Differing times and differing measures: Dimensions of historical time in Vygotsky’s work

Abstract

The historicity of psychological phenomena plays a key role in Vygotsky’s developmental theory. However, we rarely realize what historicity means to Vygotsky, and what implications the notions about the nature of historical change bring to his theory. We suggest, based on dialogue with authors from the social sciences, that Vygotsky worked with different notions of the nature of historical changes in each developmental plane (phylogenetic, ontogenetic, and historical-cultural). Our investigation on this topic showed that, for Vygotsky, each timescale studied behaved differently: for instance, teleological in civilizational scale, semi-open in ontogenetic time. Due to the great influence exerted by the author’s work on the fields of developmental and cultural psychology, we understand that this kind of investigation can be useful to clarify and enrich both scholarly knowledge about his works and contemporary claims about the role of historical change on the developmental processes in psychology.