A dialogical conception of concepts

Concepts as generalizations

Concepts ² as word meanings are generalizations: “There is no question that any concept is a generalization” (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, p. 224). In this sense, and following our previous emphasis on generalizations, from our reading of Vygotsky, it seems that concepts are mental operations that occur each time one uses words to signify, for instance, to communicate, to reason, to understand, or in problem solving:

The concept does not live in isolation, that is not a congealed, static formation but a formation that is encountered in the vital and complex process of thinking. A concept always fulfills some function in communication, reasoning, understanding, or problem solving. (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, p. 123)

As an operation, according to Vygotsky’s (1934/1987) emphasis in chapter 5, concepts are involved in the functional use of the word. This means that concepts are what they are because of their function in social life and not because of their place in the language system. In fact, using a concrete word or utterance does not correspond directly with a particular concept. To have a word is not to have a concept. Concept, as a generalization, is the specific mental path in which thinking unfolds in a specific use of language. However, although concepts as generalizations occur in language use, they do not coincide with it. While it is possible for two thinking subjects to use a word in the same way, each of them may be operating with that word differently, that is, generalizing in a different way. This is due to the developmental difference between, for example, an adult and a child.

Before we continue, it is important to say something about terminology. We have been referring to concepts as word meanings and generalizations. The problem is that Vygotsky (1934/1987) uses confused terminology across chapters 5 and 6. In chapter 5, he reports the results of an empirical investigation with the “method of double stimulation.” This experiment allows Vygotsky and his colleagues to see how children’s generalizations develop when they do not already know the meaning of the words involved. He describes three “structures of generalization,” that is, ways of generalizing that share some basic criteria: syncretic, complexes, and concepts. The idea is that children share the ways in which they generalize at some stages of development, but they change the way they generalize as they get older. From this point of view, and in this chapter, the notion of concepts only corresponds to the more developed and systematic means of generalization (“true concept”). However, in chapter 6 of the same book, the author uses the notion of concept also to refer to the early of generalization. Following the distinction made by Piaget, he develops his ideas around the distinction between spontaneous and scientific concepts. It is worth noting that this apparent inconsistency may be attributed to the different dates (and purposes) when both chapters were written (see Yasnitsky, 2011).

There is no explicit reference in the book to how the different structures of generalization of chapter 5 correspond to the distinction in chapter 6. Nonetheless, there are valid reasons to consider that scientific concepts are “true concepts” (both are attained during adolescence due to their specific social demands and activities) and that spontaneous concepts are typically complexive ways of thinking (Blunden, 2012; Miller, 2011). The problem that arises with the use of this terminology is that the term concept has a twofold meaning. On the one hand, concept refers to the meaning-making activity of generalizing with the use of words. On the other hand, it refers to the more developed stage of this activity. In order to make our points clearly, we will be using the notion of concept as involving both scientific and spontaneous of generalization.

Developmental aspects of concepts

Vygotsky (1934/1987) sends a clear and straightforward message: concepts develop. In both chapter 5 and chapter 6 he discusses how and why concepts develop with both micro (mostly ch. 5) and ontogenetic descriptions. In chapter 5 he describes the three types of structures of generalizations aforementioned. Syncretic concepts are the early forms of generalization and consist of grouping things as unordered and unformed collections with only a diffuse relation to the word, and by subjective, mostly perceptual, criteria. Vygotsky describes three phases of syncretic concepts.

Complexes are generalizations that occur according to objective features, but that lack systematic and single connections of logical equivalent type. Vygotsky describes five phases of complexes, the fifth of which is of utmost importance, called “pseudoconcept.” Pseudoconcepts are apparently similar to concepts in the sense that children and adults coincide in the use of words. However, adults and children differ in the type of generalizations they make. Although children seem to generalize in systematic ways, the connections are not completely logical and stable. Vygotsky says that pseudoconcepts are the most common complexes in the lives of young children. Even though he describes many phases of syncretic and complexes, the truth is that in real life words are not unknown to the children. They do not invent words, but encounter them already formed and filled with meaning in their social life.

The difference between pseudoconcepts and “true concepts” is the lack of abstraction of the former. Vygotsky considers abstraction as corresponding to another “root of development” that humans share with other animals, which unfolds in parallel to the generalization processes described above. Complexive thinking is mostly synthetical, that is: “it is permeated with an over abundance of connections and is characterized by a paucity of abstraction. The capacity of isolate features is extremely limited” (1934/1987, p. 156). At some point in development, generalization and abstraction collaborate in concept formation, constituting what is called “true concept,” in which generalization is based on connections of a stable and logical type. These stable connections are possible due to the use of abstraction in conceptualization. Although abstraction is present in children’s lives from early stages of development, it is not fully present in conceptualization until adolescence: “The concept arises when several abstracted features are re-synthetized and when this abstract synthesis becomes the basic form of thinking through which the child perceives and interprets reality” (1934/1987, p. 159).

Two comments are relevant at this point. First, these three types of generalization (syncretic, complexes, and concepts) are structures of generalization, each involving different phases. The notion of structure of generalization is important, because it expresses that multiple generalizations may occur according to common patterns that show some stability over time and across people. Second, as Miller (2011) points out clearly, abstraction as the second root of concept development shows how the so-called “natural line of development” should not be overlooked in reconstructing Vygotsky’s theory of concepts.

In chapter 6 Vygotsky (1934/1987) discusses the difference between spontaneous and scientific concepts. Whereas the first are generalizations that are spontaneously learnt, scientific concepts are learnt through a systematic instructional relationship between children and adults. This chapter sheds light on “true concept” characteristics, the most important of which is the presence of a system. Scientific concepts are generalizations that are mediated by other generalizations, or concepts. They have no direct relation to reality or concrete objects but mediate ones. That is why they are generalizations that occur through stable connections. These connections do not depend on perceptual or situational aspects, but on the system in which all these generalizations are interconnected.

Vygotsky affirms that every generalization is a generalization of previous ones, that is, any act of generalization occurs based on past generalizations and transforms them. Scientific concepts are, in a way, generalizations of spontaneous concepts, or complexive ways of thinking. This is one of the reasons why children and adults can coincide over the use of words but think through different concepts. Generalizations unfold according to the specific use of words, but this is only part of the story. They also unfold influenced by previous generalizations and according to the ontogenetic conceptual history of a given individual:

By addressing the child in speech, adults determine the path along which the development of generalization will move and where the development will lead, that is, they determine the resulting generalizations. However, the adult cannot transfer his own mode of thinking to the child. Children acquire word meanings from adults, but they are obliged to represent these meanings as concrete objects and complexes. (1934/1987, p. 143)

The role of speech in concept development

According to Vygotsky’s (1934/1987) theory of concept development, generalizations develop. The fundamental question is why. The author says it succinctly but emphatically in chapter 5: concepts develop because of the functional uses of the word. The use of language in social practices and collaborative activity is the main reason for concept development. This does not imply a denial of the individual and natural factors that co-participate in this development, but it does shed light on the nature of concepts: “The new, essential, and central feature of this process [concept formation], the feature that can be viewed as the proximal cause of the maturation of concepts, is a specific way of using the words” (1934/1987, p. 131).

Conventional and social uses of language orient children’s generalizations. However, and as it is possible to appreciate in the quote from p. 143, adults cannot simply transfer their generalizations to children in a kind of magic use of words. The conventional use of words represents the frame in which children’s generalizations develop, but they develop according to individual developmental characteristics insofar as they collaboratively use these words. Nevertheless, as they grow up, children participate in different social institutions (i.e., schooling) and in different social activities within them. That is why, from a child’s perspective, the social uses of language change over development.

According to Vygotsky, the social talk in which children participate in instructional settings transforms the way they generalize. The systematic use of definition, learning to write, the use of abstract terms that are meaningful only within a system of concepts, learning a new language, among others (many of these aspects of instruction are discussed in ch. 6), demand specific ways in which generalization and abstraction co-occur. Through these new ways of talking, children are able to think according to stable, specific, and very sophisticated cultural ways of thinking. Moreover, with the emergence of the system of concepts, generalizations become verbally driven, insofar as they become a sort of verbal path. In that system of concepts there are many equivalent verbal paths, or ways to talk, that may be used to think in some situations. This contributes to flexibility of thinking and consciousness.

This brings us to an important point. To say that the way people generalize changes over their lifespan is to assert that meanings, as units of language and thought, as microgenetical movements, develop through ontogeny. Although microgenetical movement from thought to word is only well described in the case of a developed consciousness in chapter 7 of Thinking and Speech, a microgenetical reading of chapter 5 suggests that the “generalization structures” described in this chapter are different ways in which microgenetical movements may occur through childhood. From a microgenetical reading of scientific concepts, these formations may be viewed as processes of generalization/abstraction that occur through a sort of dialogical movement. The formation of a conceptual system would be responsible for this dialogical movement of thinking, insofar as through the system, concepts occur facing alternative and equivalent ways of generalizing/abstracting. A developed concept consists of a given path through other concepts within the system, which includes relations of generality and equivalence. This path is not necessarily one for each word or a static link between concepts: “The law of concept equivalence says that any concept can be represented through other concepts in an infinite number of ways” (Vygotsky, 1934/1987, p. 226). Similar to James’ notion of mode of conceiving, concepts are always partial: they are actually one among many paths that may be followed in a given social context. This sort of dialogical movement of concepts has another important implication, derived by the emergence of the system: the development of voluntary thinking. The system allows thinking to generalize/abstract the process of thinking itself. A concept, as one verbal path, may take another verbal path as its object.

However, up to this point, we have not mentioned one very important aspect of Vygotsky’s theory of concepts: inner speech. The functional use of words plays a fundamental role in concept development because of the internalization of language and the emergence of inner speech. Basically, what is internalized along development is the way we use language in collaborative activities. Moreover, one may say that those collaborative activities are those that are internalized so far as some ways of talking are appropriated and used for regulating our own activity (for a revision of Vygotsky’s notion of inner speech, see Larraín & Haye, 2012). Functional uses of language allow social and collaborative practices to take place accordingly. But it is the appropriation of these collaborative activities through inner speech that impacts and determines the way we generalize. In particular, the appropriation of systematic and instructional ways of talking is derived in the constitution of a conceptual system. One may conceive of the system as a dialogical frame of conventional collaboration. Scientific concepts are verbal paths that have been appropriated and internalized from specific social uses of signs.

Concepts as stable realities

Whereas generalizations change over development when unfolding in speech, they seem to be rather stable across individuals of a given speaker-community. Both dynamism and stability, in terms of the way in which we generalize through life, depend on the way we use words with others to think collaboratively. We do not use language in a chaotic ever-changing way. We use words for communicating with other people in a rather stable way and, in doing so, our generalizations are conditioned and oriented by the way other people of our community have generalized using the same words for years. The generalized way to unify things and events is typically enabled by words, and mediated through them, by the way other people, or oneself, in previous moments have done so and project that they could. When appropriating some ways of using words we are progressively appropriating others’ ways of generalizing. Speech allows generalizing in a shared way and represents a sort of common end of development.

In this sense, Vygotsky’s theory of concepts accounts both for their dynamic and stable and for their conventional nature. The theory discusses the idea of concepts as object-like realities offering a different account for their stability. However, from our point of view, the notion of concepts as objects may have some place in the theory. Scientific concepts, in a way, may be conceived of as generalization/abstraction movements that, in turn, may become objects of generalization. To objectify in this way would be to appropriate some equivalence relation among different generalization/abstraction paths, or concepts. That movement of objectification is at the same time a subjectification movement in which a perspective regarding this equivalence is taken. Again, this is related to inner speech, and involves not only some conscious awareness but also some ability to be responsible for one’s own thought and to give an account of it both to others and the self (see Shotter, 2006). Echoing James’ notion of conception, Vygotsky’s concepts live in utterances. Consequently, we read Vygotsky’s theory of concepts more as a grammatical theory (as Wittgenstein’s discussion on concepts) than as a lexical one. More than thing-like entities, concepts are conceived as stable, shared, and repetitive forms of thinking that may be objectified in the restrictive sense exposed above. From some points of view, to hold an object-like notion of concepts may be useful. Nonetheless, in order to enrich a sociocultural theory of psychological processes, concepts should not be excluded from a theoretical examination and elaboration, for the sake of its utility.

Summing up, from our reading of Vygotsky, and since, according to him, the way people generalize depends upon how they use signs, we would say that the way in which people generalize depends upon the discursive practices in which they participate and have participated; people with different histories of discursive practices will use words differently to unify things in a generalized way. Specifically, instruction emerges as a social activity in which words are used to generalize in a very specific and non-perceptual way. Through instruction children participate not only in the way others generalize, but also in a very stable, shared, and historically powerful (in the sense of dominant) way. Vygotsky (1934/1987) advanced that through this new way of generalizing adolescents become able to generalize their own psychological operations, that is, to treat each of their own processes of remembering, thinking, perceiving, imagining, among others, as being similar to others’ own or alien ones. Thinking, unfolding through inner speech, becomes a generalizing movement that can itself be an object of its own generalizing activity.

Nonetheless, and considering that concepts have tremendous importance in Vygotsky’s notion of verbal thinking, it would hardly be acceptable for thinking always to occur as (developed) concepts: as a systematically and conventional way of unifying ideas. In fact, Vygotsky asserts that adults typically think through complexes. In this sense, although generalizations (and in a sense, concepts) are typically involved in the ways that adults usually think, they are not always systematic generalizations. Moreover, particularization as the other side of the same coin, may have more or less importance in some modes of thinking. Take for instance, the way we typically categorize, infer, recognize, and anticipate, among others. The idea we want to stress is that generalizations/particularizations are always involved, in one way or another, in human thinking. Since consciousness as a psychological system is semiotically mediated, or mediated by word meanings, one may think that generalizations are involved in the development of personality and emotional regulation, and not just in “cognitive activities” (see Vygotsky, 1930/1997).

There is a wide variety in the way adults usually think, and this variation is not properly accounted for in Vygotsky’s thoughts. His modernist emphasis on school and scientific practices, although important for shedding light on the socio-historical nature of consciousness, limits the acknowledgment of other social practices’ influence on conceptual development. In order to account for conceptual thinking it is necessary to enrich the notion of mediated social practices. We need to think of generalization/particularization movements, as the conceptual dimension of thinking, as involved in the complex structure of social life. Moreover, Vygotsky’s theory of language, although heavily influenced by the Romantic tradition of Humboldt through Potebnia (see Bertau, 2011), is not explicit and well developed. Since language plays a crucial role in concept formation, and considering that some contemporaneous Russian authors developed a rich theory of language and discourse inspired also by the Romantic linguistic tradition, it is important to explore the implications that a notion of language developed in this sense would have for the Vygotskian comprehension of concepts. In the next section we discuss the implications of our reading of some works of Bakhtin and Vološinov (also influenced by the Romantic linguist tradition, again see Bertau, 2011) for the notion of concept.

Speech genres and thinking activities

As mentioned in the previous section, thinking may unfold through a wide variety of forms. Generalizing activity varies and it is possible to observe different thinking activities (calculating, debating, deliberating, reasoning, dreaming, telling stories, among others) occurring even in the same unit of time (see Larraín & Haye, 2012). From our reading of Bakhtin’s and Vološinov’s works, it is the notion of speech genres that may account for this diversity:

All the diverse areas of human activity involve the use of language. Quite understandably, the nature and forms of this use are just as diverse as are the areas of human activity. This, of course, in no way disaffirms the national unity of language. Language is realized in the form of individual concrete utterances (oral and written) by participants in the various areas of human activity. These utterances reflect the specific conditions and goals of each of such area not only through their content (thematic) and linguistic style, that is, the selection of the lexical, phraseological, and grammatical resources of the language, but above all through their compositional structure. . . . Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres. (Bakhtin, 1986, p. 60)

Social activities are diverse but rather stable and, although they change over historical time, they maintain certain characteristics that make them participate in a sort of generic way of acting. Social activities may be identified as a part of groups of activities with similar participants’ goals, types of participant, material means for producing the activity, and, of course, social means, including forms of talking. Therefore, there is a diversity of speech genres available for social expression. Take, for instance, that each sphere of activity contains an entire repertoire of them. Each speech genre, in turn, specifies typical forms of participants (speaker and addressee) and compositional characteristics of any utterance resemble its generic form and allow the listener to understand its meaning even before the speaker has finished it. In actuality, participants do not stay outside the utterance, but they enter the utterance and are represented (of course not necessarily as characters) in its compositional style, determining utterance meaning. In fact, Vološinov (1926/1976b) asserts that every utterance resolves a social situation insofar as each utterance always involves three participants in a hierarchical relation: speaker, listener, and hero. The former is the one who holds the position that is being articulated, the second the one towards whom that position is responding, and the latter is the perspective that speaker and listener are evaluating. Every utterance unfolds a particular social organization depending on the typical form or social activity in which it occurs.

Although private speech does not have concrete, immediate listeners, it is addressed to, and supposes an audience. According to Vološinov (1927/1976a), every act of consciousness entails the orientation towards a possible audience. This permanent co-participant of all our conscious acts determines not only the content of consciousness, but also the very selection of the content. The addressee, as well as the anticipation of the listener’s horizon of understanding (Bakhtin, 1981), becomes a central aspect in the construction of every utterance, including “inner” ones. This has a particularly relevant consequence, namely, that inner speech has a social context that influences its constitution. Moreover, Bakhtin and Medvedev (1928/1978) affirm that there are many types of speech genres available for inner expression, depending on the type of social activity in which the utterance or ideological act takes place: “One might say that human consciousness possesses a series of inner genres for seeing and conceptualizing reality. A given consciousness is richer or poorer in genres, depending on its ideological environment” (p. 134). In this way, extra-verbal situations determine all human acts of consciousness.

Within this framework, we propose that speech genres constitute the compositional constraints of human thinking determining the formal aspects of this movement. Moreover, speech genres are already generalizations of previous social interactions—not necessarily those that have been experienced by a given thinker, but those that are culturally transmitted among speakers along with each specific social activity.

Thinking as unfolding through inner speech moves according to the dynamics of social activities. We generalize according to the generic way people generalize in generic types of social activity. Those activities enable and constrain in specific manners the way we generalize and the way we articulate different generalization movements. This is coherent with Vygotsky, who affirms that in order to generalize with words people have to use them. Generalization occurs when people communicate through signs, that is, as part of their discursive practices. Generic methods of social activity and of generalization are tightly related. If social activities always occurred in a new manner, in a completely different way to previous ones, then “shared” generalization processes would be non-existent. Generalization as a cultural way of thinking unifies depending on the generic character of activity and speech. Consequently, concepts may be viewed as generic ways of generalizing.

Generalization as a dialogical activity

According to Bakhtin (1986), discourse, as a living process of human communication, may be conceived of as a social movement in which different points of view, perspectives, ideas, positionings, etc., meet and interact. In contrast to the unity of langue, utterances are unrepeatable events of interaction where a speaking subject takes a position regarding other immediate or mediated position-taking movements. What takes place is the rising of a new perspective from a previous one, contesting or complementing a given perspective with a response (Haye & Larraín, 2011). Therefore, dialogicality, as the constant reference to otherness, is the main characteristic of human discourse, and social interdependence functions as the unity of discursive and cultural life (Marková, 2003). In each unit of discourse there are always at least two perspectives contesting each other, thus establishing relations marked by tension. Each perspective is not a disinterested view of the world, but an evaluative stand towards both an immediate previous position (Vološinov, 1929/1986) and other viewpoints involved as virtual “voices,” as in the case of the social atmosphere of the utterance.

Vološinov (1927/1976a; 1929/1986) emphatically affirms that individual consciousness is semiotically mediated. If discourse in general works dialogically then the inner forms of discourse, according to our discussion above, would also entail the semiotic articulation of an evaluative position-taking tendency in relation to assumed, remembered, perceived, or merely imagined evaluative positions. Inner speech should be regarded as a dialogical movement that is involved in and constitutive of consciousness and all psychological processes, insofar as they have been transformed or mediated by the participation in discursive practices. That is to say, psychological processes are dialogical. They take place, following the model of the utterance in outer speech, within the inner semiotic articulation of evaluative positioning movements as responses to other positions (for a discussion of a dialogical notion of inner speech, see Larraín & Haye, 2012).

Following the previous discussion about thinking, and taking a dialogical notion of discursive movement, one may say that conceptual thinking occurring through discourse is a movement in which different generalizations meet. There is always an alternative way to generalize, acting as a background to understanding. Generalization would then be a process that always occurs facing an alternative way of generalizing, which discusses it, complements it, opposes it, etc. Moreover, generalization would involve emotional processes insofar as it occurs as evaluation in response to another’s points of view, that is, as interested ways of generalizing. Like the utterance, each stream of thought would involve the interaction between two or more generalization movements, it would be the shift between them, the generation of a generalization from a previous one, to the previous one. From this point of view, concepts are generic means of generalization that involve at least two generalizations: the one that is occurring, and the other one to which the first one is responding. Vygotsky’s idea that generalizations are also generalizations of previous ones is coherent with this Bakhtinian implication. Moreover, Vygotsky’s notion of scientific concepts is certainly coherent insofar as they occur in a system in which there are many other equivalent generalizations. Concepts, thus, are generic ways of generalizing in response to alternative, maybe equivalent, generalizations.

Such a dialogical view of concepts has another unexpected implication: if concepts are generalizations that occur facing alternative ones (equivalent ones in the case of developed concepts), then the particular occurrence of one generalization, the election of one concept over another, is accounted for not by cognitive “intra-conceptual” reasons, but by the rhetorical aspects of discourse. One concept is relevant and pertinent because in a given situation it may be an adequate “generic” way to respond. We will develop this idea in our last section.

The rhetorical dimension of concepts

From a Bakhtinian approach to discourse, one may say that rhetoric is an inherent aspect of discursive activity. Rhetoric, as intimately related to the presentation of one point of view, in a way that it effectively contests a previous or anticipated one, would be an activity typically involved in every utterance. This activity goes beyond persuasion: it is not just a matter of persuading or seducing, but of raising a position, of showing something new: a new point of view. Accordingly, as the ancient Greek rhetor was the one who orated in order to make a point, to present a case, to show something new both to juries and citizens (Arthurs, 1994), every utterance involves the work of a sort of rhetor: a presentation of a perspective, that is, not of a representation but the presentation of a movement direction, a tendency, a possible change in the flow of experience, a virtual positioning move. Irrespective of their persuasive power, utterances consist of rhetorical activity.

As Aristotle pointed out, rhetoric is concerned with the social aspects of discourse. The difference is that whereas for Aristotle only some forms of speech are meant to consider explicitly the characteristics of addressees, audiences, participants, and so on, from a Bakhtinian approach all discursive activity already involves a systematic consideration of social conditions. In contemporary times, Billig (1987) and others (i.e., Perelman & Olbrechts-Tyteca, 1969) stress that rhetoric lives inasmuch as social affairs are due not to necessity but to social interest. Since there may be more than one position in each and every issue, human affairs are debatable and deal with potential and actual contradictions. Rhetoric lives in discursive life and so do typically human psychological processes, such as conceptual thinking.

A rhetorical approach to thinking, therefore, should take into account that thinking is a movement of social interaction determined by social interests and tensions. However, although we say that every utterance (even inner ones) involves a rhetorical dimension because of its social nature, rhetoric and social is not the same. Whereas social is applied to a situation defined by the presence of the relation between self and other, rhetoric is the aspect of the social involved in the effort of showing something new to this other, in order to gain his or her attention, favor, love, interest, etc. The social cannot be reduced to its rhetorical dimension. It also involves other dimensions: political, ethical, aesthetic, etc.

Considering what has been said regarding the relationship between the notions of speech genre and generalizations, one may add that the rhetorical work of thinking is enabled and constrained by the speech genre in which it unfolds. The speech genre in which thinking activity unfolds has a particular role in specifying the type of goal that the current thinking activity pursues, the type of participants, and their hierarchical relationship. Therefore, typically the composition of a point of view, that is, the composition of a generalization and its persuasive power, depends on the speech genre (on the generic way to compose). This is not to say that speech completely determines thinking, but to recognize that there are diverse types of typical generalization processes, which are linked to diverse types of social activity through inner speech genres. An inner speech genre acts as a discursive repertoire in which generalizations, given their social goals and function, unfold. Moreover, genres enable and constrain the way that generalizations unfold according to typical and historical means of activity, which are now materialized in the compositional forms and expressive styles of those genres.

The diverse forms of thinking activity mentioned in previous sections, let’s say, calculating, debating, narrating, among others, may be conceived of as diverse typical thinking activities. They have in common that they serve different intellectual functions (functions of comprehension) and involve generalizations. They differ in that they take place through different inner speech genres, which accomplish different functions. Each of these genres supposes specific participants and social relations inside each stream of thought, and determines the material product of the rhetorical activity: the particular composition and style.

In order to account for the way in which we typically think through concepts, rhetoric must be considered a fundamental regulation of thinking. Rhetorical activity modifies the way in which thinking moves and influences its composition. Thinking and generalizations, when occurring through discourse, are not just a social movement, not even just a dialogical one; they constitute a movement unfolding according to its inner rhetorical mediation. This does not imply that rhetorical considerations must take the form of conscious strategies; inner rhetoric also involves internalized tactics and automatized considerations. It is important to note here that non-reflective tracts of thought are, from a Vygotskian perspective, not necessarily unmediated (see Haye & Larraín, 2013).

Coherently, one may say that concepts, as unfolding in discourse, are generalizations that occur in response to other generalizations according to cultural ways of generalizing. These cultural ways, however, are not shared ideas, or shared generalizations as products, but ways of moving that resemble historical and typical means of social activity through their materialization in discourse. These cultural ways of mirroring involve typical forms of dealing with difference, contradiction, and social tension. Therefore, it is not simply to generalize in response to other generalizations, but to compose it in such a way that it effectively responds: resolves a situation, fulfills a social function, deals with interest and tension. One concept is pertinent and relevant over others because of its rhetorical power. Concepts are generic ways of generalizing experience through which thinking and speaking subjects make a difference in their social and conflicting stream of experience.