CONCEPT
Cultural-Historical Theory
The school of psychology Vygotsky founded with Luria and Leontiev — the claim that higher psychological functions are constructed through the use of cultural tools, that development is fundamentally social, and that the tools a society makes available shape the minds it produces.
Cultural-historical theory is the intellectual tradition Vygotsky launched in Moscow in the late 1920s and that survived his death to shape developmental psychology, educational theory, and now the analysis of technology-mediated cognition. Its central claim is that what distinguishes human cognition from that of other species is not raw computational power but the mediation of cognitive activity by cultural tools — especially language — that are learned through social interaction and then internalized to restructure the individual mind. The tools are not incidental; they are constitutive. A literate society produces literate minds, which think differently from pre-literate minds. The tradition thus treats every major transition in cultural tools — writing, printing, computation, and now artificial intelligence — as an event in the developmental history of human cognition.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The tradition distinguishes itself from three alternatives. Against behaviorism, it insists on the internal psychological