How Individuals Matter: An Analysis, an Emulation, and a Response to Nathalie Bulle

Nathalie Bulle, writing in these pages, asks whether Vygotsky is indeed responsible for a major, foundational, contribution to integrative psychological and behavioral science. Bulle queries both "analysts" who strive to establish what Vygotsky's original texts actually meant in context and "emulators" who attempt to simulate his work on modern, hence not necessarily compatible, methodological "hardware". Here we query Bulle's distinction: as Vygotsky's legatees, we hold that analysis (at least in Vygotsky's sense) and emulation constitute each other. We demonstrate: first, we analyze Vygotsky's contribution using his own methodological prolegomena, "The Historical Sense of the Crisis in Psychology", newly translated in full for the first time, and we find that his crisis was not simply, as Bulle contends, due to "the triumph in Vygotsky's name of an objectivistic, natural science, approach to psychology"; it is better understood today as due to the kind of interpretative, "understanding" way of handling data that methodological individualism advocates. We then emulate Vygotsky's later semic method using data from post-seminar interviews about an initial teacher education seminar in Australia. We contend that Vygotsky's major, foundational, contribution to integrating psychological and behavioral science was twofold: he explained the methodological clash between the two and showed a way out of it through the study of meaning.