Between Beasts and Gods—Inner Speech as a Meta-Higher Psychological Function

Abstract

Inner Speech is a central concept in Vygotskyan approach to language and its relations to thought. Vygotsky develops a straightforward theory on the origins, development, and function of inner speech, recognized even today as one of the best articulated accounts on the matter. Although several works apply Vygotskyan theory to differing contexts and data sets, compare and it to other approaches and evaluate it in face of contemporary new findings and theories, few try to develop the theory itself and interpretate its role in the context of Historical-Cultural Psychology as a whole. In this paper will be argued that inner speech has all the properties of a higher psychological function (HPF) and should be interpreted as one. Moreover, as a higher psychological function, there should be cultural differences between the form assumed by it among distinct cultural groups and along historical time. Departing from historical and indigenous psychology studies, few examples will be presented supporting this interpretation. It will also be argued that inner speech should be interpreted as a HPF of a special kind, a meta-HPF, due to its far-reaching capacity of reorganizing other complex functional systems. At the end, a few educational remarks concerning the above discussion will be drawn.KeywordsHigher psychological functionsInner speechLanguage regulatory functionLanguage functions