Defining thought

The article presents V. V. Davydov's views on such notions as activity, ideal and consciousness, on their deep interrelation and the necessity of analyzing them as a continuous whole. The individual consciousness, according to Davydov, can be characterized as one's reproduction of ideal image of his/her activity and of other people's positions ideally represented in activity. Davydov considers human thought to be a specific mode of activity, a search for necessary conditions of actions by making changes (real or ideal) to the given situations, generally by modeling. The author states that in defining mental action it is necessary to bear in mind that it can only be revealed in overcoming the objective way of task solving, in other words, it is a conditional performance of objective operations, which takes into account the results of other people's actions fixed in a word. A notion should be regarded as a specific form, as a subject's means of action to reveal the hidden qualities of an object, which determines the special structure of the mental act.

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