1. Introduction 2. The emergence of learning activity as a historical form of human learning 3. The zone of proximal development as the basic category of expansive research 4. The instruments of expansion 5. Toward an expansive methodology 6. Epilogue.

Learning by expanding: An activity-theoretical approach to developmental research

Part I. Experimental Studies: 2. Experiment in psychology 3. Experiments on perceiving III Experiments on imaging 4-8. Experiments on remembering: (a) The method of description (b) The method of repeated reproduction (c) The method of picture writing (d) The method of serial reproduction (e) The method of serial reproduction picture material 9. Perceiving, recognizing, remembering 10. A theory of remembering 11. Images and their functions 12. Meaning Part II. Remembering as a Study in Social Psychology: 13. Social psychology 14. Social psychology and the matter of recall 15. Social psychology and the manner of recall 16. Conventionalism 17. The notion of a collective unconscious 18. The basis of social recall 19. A summary and some conclusions.

Remembering. A Study in Experimental and Social Psychology, Cambridge (University Press) 1964.

From the Publisher:
The old opposition of matter versus mind stubbornly persists in the way we study mind and brain. In treating cognition as problem solving, Andy Clark suggests, we may often abstract too far from the very body and world in which our brains evolved to guide us. Whereas the mental has been treated as a realm that is distinct from the body and the world, Clark forcefully attests that a key to understanding brains is to see them as controllers of embodied activity. From this paradigm shift he advances the construction of a cognitive science of the embodied mind.

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Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again

The measurement of meaning

How we Think

This article provides a general overview of methodology as a cyclical process of conceptually integrating assumptions, theory, phenomenon, and methods with the goal of deriving data appropriate for

Phenomenon, Methodology and Interpretation in the Study of Meaning: American Women Constructing Themselves as Mothers and Career Workers:

Quantification in the social sciences is a result of social standardization of knowledge and its construction process. Psychologists’ recurrent fascination with “contributing to the literature”-resulting in large databanks pooled together-may decrease the empirical potential for innovation in psychology. Contemporary qualitative mathematics provides many examples of deductive formal systems that could be abductively mapped onto psychologists’ phenomena of interests so that they go beyond simple metaphoric description devices. If psychology is to become abstracting—rather than “empirical”-science, it needs to become knowledgeable of mathematics far beyond statistics. Psychology has in the last century followed the inductive model, with all of its “side effects.” Given that psychology’s initial phenomena are qualitative in nature, quantification can easily lead to data alienation. The phenomena of psychological kind require the use of different systems of numbers to be used to capture their qualitative nature—possibly complex numbers, and beyond the-mathematical spaces.

Who shall survive? Psychology that replaces quantification with qualitative mathematics

Cultural psychology and its future: Complementarity in a new key

Participating in Piaget

Our knowledge is trapped in the discourse about causality. This trap is set by the common language notions of something causing something else and its penetration into scientific domains. The crucial feature of the phenomena in the social sciences is the flexibility for intentional coordination of conditions of personal and collective cultures with social representations which is a feature absent at the lower levels of catalysis. This is made possible for the use of sign systems at various levels—personal, communal, societal, economic, and political. We can look at human phenomena as semiotically catalyzed. Social sciences introduce a new demand for philosophy of science—to account for the agency of purposeful actors and their co(unter)-actions in any generalized scheme of catalytic processes. This demand is an opportunity that may lead all social sciences toward understanding the dramatic realities of the human condition.

Jaan Valsiner

Papers

Phenomenon, Methodology and Interpretation in the Study of Meaning: American Women Constructing Themselves as Mothers and Career Workers:

Who shall survive? Psychology that replaces quantification with qualitative mathematics

Cultural psychology and its future: Complementarity in a new key

Participating in Piaget

From Causality to Catalysis in the Social Sciences