Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 43, no. 5, SeptemberOctober 2005, pp. 2540. 2005 M.E.

. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved. ISSN 10610405/2005 $9.50 + 0.00.

A.N. LEONTIEV

Lecture 35. Types of Thinking. Thinking and Sensory Cognition

We begin this semester with the new subject of thinking, one could say, a classical subject, rather difficult. You know very well that it is not only psychology that deals with the processes of thinking. Thinking is also an object of study in the theory of knowledge, that is, philosophy. A special science also deals with thinkinglogic, in all its aspects and areas. Thinking became a concern of psychology relatively recently, at a time when psychology had already begun to take shape as an independent field of knowledge and the first systematic concepts about the psychology of thinking and about psychological issues of thinking provided the content of the so-called psychology of associationism of the nineteenth century. It was based on a set of very simple, common-knowledge propositions that the main laws guiding the movement of ideas, of concepts in the mind of man, are the laws of connections, that is, the laws of associations. In this context, various types of associations were described: association through simultaneity, similarity, and contrast. And several special empirical observations were conducted, which paved the
English translation 2005 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text 2000 A.A. Leontiev, D.A. Leontiev, and Smysl. Lektsiia 35. Vidy myshleniia. Myshlenie i chuvstvennoe poznanie, in Lektsii po obshchei psikhologii [Lectures on General Psychology], ed. D.A. Leontiev and E.E. Sokolova (Moscow: Smysl, 2000), pp. 32837. This paper is published based on a typewritten version of the text. There is no tape recording. The lecture was delivered on March 5, 1975. Translated by Nora Favorov.
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way for the introduction of such concepts as perseveration, that is, extending the effect of associations on the subsequent flow of processes. Or, concepts that in modern terms we might call expectation, set, they called, anticipation. That was the term they used, and others like it, in psychology of associationism. At the same time, it was characteristic that thinking was always seen as an internal process, played out in the field of consciousness, in the internal field. It can be found or described through utterances, that is the solution to, let us say, associational problems (one idea or concept, through association, brings forth another), or through direct study not of the process itself, but of its product. So, various products of the internal intellectual process, the thinking process, were subject to analysis. You can see, therefore, that, initially in psychology, the problem of thinking emerged as the problem of internal thinking. It could also be called verbal. Or even verbal-logicala form of discursive thinking, in Russian, of reasoning thinking, which is an internal, logical process. Naturally, by this time the well-known differentiation between the psychological and the logical approach had emerged. This distinction presented serious difficulty, and if you take old psychology textbooks or old psychology courses, you will find in the pages of these textbooks or in the psychology courses chapters or paragraphs, for example, a chapter on reason, on syllogisms, that is, essentially a repetition of such chapters normally belonging to formal logic. The problem of the logical and the psychological, in essence, had not been resolved. Pages from textbooks on formal logic were transposed into textbooks of psychology. A significant contribution to the further study of the psychology of thinking was made by experimentation conducted within the framework of experimental human self-observation, which also dealt with a verballogical process (I have in mind the contribution made by the so-called Wrzburg school). The Wrzburg school is represented by a number of very well-known names, preeminent in the first quarter of our century. There are, for example, names such as O. Klpe and N. Ach, and a number of other very eminent psychologists. Incidentally, they are very well represented in our literature, in one of the collections devoted to thinking.1 There is also a very good profile of this school, of this approach, that was published a long time ago; I will also mention this tiny book as being of interest. It came out as part of the series New Ideas in Philosophy. It has a marvelous article about this school and there is an important article by Klpe.2

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What exactly has this school given us and why, out of all of associational psychology, have I chosen to make special mention of it? It is because this school has introduced a fundamental proposition. It has demonstrated that the cognitive process that we describe as an internal process, a process of thinking that takes place internally, is not an effect of the struggle, as has been said, between association, that is, between the associative process, and the process of perseveration. The associative process somewhere, at some time, emerges and somewhere along the way dies out. Please note, if there were no activity, there would be some assortment of ideas, that is, the kind of thinking that follows some paths that have been well-trodden by associations. To this was added a very important tenet that is known in these terms: it is the tenet of determining tendency, or to put it differently, the role of the task that is organizer of the process and the director of the process. So, the most important condition giving rise to this process is not the internal struggle of two tendencies, but the presence of a certain task before the subject that generates this fundamental tendency or direction of the thinking process. This was a fundamental historical landmark in the development of psychological knowledge about thinking. It should be said that this began the formulation of a very important problem in psychologythe problem of generalization, of concept. The experimental nature of this research allowed for a number of unclear questions to come into view and for light to be shed on them, for new questions to be posed, but there were limitations because research into thinking, albeit experimental, was still introspective, that is, founded on the evidence of the thinker, in this case the experimental subject solving a problem. Certain difficulties remained in distinguishing between logical and psychological content, that is, between the logical and psychological aspects of this process. It is essential that the complexity of this process be emphasized. I would like to direct your attention to the fact that if logical processes occur in the mind of a person, then, of course, they can take place only on the basis of the laws of operation of the human brain. The difficulty of this issue rests in the following: are the logical processes that we observe derived from the properties of this mind? There have been attempts to construct a psychological logic, deduced from the mind. But, you understand that the logical relations that we find in the cognitive process are not a product of the generation of corresponding processes in the mind, but are

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an expression, or rather a reflection of certain connections that we reproduce. These laws exist in and of themselves. They reflect objective connections and the ways in which they are operated. If this is the case, then there is no place, essentially, for the psychology of thinking, with the exception of special questions. What are these questions? First, it is understood that man is not born with logical thinking. He acquires logic. It is not lessons in logic that are necessary, but generalizations of the experiences of perception, of the experience of communication with other people. Man acquires human norms. Thinkingthat is what logical norms are. This means it is possible to talk about the psychology of thinking in the child. This is not the same thing as factual logicright? Thinking can be ascertained in children, let us say, of a preschool or early school age, but it differs from the logical thinking of the adult. Second, pathological thinking is a persistent disturbance regarding logical thinking. There are differences between various types of pathology. Pathological thinking also falls beyond the bounds of what we call logic, however one might interpret this subject. And finally, the last thing, so-called creative thinking. Incidentally, this problem was also presented in an excellent way by the Wrzburg school. It is a problem of so-called productive thinking. The meaning of this problem can be summed up in the following way. Let us say that we are analyzing some kind of logical operationslet us take an ordinary, banal syllogism, reasoning along a classical model about the mortality of man, that Socrates is a man, and the conclusion, that is, the result of this thinking, consists in the notion that Socrates must be mortal. You see, even in this simple syllogism, most elementary in form, certain difficulties are found consisting in the fact that you must have the first and second premise in order to reach the conclusion. How do you choose the first and second premise? You analyze premises and through this process find the required conclusion, but you do not know why those particular premises are required. Do you understand? You have to find the proposition, which comes from bringing together two premises: All people are mortal, Socrates is a person. Next comes the conclusion, whether correctly or incorrectly arrived at. But the basic idea remains the search for these premises. All people are mortal. An elephant is not a person. Try to draw a conclusion. You will say to me, Theres a mistake! You cant construct it that way! Yes. There is a mistake, and a crude one. It should have been, Living beings are mortal. An elephant

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is a living beingand so on, but this is a matter for logic. The problem remains, and it is a very subtle problem. So, I repeat, these were the landmarks we had. The first landmark is associational psychology, which portrays these processes in the form of a flow of associations directed by internal tendencies. The second moment occurs when these processes are identified as goal oriented, they are subject to objectives. And finally, the last, which I would like to particularly emphasize: the experience of life, practical tasks, which arose before the psychologist, the expansion of the field of vision of psychology, the expansion of the possibility for empirical, including experimental, research inevitably led to something I would conditionally call a refusal to study only discursive, or primarily discursive, logical, reasoning thinking. And then thinking appeared in a nonlogical form, and, consequently, more clearly. What do I mean by this? These are first and foremost successes in the ontogenic study of thinking. You see: thinking is present, but it is not equipped with the norms of logic, and it is left on its own, to flow in its own way, uncomplicated by human thinking, the experience of human practice that has taken shape in the formulas or the laws of logic. Second, there is the folk psychology or psychology of people, ethnopsychology. Research really picked up on the basis of extensive ethnographic material collected at the turn of the century, when contacts were made during voyages, during trade, with the help of guides who laid the way for commerce and sometimes for military occupation, that is, more often than not. This ethnographic material indicated that the thinking process flowed differently in a number of peoples at a relatively low level of socioeconomic developmentthere is a certain uniqueness. The best-known name, familiar here thanks to translations, is L. Lvy-Bruhl and his work, Primitive Mentality.3 A very strange logic is described there, not at all like the logic we encounter in those belonging to peoples at significantly higher levels of economic, cultural, and social development. This refers to the logic observed in peoples who live under conditions recalling the condition of primitive order. Vast amounts of material were collected and this material was used by Lvy-Bruhl and Turnwald and a whole group of people who pursued the question of the existence of psychology in a historical sense, or rather an ethnographic sense. Soon studies appeared that were historical. I am referring to the Meyerson school in France, which is now represented by several indi-

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vidual researchers using historical artifacts in the study of the psychology of thinking. One well-known subject area developed within the Meyerson school is based on the study of objective historical documents of the ancient world, of GreeceGreek art, Greek literatureall expressions of Greek creativity. Finally, the development of technology led to the problem being viewed on yet another plane: manual or technical thinkinglet us say the ability to see quickly which way a gear is going to turn if another, linked to it by two or three other gears, turns, let us say, clockwise. Or, how to create a whole from several elements. How to put together a cube from its separate pieces. Or, along the same lines, these last tasks: to put something together or take something apart, to determine direction, visually, using sightthese are very common, for instance, in one of our countrys ethnic groups. I personally came upon such a game back in 1930putting together a very complex stereometric figure from pieces of wood. There was this game of patient construction and at the same time of envisioning complex, spatial interrelations, and I saw it. So-called technical thinking was discovered. In order to select candidates for the first stage of training as a mechanic, it might be necessary to see how they handle problems involving spatial thinking. Or problems involving the relations that are perceived in the immediate mechanical way or revealed through testing direct mechanical perception, or how they do on tests involving the discovery of relations. That is how this branch of research emerged. The aristocratic nature of discursive thinking was eliminated. Beyond it, a tremendous number of processes were discovered that are, first of all, undeniably cognitive; second, that appear beyond the bounds of the data of sensory perception and are somehow distinct from that perception. This is not perception, it is thinking, but not in the traditional forms of discursive thinking. This was especially well presented in the works of yet another school, also from the turn of the century. Here, not a word can be said without mentioning old authors, who also did something in this area, and this was particularly striking in the twentieth century. Have you guessed about whom Im talking? Im talking about the Gestalt school of psychology. Khlers apes, famous throughout the world, use a longer stick to get another stick. At first they do not see the solution, but then suddenly they see itKhler insists on this. K. Bhler would call this an aha reaction. I.P. Pavlov used another word, one that was entirely correct: manual

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thinking of apes. Trials, but trials along a particular line. This is a complex process. We have started to talk about animal intellect. And intellect, after all, is thinking. But we do have to say thinking in its prehuman forms. Let us decide it thus: intellect is a broader concept, while thinking is more narrow (human intellect, human intellectual behavior). Khlers research was immediately reflected in the research of child psychology. The same Bhler, and later the other authors, came out with studies conducted on small children using the same method as Khler. The tasks were the same: to figure out where to position a chair so as to reach toys that had been hung or placed high up, or to roll a ball out of a structure something like a labyrinth; to work with a cage, but not from inside the cage. On the contrary, the target object is inside the cage and the child, naturally, is outside the cage and must somehow get the object out of the cage. In short, a vast number of such methods were devised. But it was characteristic of all of them that they related to thinking in a very broad sense and did not limit themselves to the confines of reasoning and discursive thinking, always using the apparatus of logic. Perhaps, given this broader understanding, success will be achieved (and, perhaps, partial success has already been achieved) in approaching an understanding of what is called the creative aspect of thinking, the special nature of the thinking process, something that is sometimes called intuition, right? That which is designated as visual thinking (this is a very perplexing term). In short, an idea has formed that thinking can be different, can be qualitatively different, that there can be qualitatively distinct unique phases in development. Some have merely described the forms, others have connected them historically, that is, tried to make them into a certain progression in phylogenetic development: from animal thinking to modern, developed human thinking, or from that of a very small child, from a newborn, to an adolescent, with the full morphological apparatus that we usually use. The terms manual, or sometimes practical, thinking have emerged; sometimes technical thinking or technical intellect (a less common concept) are used as equivalents. Then there is vivid-image thinking. Here the emphasis is probably not so much on motor or practical aspects (i.e., actions with an object: to act with it, to figure something out about it), but on the image, on the representation, on its sensory nature, on that which moves in thinking, on the sensory nature of the movement itself. This left an impression on certain ideas of Khler. He saw things in this waythat in the sensory-phenomenal sphere there is a conver-

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gence of tool and goal. And some special studies by [E.R.] Jaensch with eideticists allowed a real interdependence to be seen: the movement of these things in the phenomenal visual field of a person experiencing need, necessity just like that, visually: the stick gravitates, moves toward the goal. Khler also used the term in eidetic images, that is, in images that only a certain portion of people are able to maintain, people who have this eidetic memory. You know what an eideticist is and what eidetic images are. An eideticist, when he is asked how to get something sees how one moves toward the other, that is, the representation is visualized. But this is, of course, an extreme, special case. This is an exception, right? Thus, the vivid image is thinking. It can be called sensory thinking, thinking in images. It can also be called vivid thinking. Sometimes it can be called visual thinking, because it relies primarily on vision. And finally, that from which it all startedthis is thinking in words, presupposing the presence of verbal concepts, meanings. This is discursive thinking, this is logical thinking, this is verbal thinkingit is also characterized this way, but it is all the same, it all refers to the same process. I draw the same conclusion: at the present time, thinking appears before us as a process that flows in various forms, in such forms as, for instance, motive, motor action, representations, and living images. Then, we have logical thinking, reasoning, discursive thinking. And this diversity of types of thinkingit is, one could say, what constitutes the endeavor of psychologists (and not only psychologists), who are focused on the study of this problem, the problem of the specific science of psychology: psychophysiology, child psychology, animal psychology, in a word, the fields that we are studying. And now there can be no talk of psychology generating logic. The two simply do not go together. Take vivid-motor thinking, also called sympractical thinking, which is directly interwoven with practical action (I actually prefer this term). Then, visual thinkingI would prefer this term, it is more concise. And finally, discursive thinking. These are the three fundamental forms. It is possible to talk about some subforms, variations on forms, and so on for all eternity. One could continue to analyze, to classify. It is natural that this summation must be conceived primarily from a theoretical, psychological point of view. We are focusing on thinking and cannot describe it using only, let us say, verbal concepts in this process, subject

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to the demands of logic. We must differentiate it, we must distinguish it first and foremost from other forms of understanding. You know, after all, that this is a fundamental distinctionbetween immediate, sensory perception and cognition in the form of thinking. This is a generally accepted distinction, firmly established and understood by everyone. Perception and thinking are two levels of cognition, two forms of cognition. And the second, of course, cannot exist without the first. The connection here is unambiguous, unidirectional in a certain sense. Francis Bacon, whom Vygotsky and many other authors have cited, once said, There is nothing in the intellect that did not first exist in feelings. Any materialist will insist on that point of view. In this sense we are all sensualists, we all recognize sensory perception, the data of sensation, of perception, to put it another way, as the source of our knowledge. And now we have yet another level. Here we have sympractical, or manual thinking, vivid, vivid-action, and reasoning thinking? What makes them all different from immediate-sensory perception? I am posing this question and devoting so much time to it in order to clear the path ahead, to eliminate certain misunderstandings. And they do arise. I know that they arise quite often, and I would like in advance to prevent serious misunderstandingsdistinguishing poorly between perception and thinking, a distinction using false criteria. Perception provides a vivid image, but thinking? You could say that it is abstract. But thinking can have as its product something concrete, represented in a concrete, sensory image. It does not pass using this criterion. The presence of verbal generalizations? But, if you will allow, are not verbal generalizations part of the process of perception of the objective world, of sensory perception? I can clearly see a microphone; I perceive it as a microphone. We talked quite a bit about this when we looked at perception. There is a unique semantic of perception that expresses objectivity, human perceptual objectivity. So, there is no such criterion. And, in general, one could say that perception gives us an individual object, a representation of it, its cognition, but generalizationthis is rather a matter of thinking. Comrades! In this day and age, who can deny perceptions ability to create generalized images? The simplest of experiments will demonstrate the presence of these generalizations and the corresponding analysis. Take the simplest animal experiments. If you have not been told about them, I will simply give a brief summary, and if you have been told, then I will just refresh your memory and point to an example.

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There is a problem that has demanded quite a bit of time from animal researchers. This is the problem of stimulus equivalence. The most ordinary experiment with the formation of a skill and a conditional connection, if you like. A connection to what? In this case it is a connection to the appearance of a triangle. In the animal, a high-order animal, the following connection has been made: where there is a triangle, there is food. One needs to go in the direction of the triangle and do something preconditioned. And now let us switch this triangle that we, as investigators, were using and that the animal knew from previous experiments, and replace it with another stimulus and see which stimuli will be equivalent and which will not. That is, which stimuli will elicit the reaction that has been learned, drilled in and established, and which will not. What will be related to that which came before, and what will be differentiated? Then we can go into differentiation as far as we like, with great accuracythese are Pavlovs famous tenets. Well, here is the triangle. Let us disconnect it. It had solid lines, now let us use dotted lines. Let us try simply using three dots. It was blacklet us make it white on a dark background, or maybe even colored. Do you understand what I mean by varying the stimulus? And then let us conduct a series of experiments and we will see: there has been a generalizationhere is what has been included, and here is what has been excluded; and with this animal the following happenedthis is the way his generalization went. We performed this experiment on rats, monkeys, and different kinds of animals with different behavior, ecologies, and a different basis. We got answers to these questions about generalization. Not to mention experiments with people, of the analyticity and visualization of their perception, of the endowment of the image with meaning, that is, of the use of speech, or verbal meanings. So some other criteria must be found. And then, perhaps, we really will see not the breaking away of thinking from sensation, but rather their relationship, their transitions, and most important, the transformation of one into the other. And maybe then we will find a historical approach to the change of forms of thinking, to its historical and ontogenetic development. And we will settle the question about the relationship between animal manual thinkingI am using Pavlovs termand human, verbal intellect, which functions under conditions of the mastery of sociohistorically developed concepts that have been set as the meanings of specific words. Then, perhaps, the place of logic will also be found.

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Let us go ahead and answer the question of how we distinguish between the level of cognition that we call the level of thinking, and the level that we call the level of sensory cognition, the level of perception. I would like to proceed in the following way: I myself will put forward a certain hypothesisI would like to make use of this pedagogic technique todayand then together we will consider in detail how this hypothetical criterion looks in relation to various specific processes and phenomena about which we know something more or less adequately. I would write two such formulas, but, comrades, please recognize their conditionality. These are not some symbolic nomenclature; for my own convenience I simply want to make this visual. So, you see that when we look at perception, we find this process is always included in the interaction between the perceiving subject and the perceived object, regardless of what it is. It must have one property: it must be able to act on one of the sensory organs, right? On many of them at once or just on one, but it must have an effect, right? And finally, the other condition it must be an object of our activity, this object. Into this system, however developed it might be, go all processes that we call interaction. Whatever the subject brings with him, whatever previous experience might refract this effect and take part in this interaction. It may be individual experience. It may be the experience of an entire species. In animals, species experience is literally biological, hereditary. This is what we find as inherent in the subject. Now, what other kind of experience could there be? Species experience in other senses: sociohistorical, acquired experience, and, third, individual experience. There are species phylogenic and species historical experiencethat which is acquired and learned by each new generation. It is not written down and prepared, but it also is not built on the basis of individual generalization. This is the experience of generations, the experience of social practice, reflected in language, in the system of concepts, of meanings that are acquired by a child to one degree or another, right? And it is natural that experience is part of perception. But I am now outlining another scheme. Actually, I only came up with it just now. Its essence is the following: if the first sphere of cognition, the level of cognition, fits into this scheme of the process of interaction perceiving subjectperceived reality, then the second scheme is a bit trickier. This is because here the object of my cognition is the interaction ascertained by me, that is, a process binding together object and object. The first relation can be called subjectobject, or objectsubject. And

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the second? Objectobject? No. Subjectobjectobject. Now let us try to see whether this is the way it is and what it means. Here, everything is represented in the following way: we can take a hackneyed example that I have used before. It is very simple. What I am talking about is the possibility, thanks to this scheme, of going beyond the limits of the properties immediately accessible to our sensory organs, that is, to our perception. This scheme, the second one, goes beyond those boundaries, and the first one does not go beyond them. Now, about the illustration I was just talking about. The threshold of my musculocutaneous sensitivity, as we know, is rather crude and lies within a fairly small range. Essentially, I have to go beyond the boundaries of that range, that is, go beyond the bounds of the capabilities afforded me by my organs of perception, my sensory organs. How do I do that? I cannot distinguish between the hardness of this material and that. I tried touching themthis one is hard and that one is also hard. They are equally hard. This is beyond the bounds of the capabilities of my sensory perception. I cannot answer this question on the basis of this given interactionIobject and objectI. So, I interact with this object and I interact with that object and I say that they are both hard, but I cannot differentiate. But now, perhaps, I will try something. I will do this: I will scratch here and seethere is no scratch, and now something else happens: I scratch thereand a scratch appeared. What did I do? I introduced, I determined an interaction of two objects and by changing one of them I could judgeI issued a judgmentabout a property of the other. That object turned out to be harder. I did not know that and was not able to find it out. It was beyond the limits accessible to my sensory organs. I do not know whether this or that element is contained in a given substance and I cannot find that out because the substance is far away from me (let us say, it is some planet or other heavenly body). But, can I get a spectrogram? I can. And before me is a developed spectrogram. I see a black linethat is hydrogen, you see? How can I know? By the effect on me or by the change in some phenomenon caused by the effect of that object that becomes the object of my cognition. Do you understand the mechanism? Now, I will put it to work in a certain formula: the essence of the matter is that we are judging what we cannot see by what we can see through direct perceptionwhat we cannot judge directly without putting something else into action. We do not have the sensory organs for that. Then we have the solution to the paradox: there is nothing in thinking

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besides what is given through sensation, through perception, through cognition. But the range of our sensitivity differs from the range of our perception because, in studying the interaction of things, we discover the properties that are not revealed to us through the interaction between perceiving subject and object. Then a very important theoretical thinking becomes clear that was expressed by Marx in his contention that, initially, thinking is directly intertwined with practical action. Beyond that there can be other observations, perhaps, even more valid ones: essentially, tools are a true abstraction. Productive action is generally an experiment. Productive action in the broad sense, productive action removed from its result, is an experiment. I have in mind a representation of a certain result that I have to achieve, a substantive, objective result of my objective action. I can, of course, immediately switch to an action with this material, with the object of labor, assuming I will get a certain result. But I can also do something else. I can try things. I can make a preliminary test. And then will that test be practical or cognitive action? If I bend something, not in order to create a bow, but to see how pliant this material is, because I could discard it and pick another with the help of tests. So, as long as I have not started to make itwhat is this? Is this a practical or cognitive activity? It must be cognitive. What is it separate from? From the immediate product that I need. It might, by chance, be the same, or it might not be. I bend itit is not pliant enough; I bend anotherit is pliant enough, it would be suitable, and I continue to work on it. I subject the properties of an object, the properties of a material that are hidden from me in a direct contact, to reliable testing using direct action in order to apply this cognitive element of my practical action. I can go through an experimental stage. This is how experiments came about. Therefore, in Marx we encounter the idea that industry and experiment are the first forms in which human thinking is expressed. Industrial action, labor action, and experiment! Why experiment? It is a practical action separate from the need to achieve a practical result, an action directed only at attaining knowledge about its applicability or inapplicability, pliancy or lack of pliancy, hardness or lack of hardness, and so on. You see, this recalls trials at the elementary stages of ontogenic and phylogenic development. However, it is not trials that reveal the special features of the cognitive process, but starting with the special features of the cognitive process, one can understand trials. The problem has been turned upside down compared to how it was formulated in early behaviorism, for example.

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Let me ask a clarifying question (with a purely didactic purpose), so that everything will be perfectly clear. When we say that an action is taking place with the help of trial and error, are the trials chaotic? Or are they not chaotic? Even at the level of animal psychology? Is everything tried, or just certain things? They are not chaotic. Have you understood the sense in which the problem has been turned upside down? Things are not chaotic, although they may be portrayed as chaotic. I recall something I saw: a fence, and by the fence a chicken (the chicken, as is well known, is frankly not among the smartest of animals, but is a really stupid bird); but if you put it in a really ridiculous situationyou start to chase it with a broom or something, it rushes about here and there and goes through a hole in the fence, and now you, thank goodness, have finished waving your threatening broom. You repeat the experiment and gradually, what happens? The number of necessary trials is reduced. Theoretically, we are told that there is a learning curve, and you can look and see if such a curve always really appears. If it is a very idiotic situation, then in animals it always appears. But if you just slightly bring the situation of this experiment closer to a situation that resembles real life, you will see that in the best case you will get a certain start to the curvea decline, and then suddenly the curve falls vertically and the solution appears with so-called good mistakes. You simply introduced it into a situation what an ethologist would now recognize as appropriate for observing animals, that is, a situation that does not resemble one where, let us say, a rabbit is taught to play the flute, but more like one where a rabbit is taught to play the drums. I am sure you understand the difference? One relies on an acting mechanism and the other has nothing at all to rely on. So, I would say, simplifying things completely (comrades, today I am talking with you, and not reading you a lecture; I want to give you this idea as simply as I can from the start), I insist that perception can with a little imagination be compared to hitting a ball that goes straight into the pocket in billiards. But, with thinking it is harder, trickier: there is always a double play, there is always the relationship between objects. You see, an object is only able to influence or affect me to the extent that I have organs for thatsight, as a reflection of light beams, mechanical, given contact, like a vibrating body (keeping in mind elastic waves that reach my hearing organs), through their chemical properties (albeit limited to a very small set) on the organ of taste, smell. We

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are able to pick up only small pieces. If I want to find out whether a solution is slightly acidic or slightly alkaline, I try tasting it, but I cannot tell. I cannot say, because the threshold is fuzzy. But, if a litmus paper turns pink, it is acid, if you pleaseif it turns blue, then it is alkaline. I can judge the chemical property based on the color. I can determine the presence of hydrogen based on the black spectral lineI use one to determine the other. I test these connections, I develop them, I determine the rules by which these connections operate, and that is how logic emerges, because if these connections are made more complex, the object moves farther away. If the object is mediated multiple times, then I have to pass through the paths of mediation, and this is practically impossible unless the theoretical thinking that is essential to consciousnessthinking that does not rely directly on practical interactions, however complex and far-removed they may becomes into effect. We have to use some guiding thread so we do not lose our way, some apparatus. And this apparatus, the means, the thread, are the logical apparatus that does not allow us to become lostto the contrary, it shows us the way. But the process, in essence, remains the same at any level of development in any form. These complex relations are not immediately evidentthe transition from I and object to I and judgment made about one object based on the change in another. I need to determine the height of a tree, but there is a river between me and the tree. It is frightfully cold and I am not planning to swim across the river. I am not planning to catch pneumonia. And in any event, I cannot cross the river. I cannot swim and I do not have the necessary means. I cannot walk to the tree. But do I need to go to it or not? Can I substitute a theoretical process for the practical process of measuring the distance to the tree? Who does not know elementary geometry, which teaches how to calculate such a value? I am able to do this. For this there is a theory and theoretical thinking. We are forever shortening the path. We incorporate theoretical links, with which we arm our thinking, and we determine the angles. We determine two angles, we calculate the restand there was no need to cross the river. And this is called theoretical computation. But, however complex we may make things, whatever abstractions we may introduce, whatever hypotheses we may put forward, they always have their sensory starting point. And the mediated path, which, again, predicts some point, which we can use to judge the correctness or incorrectness of the process we are predicting, is always complex. There-

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fore, the intricate, abstract sciences remain all the same within the bounds of the function that they fulfill; they are incorporated inside the process. Logic can never become a subject of perception, no kind of logic. The subject of perception is still the person. Its true object is the world, reality. And, not only the reality that is capable of exerting its direct effect on the sensory organs, but also all actuality that takes the form of interactions. And is the reality that does not possess the attribute of interacting with anything hidden from man? Such reality does not exist. It is not reality, but unreality, negative reality, since we always see interaction between the elements of the world. Behind interaction there is the world itself, right? There is nothing else. So, a noninteracting world is total nonsense. And a world that does not know interaction is unknowable. But there is no such world, not under any circumstances. On that note, I end the introduction to this topic. Notes
1. See A.M. Matiushkin, ed., The Psychology of Thinking [Psikhologiia myshleniia] (Moscow, 1965). 2. See New Ideas in Philosophy [Novye idei v filosofii], Collection 16, Psychology of Thinking [Psikhologiia myshleniia] (St. Petersburg, 1914). 3. L. Levi-Briul [Lvy-Bruhl], Primitive Mentality [Pervobytnoe myshlenie] (Moscow, 1930).

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