a. a. leontiev - sense as a psychological concept

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English translation © 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text “Smyslkak psikhologicheskoe poniatie,” in Iazyk i rechevaia deiatel’nost’ v obshchei ipedagogicheskoi psikhologii (Moscow and Voronezh: IPO MODEK, 2001), pp.141–52. Published with the permission of Dmitry A. Leontiev.

Translated by Nora Favorov.

Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 44, no. 3,May–June 2006, pp. 57–69.© 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.ISSN 1061–0405/2006 $9.50 + 0.00.DOI 10.2753RPO10610405440305

A.A. LEONTIEV

Sense as a Psychological Concept

In the title of this article, the term “sense” is used differently fromthe way it has generally been used in logic and philosophy sincethe time of Gottlob Frege. Nonetheless, replacing it with someother term is not possible, as in psychology—in particular in theSoviet Vygotskian school of psychology—it is as universally ac-cepted as it is in logic, or almost so.

For Frege, meaning is something designated by a “proper name,”a “sign,” that is, referent, while a sense of the name (Sinn) is theinformation it contains, and unambiguously characerizes the objector the path in which a name signifies an object. The classicalexample of expressions with one meaning but different senses ismorning star and evening star. Furthermore, Frege distinguishesthe idea between “meaning” and “sense” representations, theinternal image of an object “arising from memories of sensoryimpressions that a person previously had. The representation issubjective: it is often permeated with emotions, the clarity of itsconstituent parts differs and is contantly changing; even in oneand the same person, representations connected to one and the samesense are different at different times; one person’s representation is

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not another’s.”1 If an idea is subjective, then sense is objective. It“can be the common property of many people, and, consequently,is not a part or mode of an individual mind; for one can hardlydoubt that humanity has a storehouse of thoughts that it conveysfrom one generation to the next.”2

The modern version of Frege’s theory is most clearly presentedin a well-known book by A. Church.3 Here we do not have theconcept of the “representation,” but sense is informally defined assomething that is assimilated when a concept is understood. Here,Church supplies a special footnote to emphasize that the conceptof sense is devoid of any psychological implication. This footnoteis quite indicative: what the true logician nowadays fears most iscommitting the sin of psychology. (As can be seen above, Fregehad no such fear.) This fear is rooted in the commonly held objec-tive of contemporary formal logic of operating with forms of knowl-edge, and not forms of thinking. This feature can be bestcharacterized by words stated eighty years ago by the great Russianlinguist A.A. Potebnia: “it (logic) is a hypothetical science. It says:if a thought is given, then the relationship between its elementsmust be of such-and-such a nature; otherwise, the thought is notlogical. But logic says nothing about how we arrived at such athought. . . . For example, in making assertions, logic does notexamine the process of stating, but from its one-sided point ofview evaluates the results of the completed process.”4

But let us return to Frege and ask ourselves the following ques-tion. What parameters does he apply in contrasting sense andrepresentation? The answer is clear. A representation is a subjec-tive category, a psychological category, because for Frege it isindividual and weak; sense is a logical-objective category, be-cause it “can be the common property of many people.” Whatcan be “common property” can therefore not be a “part and modeof an individual mind.” In a word, Frege, like his modern follow-ers such as Church, bases his thinking on the premise that the psy-chological = the individual = the subjective, while the logical =the common (social) = the objective.

It is an understandable position, but not one that can claim to be


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unique and mandatory. It would be sufficient to find a psychologi-cal theory in which the equations prove to be wrong, whereby thesystem of categories proposed by Frege would demand a signifi-cant reevaluation.

Just such a psychological theory was developed by the Vygotskyschool.5 We will examine several if its aspects that are fundamen-tal to a psychological description of the concept of thought.

According to this theory, man is not in relationships of adapta-tion with surrounding reality, like an animal, but of active mastery,of influencing reality. This becomes possible for him as a result ofthe human ability to foresee his own actions and to consciouslyplan them. And this ability, in turn, is conditioned by the fact thatevery uniquely human activity—practical, labor activity and theo-retical, cognitive activity—is mediated by auxiliary means thatare socially developed and preserved in the “collective memory”of society. In practical activity this is tools; in theoretical activity,this is signs, including linguistic signs.

In being incorporated into human activity, tools and signs arenot automatically “over-added to the mix.” They alter the verystructure of activity, as they force man to form new, more com-plex connections in his mind, connections that permit new, higher-order forms of behavior. Thus, the human psyche, in incorporatingtools and signs into activity, takes on a new quality, and does notmerely undergo a quantitative change. Language and labor, orrather, labor and language restructure the human psyche down toits foundation, rather than basically refashioning it.

Humanity’s sociohistorical experience, its material and spiri-tual culture, are man’s “essential powers” (Wesenskräfte) expressedin mediated form, in the “form of the existence” of human abilities(Marx). Every individual person “appropriates” (aneignet) thesemediated abilities and properties, organically merging them withneurophysiological conditions that they have inherited genetically.6

The spiritual and mental development of the individual is the activeprocess of appropriating sociohistorical experience in the course ofhis practical and theoretical activity; he does not “discover” theworld for himself as a result of insight or anything analogous to it;



but over a long period, in a painstaking and orderly manner, mold-ing the formation of his psychic awareness, erecting level afterlevel, building them up to tear them down; and, finally, reaching aheight from which the boundless horizons of human knowledgeand human ability opens up before him, which is now accessibleto him as well.

So, humanity’s intrinsic “storehouse of thoughts” is indeed a“part or mode of an individual mind.” Furthermore, the “mind,”the individual psyche, can exist only by retrieving information fromthis storehouse. But the relationship here is two-sided—after all,the “storehouse” itself has real existence only within millions ofindividual psyches.7

This is the viewpoint held by L.S. Vygotsky and his school onthe nature of human mental activity. With respect to its specificstructural nature, it is determined first and foremost by the factthat, from the very start, there is a conscious goal in activity. Activ-ity is planned and organized—consciously or unconsciously—inprecisely a way such that the goal is achieved using optimal meansand minimal expenditure of time and energy.8 In addition to a goal,the activity act is characterized by a specific motive; one and thesame (on the surface) activity can be carried out as the result ofdifferent motives, driven by different needs. The attainment of agoal is the satisfaction of a need; with the attainment of the goal,the activity act is accomplished.

We will emphasize once again a point made above: an individual’sassimilation of social values takes place in the course of activity.The child begins to use a spoon in its characteristic function notbecause he has some abstract knowledge of a spoon. He is simplypresented with the necessity of eating his porridge on his own, andwe make available an appropriate means to achieve this and givehim a minimal idea of operations with these means (it is not sur-prising that any child, speaking any language, when he forgets thename of the spoon will say, “the thing for eating porridge” or some-thing of that nature).

The same is true for linguistic signs. This side of the problem wasthoroughly studied by Vygotsky himself and has been repeatedly


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dealt with since then.9 Using linguistic signs to the extent possibleat each level of his/her development, the child gradually mastersthe appropriate rules of usage for these signs. At first, these are thesame signs as those used by adults only in the case of objectivereference, but the way of referring and the nature of the intercon-nection of signs with one another is different. The usage of signshas the opposite effect on the psychophysiological organization oflinguistic ability,10 so the possibility for more complex forms ofactivity emerges, and so on; ultimately, not only object reference,but the subjects’ correlation per se, the rules for using a particularsign come to resemble the rules generally accepted in the givensociety or a given linguistic community.

One and the same word with identical reference to objects andphenomena of the external world “means” different things to thechild at different ages and different stages of development. In Frege’sterminology, the meaning of a word remains the same, but its sensedevelops as a means in which the name signifies the object develop-ment. In the psychological conception of Vygotsky and his school,the terminology used for these two aspects is not clearly differenti-ated; Vygotsky talks about the “development of concepts,” althoughthe term “concept” is hardly appropriate for the genetic aspect ofmeaning. Below, we will first of all preserve Frege’s term “mean-ing,” and second, we will talk about “signification.”

So, in entering into the activity of the individual (the child), theword, with its objective, essentially extrapsychological meaning,acquires a different, gradually developing signification that approxi-mates the generally accepted one. We should note two aspects ofthis phenomenon. First, this becomes possible only as a result ofthe fact that the word has correspondence to the referent, as ifreplacing it by activity; in this sense, the mastery of meaning isthe most important way—one might say the determining way—inwhich individual behavior is mediated through social experience.Second, the meaning of a word is by no means confined to the factof its correspondence to a given object or class of objects (phe-nomena) of reality, although such a correspondence (object refer-ence) forms its basis; in other words, our concept of “meaning”



does not correspond with Frege’s, despite identical terminology.If for Frege meaning is denotatum, for us it is something closerto the potential possibility of a word’s reference to a given refer-ent or class of referents, realized through various “significations,”and depending primarily on the place of the given referent withinactivity.

Based on the above, it can be concluded that meaning is asocially codified form of social experience assimilated by eachindividual. This codification is its constituting feature, which isexpressed in the fact that the corresponding referent can be con-sciously perceived.

What is meant by this “can be perceived? First, it signifies thatthe referent, that is, the fragment of reality reflected in meaning,can be an object of actual perception, toward which the consciousactivity of the subject is directed. Second, it signifies that what weare aware of in objects or phenomena of reality turns out to becommon to any person speaking the given language and living inthe given society, who has attained a certain level of mental devel-opment. Third, it signifies that we have at our disposal some kindof objectivized psychological foundation on which we project, soto speak, our knowledge about reality. More often than not thisfoundation is the word.11

If we look at meaning as a fact of the psyche, as Frege’s “repre-sentation,” and not as “meaning,” we notice something paradoxi-cal. While meaning is objective, it never appears to be an objectivephenomenon for each individual. It is not a matter of individualvariations in the acquisition of a given meaning, the differences“in sensory impressions that a person had previously,” and so on;the point is that in acquiring social experience that has been cap-tured in meanings, the individual incorporates this experience intoa system of his living relationships, into a system of his activity.And this is primarily expressed in the fact that any content encap-sulated in meaning is perceived by a person in different ways de-pending on the motive of the corresponding activity. This wasexpressed well by I. Verhaar in a talk at the ninth InternationalCongress of Linguists. “Thoughts that come with the word prison


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will be different for an architect, a lawyer, a prisoner, or an officialreviewing a verdict. But the meaning that is ‘put into’ the wordprison is absolutely the same for all these people.”12

So if we attempt to define “sense” in our understanding, then itwill be most accurate to talk about it in terms of an analogue ofmeaning in a concrete activity. But this is not simply an individual-psychological aspect of meaning and even less, of its affectivecoloring.

At the start of his life, a person usually behaves as if life lasts forever.But then something changes in his life or, perhaps, his life approachesits end, and the same person now counts his remaining years, evenmonths. He hurries to realize some of his intentions and abandonsothers. You could say that his awareness of death has been altered. Buthas his meaning changed or expanded, has his awareness of the veryconcept, the “meaning” of death been altered? No. The sense haschanged for him. . . . [And then] indeed in the first case the idea ofdeath can be extremely affective for the subject, and in the secondcase, to the contrary, it cannot elicit any strong emotion at all.13

In order to take the next step in our reasoning, we will have tolook at the relationship between meaning and sense from the per-spective of the historical development of human consciousness.And, the first fundamental fact that we must encounter is thedependence of forms and manner of a person’s reflection of ob-jective reality on the particular features of the society in which helives. As it pertains to capitalist society, it has been described byKarl Marx as the fact of “self-alienation.”

If we examine the collective activity of primitive hunters, wesee that the motive is in agreement with this activity, or one couldeven say it coincides with the objective result. It is stimulated byeach person’s share in the overall catch, but this catch is at thesame time the result of the activity of the primitive collective andeach of its members. Things are different in a class society, inparticular (most keenly felt), in capitalist society. Here the motivefor labor activity by a worker does not coincide with its result, theobjective content of activity does not coincide with the subjectivecontent, the sense of his labor does not coincide with its meaning.



The worker produces for himself neither the silk that he weaves northe gold that he extracts from the mine, nor the palace that he builds.For himself he produces a wage, but the silk, the gold, the palace aretransformed for him into a specific number of vital means, perhapsinto a cotton jacket, into a copper coin, into a place to live in somebasement. . . . The sense of his twelve-hour labor does not consist inthe fact that he weaves, spins, drills, and so on, but in the fact that it isa way of earning a wage that makes it possible for him to eat, to go toa tavern, to sleep.14

A paradoxical phenomenon emerges, the very one that is charac-terized by Marx as “self-alienation” of the worker, alienation fromhis own essence. On the one hand, he is a creator, a producer ofmaterial value, the bearer of knowledge and skills, ensuring thelife and development of society; on the other hand, for him thecontent of his labor is secondary, he is working not in order to pro-duce, but in order to live. It is as if he is split in two in his relation-ship to labor, and this cannot fail to be reflected in his conscious-ness and his perception of material and social reality, the world ofobjects, and the world of human relations. It is not unusual for thisbifurcation to take on hideous forms that, perhaps, are more obvi-ously demonstrated in internal tendencies that are common to allcapitalist society. “The glazier rejoices in the hailstorm that couldbreak all the panes of glass,” wrote Fourier.

This phenomenon is also vividly reflected in speech activity,giving rise to a sharp divergence between the meaning of wordsand their sense. Look at the (extremely telling) words that a con-temporary Spanish writer, who has nothing at all to do with Marx-ism, puts in the mouth of his protagonist, a proletarian living onthe outskirts of town.

Uptown folk have taken over the language of people on the outskirts.Words used to be coins—real or counterfeit. Now there is nothing butcounterfeit in circulation. The words “bread,” “justice,” and “man”have all lost their original meaning. They have become empty sounds,instruments of lies. . . . Uptown folk have taken words, deprived themof their living flesh and transplanted them into their barren soil. Thetruth cannot roll from their tongue, just as grass cannot grow throughthe asphalt of their streets. . . . For them, the word “bread” does not


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mean bread and the word “man” does not mean man. Each word hasbecome a mousetrap for them, every phrase is a snare. . . . And thepeople from the outskirts have to keep quiet. Their tongues no longerobey them. (Juan Goytisolo, Undertow)

Let us attempt to analyze this tirade. Of course, Goytisolo’sprotagonist does not actually believe that the meaning (in ourunderstanding of this term) of the word “bread” is different for“uptown folk” and “people on the outskirts.” The word contin-ues to signify bread. But the bread itself is perceived in differentways. For one person it is a means of survival, a means of satis-fying a natural need, and, at the same time, it is a social valuethat is clearly recognized and easily measurable in terms of theamount of labor expended for it. There is a reason why peasantsin a Russian village consider it impossible to throw away even acrust of bread, not to mention a whole slice, and sternly punishchildren if they violate this prohibition. For another person, breadis not perceived as having a social value; he pays for it in a storewith an impersonal coin that has been easily earned, not with thesweat of labor, working at a lathe or plowing the furrows, andthe attitude toward it is fundamentally different. The sense ofbread, and, consequently, the perception of the word “bread” dif-fers; the worker, the novel’s protagonist, intuitively senses this.The root of this difference is the social structure of capitalistsociety, reflected in the motivation of labor and other human ac-tivities, coloring their perception of such seemingly neutral wordsas “bread” or “person.”

This does not mean that the difference in motives for an activ-ity, and therefore the difference in the sense of a referent or theword that corresponds to it necessarily depends on class differ-ences. But in a class society (most clearly in capitalist society),the objective meaning of the referent (or word) and its sense al-ways diverge to some degree, since the “personal” interest, the“personal” motive and the overall interest of society diverge. Amost important step forward was taken by socialist society in com-parison with capitalist society, and this step was the liquidation ofthe socioeconomic basis for alienation.



Whether or not class stratification of society is directly reflectedin the particular features of sense, as a rule, sense is tied to thesocial structure of society in one way or another. Sense is not indi-vidual, since people’s relationship with objective and social real-ity is not individual; this relationship is always colored by aparticular set of group interests. And it would be strange if it wereany other way, since a person is not Robinson Crusoe living on anisland, surrounded by a boundless sea of unfamiliar individuali-ties. And no matter how hard he might try at times—in the personof philosophers such as [José] Ortega y Gasset—to publicly closehis eyes to his social essence, it remains with him.

So, sense, like meaning, is a form of social influence on theindividual, a form of social experience that is required by the indi-vidual. But unlike meaning, it is not in a codified form. As a rule,this sense does not exist as something separate from meaning forthe person individualizing it. On the contrary, it seems that a per-son immediately perceives the referent (or word) in its objectivemeaning. But all objects of human reality, like all words of humanlanguage, are seen by each of us as if through the prism of our“personal” (and, in practice, social) interest. And it takes a specialeffort of analytical thought to be able to rise above this interest tosee the separateness of sense and meaning.

* * *

We have covered a long distance over the course of a few pages.Having started by contrasting meaning and sense on a one-sidedlogical basis (Frege), we made our way step by step toward a fun-damentally different point of view on their interrelations. Alongthe way we had to call on the findings of philosophy, psychology,logic, and linguistics.

As a result, we have arrived at a certain understanding of sense,one that is only conditionally labeled “psychological” in the titleof this article because, while psychological, at the same time, itextends beyond the boundaries of psychology in its traditionalunderstanding. This understanding could be called semiotic if


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contemporary semiotics—having forgotten the warning of one ofits prophets, Ferdinand de Saussure—did not deliberately limititself to a purely phenomenalistic view of the structure of signsystems. It could also have been called semantic—recalling thedefinition of semantics by Hayakawa as the study of the relation-ships between language, thought, and behavior—if only the un-derstanding of the interconnection and relative significance of thesethree components among proponents of “general semantics” hadnot been diametrically opposed to ours.

One way or another, the concept of sense outlined above andfirst proposed in 1944 by A.N. Leontiev is not, as the concept ofmeaning, the domain of a single science or a component of asingle model of reality. Without demanding each time a funda-mental change in the perspective on the objective essence of sense,on the objective significance of this phenomenon for the truereality of people in society, the concept of sense can also be used,and to a certain extent is already used, in a variety of aspects ofscientific research by a number of sciences: philosophy, psychol-ogy, pedagogy, sociology, ethnography, linguistics, and finally,psycholinguistics. In serving within these sciences in its variousaspects, we repeat, it does not lose its integrity and qualitativedistinctness.

Is it justified to advance such “global” notions in an age of sci-entific differentiation and a multiplicity of scientific models? Yes,if we view this differentiation, this multiplicity as a step towardintegrating them into a new Science of Man; and, in particular, (asour next task) toward the creation of a “general theory of the posi-tion of language in social life,” about which D. Hymes dreamednot long ago.15 And this dream is not unfounded: observing theevolution of contemporary, including American, psychology, theevolution of contemporary linguistics, and so on, one can clearlysee a tendency toward synthesis taking on increasing significanceand increasingly coloring the system of ideas and concepts of thesesciences. The opposite tendencies, no matter how strong they mightbe now, belong to yesterday’s science.

One can agree or disagree with the theoretical dogma of one



school or another. But the history of science, the history of ideas isfollowing its course, and it is essential that we be able to under-stand in time where this course is leading us.

Notes

1. B.V. Biriukov, “Teoriia smysla Gotloba Frege,” in Primenenie logiki vnauke i tekhnike (Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1960).

2. G. Frege, “Uber Sinn und Bedeutung,” Zeitschrift für Philosophie undphilosophische Kritik, 1892, vol. 100, p. 20.

3. A. Church, Vvedenie v matematicheskuiu logiku, vol. 1 (Moscow, 1960).4. A.A. Potebnia, Iz zapisok po russkoi grammatike (Moscow: Uchpedgiz,

1958), p. 70.5. In our subsequent discussion of the views of the Vygotsky school on the

problem of sense we primarily have in mind A.N. Leontiev, A.R. Luria, and theirfollowers. As far as Vygotsky himself is concerned, he shared the position of F.Paulhan, from whom he also borrowed the term “sense” (smysl) (see F. Paulhan,La double fonction du langage [Paris, 1929]); in Vygotsky, the distinction be-tween meaning (znachenie) and sense (smysl) was generally equivalent to thedistinction between connotative and denotative meanings that is generally ac-cepted in linguistics.

6. See A.N. Leontiev and A.A. Leontiev, “Social and Individual in the Lan-guage,” Language and Speech, 1959, vol. 2, p. 4.

7. Or, as the same thought was expressed by F. Engels, “Human thoughtexists only as the individual thinking of many billions of current, past, andfuture people” (K. Marks [Marx] and F. Engel’s [Engels] Sobr. soch., vol. 20,p. 87).

8. The physiological basis for optimization of activity is provided in theworks of N.A. Bernstein, primarily in the book published after his death, Ocherkipo fiziologii dvizheniia i fiziologii aktivnosti (Moscow: Meditsina, 1966).

9. Here we will cite, in addition to Vygotsky’s famous monograph, our ownbook, The Word in Speech Activity [Slovo v rechevoi deiatel’nosti] (Moscow:Nauka, 1965), where the corresponding literature is listed.

10. Here it would be fitting to introduce, following the examples of P.K.Anokhin and A.N. Leontiev, the concept of the “functional system,” but thatwould take us too far afield.

11. But other forms of fixing meanings are also possible: “in the form of askill, as a generalized ‘mode of action,’ of norms of behavior, and so on” (A.N.Leont’ev [Leontiev], Problemy razvitiia psikhiki, 2d ed. [Moscow, 1965], p. 289).Naturally, in talking about awareness, we did not have in mind awareness ofmeaning, and even less so, signification. Both of these are optional; for us, theyare epiphenomena. On the other hand, the potential to be an object of awarenessalso plays a certain role in cases where the corresponding denotatum, reflected inmeaning, does not immediately serve as the goal of an activity.

12. J.M.W. Verhaar, “Speech, Language, and Inner Form,” Proceedings of


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the Ninth International Congress of Linguists (The Hague, 1964), p. 749.13. A.N. Leont’ev [Leontiev], “Psikhologicheskie voprosy soznatel’nosti

ucheniia,” Izvestiia APN RSFSR, no. 7 (Moscow, 1946), p. 28.14. Marx and Engels, Soch., vol. 6, p. 432. Here and subsequently we rely in

part on the reasoning expressed by A.N. Leontiev in his book Problems in theDevelopment of Mind [Problemy razvitiia psikhiki] (Moscow, 1965), p. 315 f.

15. D. Hymes, “Review of New Directions in the Study of Language, ed. E.N.Lenneberg,” Contemporary Psychology, 1965, vol. 10, no. 12, p. 549.

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a. a. leontiev - sense as a psychological concept

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