THE CULTIVATED MIND - FROM MENTAL MEDIATION TO CULTIVATION

Both Piaget and Vygotsky stressed the role of mediation in human devel opment. While Piaget, within his cognitive adaptational model of devel opmental constructivism, identified mental mediation as the primary me chanism underlying intellectual development, Vygotsky emphasized the c ultural mediation by tools, signs, and social interaction as the core mechanism of higher mental functioning. Despite important differences between these two theorists' conceptualizations of developmental media tion, they shared the view that cognitive structures are built through a process of internalization by reconstituting external (inter)action s in a new form on an internal plane. Neither Piaget nor Vygotsky, how ever, paid adequate attention to what Simmel has called the cultivatio n principle. According to this principle, the cultivated mind is const ructed through the ongoing transactions of the person with his or her cultural environment, i.e., permanently changing cultural forms, such as personal possessions, places, settings, institutions. These cultura l forms are mostly overlooked in contemporary developmental theorizing and research. Simmel's cultural forms result from externalizations of former person-culture transactions. In other words, a person shapes o r creates his or her own developmental conditions by a process of tran sactional constitution between himself or herself and his or her cultu rally structured environment. Thus, human development is not as indivi dual biased as, for example, the Piagetian model of adaptive construct ivism assumes. Instead, based on a cultural-mediational model developm ent is structured through person-culture transactions as they are crea ted and recreated by cultivating one's own culture (external mind) tow ard cultivating one's own mind (internal mind). These transactions can be facilitated, to varying degrees, by social coconstructions. Simply put, the internal and the external mind (culture) mutually cultivate or co-develop each other. (C) 1998 Academic Press.