Thought and Language, revised and expanded edition (Mit Press) Paperback – July 6, 2012

Groundbreaking and insightful.

Easy to read!

This book was essential to my research. It is an easy read and not overly filled with jargon. It is a great resource for someone trying to explain Vygotsky's theories

I am not a linguist but rather a psychologist interested in the relation between thought and language. From reading this translation, I infer that Vygotsky was a great writer and the translators likewise. I've read current literature and this work has a remarkably contemporary feel to me. If you're interested in the topic, you can't go wrong with this classic.

Excellent resource and service!!

Starts off slow introducing things to the reader and builds up over time until it picks up and gets better in explaining in detail the results of his work and his conclusions after all the hard work of getting past all the framework for a good many chapters in. The book can be a bit extensive, but it's not overwhelmingly taxing with poor formatting and typography thankfully, rather, it makes it a little easier to read and understand the views being conveyed; however, as subject matter is concerned, it leaves an interesting cliffhanger of the usual "can you use an abstract modular framework to explain and describe the nature of thought relative to language or not?"The question itself is basically the same kind of wall that quantum physics is being blocked by as well in it's understanding of that phenomena. At the same time, it's also another rehashed and repeated question of "Can we explain the nature of thought, mind and consciousness without the rationality of a model's theoretical framework?" In which, he declines no, but has left contributions of the stages and nature of thought over the developmental span and how concrete and abstract concepts are formed by performance of pattern recognition of those concepts, but are limited to the framework of language and feels and believes this his work and model like his predecessors and the rest to be contemporary and nothing novel or timeless.Basically, it all boils down to questioning the nature of the model's framework, and if it does fall inline with ontological reality or not and will there? Afterwards, he gives his final thoughts and leaves the conclusions in a cliffhanger where he too was stumped and eventually concluded from there and once again posed the question of trying to understand the ontological nature of the fundamental laws of human thought, mind and consciousness with or without a modular theoretical framework. Unfortunately, despite his efforts and untimely death, his work has been left inconclusive.Despite the excellent formatting of this book, the subject matter also wasn't as great and interesting as hoped for and made out to be to the reader to be disappointed and underwhelmed by the explanation and reviews for it to be worth an expensive $25 to acquire in one's library. Sure, it had some interesting information, but almost nothing home to write about or even worth keeping in a library if you want someone else's take and methodology of their findings in one book which honestly didn't lead much to all or even comes to any good conclusion either.This is to help the curious reader whose curiosity is piqued by both the cover and synopsis, in hopes that it'll give them an idea as to what it is they're in for to help save them the disappointment of them being overhyped for what it isn't: a model for the nature of thought and consciousness. It's an explanation of the framework, processes and findings of those experiments he observed and conducted. Nothing else.

An important book about Vygotsky

For a long time, early Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky was a notable presence on the margins of American psychology, especially educational psychology: and there were those of us in other intellectual fields who were potentially looking for a star from the East to brighten our day. Unfortunately, *Thought and Language* as 'corrected and updated' by MIT Press some decades ago is unlikely to help you make psychological sense of the present. Trained as a humanist, Vygotsky might be expected to take Philistine psychology and give it cultural discipline; there is plenty of culture in this book, but little discipline. Picking two huge and ill-defined topics, thought and speech, Vygotsky gives us critiques of (early) Piaget and Stern on the child's gradual development of an adult mentality in these areas (placing self-interested behavior at the end of the genetic process rather than its beginning), but even compared to Freud Vygotsky's naturalism is almost non-existent.Marx's dictum "The anatomy of man is the key to the anatomy of the ape" is, taken literally, exactly the wrong advice for someone trying to understand the biology of mindedness: in this book Vygotsky simply asserts man's primacy amongst the primates, rather than carefully rooting human abilities in animal ethology as a whole. Ultimately, if psychology is going to be more than elaborations on cherished prejudices -- be they shockingly reactionary, as with Steven Pinker's defense at the turn of the century of of the idea of racial IQ differences, or blue-sky socialist platitudes uttered under Stalin's heel -- there needs to be explanadum and explanans coherently related. Perhaps Vygotsky's follower Luria delivered this, but Vygotsky doesn't.(NB: If you are concerned about the justice this translation, which could benefit from a judiciously inserted grammatical article or two, does to the book there is another rarer translation in an English-language "Collected Works".)