Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 43, no.

5,
September–October 2005, pp. 25–40.
© 2005 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 1061–0405/2005 $9.50 + 0.00.

A.N. LEONTIEV

Lecture 35. Types of Thinking.

Thinking and Sensory Cognition

We begin this semester with the new subject of “thinking,” one could
say, a classical subject, rather difficult. You know very well that it is not
only psychology that deals with the processes of thinking. Thinking is
also an object of study in the theory of knowledge, that is, philosophy. A
special science also deals with thinking—logic, in all its aspects and
areas.
Thinking became a concern of psychology relatively recently, at a
time when psychology had already begun to take shape as an indepen-
dent field of knowledge and the first systematic concepts about the psy-
chology of thinking and about psychological issues of thinking provided
the content of the so-called psychology of associationism of the nine-
teenth century. It was based on a set of very simple, common-knowl-
edge propositions that the main laws guiding the movement of ideas, of
concepts in the mind of man, are the laws of connections, that is, the
laws of associations. In this context, various types of associations were
described: association through simultaneity, similarity, and contrast. And
several special empirical observations were conducted, which paved the

English translation © 2005 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text © 2000
A.A. Leontiev, D.A. Leontiev, and “Smysl.” “Lektsiia 35. Vidy myshleniia.
Myshlenie i chuvstvennoe poznanie,” in Lektsii po obshchei psikhologii [Lectures
on General Psychology], ed. D.A. Leontiev and E.E. Sokolova (Moscow: Smysl,
2000), pp. 328–37.
This paper is published based on a typewritten version of the text. There is no
tape recording. The lecture was delivered on March 5, 1975.
Translated by Nora Favorov.

25
26 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

way for the introduction of such concepts as “perseveration,” that is,

extending the effect of associations on the subsequent flow of processes.
Or, concepts that in modern terms we might call “expectation,” “ set,”
they called, “anticipation.” That was the term they used, and others like
it, in “psychology of associationism.”
At the same time, it was characteristic that thinking was always seen
as an internal process, played out in the field of consciousness, in the
internal field. It can be found or described through utterances, that is the
solution to, let us say, associational problems (one idea or concept,
through association, brings forth another), or through direct study not of
the process itself, but of its product. So, various products of the internal
intellectual process, the thinking process, were subject to analysis. You
can see, therefore, that, initially in psychology, the problem of thinking
emerged as the problem of internal thinking. It could also be called “ver-
bal.” Or even “verbal-logical”—a form of “discursive thinking,” in Rus-
sian, of reasoning thinking, which is an internal, logical process.
Naturally, by this time the well-known differentiation between the psy-
chological and the logical approach had emerged. This distinction pre-
sented serious difficulty, and if you take old psychology textbooks or old
psychology courses, you will find in the pages of these textbooks or in the
psychology courses chapters or paragraphs, for example, a chapter “on
reason,” “on syllogisms,” that is, essentially a repetition of such chapters
normally belonging to formal logic. The problem of the logical and the
psychological, in essence, had not been resolved. Pages from textbooks
on formal logic were transposed into textbooks of psychology.
A significant contribution to the further study of the psychology of
thinking was made by experimentation conducted within the framework
of experimental human self-observation, which also dealt with a verbal-
logical process (I have in mind the contribution made by the so-called
Würzburg school). The Würzburg school is represented by a number of
very well-known names, preeminent in the first quarter of our century.
There are, for example, names such as O. Külpe and N. Ach, and a num-
ber of other very eminent psychologists. Incidentally, they are very well
represented in our literature, in one of the collections devoted to think-
ing.1 There is also a very good profile of this school, of this approach,
that was published a long time ago; I will also mention this tiny book as
being of interest. It came out as part of the series “New Ideas in Philoso-
phy.” It has a marvelous article about this school and there is an impor-
tant article by Külpe.2
 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2005 27

What exactly has this school given us and why, out of all of associa-
tional psychology, have I chosen to make special mention of it?
It is because this school has introduced a fundamental proposition. It
has demonstrated that the cognitive process that we describe as an inter-
nal process, a process of thinking that takes place internally, is not an
effect of the struggle, as has been said, between association, that is,
between the associative process, and the process of perseveration. The
associative process somewhere, at some time, emerges and somewhere
along the way dies out. Please note, if there were no activity, there would
be some assortment of ideas, that is, the kind of thinking that follows
some paths that have been well-trodden by associations. To this was
added a very important tenet that is known in these terms: it is the tenet
of “determining tendency,” or to put it differently, the role of the task that
is organizer of the process and the director of the process. So, the most
important condition giving rise to this process is not the internal struggle
of two tendencies, but the presence of a certain task before the subject that
generates this fundamental tendency or direction of the thinking process.
This was a fundamental historical landmark in the development of psy-
chological knowledge about thinking. It should be said that this began the
formulation of a very important problem in psychology—the problem of
generalization, of concept.
The experimental nature of this research allowed for a number of
unclear questions to come into view and for light to be shed on them, for
new questions to be posed, but there were limitations because research
into thinking, albeit experimental, was still introspective, that is, founded
on the evidence of the thinker, in this case the experimental subject solv-
ing a problem.
Certain difficulties remained in distinguishing between logical and
psychological content, that is, between the logical and psychological
aspects of this process.
It is essential that the complexity of this process be emphasized. I would
like to direct your attention to the fact that if logical processes occur “in
the mind” of a person, then, of course, they can take place only on the
basis of the laws of operation of the human brain. The difficulty of this
issue rests in the following: are the logical processes that we observe de-
rived from the properties of this mind? There have been attempts to con-
struct a psychological logic, deduced from the mind. But, you understand
that the logical relations that we find in the cognitive process are not a
product of the generation of corresponding processes in the mind, but are
28 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

an expression, or rather a reflection of certain connections that we repro-

duce. These laws exist in and of themselves. They reflect objective con-
nections and the ways in which they are operated. If this is the case, then
there is no place, essentially, for the psychology of thinking, with the
exception of special questions. What are these questions?
First, it is understood that man is not born with logical thinking. He
acquires logic. It is not lessons in logic that are necessary, but generali-
zations of the experiences of perception, of the experience of communi-
cation with other people. Man acquires human norms. Thinking—that
is what logical norms are.
This means it is possible to talk about the psychology of thinking in
the child. This is not the same thing as factual logic—right? Thinking
can be ascertained in children, let us say, of a preschool or early school
age, but it differs from the logical thinking of the adult. Second, patho-
logical thinking is a persistent disturbance regarding logical thinking.
There are differences between various types of pathology. Pathological
thinking also falls beyond the bounds of what we call “logic,” however
one might interpret this subject.
And finally, the last thing, so-called creative thinking. Incidentally,
this problem was also presented in an excellent way by the Würzburg
school. It is a problem of so-called productive thinking. The meaning of
this problem can be summed up in the following way. Let us say that we
are analyzing some kind of logical operations—let us take an ordinary,
banal syllogism, reasoning along a classical model about the mortality
of man, that Socrates is a man, and the conclusion, that is, the result of
this thinking, consists in the notion that Socrates must be mortal. You
see, even in this simple syllogism, most elementary in form, certain
difficulties are found consisting in the fact that you must have the first
and second premise in order to reach the conclusion. How do you choose
the first and second premise? You analyze premises and through this
process find the required conclusion, but you do not know why those
particular premises are required. Do you understand? You have to find
the proposition, which comes from bringing together two premises: “All
people are mortal,” “Socrates is a person.” Next comes the conclusion,
whether correctly or incorrectly arrived at. But the basic idea remains—
the search for these premises. “All people are mortal.” “An elephant is
not a person.” Try to draw a conclusion. You will say to me, “There’s a
mistake! You can’t construct it that way!” Yes. There is a mistake, and a
crude one. It should have been, “Living beings are mortal. An elephant
 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2005 29

is a living being”—and so on, but this is a matter for logic. The problem
remains, and it is a very subtle problem.
So, I repeat, these were the landmarks we had. The first landmark is
associational psychology, which portrays these processes in the form of a
flow of associations directed by internal tendencies. The second moment
occurs when these processes are identified as goal oriented, they are sub-
ject to objectives. And finally, the last, which I would like to particularly
emphasize: the experience of life, practical tasks, which arose before the
psychologist, the expansion of the field of vision of psychology, the ex-
pansion of the possibility for empirical, including experimental, research
inevitably led to something I would conditionally call a refusal to study
only discursive, or primarily discursive, logical, reasoning thinking. And
then thinking appeared in a nonlogical form, and, consequently, more
clearly. What do I mean by this?
These are first and foremost successes in the ontogenic study of think-
ing. You see: thinking is present, but it is not equipped with the norms of
logic, and it is left on its own, to flow in its own way, uncomplicated by
human thinking, the experience of human practice that has taken shape
in the formulas or the laws of logic.
Second, there is the folk psychology or psychology of people,
ethnopsychology. Research really picked up on the basis of extensive
ethnographic material collected at the turn of the century, when contacts
were made during voyages, during trade, with the help of guides who
laid the way for commerce and sometimes for military occupation, that
is, more often than not. This ethnographic material indicated that the
thinking process flowed differently in a number of peoples at a rela-
tively low level of socioeconomic development—there is a certain unique-
ness. The best-known name, familiar here thanks to translations, is L.
Lévy-Bruhl and his work, Primitive Mentality.3 A very strange logic is
described there, not at all like the logic we encounter in those belonging
to peoples at significantly higher levels of economic, cultural, and so-
cial development.
This refers to the logic observed in peoples who live under conditions
recalling the condition of primitive order. Vast amounts of material were
collected and this material was used by Lévy-Bruhl and Turnwald and a
whole group of people who pursued the question of the existence of
psychology in a historical sense, or rather an ethnographic sense.
Soon studies appeared that were historical. I am referring to the
Meyerson school in France, which is now represented by several indi-
30 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

vidual researchers using historical artifacts in the study of the psychology

of thinking. One well-known subject area developed within the Meyerson
school is based on the study of objective historical documents of the an-
cient world, of Greece—Greek art, Greek literature—all expressions of
Greek creativity.
Finally, the development of technology led to the problem being
viewed on yet another plane: “manual” or “technical thinking”—let us
say the ability to see quickly which way a gear is going to turn if an-
other, linked to it by two or three other gears, turns, let us say, clock-
wise. Or, how to create a whole from several elements. How to put
together a cube from its separate pieces. Or, along the same lines, these
last tasks: to put something together or take something apart, to deter-
mine direction, visually, using sight—these are very common, for in-
stance, in one of our country’s ethnic groups. I personally came upon
such a game back in 1930—putting together a very complex stereomet-
ric figure from pieces of wood. There was this game of patient construc-
tion and at the same time of envisioning complex, spatial interrelations,
and I saw it.
So-called technical thinking was discovered. In order to select candi-
dates for the first stage of training as a mechanic, it might be necessary
to see how they handle problems involving spatial thinking. Or prob-
lems involving the relations that are perceived in the immediate “me-
chanical” way or revealed through testing direct mechanical perception,
or how they do on tests involving the discovery of relations. That is how
this branch of research emerged. The aristocratic nature of discursive
thinking was eliminated. Beyond it, a tremendous number of processes
were discovered that are, first of all, undeniably cognitive; second, that
appear beyond the bounds of the data of sensory perception and are
somehow distinct from that perception. This is not perception, it is think-
ing, but not in the traditional forms of discursive thinking. This was
especially well presented in the works of yet another school, also from
the turn of the century. Here, not a word can be said without mentioning
old authors, who also did something in this area, and this was particu-
larly striking in the twentieth century. Have you guessed about whom
I’m talking? I’m talking about the Gestalt school of psychology. Köhler’s
apes, famous throughout the world, use a longer stick to get another
stick. At first they do not see the solution, but then suddenly they see
it—Köhler insists on this. K. Bühler would call this an “aha reaction.”
I.P. Pavlov used another word, one that was entirely correct: “manual
 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2005 31

thinking of apes.” Trials, but trials along a particular line. This is a com-
plex process. We have started to talk about animal intellect. And intel-
lect, after all, is thinking. But we do have to say “thinking in its prehuman
forms.” Let us decide it thus: intellect is a broader concept, while think-
ing is more narrow (human intellect, human intellectual behavior).
Köhler’s research was immediately reflected in the research of child
psychology. The same Bühler, and later the other authors, came out with
studies conducted on small children using the same method as Köhler.
The tasks were the same: to figure out where to position a chair so as to
reach toys that had been hung or placed high up, or to roll a ball out of a
structure something like a labyrinth; to work with a cage, but not from
inside the cage. On the contrary, the target object is inside the cage and
the child, naturally, is outside the cage and must somehow get the object
out of the cage. In short, a vast number of such methods were devised.
But it was characteristic of all of them that they related to thinking in a
very broad sense and did not limit themselves to the confines of reason-
ing and discursive thinking, always using the apparatus of logic.
Perhaps, given this broader understanding, success will be achieved
(and, perhaps, partial success has already been achieved) in approach-
ing an understanding of what is called the creative aspect of thinking,
the special nature of the thinking process, something that is sometimes
called “intuition,” right? That which is designated as visual thinking
(this is a very perplexing term). In short, an idea has formed that think-
ing can be different, can be qualitatively different, that there can be quali-
tatively distinct unique phases in development. Some have merely
described the forms, others have connected them historically, that is,
tried to make them into a certain progression in phylogenetic develop-
ment: from animal thinking to modern, developed human thinking, or
from that of a very small child, from a newborn, to an adolescent, with
the full morphological apparatus that we usually use.
The terms “manual,” or sometimes “practical,” thinking have emerged;
sometimes “technical thinking” or “technical intellect” (a less common
concept) are used as equivalents. Then there is “vivid-image thinking.”
Here the emphasis is probably not so much on motor or practical as-
pects (i.e., actions with an object: to act with it, to figure something out
about it), but on the image, on the representation, on its sensory nature,
on that which moves in thinking, on the sensory nature of the movement
itself. This left an impression on certain ideas of Köhler. He saw things
in this way—that in the sensory-phenomenal sphere there is a conver-
32 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

gence of tool and goal. And some special studies by [E.R.] Jaensch with
eideticists allowed a real interdependence to be seen: the movement of
these things in the phenomenal visual field of a person experiencing
need, necessity just like that, visually: the stick gravitates, moves to-
ward the goal. Köhler also used the term “in eidetic images,” that is, in
images that only a certain portion of people are able to maintain, people
who have this eidetic memory. You know what an “eideticist” is and
what “eidetic images” are. An eideticist, when he is asked how to get
something sees how one moves toward the other, that is, the representa-
tion is visualized. But this is, of course, an extreme, special case. This is
an exception, right? Thus, the vivid image is thinking. It can be called
“sensory thinking,” “thinking in images.” It can also be called “vivid
thinking.” Sometimes it can be called “visual thinking,” because it relies
primarily on vision.
And finally, that from which it all started—this is “thinking in words,”
presupposing the presence of verbal concepts, meanings. This is discur-
sive thinking, this is logical thinking, this is verbal thinking—it is also
characterized this way, but it is all the same, it all refers to the same
process.
I draw the same conclusion: at the present time, thinking appears
before us as a process that flows in various forms, in such forms as, for
instance, motive, “motor action,” representations, and living images. Then,
we have logical thinking, reasoning, discursive thinking. And this diver-
sity of types of thinking—it is, one could say, what constitutes the en-
deavor of psychologists (and not only psychologists), who are focused
on the study of this problem, the problem of the specific science of psy-
chology: psychophysiology, child psychology, animal psychology, in a
word, the fields that we are studying.
And now there can be no talk of psychology “generating” logic. The
two simply do not go together.
Take vivid-motor thinking, also called “sympractical thinking,” which
is directly interwoven with practical action (I actually prefer this term).
Then, “visual” thinking—I would prefer this term, it is more concise.
And finally, “discursive” thinking. These are the three fundamental forms.
It is possible to talk about some subforms, variations on forms, and so
on for all eternity. One could continue to analyze, to classify. It is natu-
ral that this summation must be conceived primarily from a theoretical,
psychological point of view. We are focusing on thinking and cannot
describe it using only, let us say, verbal concepts in this process, subject
 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2005 33

to the demands of logic. We must differentiate it, we must distinguish it

first and foremost from other forms of understanding. You know, after
all, that this is a fundamental distinction—between immediate, sensory
perception and cognition in the form of thinking. This is a generally
accepted distinction, firmly established and understood by everyone. Per-
ception and thinking are two levels of cognition, two forms of cognition.
And the second, of course, cannot exist without the first. The connection
here is unambiguous, unidirectional in a certain sense. Francis Bacon,
whom Vygotsky and many other authors have cited, once said, “There is
nothing in the intellect that did not first exist in feelings.” Any material-
ist will insist on that point of view. In this sense we are all sensualists,
we all recognize sensory perception, the data of sensation, of percep-
tion, to put it another way, as the source of our knowledge. And now we
have yet another level. Here we have sympractical, or manual thinking,
vivid, vivid-action, and reasoning thinking? What makes them all dif-
ferent from immediate-sensory perception?
I am posing this question and devoting so much time to it in order to
clear the path ahead, to eliminate certain misunderstandings. And they
do arise. I know that they arise quite often, and I would like in advance
to prevent serious misunderstandings—distinguishing poorly between
perception and thinking, a distinction using false criteria.
Perception provides a vivid image, but thinking? You could say that
it is abstract. But thinking can have as its product something concrete,
represented in a concrete, sensory image. It does not pass using this
criterion. The presence of verbal generalizations? But, if you will allow,
are not verbal generalizations part of the process of perception of the
objective world, of sensory perception? I can clearly see a microphone;
I perceive it as a microphone. We talked quite a bit about this when we
looked at perception. There is a unique semantic of perception that ex-
presses objectivity, human perceptual objectivity. So, there is no such
criterion. And, in general, one could say that perception gives us an
individual object, a representation of it, its cognition, but generaliza-
tion—this is rather a matter of thinking. Comrades! In this day and age,
who can deny perception’s ability to create generalized images? The
simplest of experiments will demonstrate the presence of these gener-
alizations and the corresponding analysis. Take the simplest animal ex-
periments. If you have not been told about them, I will simply give a
brief summary, and if you have been told, then I will just refresh your
memory and point to an example.
34 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

There is a problem that has demanded quite a bit of time from animal
researchers. This is the problem of “stimulus equivalence.” The most
ordinary experiment with the formation of a skill and a conditional con-
nection, if you like. A connection to what? In this case it is a connection
to the appearance of a triangle. In the animal, a high-order animal, the
following connection has been made: where there is a triangle, there is
food. One needs to go in the direction of the triangle and do something
preconditioned. And now let us switch this triangle that we, as investi-
gators, were using and that the animal knew from previous experiments,
and replace it with another stimulus and see which stimuli will be equiva-
lent and which will not. That is, which stimuli will elicit the reaction
that has been learned, drilled in and established, and which will not.
What will be related to that which came before, and what will be differ-
entiated? Then we can go into differentiation as far as we like, with
great accuracy—these are Pavlov’s famous tenets. Well, here is the tri-
angle. Let us disconnect it. It had solid lines, now let us use dotted lines.
Let us try simply using three dots. It was black—let us make it white on
a dark background, or maybe even colored. Do you understand what I
mean by varying the stimulus? And then let us conduct a series of ex-
periments and we will see: there has been a generalization—here is what
has been included, and here is what has been excluded; and with this
animal the following happened—this is the way his generalization went.
We performed this experiment on rats, monkeys, and different kinds of
animals with different behavior, ecologies, and a different basis. We got
answers to these questions about generalization. Not to mention experi-
ments with people, of the analyticity and visualization of their percep-
tion, of the endowment of the image with meaning, that is, of the use of
speech, or verbal meanings.
So some other criteria must be found. And then, perhaps, we really
will see not the breaking away of thinking from sensation, but rather
their relationship, their transitions, and most important, the transforma-
tion of one into the other. And maybe then we will find a historical
approach to the change of forms of thinking, to its historical and ontoge-
netic development. And we will settle the question about the relation-
ship between animal manual thinking—I am using Pavlov’s term—and
human, verbal intellect, which functions under conditions of the mas-
tery of sociohistorically developed concepts that have been set as the
meanings of specific words. Then, perhaps, the place of logic will also
be found.
 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2005 35

Let us go ahead and answer the question of how we distinguish be-

tween the level of cognition that we call the level of thinking, and the
level that we call the level of sensory cognition, the level of perception.
I would like to proceed in the following way: I myself will put for-
ward a certain hypothesis—I would like to make use of this pedagogic
technique today—and then together we will consider in detail how this
hypothetical criterion looks in relation to various specific processes and
phenomena about which we know something more or less adequately. I
would write two such formulas, but, comrades, please recognize their
conditionality. These are not some symbolic nomenclature; for my own
convenience I simply want to make this visual. So, you see that when
we look at perception, we find this process is always included in the
interaction between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, re-
gardless of what it is. It must have one property: it must be able to act on
one of the sensory organs, right? On many of them at once or just on
one, but it must have an effect, right? And finally, the other condition—
it must be an object of our activity, this object.
Into this system, however developed it might be, go all processes that
we call interaction. Whatever the subject brings with him, whatever previ-
ous experience might refract this effect and take part in this interaction. It
may be individual experience. It may be the experience of an entire
species. In animals, species experience is literally biological, heredi-
tary. This is what we find as inherent in the subject. Now, what other
kind of experience could there be? Species’ experience in other senses:
sociohistorical, acquired experience, and, third, individual experience.
There are species’ phylogenic and species’ historical experience—that
which is acquired and learned by each new generation. It is not written
down and prepared, but it also is not built on the basis of individual
generalization. This is the experience of generations, the experience of
social practice, reflected in language, in the system of concepts, of mean-
ings that are acquired by a child to one degree or another, right? And it is
natural that experience is part of perception.
But I am now outlining another scheme. Actually, I only came up with
it just now. Its essence is the following: if the first sphere of cognition, the
level of cognition, fits into this scheme of the process of interaction “per-
ceiving subject–perceived reality,” then the second scheme is a bit trickier.
This is because here the object of my cognition is the interaction ascer-
tained by me, that is, a process binding together “object” and “object.”
The first relation can be called “subject–object,” or “object–subject.” And
36 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

the second? “Object–object”? No. “Subject–object–object.” Now let us

try to see whether this is the way it is and what it means.
Here, everything is represented in the following way: we can take a
hackneyed example that I have used before. It is very simple. What I am
talking about is the possibility, thanks to this scheme, of going beyond
the limits of the properties immediately accessible to our sensory organs,
that is, to our perception. This scheme, the second one, goes beyond
those boundaries, and the first one does not go beyond them. Now, about
the illustration I was just talking about.
The threshold of my musculocutaneous sensitivity, as we know, is rather
crude and lies within a fairly small range. Essentially, I have to go beyond
the boundaries of that range, that is, go beyond the bounds of the capabili-
ties afforded me by my organs of perception, my sensory organs. How do
I do that? I cannot distinguish between the hardness of this material and
that. I tried touching them—this one is hard and that one is also hard.
They are equally hard. This is beyond the bounds of the capabilities of my
sensory perception. I cannot answer this question on the basis of this given
interaction—“I–object” and “object–I.” So, I interact with this object and
I interact with that object and I say that they are both hard, but I cannot
differentiate. But now, perhaps, I will try something. I will do this: I will
scratch here and see—there is no scratch, and now something else hap-
pens: I scratch there—and a scratch appeared. What did I do? I intro-
duced, I determined an interaction of two objects and by changing one of
them I could judge—I issued a judgment—about a property of the other.
That object turned out to be harder. I did not know that and was not able to
find it out. It was beyond the limits accessible to my sensory organs.
I do not know whether this or that element is contained in a given
substance and I cannot find that out because the substance is far away
from me (let us say, it is some planet or other heavenly body). But, can
I get a spectrogram? I can. And before me is a developed spectrogram. I
see a black line—that is hydrogen, you see? How can I know? By the
effect on me or by the change in some phenomenon caused by the effect
of that object that becomes the object of my cognition. Do you under-
stand the mechanism? Now, I will put it to work in a certain formula: the
essence of the matter is that we are judging what we cannot see by what
we can see through direct perception—what we cannot judge directly
without putting something else into action. We do not have the sensory
organs for that.
Then we have the solution to the paradox: there is nothing in thinking
 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2005 37

besides what is given through sensation, through perception, through

cognition. But the range of our sensitivity differs from the range of our
perception because, in studying the interaction of things, we discover
the properties that are not revealed to us through the interaction between
“perceiving subject” and “object.” Then a very important theoretical
thinking becomes clear that was expressed by Marx in his contention
that, initially, thinking is directly intertwined with practical action.
Beyond that there can be other observations, perhaps, even more valid
ones: essentially, tools are a true abstraction. Productive action is gen-
erally an experiment. Productive action in the broad sense, productive
action removed from its result, is an experiment. I have in mind a repre-
sentation of a certain result that I have to achieve, a substantive, objec-
tive result of my objective action. I can, of course, immediately switch
to an action with this material, with the object of labor, assuming I will
get a certain result. But I can also do something else. I can try things. I
can make a preliminary test. And then will that test be practical or cog-
nitive action? If I bend something, not in order to create a bow, but to see
how pliant this material is, because I could discard it and pick another
with the help of tests. So, as long as I have not started to make it—what is
this? Is this a practical or cognitive activity? It must be cognitive. What is
it separate from? From the immediate product that I need. It might, by
chance, be the same, or it might not be. I bend it—it is not pliant enough;
I bend another—it is pliant enough, it would be suitable, and I continue to
work on it. I subject the properties of an object, the properties of a mate-
rial that are hidden from me in a direct contact, to reliable testing using
direct action in order to apply this cognitive element of my practical ac-
tion. I can go through an experimental stage. This is how experiments
came about. Therefore, in Marx we encounter the idea that industry and
experiment are the first forms in which human thinking is expressed. In-
dustrial action, labor action, and experiment! Why experiment? It is a
practical action separate from the need to achieve a practical result, an
action directed only at attaining knowledge about its applicability or inap-
plicability, pliancy or lack of pliancy, hardness or lack of hardness, and so
on. You see, this recalls trials at the elementary stages of ontogenic and
phylogenic development. However, it is not trials that reveal the special
features of the cognitive process, but starting with the special features of
the cognitive process, one can understand trials. The problem has been
turned upside down compared to how it was formulated in early behavior-
ism, for example.
38 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

Let me ask a clarifying question (with a purely didactic purpose), so

that everything will be perfectly clear.
When we say that an action is taking place with the help of trial and
error, are the trials chaotic? Or are they not chaotic? Even at the level of
animal psychology? Is everything tried, or just certain things? They are
not chaotic.
Have you understood the sense in which the problem has been turned
upside down? Things are not chaotic, although they may be portrayed as
chaotic. I recall something I saw: a fence, and by the fence a chicken
(the chicken, as is well known, is frankly not among the smartest of
animals, but is a really stupid bird); but if you put it in a really ridiculous
situation—you start to chase it with a broom or something, it rushes
about here and there and goes through a hole in the fence, and now you,
thank goodness, have finished waving your threatening broom. You
repeat the experiment and gradually, what happens? The number of nec-
essary trials is reduced. Theoretically, we are told that there is a learning
curve, and you can look and see if such a curve always really appears. If
it is a very idiotic situation, then in animals it always appears. But if you
just slightly bring the situation of this experiment closer to a situation
that resembles real life, you will see that in the best case you will get a
certain start to the curve—a decline, and then suddenly the curve falls
vertically and the solution appears with so-called good mistakes. You
simply introduced it into a situation what an ethologist would now rec-
ognize as appropriate for observing animals, that is, a situation that does
not resemble one where, let us say, a rabbit is taught to play the flute, but
more like one where a rabbit is taught to play the drums. I am sure you
understand the difference? One relies on an acting mechanism and the
other has nothing at all to rely on.
So, I would say, simplifying things completely (comrades, today I
am talking with you, and not reading you a lecture; I want to give you
this idea as simply as I can from the start), I insist that perception can
with a little imagination be compared to hitting a ball that goes straight
into the pocket in billiards. But, with thinking it is harder, trickier: there
is always a “double play,” there is always the relationship between ob-
jects. You see, an object is only able to influence or affect me to the
extent that I have organs for that—sight, as a reflection of light beams,
mechanical, given contact, like a vibrating body (keeping in mind elas-
tic waves that reach my hearing organs), through their chemical proper-
ties (albeit limited to a very small set) on the organ of taste, smell. We
 SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2005 39

are able to pick up only small pieces. If I want to find out whether a
solution is slightly acidic or slightly alkaline, I try tasting it, but I cannot
tell. I cannot say, because the threshold is fuzzy. But, if a litmus paper
turns pink, it is acid, if you please—if it turns blue, then it is alkaline. I
can judge the chemical property based on the color. I can determine the
presence of hydrogen based on the black spectral line—I use one to
determine the other. I test these connections, I develop them, I deter-
mine the rules by which these connections operate, and that is how logic
emerges, because if these connections are made more complex, the ob-
ject moves farther away. If the object is mediated multiple times, then I
have to pass through the paths of mediation, and this is practically im-
possible unless the theoretical thinking that is essential to conscious-
ness—thinking that does not rely directly on practical interactions,
however complex and far-removed they may be—comes into effect. We
have to use some guiding thread so we do not lose our way, some appa-
ratus. And this apparatus, the means, the thread, are the logical appara-
tus that does not allow us to become lost—to the contrary, it shows us
the way. But the process, in essence, remains the same at any level of
development in any form. These complex relations are not immediately
evident—the transition from “I” and “object” to “I” and “judgment made
about one object based on the change in another.” I need to determine
the height of a tree, but there is a river between me and the tree. It is
frightfully cold and I am not planning to swim across the river. I am not
planning to catch pneumonia. And in any event, I cannot cross the river.
I cannot swim and I do not have the necessary means. I cannot walk to
the tree. But do I need to go to it or not? Can I substitute a theoretical
process for the practical process of measuring the distance to the tree?
Who does not know elementary geometry, which teaches how to calcu-
late such a value? I am able to do this. For this there is a theory and
theoretical thinking. We are forever shortening the path. We incorpo-
rate theoretical links, with which we arm our thinking, and we deter-
mine the angles. We determine two angles, we calculate the rest—and
there was no need to cross the river. And this is called theoretical
computation.
But, however complex we may make things, whatever abstractions
we may introduce, whatever hypotheses we may put forward, they al-
ways have their sensory starting point. And the mediated path, which,
again, predicts some point, which we can use to judge the correctness or
incorrectness of the process we are predicting, is always complex. There-
40 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY

fore, the intricate, abstract sciences remain all the same within the bounds
of the function that they fulfill; they are incorporated inside the process.
Logic can never become a subject of perception, no kind of logic. The
subject of perception is still the person. Its true object is the world, reality.
And, not only the reality that is capable of exerting its direct effect on the
sensory organs, but also all actuality that takes the form of interactions.
And is the reality that does not possess the attribute of interacting
with anything hidden from man? Such reality does not exist. It is not
reality, but “unreality,” negative reality, since we always see interaction
between the elements of the world. Behind interaction there is the world
itself, right? There is nothing else. So, a noninteracting world is total
nonsense. And a world that does not know interaction is unknowable.
But there is no such world, not under any circumstances. On that note, I
end the introduction to this topic.

Notes

1. See A.M. Matiushkin, ed., The Psychology of Thinking [Psikhologiia

myshleniia] (Moscow, 1965).
2. See New Ideas in Philosophy [Novye idei v filosofii], Collection 16, Psychol-
ogy of Thinking [Psikhologiia myshleniia] (St. Petersburg, 1914).
3. L. Levi-Briul’ [Lévy-Bruhl], Primitive Mentality [Pervobytnoe myshlenie]
(Moscow, 1930).

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