Consciousness and Linguistic Competency: Making Interdisciplinary Choices

A difficult problem for interdisciplinary study is deciding what constructs from other fields will comport well with the concerns of one's own academic area. Consciousness is a crucial concept for any discipline concerned with human behavior, but is particularly problematic for human communication scholars since it is not a primitive concept for speech communication. This essay advocates choosing a conception of consciousness that reflects the active role of language in shaping human consciousness and is presented in the theories of Vygotsky and Luria. The author suggests that such a perspective would be more practical and heuristic for communication studies than others currently being advanced since assessments of linguistic competency could then be used to investigate human consciousness.