A DIFFICULT PROBLEM OF COMMUNICATION: CONTINUATION OF THE DIALOGUE WITH E.F. TARASOV

Zhuravlev I.V.

Moscow International Academy
Moscow, Russia
e-mail: semiotik@yandex.ru

Introduction: Personality and Science

The loss that befell our science in September 2024 stirred up a vast field of the unspoken, the unspoken, the uncomprehended, the misunderstood. The head of the Moscow School of Psycholinguistics, Evgeny Fedorovich Tarasov (1935–2024), has passed away—a man whose personal and scientific legacy cannot be adequately represented by any list of accomplishments, no matter how lengthy, or by a list of scientific publications. We maintained a dialogue with him for many years, and this dialogue continues today.

Evgeny Fedorovich staunchly defended the methodological positions on which Russian psycholinguistics was built—L.S. Vygotsky's cultural-historical psychology and A.N. Leontiev's general psychological theory of activity. At the same time, he understood that no theory can claim to exhaustively explain all possible facts in a given subject area, that theory is not a rigid set of postulates, that it must evolve... "Wait a minute! Citing Leontiev doesn't prove anything!" he would often say in a polemic. It was he, as the School's center of gravity, who nurtured philosophical thinking in his students and colleagues; it was through his guidance that PhD candidates learned to relate their research to a post-nonclassical type of rationality and rely on a triangulation approach.

The Psycholinguistics Sector of the Institute of Linguistics was a remarkable place. It was always bustling with life. Staff, graduate students, colleagues from other departments, always someone arriving from faraway places, someone rushing straight to the train station with a suitcase… A huge armchair towered over them (according to legend, it belonged to A.A. Reformatsky). A photograph of Wittgenstein was pinned to the wall of a cabinet, and next to it, another: A.A. Leontiev conversing with Noam Chomsky… The desk of the chief (as his colleagues called Yevgeny Fedorovich) was always piled high with papers, folders, and books. Something incredibly interesting was being discussed—the organization of a new experiment, a scientific problem, someone's article or book. And everyone who entered was greeted with extraordinary hospitality. "Get a sandwich! Marina, pour him some tea! Take care of the guest!" There's always something delicious on the table, and the whole institute knows it... Marina, always on top of things, pours five spoons of sugar into the chef's large cup, and the conversation continues. Amazing friendliness, interest, a willingness to listen, support, and help... Subtle irony, laughter, and characteristic gestures. He always genuinely endeared himself to his interlocutors.

Not just research, but also extensive practice. Not just theory, but also experiment. "Psycholinguistics," he said, "is the linguistics of the future, since there can no longer be a modern linguistic theory that is not tested experimentally!" Not a single-minded focus on a single problem, not a single-field limitation, but a broad outlook, an interest in everything: any cultural object could captivate him as a subject of study. Not desk work, above all, but teamwork, interaction with a huge number of colleagues and students, the formation of a School that, developing like a broad wave, reached the remote corners of the country and spread beyond its borders, engaging and captivating new people, initiating the emergence of new research teams. He was the center of gravity, the organizing force of the School... Not just immersion in the past, not just a brilliant grasp of the fundamentals, but the shaping of the future.

His texts are profound and thoughtful, his language complex, his formulations beautiful and precise. Discussing and explaining speech activity and verbal communication, speaking of non-linguistic and linguistic consciousness, he always recognized the need for philosophical reflection on the categories of internal and external, individual and social, activity, consciousness, and language. He was convinced that only an activity-based explanatory principle allows for an adequate approach to solving the four main tasks of psycholinguistics—answering questions about how speech is generated, perceived, verbal communication, and the ontogenesis of speech ability occur. All these tasks stem from one—the task of describing the ontology of verbal communication.

As E.F. Tarasov wrote, verbal communication is "a complex process that includes external and internal links. External links can be understood as the production and perception of spoken or written speech, accompanied by the co-use of non-linguistic signs, i.e., what is found in the interpersonal space between communicants. Internal links are the mental processes that ensure the production and perception of external speech" [6, p. 107]. But the most important thing is that "for communicants, speech is only an instrument for regulating the behavior of the interlocutor with the goal of organizing joint activity (JA) with him, aimed at producing cultural objects that satisfy the needs of communicants" [ibid.]. In other words, the ontology of verbal communication is an activity-based ontology.

Neglect of this fact leads to the formation of reductionist models of verbal communication. Just as solving the "hard problem of consciousness" [9] proves fundamentally impossible if the psychophysical problem is reduced to the "consciousness-body" problem (instead of considering the social individual as the bearer of consciousness), so too solving the "hard problem of communication" leads the researcher into dead ends if they neglect the internal sociality of communicants. Man "acts within himself in a social manner" [3, p. 412]—this is the key tenet of cultural-historical psychology and the general psychological theory of activity, which allows us to avoid reductionism in the construction of a theory of verbal communication.

The difficult problem of communication

The hard problem of communication can be called the problem of "linking" the individual and the social. But, as with the "hard problem of consciousness," we are talking about concretizing Descartes' psychophysical problem. Let me remind you that the snag for modern neuroscience and modern analytic philosophy is the question of how conscious experience is related to physical (brain) processes: no matter how we describe physical processes in the brain, we will never understand how and why these processes are accompanied by "qualia," subjective experience (and precisely this, and not some other subjective experience). For example, when I perceive a table, I also experience what it is like to perceive a table, i.e. I have the qualia of a table—a subjective conscious perception that I cannot share with anyone else, since the other person will have his perception, not mine (here we can recall T. Nagel's famous article "What is it like to be a bat?" [10]). In this regard, D. Chalmers asks why we are "not dark inside" and argues that modern functionalism (the explanation of the phenomena of consciousness from the point of view of their functional role in the regulation of behavior) will never be able to answer this question [9]. It is clear that in cultural-historical psychology and in the general psychological theory of activity, the psychophysical problem (and, accordingly, the problem of qualia) is removed. F.T. Mikhailov spoke in this regard about the "end of the psychophysical problem" [5], and A.N. Leontiev firmly stated that the "real opposition" is the opposition between image and process, and not the opposition between consciousness (as internal) and the objective world (as external) [4, p. 368]. Accordingly, the difficult problem of communication must also be resolved here.

But let's at least try to formulate it first. I believe the difficult problem of communication can be represented in the following (and similar) questions:

(1) If the participants in communication must «already» be essentially connected to each other before they can begin to communicate, then how can one move from this connection to the very experience of communication, the continuity of which is irreversibly lost in the process of such a transition?

(2) If what is «experienced» is always the «private,» i.e. some unique content that alone can be communicated, since there is no need to communicate the «general» («public»), then how does this «private» become «public» in the forms of communication, while preserving its substantive communicative value precisely as «private»?

(3) If the subject of communication is decentralized, if he is fundamentally opaque to himself and can be accessible to himself only in the forms of communication, i.e. is always «other» to himself, then how can he possess that «private» content that must be «transmitted» to another in the act of communication?

(4) If thought is simultaneous and speech is successive, then how is it possible to articulate thought and understand speech? Moving from speech to thought, one can discover only condensed forms of speech, and moving from thought to speech, one can discover nothing at all (what is "expressed" in speech is something completely different from what was "contained" in thought). Who then communicates, and how?

Situations in which this problem manifests itself include situations understanding of another (which seems impossible due to the «obviousness» of the fact that we can only understand ourselves), appeals to another (which, it seems, must be embedded in any communicative act as if «in advance,» i.e. even before the act of communication reveals to us the other to whom we must turn), understanding oneself (it is unclear how to understand ourselves if we are accessible to ourselves only through the means of addressing another) and appeals to oneself (in order to address oneself, one must somehow already be given to oneself, and one can only be given to oneself through the means of addressing another and oneself as another). The sociality of the communicant must always «run» ahead of itself (we discussed this problem, without calling it difficult, however, in the 2005 article [1]).

Why do we call the difficult problem of communication a concretization of the psychophysical problem? The fact is that, no matter which of the proposed formulations of our problem we consider, we will find a statement of an "explanatory gap," which, it may seem, points to an ontological rift between the "given" and the "represented," the "private" and the "public," "thought" and "speech." As if, in discovering this gap, we find ourselves forced to say that what is thought, felt, and experienced is one thing, while what is communicated, formalized by external means, and put into words is something entirely different. It was no coincidence that L.S. Vygotsky said that the problem of thinking and speech is via regia all of historical psychology [3, p. 293]. One would like to attribute thought to one substance, and speech to another...

But, as we know, cultural-historical psychology is an anti-Cartesian, monistic psychology, requiring us not to divide the world into two substances, but to see it in its unity. Therefore, in discussing the difficult problem of communication, we must now try to answer the question of how it can be resolved within the theory of verbal communication.

Theory of speech communication: controversial issues

Here we again return to the dialogue with E.F. Tarasov. The fundamental postulate of the theory he defends is that "when analyzing verbal communication, it is necessary in each specific case to identify the activity within whose structure the analyzed communication unfolds" [7, p. 32]. Communication serves to organize activity. Accordingly, a person enters into communication with another person only when they need to organize joint activity, i.e., when they cannot solve the problems facing them by their own means. Evgeny Fedorovich always defended this thesis and was adamant about it. And here we had a heated debate. For Evgeny Fedorovich, the main thing was that communicants, during communication, solve a number of problems that can be divided into two groups: some problems are aimed at organizing communication, others at organizing activity. For example, a person must orient the interlocutor in themselves, as well as indicate to them what and why they can do together. "The pragmatic function of speech is to serve as a tool for organizing the joint activities of members of society who cannot satisfy their needs alone and are therefore forced to cooperate with one another, which requires the ability to regulate each other's external and internal behavior. Such regulation presupposes that employees can, through speech, communicate their thoughts to one another, and by focusing on these, they can coordinate their internal and external actions" [8, p. 128].

While agreeing with this general scheme and the basic postulate of the theory, my objections were that a person is often not oriented within himself and may not know why he enters into communication and what activity he is organizing. Therefore, one of the necessary tasks solved by a communicant in the course of communication must be not only the interlocutor’s orientation within himself, but also (and even primarily) the communicant’s orientation within himself. Looking at others, we look at ourselves; through others we recognize ourselves. Accordingly, in our discussions, I emphasized the necessity of communication for a person’s self-organization, noting that we communicate with ourselves in the same way as with other people [2]. This statement contains one of the main theses of L.S. Vygotsky: we use signs to control our own behavior and have access to ourselves only in the forms of the same means that we use to control the behavior of other people. I regulate my own behavior in the same way as the behavior of another person; I communicate with myself as with another, but this requires language, requires signs. All consciousness is "wired" with signs; without a sign, there is no consciousness, since to perceive is the same as to signify, i.e., to translate into a form accessible for communication to another and to oneself as another. The primary system of signs is language, and therefore consciousness is impossible without language.

Evgeny Fedorovich found such formulations radical. He insisted that images of consciousness are externalized through linguistic means only when a person is faced with the need to convey something to another in order to organize joint activity; the images of consciousness themselves, from this perspective, are non-linguistic, for they are accessible to their bearer without language. If an image is externalized in language, then it is inevitably transformed; when a person shares the contents of their consciousness with someone, they clothe this content in forms common to the communicants—in the forms of language. But in generating an utterance, that is, moving from thought to speech, we inevitably lose something. This is why Evgeny Fedorovich so often quoted the words of Fyodor Tyutchev: "A thought expressed is a lie." I do not need to formulate for myself what I formulate for another. Hence the opposition between non-linguistic and linguistic consciousness; language here functions as a mode of consciousness's existence in an external form. The key to understanding one person by another is the commonality of their consciousness, which is connected not so much with language as with their belonging to the same culture, the objects of which can act for them as objects of their joint activity.

Anti-reductionism in the theory of speech communication

The astute reader will recognize that the formulations presented reveal the problem we have called the difficult problem of communication. It is important to understand that both positions presented are based on an activity-based methodology, meaning that the similarities between them still outweigh the differences. Calling the theory of verbal communication he advocated anti-reductionist, Evgeny Fedorovich contrasted it with various reductionist models based on an ontological criterion: any model of verbal communication will be reductionist if it fails to take into account the "multiplicity" of communicants and their involvement in joint activity. In reductionist models, "communicants are depicted as single subjects, each of whom alone produces and perceives a verbal message" [6, p. 108]. I'll add that communication between "single subjects," one of whom "produces" something and the other "perceives," is impossible in principle, for to be a subject of communication means to be a social subject, i.e., a subject who "carries" a system of social relations within their head (this is precisely the concept of personality in the general psychological theory of activity). Only a social being can engage in communication and organize activity, for only a social perspective allows one to see things as objects of shared activity. Humans are such beings; they are always social beings (as long, of course, as they retain their humanity).

The gap between "private" and "public" exists only because each of us possesses a unique position in activity, our own "non-alibi in being," as Mikhail Bakhtin put it. The "I" is a sign of a person's position in activity. Activity is the substance of consciousness; it is essentially only social. Thus, what is experienced, perceived, and realized is always something unique and singular, yet this same uniqueness is only possible as public, collective, and universal. By emphasizing one or the other, we risk overlooking the "preceding unity" (for example, the unity of thought and speech). I have no accessible contents that I could not share with others, since they are accessible to me in the same forms in which I can share them. Conversely, however, I am always the subject or bearer of these contents; I relate them to myself, I appropriate them, even if only in generally significant forms. "Private" is only possible in "public" forms; the first-person position is an internalized third-person position. The dispute is resolved, the problem is resolved.

Of course, a solution to the problem cannot be justified in a few formulations; here we have only outlined the path along which this solution should be sought. Just as the difficult problem of consciousness cannot be solved by adhering to a physicalist ontology, i.e., by attempting to correlate states of consciousness with processes in the brain (here physicalism, even calling itself nonreductive, remains essentially reductionist), so too the difficult problem of communication cannot be solved by attempting to correlate the individual and the social as if it were assumed that initially asocial individuals could one day gather together and begin to communicate, producing their sociality. The solution to both problems is possible only within an activity-based ontology. The contribution of Evgeny Fedorovich Tarasov to the substantiation of this ontology is invaluable.

Literature

1. Zhuravlev I.V. Communication Time // Man: Image and Essence. 2005: Theories of Truth. Language in the Context of Globalization. Moscow: INION, 2005. Pp. 83–108.
2. Zhuravlev I.V. E.F. Tarasov's Theory of Speech Communication: Methodology and Development Prospects // Questions of Psycholinguistics. 2020. No. 2 (44). P. 16–26.
3. Notebooks of L.S. Vygotsky. Selected Works / Edited by Ekaterina Zavershneva and René van der Veer. Moscow: Canon+ Publishing House, ROOI Rehabilitation, 2018. 608 p.
4. Leontiev A.N. Formation of activity psychology: early works. Moscow: Smysl, 2003. 439 p.
5. Mikhailov F.T. The Riddle of the Human Self. 2nd ed. Moscow: Politizdat, 1976. 287 p.
6. Tarasov E.F. Metaphysics of speech communication // Metaphysics. 2022. No. 3 (45). P. 105–113.
7. Tarasov E.F. Problems of the Theory of Speech Communication: A scientific report on published works, submitted for defense for the degree of Doctor of Philological Sciences. Moscow: Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences, 1992. 56 p.
8. Tarasov E.F. Theory of speech activity: methodological foundations // Metaphysics. 2024. No. 3 (53). P. 125–133.
9. Chalmers D. The hard problem of consciousness // The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Second Edition. Edited by Susan Schneider and Max Velmans. John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2017. 32–42.
10. Nagel T. What is like to be a bat? // Philosophy of mind: classical and contemporary readings / David J. Chalmers. NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 219–226.

References

1. Zhuravlev IV. Time of Communication // Man: Image and Essence. 2005: Theories of Truth. Language in the Context of Globalization. Moscow: INION, 2005. pp. 83–108.
2. Zhuravlev I.V. E. F. Tarasov’s theory of speech communication: methodology and development prospects // Voprosy psiholingvistiki. No. 2 (44). P. 16–26.
3. Notebooks of L. S. Vygotsky. Selected / Under the general editorship of Ekaterina Zavershneva and Rene van der Veer. Moscow: Publishing House "Kanon+" ROOI "Reabilitaciya", 2018. 608 p.
4. Leont'ev AN. Formation of the psychology of activity: Early work. Moscow: Smysl, 2003. 439 p.
5. Mihajlov FT. The Riddle of the Human Self. Izd. 2nd edition. M.: Politizdat, 1976. 287 s.
6. Tarasov EF. Metaphysics of speech communication // Metafizika. 2022. No. 3 (45). P. 105–113.
7. Tarasov EF. Problems of the theory of speech communication: Scientific report on published works, submitted for defense for the degree of Doctor of Philological Sciences. : Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences, 1992. 56 p.
8. Tarasov EF. Theory of speech activity: methodological foundations // Metafizika. 2024. No. 3 (53). P. 125–133.
9. Chalmers D. The hard problem of consciousness // The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, Second Edition. Edited by Susan Schneider and Max Velmans. John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2017. Pp. 32–42.
10. Nagel T. What is like to be a bat? // Philosophy of mind: classical and contemporary readings / David J. Chalmers. NY: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 219–226.