The street

I begin with a deceptively simple question—what is a street?—and end up with the whole universe of human culturally organized life. What looks as if it is nothing—the «in-between space»—becomes the arena that is the missing link—a stage— in the relation between a person and a society.Peer Reviewe

Striving for Synthesis in General Psychology:Lessons from India

The importance of the life-long contributions of Professor Sinha is in his search for new perspectives in psychology that would respect Indian cultural history. In that spirit, I will outline themes that are prominent in Indian cultural traditions from which universal science of human psychology could learn. All human beings relate to water and fertility, creating meaningful rituals of handling this valuable commodity. Likewise, it is deeply human to generate borders and social conditions for their crossings, and to participate collective rituals of symbolic processions. Psychology in the Occident has looked towards India as if it were an esoteric collection of local practices that would fit the empirical interests of cross-cultural psychology. I would claim that the psychological riches of India are of primary importance for general psychology.The importance of the life-long contributions of Professor Sinha is in his search for new perspectives in psychology that would respect Indian cultural history. In that spirit I will outline themes that are prominent in Indian cultural traditions from which universal science of human psychology could learn. All human beings relate to water and fertility, creating meaningful rituals of handling this valuable commodity. Likewise it is deeply human to generate borders and social conditions for their crossings, and to participate collective rituals of symbolic processions. Psychology in the Occident has been looking towards India as if it were an esoteric collection of local practices that would fit the empirical interests of cross-cultural psychology. I would claim that the psychological riches of India are of primary importance for general psychology

Semiotic autoregulation: Dynamic sign hierarchies constraining the stream of consciousness

For all human sciences, understanding of how the mind works requires a new theory that starts from the assumption of potential infinite variability of human symbolic forms. These forms are socially constructed by the person who moves through an endless variety of unique encounters with the world. A theory of symbolic forms needs to capture the essence of hyperdynamic, irreversible nature of the stream of consciousness and activity. The human mind is regulated through a dynamic hierarchy of semiotic mechanisms of increasingly generalized kind, which involves mutual constraining between levels of the hierarchy. It is demonstrated that semiotic mediation leads to a triplet of personal-cultural constructions — a new symbolic form, a metasymbolic form, and a regulatory signal to stop or enable the construction of further semiotic hierarchy. In everyday terms — human beings produce new problems, together with new efforts at solving them, and make decisions when to stop producing the former two. Hence, semiotic mediation guarantees both flexibility and inflexibility of the human psychological system, through the processes of abstracting generalization and contextualizing specification. Context specificity of psychological phenomena is an indication of general mechanisms that generate variability. Scientific investigation of human psychological complexity is necessarily oriented to the study of variability within the individual person’s psychological time-space

Co-constructionism and development: a socio-historic tradition

The term "co-constructionism" is becoming increasingly used in contemporaiy developmental psychology. Its major function is to unify two conceptual domains - constructionism and sociogeneticism - that have been habitually viewed as if they were irreconcilable opposites. Despite respectable history within psychology and muny contemporary tendencies to move psychology in the social constructivist and discursive directions, most of the critical problems of co-constructionist theoretical system remain hostages either to the common language uses of psychologists, or to the methods-dominated imperatives for "empirical research" practices. Co-constructionism as a general orientation rnay make it possible for psychologists to create novel methodologies that might take into account the open-systemic nature of development.El término "co-construccionismo" aparece citado cada vez con más frecuencia en los trabajos actuales de psicologia del desarollo. Su principal función es unificar dos dominios conceptuales -construccionismo y sociogénesis- considerados habitualmente opuestos e irreconciliables. A pesar de los esfuerzos de orientar la psicologia hacia una dirección constructivista o discursiva, esfuerzos que pueden encontrarse a lo largo de la historia de la psicologia y también actualmente, la mayoría de los problemas críticos del sistema teórico co-construccionista permanecen cautivos del lenguaje común usado por los psicólogos y de los imperativos metodológicos dominantes en las prácticas de investigación empírica. El co-construccionismo, entendido como una orientación general, puede contribuir a que los psicólogos creen nuevas metodologías que puedan tener en cuenta la naturaleza sistémica y abierta del desarrollo

Ornamented Worlds and Textures of Feeling: The Power of Abundance

Human development takes place in an ornamented –redundantly patterned and highly repetitive – world.The emergence of knowledge takes the form of episodicunpredictable synthetic events at the intersectionof the fields of internal and external cultural meaningsystems – through the mutually linked processes ofconstructive internalization and externalization. Patterns ofdecorations – ornaments – are relevant as redundant “inputs”into the internalization/externalization processes.Ornaments can be viewed not merely as "aestheticaccessories" to human activity contexts but as holisticdevices of cultural guidance of human conduct thatacts through the subjectivity of personal feelings. Thisguidance is peripheral in its nature – surrounding theordinary life activities with affectively oriented texturesof cultural meanings

Co-constructionism and development: a socio-historic tradition

The term "co-constructionism" is becoming increasingly used in contemporaiy developmental psychology. Its major function is to unify two conceptual domains - constructionism and sociogeneticism - that have been habitually viewed as if they were irreconcilable opposites. Despite respectable history within psychology and muny contemporary tendencies to move psychology in the social constructivist and discursive directions, most of the critical problems of co-constructionist theoretical system remain hostages either to the common language uses of psychologists, or to the methods-dominated imperatives for "empirical research" practices. Co-constructionism as a general orientation rnay make it possible for psychologists to create novel methodologies that might take into account the open-systemic nature of development.El término "co-construccionismo" aparece citado cada vez con más frecuencia en los trabajos actuales de psicologia del desarollo. Su principal función es unificar dos dominios conceptuales -construccionismo y sociogénesis- considerados habitualmente opuestos e irreconciliables. A pesar de los esfuerzos de orientar la psicologia hacia una dirección constructivista o discursiva, esfuerzos que pueden encontrarse a lo largo de la historia de la psicologia y también actualmente, la mayoría de los problemas críticos del sistema teórico co-construccionista permanecen cautivos del lenguaje común usado por los psicólogos y de los imperativos metodológicos dominantes en las prácticas de investigación empírica. El co-construccionismo, entendido como una orientación general, puede contribuir a que los psicólogos creen nuevas metodologías que puedan tener en cuenta la naturaleza sistémica y abierta del desarrollo

Social representations: a revolutionary paradigm?

Against the prevailing view that progress in science is characterized by the progressive accumulation of knowledge, Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962 introduced the idea of revolutionary paradigm shifts. For Kuhn, everyday science is normal science in which scientists are engaged in problem solving activities set in the context of a widely accepted paradigm that constitutes a broad acceptance of a fundamental theoretical framework, an agreement on researchable phenomena and on the appropriate methodology. But, on occasions normal science throws up vexing issues and anomalous results. In response, some scientists carry on regardless, while others begin to lose confidence in the paradigm and look to other options, namely rival paradigms. As more and more scientists switch allegiance to the rival paradigm, the revolution gathers pace, supported by the indoctrination of students through lectures, academic papers and textbooks. In response to critics, including Lakatos who suggested that his depiction reduced scientific progress to mob psychology, Kuhn offered a set of criteria that contributed to the apparent ‘gestalt switch’ from the old to the new paradigm. But that is another story, as indeed is Kuhn’s claim that the social sciences are pre-paradigmatic – in other words, that the only consensus is that there is no consensus