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English translation 2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc., from the Russian text Smysl
kak psikhologicheskoe poniatie, in Iazyk i rechevaia deiatelnost v obshchei i
pedagogicheskoi psikhologii (Moscow and Voronezh: IPO MODEK, 2001), pp.
14152. Published with the permission of Dmitry A. Leontiev.
Translated by Nora Favorov.
Journal of Russian and East European Psychology, vol. 44, no. 3,
MayJune 2006, pp. 5769.
2006 M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All rights reserved.
ISSN 10610405/2006 $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 from
the way it has generally been used in logic and philosophy since
the time of Gottlob Frege. Nonetheless, replacing it with some
other term is not possible, as in psychologyin particular in the
Soviet Vygotskian school of psychologyit 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 the
information it contains, and unambiguously characerizes the object
or the path in which a name signifies an object. The classical
example of expressions with one meaning but different senses is
morning star and evening star. Furthermore, Frege distinguishes
the idea between meaning and sense representations, the
internal image of an object arising from memories of sensory
impressions that a person previously had. The representation is
subjective: it is often permeated with emotions, the clarity of its
constituent parts differs and is contantly changing; even in one
and the same person, representations connected to one and the same
sense are different at different times; one persons representation is
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not anothers.
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 hardly
doubt that humanity has a storehouse of thoughts that it conveys
from one generation to the next.
2
The modern version of Freges theory is most clearly presented
in a well-known book by A. Church.
3
Here we do not have the
concept of the representation, but sense is informally defined as
something that is assimilated when a concept is understood. Here,
Church supplies a special footnote to emphasize that the concept
of sense is devoid of any psychological implication. This footnote
is quite indicative: what the true logician nowadays fears most is
committing the sin of psychology. (As can be seen above, Frege
had 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 best
characterized by words stated eighty years ago by the great Russian
linguist A.A. Potebnia: it (logic) is a hypothetical science. It says:
if a thought is given, then the relationship between its elements
must be of such-and-such a nature; otherwise, the thought is not
logical. But logic says nothing about how we arrived at such a
thought. . . . For example, in making assertions, logic does not
examine the process of stating, but from its one-sided point of
view 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 and
representation? The answer is clear. A representation is a subjec-
tive category, a psychological category, because for Frege it is
individual and weak; sense is a logical-objective category, be-
cause it can be the common property of many people. What
can be common property can therefore not be a part and mode
of 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 the
system of categories proposed by Frege would demand a signifi-
cant reevaluation.
Just such a psychological theory was developed by the Vygotsky
school.
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 of
the human ability to foresee his own actions and to consciously
plan them. And this ability, in turn, is conditioned by the fact that
every uniquely human activitypractical, labor activity and theo-
retical, cognitive activityis mediated by auxiliary means that
are 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 are
not automatically over-added to the mix. They alter the very
structure 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 incorporating
tools and signs into activity, takes on a new quality, and does not
merely undergo a quantitative change. Language and labor, or
rather, labor and language restructure the human psyche down to
its foundation, rather than basically refashioning it.
Humanitys sociohistorical experience, its material and spiri-
tual culture, are mans essential powers (Wesenskrfte) expressed
in mediated form, in the form of the existence of human abilities
(Marx). Every individual person appropriates (aneignet) these
mediated abilities and properties, organically merging them with
neurophysiological conditions that they have inherited genetically.
6
The spiritual and mental development of the individual is the active
process of appropriating sociohistorical experience in the course of
his practical and theoretical activity; he does not discover the
world for himself as a result of insight or anything analogous to it;
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60 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY
but over a long period, in a painstaking and orderly manner, mold-
ing the formation of his psychic awareness, erecting level after
level, building them up to tear them down; and, finally, reaching a
height from which the boundless horizons of human knowledge
and human ability opens up before him, which is now accessible
to him as well.
So, humanitys 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 from
this storehouse. But the relationship here is two-sidedafter all,
the storehouse itself has real existence only within millions of
individual psyches.
7
This is the viewpoint held by L.S. Vygotsky and his school on
the nature of human mental activity. With respect to its specific
structural nature, it is determined first and foremost by the fact
that, from the very start, there is a conscious goal in activity. Activ-
ity is planned and organizedconsciously or unconsciouslyin
precisely a way such that the goal is achieved using optimal means
and minimal expenditure of time and energy.
8
In addition to a goal,
the activity act is characterized by a specific motive; one and the
same (on the surface) activity can be carried out as the result of
different motives, driven by different needs. The attainment of a
goal 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 individuals
assimilation of social values takes place in the course of activity.
The child begins to use a spoon in its characteristic function not
because he has some abstract knowledge of a spoon. He is simply
presented with the necessity of eating his porridge on his own, and
we make available an appropriate means to achieve this and give
him a minimal idea of operations with these means (it is not sur-
prising that any child, speaking any language, when he forgets the
name 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 was
thoroughly studied by Vygotsky himself and has been repeatedly
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MAYJUNE 2006 61
dealt with since then.
9
Using linguistic signs to the extent possible
at each level of his/her development, the child gradually masters
the appropriate rules of usage for these signs. At first, these are the
same signs as those used by adults only in the case of objective
reference, but the way of referring and the nature of the intercon-
nection of signs with one another is different. The usage of signs
has the opposite effect on the psychophysiological organization of
linguistic ability,
10
so the possibility for more complex forms of
activity emerges, and so on; ultimately, not only object reference,
but the subjects correlation per se, the rules for using a particular
sign come to resemble the rules generally accepted in the given
society or a given linguistic community.
One and the same word with identical reference to objects and
phenomena of the external world means different things to the
child at different ages and different stages of development. In Freges
terminology, the meaning of a word remains the same, but its sense
develops 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, although
the term concept is hardly appropriate for the genetic aspect of
meaning. Below, we will first of all preserve Freges term mean-
ing, and second, we will talk about signification.
So, in entering into the activity of the individual (the child), the
word, with its objective, essentially extrapsychological meaning,
acquires a different, gradually developing signification that approxi-
mates the generally accepted one. We should note two aspects of
this phenomenon. First, this becomes possible only as a result of
the fact that the word has correspondence to the referent, as if
replacing it by activity; in this sense, the mastery of meaning is
the most important wayone might say the determining wayin
which individual behavior is mediated through social experience.
Second, the meaning of a word is by no means confined to the fact
of 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
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62 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY
does not correspond with Freges, despite identical terminology.
If for Frege meaning is denotatum, for us it is something closer
to the potential possibility of a words reference to a given refer-
ent or class of referents, realized through various significations,
and depending primarily on the place of the given referent within
activity.
Based on the above, it can be concluded that meaning is a
socially codified form of social experience assimilated by each
individual. This codification is its constituting feature, which is
expressed in the fact that the corresponding referent can be con-
sciously perceived.
What is meant by this can be perceived? First, it signifies that
the referent, that is, the fragment of reality reflected in meaning,
can be an object of actual perception, toward which the conscious
activity of the subject is directed. Second, it signifies that what we
are aware of in objects or phenomena of reality turns out to be
common to any person speaking the given language and living in
the given society, who has attained a certain level of mental devel-
opment. Third, it signifies that we have at our disposal some kind
of objectivized psychological foundation on which we project, so
to speak, our knowledge about reality. More often than not this
foundation is the word.
11
If we look at meaning as a fact of the psyche, as Freges repre-
sentation, and not as meaning, we notice something paradoxi-
cal. While meaning is objective, it never appears to be an objective
phenomenon for each individual. It is not a matter of individual
variations 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 into
a 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 was
expressed well by I. Verhaar in a talk at the ninth International
Congress of Linguists. Thoughts that come with the word prison
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MAYJUNE 2006 63
will be different for an architect, a lawyer, a prisoner, or an official
reviewing a verdict. But the meaning that is put into the word
prison is absolutely the same for all these people.
12
So if we attempt to define sense in our understanding, then it
will be most accurate to talk about it in terms of an analogue of
meaning in a concrete activity. But this is not simply an individual-
psychological aspect of meaning and even less, of its affective
coloring.
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 approaches
its end, and the same person now counts his remaining years, even
months. He hurries to realize some of his intentions and abandons
others. You could say that his awareness of death has been altered. But
has his meaning changed or expanded, has his awareness of the very
concept, the meaning of death been altered? No. The sense has
changed for him. . . . [And then] indeed in the first case the idea of
death can be extremely affective for the subject, and in the second
case, 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 to
look 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 the
dependence of forms and manner of a persons reflection of ob-
jective reality on the particular features of the society in which he
lives. As it pertains to capitalist society, it has been described by
Karl Marx as the fact of self-alienation.
If we examine the collective activity of primitive hunters, we
see that the motive is in agreement with this activity, or one could
even say it coincides with the objective result. It is stimulated by
each persons share in the overall catch, but this catch is at the
same time the result of the activity of the primitive collective and
each of its members. Things are different in a class society, in
particular (most keenly felt), in capitalist society. Here the motive
for labor activity by a worker does not coincide with its result, the
objective content of activity does not coincide with the subjective
content, the sense of his labor does not coincide with its meaning.
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64 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY
The worker produces for himself neither the silk that he weaves nor
the 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 are
transformed for him into a specific number of vital means, perhaps
into a cotton jacket, into a copper coin, into a place to live in some
basement. . . . The sense of his twelve-hour labor does not consist in
the fact that he weaves, spins, drills, and so on, but in the fact that it is
a way of earning a wage that makes it possible for him to eat, to go to
a tavern, to sleep.
14
A paradoxical phenomenon emerges, the very one that is charac-
terized by Marx as self-alienation of the worker, alienation from
his own essence. On the one hand, he is a creator, a producer of
material value, the bearer of knowledge and skills, ensuring the
life and development of society; on the other hand, for him the
content 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 of
objects, and the world of human relations. It is not unusual for this
bifurcation to take on hideous forms that, perhaps, are more obvi-
ously demonstrated in internal tendencies that are common to all
capitalist society. The glazier rejoices in the hailstorm that could
break 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 words
and 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 on
the outskirts of town.
Uptown folk have taken over the language of people on the outskirts.
Words used to be coinsreal or counterfeit. Now there is nothing but
counterfeit 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 them
of their living flesh and transplanted them into their barren soil. The
truth cannot roll from their tongue, just as grass cannot grow through
the 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 has
become a mousetrap for them, every phrase is a snare. . . . And the
people from the outskirts have to keep quiet. Their tongues no longer
obey them. (Juan Goytisolo, Undertow)
Let us attempt to analyze this tirade. Of course, Goytisolos
protagonist does not actually believe that the meaning (in our
understanding 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 different
ways. 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 value
that is clearly recognized and easily measurable in terms of the
amount of labor expended for it. There is a reason why peasants
in a Russian village consider it impossible to throw away even a
crust of bread, not to mention a whole slice, and sternly punish
children if they violate this prohibition. For another person, bread
is not perceived as having a social value; he pays for it in a store
with an impersonal coin that has been easily earned, not with the
sweat of labor, working at a lathe or plowing the furrows, and
the attitude toward it is fundamentally different. The sense of
bread, and, consequently, the perception of the word bread dif-
fers; the worker, the novels protagonist, intuitively senses this.
The root of this difference is the social structure of capitalist
society, reflected in the motivation of labor and other human ac-
tivities, coloring their perception of such seemingly neutral words
as 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 the
word 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. A
most important step forward was taken by socialist society in com-
parison with capitalist society, and this step was the liquidation of
the socioeconomic basis for alienation.
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66 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY
Whether or not class stratification of society is directly reflected
in the particular features of sense, as a rule, sense is tied to the
social structure of society in one way or another. Sense is not indi-
vidual, since peoples relationship with objective and social real-
ity is not individual; this relationship is always colored by a
particular set of group interests. And it would be strange if it were
any other way, since a person is not Robinson Crusoe living on an
island, surrounded by a boundless sea of unfamiliar individuali-
ties. And no matter how hard he might try at timesin the person
of philosophers such as [Jos] Ortega y Gassetto publicly close
his eyes to his social essence, it remains with him.
So, sense, like meaning, is a form of social influence on the
individual, 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 for
the person individualizing it. On the contrary, it seems that a per-
son immediately perceives the referent (or word) in its objective
meaning. But all objects of human reality, like all words of human
language, are seen by each of us as if through the prism of our
personal (and, in practice, social) interest. And it takes a special
effort of analytical thought to be able to rise above this interest to
see 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-sided
logical basis (Frege), we made our way step by step toward a fun-
damentally different point of view on their interrelations. Along
the 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 title
of this article because, while psychological, at the same time, it
extends beyond the boundaries of psychology in its traditional
understanding. This understanding could be called semiotic if
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MAYJUNE 2006 67
contemporary semioticshaving forgotten the warning of one of
its prophets, Ferdinand de Saussuredid not deliberately limit
itself to a purely phenomenalistic view of the structure of sign
systems. It could also have been called semanticrecalling the
definition of semantics by Hayakawa as the study of the relation-
ships between language, thought, and behaviorif only the un-
derstanding of the interconnection and relative significance of these
three components among proponents of general semantics had
not been diametrically opposed to ours.
One way or another, the concept of sense outlined above and
first proposed in 1944 by A.N. Leontiev is not, as the concept of
meaning, the domain of a single science or a component of a
single 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 true
reality 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 of
scientific research by a number of sciences: philosophy, psychol-
ogy, pedagogy, sociology, ethnography, linguistics, and finally,
psycholinguistics. In serving within these sciences in its various
aspects, we repeat, it does not lose its integrity and qualitative
distinctness.
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 toward
integrating them into a new Science of Man; and, in particular, (as
our next task) toward the creation of a general theory of the posi-
tion of language in social life, about which D. Hymes dreamed
not long ago.
15
And this dream is not unfounded: observing the
evolution of contemporary, including American, psychology, the
evolution of contemporary linguistics, and so on, one can clearly
see a tendency toward synthesis taking on increasing significance
and increasingly coloring the system of ideas and concepts of these
sciences. The opposite tendencies, no matter how strong they might
be now, belong to yesterdays science.
One can agree or disagree with the theoretical dogma of one
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68 JOURNAL OF RUSSIAN AND EAST EUROPEAN PSYCHOLOGY
school or another. But the history of science, the history of ideas is
following 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 v
nauke i tekhnike (Moscow: Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 1960).
2. G. Frege, Uber Sinn und Bedeutung, Zeitschrift fr Philosophie und
philosophische 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 their
followers. 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 the
distinction 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 thought
exists only as the individual thinking of many billions of current, past, and
future people (K. Marks [Marx] and F. Engels [Engels] Sobr. soch., vol. 20,
p. 87).
8. The physiological basis for optimization of activity is provided in the
works of N.A. Bernstein, primarily in the book published after his death, Ocherki
po fiziologii dvizheniia i fiziologii aktivnosti (Moscow: Meditsina, 1966).
9. Here we will cite, in addition to Vygotskys famous monograph, our own
book, The Word in Speech Activity [Slovo v rechevoi deiatelnosti] (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 that
would take us too far afield.
11. But other forms of fixing meanings are also possible: in the form of a
skill, as a generalized mode of action, of norms of behavior, and so on (A.N.
Leontev [Leontiev], Problemy razvitiia psikhiki, 2d ed. [Moscow, 1965], p. 289).
Naturally, in talking about awareness, we did not have in mind awareness of
meaning, and even less so, signification. Both of these are optional; for us, they
are epiphenomena. On the other hand, the potential to be an object of awareness
also plays a certain role in cases where the corresponding denotatum, reflected in
meaning, 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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MAYJUNE 2006 69
the Ninth International Congress of Linguists (The Hague, 1964), p. 749.
13. A.N. Leontev [Leontiev], Psikhologicheskie voprosy soznatelnosti
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 the
Development 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.
To order reprints, call 1-800-352-2210; outside the United States, call 717-632-3535.
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