Showing papers by "Jaan Valsiner published in 2010"

Between the General and the Unique: Overcoming the Nomothetic versus Idiographic Opposition

Abstract: In accordance with Windelband’s original proposal, the notions of nomothetic and idiographic are complementary terms, rather than an oppositional dyad. Given their dynamic and field-dependent nature, psychological phenomena are inherently unique—the relationship between their way of being and their constant becoming is mediated by the contingent conditions of the field. Therefore, science cannot be anything but idiographic—always facing a new unique event—while it is aimed at producing general knowledge of the nomothetic kind out of the ever-changing processes that unfold through irreversible time. The uniqueness of psychological phenomena makes it unfeasible for science to rely exclusively on inductive generalization that works through accumulation of empirical evidence provided by aggregated collections of specimens either within a single case (accumulation over time) or by assuming equivalence of exemplars across single cases subsumed under the same general class (a category viewed as a population). Ab...

Methodological thinking in psychology : 60 years gone astray?

Abstract: In recent years an increasing dissatisfaction with methods and thinking in psychology as a science can be observed. The discipline is operating under the tension between the traditional quantitative and the new qualitative methodologies. New approaches emerge in different fields of psychology and education?each of them trying to go beyond limitations of the mainstream. These new approaches, however, tend to be "historically blind" - seemingly novel ideas have actually been common in some period in the history of psychology. Knowledge of historical trends in that context becomes crucial because analysis of historical changes in psychology is informative regarding the potential of "new/old and forgotten" approaches in the study of psyche. Some approaches in psychology disappeared due to inherent limitations of them; the others disappeared due to purely non-scientific reasons. And some new approaches were rejected long ago for well-justified scientific reasons. This book brings together contributions from leading scholars in different fields of psychology - cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, cultural psychology, methodology of psychology. Each of the contributors discusses methodological issues that were more thoroughly understood more than half a century ago than they are now. Overall, the contributions support the idea that in important ways 60 years old psychology was far ahead of the most recent trends in mainstream psychology.

Towards cultural psychology of affective processes: Semiotic regulation of dynamic fields

Abstract: The newly emerging interdisciplinary area of cultural psychology has largely addressed issues of conduct and cognition. A semiotic perspective is assumed here to investigate phenomena of affective ...

Time in life and life in time: between experiencing and accounting

Abstract: Everyone agrees that happy times of the pleasurable kind seem to pass faster than stressful times. When we are in a deep sleep and then wake up, we feel the time as if it had been a moment. We fall asleep instantly─and eight hours later when we wake up, it seems to us as if just a short time has passed. On the other hand, an insomniac─ a person who is continuously struggling with habitual sleeplessness─ suffers what feels like a long time every night before the transition to sleep. Time sometimes “flies” and at other times “drags”─as all of us know. There is a deeply subjective flow involved in living-within-time. Imagine that you decided─or were asked to-do five-hundred push-ups. This is a difficult experience for nearly everyone. You start and then cannot count anymore. You feel that this simple torture is never-ending. It is another kind of pervasive time experience. You cannot go back to the state you were before you embarked on the path to the five-hundred push-ups. You function in pervasive and irreversible time. This corresponds to the suffering of terminally ill patients. Though pleasurable and distressful experiences are both pervasive, feeling relaxed might correspond to an extension of space feeling. In fact, Bergson (1907), in his work “L'évolution, correlate détente (i.e. relaxation) to extension, or créatrice.” Therefore, distress might correspond to convergence of time. According to Bergson, time is persistent─it Study Notes Time in Life and Life in Time: Between Experiencing and Accounting

Why simple lessons from history are recurrely forgotten: the bubble of "epistemic markets"

Abstract: History of psychology entails knowledge that is relevant for the future of the discipline in two ways: (a) by demonstrating why potentially productive new ideas failed under socio-political conditions in the past, and (b) how such ideas can fit into the solutions for new tasks in the present and in the future. @e borrowing of the notion of epistemic markets from the domain of economics has highlighted the focus on the first, while a functional history of psychology works for the second. Markets increase —and lose-value of the already existing products, but are not loci of creation of these products. Hence the second direction of inquiry —analysis of the structure of once invented ideas that lost their value on "epistemic markets"— but can provide new impetus for a science that becomes self-averaging —is in order. Otherwise psychology in the 21st century becomes a socially visible and substantively inconsequential part of societies' self-presentation. @e crucial feature of developmen t of ideas —epistemogenesis— occurs prior to their entrance onto the relations of value negotiations of these ideas. History of psychology plays a pivotal role in keeping the epistemogenesis in the focus of contemporary psychologists who would otherwise be seduced by science administrators and their collaborating peers to succumb to the forces of the epistemic market. @e market is merely one part of the chain of knowledge construction that proceeds from the atelier or factory of thinking and research to the public display through the constraints of market makers. Markets do not produce —but re-distribute— value. Yet their function is central for future ideas —and history of psychol- ogy is the filter through which ideas of the past can be dissociated from, or connected with, the future. Psychology is on the move to renewed focus on general theories of basic human * Invited presentation at the XXII Symposium of the Spanish Society for the History of Psychology,

9. The Instant of Being Everywhere: Options and Obstacles in Technology-mediated Education

Abstract: Contemporary technological advancements create new forms of human experiences – most notably the speed of communication, and the linking of the here-and-now and there-and-now settings. We analyze the new hybrid setting that is created for the teaching/learning contexts through seminars that use videoconferencing between remote locations, and emphasize that through these technological means teaching and learning activities move into the liminal place – heterotopia – where time and space of actions is set up under new constraints of immediacy. Human relations of our time emulate new technological devices in ways that let us forget them. Once mastered, we forget all the confusions we lived through when trying to use a computer, cell phone, or i-pod for the first time. Moreover, reliance on such hard-attained technological devices becomes a primary psychological necessity – as anyone forgetting one’s cell phone may understand. Objects which once – not so long ago – were foreign and somewhat untrusted interventions into our ordinary ways of living quickly become hyper-ordinary. Yet information technology is special; it changes us more than technological breakthroughs in other life areas – cooking technology (microwaves), water reprocessing technology, or laundromats – do. The old social boundaries or private public kind are broken down (e.g. receiving a phone call while in bathroom) and newly established (e.g., switching off one’s cell phone at the beginning of a relevant social event). We turn around while walking in a street hearing somebody behind us saying a loud «hello» to meet the friendly stranger, only to find her deeply attached to her cellphone. Even more curious are the street scenes where seemingly normal human beings can be seen talking loudly to themselves. The hands-free sets make the difference between ordinary street and an insane asylum that of a matter of degree. The nature of social institutions is likewise changing. The historic difference between formal (school) and informal (community) education crumbles with the wireless internet connections arriving inside school classrooms, and the cell phone photo cameras used to communicate exam questions to the peer elsewhere. Technology makes us free – or, more precisely – makes us dependent in new ways. These new ways both enable and restrict our ways of living; the speed of sending a message instantly to the other side of the world is balanced by the slow agony of trying to remember one’s own forgotten password among the many.