Mediation in the bull’s eye
There have been thousands of versions of the relationship between
‘language’ (or signs in general), ‘mind/society’
and ‘the world’ under the polymorphic name of semiotics.
From all this accounts we would like to focus on some of the most
important mediational views in the surroundings of Psychology. We
are going to talk about mediation but it is possible that the very
concept of mediation itself needs to be changed, for the common
(mediational) sense describes very badly what is taking place in
our example.
In the Vygotskian socio-historical theory (Kozulin,
1990; Vygotsky, 1995) language is seen as a ‘tool’ that
mediates activity, internalised after having been established ‘inter-psychologically’.
Soviet and American revisionisms of his conceptions have maintained
a very similar ontology, portraying man as agent and the object
as patient, and tools as extensions of human functions, related
to culture (see FIGURE 1).
