Identity is a phenomenon that emerges from the dialectic between individual and society.
— Berger and Luckmann (1966, 174)
Learning to mean, or to think or to know, is an intersubjective process, as John Dewey realized.
When the introspectionist thinks he has withdrawn into a wholly private realm of events disparate from other events, made out of mental stuff, he is only turning his attention to his own soliloquy. And soliloquy is the product and reflex of converse with others; social communication not an effect of soliloquy. If we had not talked with others and they with us, we should never talk to and with ourselves.
— Dewey 1929, 141
The Russian psychologist Vygotsky further developed this observation.
The major theme of Vygotsky’s theoretical framework is that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition. Vygotsky (1978) states: ‘Every function in the child’s cultural development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level; first, between people (interpsychological) and then inside the child (intrapsychological). This applies equally to voluntary attention, to logical memory, and to the formation of concepts. All the higher functions originate as actual relationships between individuals.’ … For example, in the learning of language, our first utterances with peers or adults are for the purpose of communication but once mastered they become internalized and allow ‘inner speech’.
— tip.psychology.org/vygotsky.html, c.2007
For an intelligence to function there must be another intelligence. Vygotsky was the first to stress: ‘Every higher function is divided between two people, is a mutual psychological process.’ Intelligence is always an interlocutor.
— Lotman (1990, 2)
But Lotman also stressed the role of ‘autocommunication’ within cultures. In ‘I-s/he’ communication, information coded in a text or message passes from one person to another or others; the text is a variable while the code is constant and shared between the interlocutors. But in the I-I mode of autocommunication, (including the situation where a culture addresses itself), the content of the text is constant while the code is variable – giving room for polyversity – and actual variation leads to self-discovery or transformation. In this case the message is addressed to one’s future self, as Peirce said, but the change to this new self is triggered by a crossing of ‘codes’ rather than ‘messages’: the object is fixed but the sign forks and the thought moves in a new direction. According to Lotman (1990, Chapter 2), the most viable cultures are those in which these two modes, ‘autocommunication’ and interpresonal dialogue, are in constant tension.
Human consciousness is heterogeneous. A minimal thinking apparatus must include at least two differently constructed systems to exchange information they each have worked out.
— Lotman (1990, 36)
Lotman (Chapter 3) finds a parallel between the organization of culture and that of the brain’s two hemispheres: the difference is between discrete and continuous (digital and analog) coding systems, exchanging information by means of rhetorical tropes (‘turns’) such as metaphor and metonymy.
The interrelationship between cultural memory and its self-reflection is like a constant dialogue: texts from chronologically earlier periods are brought into culture and, interacting with contemporary mechanisms, generate an image of the historical past, which culture transfers into the past and which, like an equal partner in a dialogue, affects the present. But as it transforms the present, the past too changes its shape. This process does not take place in a vacuum: both partners in the dialogue are partners too in other confrontations, both are open to the intrusion of new texts from outside, and the texts, as we have already had cause to stress, always contain in themselves the potentiality for new interpretations. This image of the historical past is not anti-scientific, although it is not scientific either. It exists alongside the scientific image of the past like another reality and interacts with it also on the basis of dialogue.
— Lotman (1990, 272)