Per una “scienza nuova” della natura umana. Esperienza, cognizione e linguaggio in Lev S. Vygotskij

This paper aims to reconstruct how Lev Semenovich Vygotsky considers the relationship between bodily experience and the emergence of cognition and language, distinguishing himself as a key interlocutor concerning many still open questions within the contemporary debate in cognitive science. Vygotsky was the first psychologist to understand the human mind as a fundamentally social and historical entity that has its raison d’être – its natural basis, so to speak – in the totality of the social relations that each of us (with our physicality) maintains with the external environment. In this respect, the process of language acquisition in children represents a privileged starting point to grasp not only the relationships between human cognition and language but also the social and socio-cognitive capacities that define us as a species. Human beings relate to the world in what may be described as an “ethological” mode, a field of actions and interactions that includes not only engagement with the external environment but also reflexive interaction with the self. This intrapersonal dimension gives rise to an inner dialogue, which plays a fundamental role in the emergence of thought, self-awareness, and self-regulation. Vygotsky’s anti-dualist perspective – drawing inspiration from the thought of Baruch Spinoza – offers a crucial theoretical foundation for a naturalistic and phenomenological account of human behavior as inherently social. In this sense, his approach may be understood as a form of “new science,” to borrow Giambattista Vico’s phrase. From this standpoint, human beings and their artifacts emerge from a natural history (in the Wittgensteinian sense) grounded in poieîn, sociogenesis, and the historicity of higher mental functions. Consequently, all human cognitive activity is socially and historically determined.