The Cultivated Mind: From Mental Mediation to Cultivation

Abstract

Both Piaget and Vygotsky stressed the role of mediation in human development. While Piaget, within his cognitive adaptational model of developmental constructivism, identified mental mediation as the primary mechanism underlying intellectual development, Vygotsky emphasized the cultural mediation by tools, signs, and social interaction as the core mechanism of higher mental functioning. Despite important differences between these two theorists' conceptualizations of developmental mediation, they shared the view that cognitive structures are built through a process of internalization by reconstituting external (inter)actions in a new form on an internal plane. Neither Piaget nor Vygotsky, however, paid adequate attention to what Simmel has called the cultivation principle. According to this principle, the cultivated mind is constructed through the ongoing transactions of the person with his or her cultural environment, i.e., permanently changing cultural forms, such as personal possessions, places, settings, institutions. These cultural forms are mostly overlooked in contemporary developmental theorizing and research. Simmel's cultural forms result from externalizations of former person–culture transactions. In other words, a person shapes or creates his or her own developmental conditions by a process of transactional constitution between himself or herself and his or her culturally structured environment. Thus, human development is not as individual biased as, for example, the Piagetian model of adaptive constructivism assumes. Instead, based on a cultural-mediational model development is structured through person–culture transactions as they are created and recreated by cultivating one's own culture (external mind) toward cultivating one's own mind (internal mind). These transactions can be facilitated, to varying degrees, by social coconstructions. Simply put, the internal and the external mind (culture) mutually cultivate or co-develop each other.