscovici (1961) intended by analysing the discourses regarding psychoanalysis that were produced and mediated by different social and political groups in French society. It is on this basis, in fact, that this author defends the use of the plural: social representations.
We can therefore understand that it is essential to bear in mind that, just like physical objects, human actions have sociocultural meanings such that both the objects and the actions function, in and of themselves, as vehicles in the mediation of these meanings or, as we intend to demonstrate, of social representations. This is compatible with the thesis of Mead and his statement that language, in which our meanings almost exclusively arise in consciousness, “is but a highly specialized form of gesture and that in the presentations of others’ attitudes and our own we have the material out of which selves are constructed, and to the fact that consciousness of meaning is so intimately bound up with self- consciousness” (Mead, 1964, p 132).
Let us take fashion as an everyday example: it defines a trend and uses different kinds of fabric and styles – that is, a technology –, in order to realise it, such that, in the final analysis, we can say that that trend is the content of this particular production. As Barthes states: The set of meanings of a system (already formalised) comprises a major function: that is, it is probable that, from one system to another, the major semantic functions do not only communicate between themselves, but also partly recuperate themselves; the form of the signifiers of fashion is, without doubt, in part, the form of the signifiers of the alimentary system, both articulated around the great opposition between work and play, between activity and leisure; we must, therefore, presuppose a total ideological description, common to all systems of the same synchrony (1992, p. 49.
In other words, we are dealing with what has often been indicated by Moscovici (1988): the relationship between social and cognitive phenomena, between communication and thought. “We all realize how much social reality, f.i., drug use, differs depending on whether it is viewed and represented as a genetic defect, a sign of family breakdown, a cultural tradition or a substance required for a group ritual. The long and short of it is that all behaviour appears at the same time as a given and a product of our way of representing it” (Moscovici, 1988, p. 214).
Social representations and personal paradigms
Given this, we can move on: in the final analysis, this active human being constructs, in his/her interaction with social representations and given sociocultural practices, what we have called, as in the post-modern approach of Young (1997), the personal paradigm, which, while not isolated from the collective, preserves the unique and particular individual identity of the subject, if we consider the notion of internalisation as transformation, as mentioned above.
So, from the point of view of intervention aimed at changes to developmental psychology, which implies a process of polysemous reconstruction, and bearing in mind our arguments, the importance of becoming familiar with social representations is clear: they give us clues regarding the basis of this paradigm. “If I ask my boyfriend to use condoms, he will think that I am sleeping around or that I don’t trust him”, said one teenager in a survey on pregnancy. Or “You use condoms in casual relationships, when you are with someone who isn’t your girlfriend. When it’s serious, you don’t use them”. In other words, condom use is not merely a question of information about contraception or disease prevention, but is an externalisation of a fundamental paradigm, in which we can identify the social representations of dating, which, in turn, are related to the social representations of romantic love and of male and female roles, and especially sexual roles (Fávero and Mello, 1997; Fávero, 2001).
Following the rationale described above, if we accept that the personal paradigm is constructed by an active subject, it is therefore possible to stimulate the internal activity of that subject by means of mediated activity in a situation of social interaction involving conversation, seeking to facilitate the exploration and synthesis of contradictions and the creation of a new basis for the transformation of meanings. So, accepting, as does Bruner (1991), that “doing and saying constitute an inseparable functional unit” and that “the relation between the act and the word is interpretable” (p. 34), we defend the view that a change in thinking and beliefs, that is, a change in personal paradigm regarding a given subject and a given social practice, can alter the practice itself.
In other words, we defend an interactional context for the psychological interventions that aim, in a final analysis, to reconstruct the subject’s mental world.
The terms “psychological interventions” and “intervention research” are used in this article in the same sense as in previous studies related to psychological community intervention (Musitu, 1999), intervention for children with learning problems (Tunmer & al., 2002), intervention and school psychology (Ktatochwill, 2004), public health oriented promotion of leisure-time physical activity (Schmidt, Budtz-Jørgensen & Avlund, 2006) and countless others related to quality of life and coping with cancer (Penson, Talsania, Chabner & Lynch, 2004; Ross, Boesen, Dalton & Johansen, 2002; Stanton, 2005; etc.).
The literature on intervention research covers a vast and diverse field and demonstrates a great challenge: when aiming to produce some kind of change or transformation, the methodological issue is precisely that of the procedures for evaluating effects and effectiveness. Staton (2005), for example points out that “the next generation of psychological intervention research requires increasingly careful a priori consideration of the nature of the samples, interventions, and outcomes involved, as well as theory-guided examinations of mechanisms for the obtained effects” (p. 4819).
Bearing in mind both the challenge described above and our theoretical arguments, three foundations are essential for our methodological proposal: the focus group, the speech acts and the grasp of consciousness in the Piagetian, developmental sense. In the following section, we will deal with each of them, with the aim of demonstrating the interconnections between them and their articulation with the theoretical and conceptual foundation described above.
An alternative methodology
Although most qualitative studies, both in Psychology and other areas, focus on interactive processes, this explicit use of interaction is not always evident in the approaches to analysis and the reporting of findings in many research reports, argue Reed & Payton (1997). Kitzinger (1994) comments that “reading some such reports it is hard to believe that there was ever more than one person in the room at the same time” (p. 104).
Thus, despite the argument of Morgan (1988) and others in a similar vein, to the effect that focus groups are characterized by the explicit use of the group interaction to produce data and insights that would be less accessible without the interaction found in the group, we can say that the literature on focus groups in qualitative research has also been criticized for its neglect of group dynamics (Kitzinger, 1994).
Group dynamics is essential for the articulation of theory and method that we are proposing. Thus, returning to the expression of Farr and Tafoya (1992), that, as a discussion group, the focus group “has something of a thinking society in miniature” (in Marková, 2003, p. 223), we made use of focus groups in a way that is more than a procedure for demonstrating people’s opinions and social representations and what they do with them, as, for example, in Myers (1998), Kitzinger (2000) and Seymour et al. (2002). They were used, rather, as an interventional strategy based on the thesis that personal paradigms are constructed by active subjects and that it is therefore possible to stimulate the subject’s internal activity with the aim of forming a new foundation for the creation and transformation of the meanings that sustain and are sustained by them.
For us, the focus group is thus a situation not merely for treating and developing the themes about a subject, but for rethinking them. We therefore sought to adopt a model of analysis of the dynamics of the group as expressed in speech, thereby showing the process of the development of the grasp of consciousness of the subjects in relation to the social representations of a specific object and its relation to their own personal paradigms, and their processes of cognitive regulation on the path to transformation. This also demonstrates the specificity of the actual psychological intervention procedure developed in the interactive situation. For this reason, three key questions were considered.
Firstly, for the analysis of interactions, we adopted the analysis of speech acts as proposed by Chabrol and Bromberg (1999) and established in Vion (2000), according to the thesis that “the interaction is partially determined by the existence of subjects that are already socialised and a social context that is already structured. But, to the degree that the subject and the social context result from the interaction, these pre-existing categories are updated and modified in and through their functioning. The interaction, therefore, is the locus for the ongoing construction and reconstruction of the subject and the society” (Vion, 2000, p. 93). Thus, according to Chabrol & Bromberg (1999), “for social actors, speech acts are the interactive means of facing and resolving ‘concrete’ or symbolic problems, and of co-creating a social reality” (p. 296).
Those authors propose five spheres to found a classification of speech acts: 1. informative (any speech act that seeks to describe, classify, define or examine objects in the world and their relations in a non-evaluative manner); 2. evaluative (any speech act that expresses a value judgement or appreciation); 3. interactive (any speech act that seeks the joint elaboration of the identities of the participants and the joint management of their relations); 4. active (any speech act that proposes action, or that incites or exhorts action or engagement); and 5. contractual (any speech act that has the function of generating or regulating communication in terms of its aims, sets of actions and communicative contract). Each of these spheres includes specific categories of speech act. For example, the informative sphere includes the categories inform, exemplify, confirm, negate, correct, explain and quote.
It should be noted that a speech act is categorised in a given sphere in terms of its meaning in relation to another speech act. In this way, it can be shown who agrees with whom, who disagrees with whom, who approves of what and from whom, who proposes something new with a view to transformation, how this is proposed, and so on. This categorisation therefore gives us clues regarding both the predominance of a given sphere of speech acts in the group and in this or that individual and, which is more important, how this predominance is altered.
Thus, and this is our second key point, adopting the analysis of speech acts produced in the focal group means defending the view that “to analyse speech acts is to take into account the contributions offered by each social actor in the interaction, together with the processes of co-construction and attribution of meaning” (Chabrol & Bromberg, 1999, p. 296). It would therefore be possible to reveal each subject’s grasp of consciousness, as well as their processes of cognitive and metacognitive regulation – as proposed by Flavell (1976) and revisited by Allal and Saada-Robert (1992) – in the acquisition of new competencies by means of the communicative processes of the interactions.
Allal and Saada-Robert (1992), use the term “cognitive” for the regulatory mechanisms considered, especially in Piagetian theory, under the structural and conceptual aspects of general development, while “metacognitive” describes in the functional regulations, activated according to varied degrees of conscience in a learning situation and serving in the management of the procedures developed by the subject.
For Piaget, the grasp of consciousness “appears in all its aspects as a process of conceptualisation, reconstructing and then overtaking, on the plane of semiotisation and representation, what has been acquired on the plane of the action schemes” (Piaget, 1974, p. 271). In terms of its functional development, it occurs first in relation to the aims and results of the action. As Piaget says, the grasp of consciousness(…)proceeds from the periphery to the centre. (…) We do not define the periphery either in terms of the object or of the subject, but of the most immediate external reaction of the subject to the object: to use it according to an aim, and to take action on the result obtained. The grasp of consciousness, starting from the periphery (aims and results), is focused towards the central regions of the action, as it seeks to reach its internal mechanism: recognition of the means employed, reason for its choice or its modification, etc. (Piaget, 1974, p. 263).
In other words, it is a movement of internalisation based on action, which leads, in the words of Piaget (1974), “to the reflected plan of action, to an awareness of the problems to be resolved and from there, to the cognitive (and no longer material) means employed to resolve them” (p. 263).
Adopting the analysis of speech acts produced in the focal group and considering that it would be possible to reveal each subject’s grasp of consciousness, as well as their processes of cognitive and metacognitive regulation, by means of the communicative processes of the interactions, is not incompatible with the process of semiotic mediation discussed above. On the contrary, as Martí (1996) demonstrated, an analysis of the processes of internalisation and externalisation in the theories of Piaget and Vygotsky demonstrates an important set of epistemological and methodological principles held in common by the two authors. For both, the relationship between internal and external (internalised and manifest actions, for Piaget; intrapsychological and interpsychological functions, for Vygotsky) is in constant mutation through development. For both, internal and external reality are not two distinct, static entities, defined once and for all, but are constructed and their boundaries are unstable.
For Piaget, the dialectical nature of knowledge was therefore based on progress in two directions: internalisation and externalisation. This is compatible with Vygotsky’s formulation which, far from considering internalisation as a simple transposition of the properties of interpersonal functioning to the internal plane, regarded it as an internal reconstruction which, in turn, modifies the interpsychological function. In other words, both defended the view that the internal plane is not given but constructed, articulating this idea with the conscience. This is also clear in Leontiev, as cited by Wertch, (1985).
Given this, it is time to clarify the third key issue in our methodological proposal: given that we are defending a methodology of intervention – that is, one that leads to transformation – so, the focus groups should take place in sequential sessions, such that the aim of each one is clearly defined in relation to the analysis of the recordings and the transcription of the speech acts produced in the previous session. As a consequence, each session must be guided by the researcher according to a general procedure that brings the group of subjects face to face not only with their own conceptions but with alternative conceptions, creating a situation of socio-cognitive conflict in the sense used by Doise & Hanselmann (1989). It is, therefore, a longitudinal proposal.
A number of authors have defended the research value of analysing conversation (see, for example, Kitzinger, 2000 and her references), but here we have developed a theoretical and methodological proposal for the analysis of changes in the social conceptions and representations of adults in relation to a specific object, according to which, by means of verbal exchanges treated as speech acts, we are able to evaluate the actual process of mediation as it happens and analyse the process of change by means of the internal regulations of adult subjects in interaction and their connection with the communicative processes of that interaction.
We have obtained significant results according to this perspective in different research situations, such as a group of teachers at the school (Fávero, 2004) or a group of carers at an institution for aged people (Fávero & Gutteres, 2005). Both cases demonstrated the convergences and divergences that mark the personal paradigms and form the basis of the practice of each teacher or carer; the grasp of consciousness of the social representations and the premises that underlie the paradigms; the implications of the paradigms for the individual’s personal and professional practice; and the cognitive and metacognitive regulations involved in moving towards a re-elaboration.
To summarise, it is a proposal that seeks to emphasise and demonstrate the development of new conceptual competencies, bearing in mind the social representations and processes of semiotic mediation, according to a theoretical and methodological integration that may represent a fruitful contribution to the processes of developmental psychology and to its integration with other areas of psychology, both in terms of research and psychological practice.
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Biographical Note
Maria Helena Fávero teaches at the Instituto de Psicologia at the Universidade de Brasília, in Brasília, DF, Brasil. She obtained her doctorate in 1984 from the Université de Toulouse – Le Mirail, France and carried out her post-doctoral work in 2001 at the “Cognitions et Activités Finalisées” Research Unit, coordinated by Professor Gérard Vergnaud, of the Université Paris VIII, Paris, France.
Contact e-mail Adress:faveromh@unb.br