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.

/pdf/being-there-putting-brain-body-and-world-together-again-31tt4y51ml.pdf

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

The measurement of meaning

How we Think

Creativity is the process of emergence of an alternative trajectory of human conduct, unfolding within irreversible time, mediated by signs. The theory of semiotic dynamics of human conduct situates the moment of emergence of novelty in the creation of sign hierarchies that either guide the person into previously known trajectory of feeling, thinking, and acting, or into a new trajectory not experienced before. This emergence is initiated by the person who strives in some direction, and utilizes signs as regulators and catalysts for bringing about innovative moments in one’s experience. Semiotic catalysis at the bifurcation point of the trajectories sets up the uncertainty of emergence of the new on the basis of past experience. Catalytic signs are field-like in their nature and occur in sign complexes that make possible the direction of affective meanings into variable pathways. Such sign fields can be observed to be encoded into symbolic resources—iconic images or re-narrated myth stories of memorable scenes that are set up to be maintained over generations and guide renewal of meaningful understandings of the world.

A semiotic approach to creativity: Resources for re-contextualization

Gustav Jahoda was not famous. He was better than the rest of us all, busily working in the field of so-called “empirical science”—he was substantive. Gustav did not try to establish his “own line” within the booming and buzzing mindscapes of emerging cultural psychologies in the 1980s, 1990s, and in our century. Yet, he was always there—a deeply critical and constructive mind to remind us all about the ephemerality of re-labeling something into a “cultural something.” He was an honest scholar for whom all institutional absurdities of the games universities play were foreign. He was a Thinker in its own right. This is the highest appreciation any scholar of today can get. Still, he was a lone fighter for substantive efforts in the field. Psychology of today is filled with actors who want to be famous. Some have succeeded—their names and references are engraved into the collective memory of textbooks. Yet, textbooks and awards do not make science—striving, suffering, and tentatively succeeding seekers of truth do, sometimes. Psychology has suffered from remarkable erosion of its historically solid strengths (Gigerenzer et al., 1989; Toomela & Valsiner, 2010). Jahoda—over decades—watchfully pointed out cases of such kind, based on his vast historical knowledge and intuitive feeling into Africa, as well as into the history of the human sciences as a whole. Jahoda’s critical stance upon flowering fashions in the social sciences—including that for declaring culture (and cultural psychology) to be a solution to the discipline’s ills—led him to new ideas. This meant also digging deeply into the traditions of 19th century anthropology with the focus on psychic unity (in the work of Theodor Weitz—Jahoda, 1995, and more deeply in Jahoda, 2014). He focused on the origins of social psychology in the

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1354067X18779436

Culture, mind, and history: Building on the contributions of Gustav Jahoda

Talking and acting: Making change and doing development

We offer a conceptual reformulation of the relations between two major psychological functions, speaking and acting. The role of speech in regulating action is traditionally presented in cultural‐historical psychology as a gradual takeover and control of the flow of actions by emerging speech functions. We expand this notion to include a variety of coordinated forms between speaking and acting in which the speech‐controlling‐action model is but one of the possibilities. Human development can be characterized as a constant overproduction of action and speech efforts, which are context‐bound, and from which the constructive selection of surviving speech and action forms emerge. Ontogeny thus entails the selective attrition of speech and action forms that emerge through episodes of individual and individual‐social other activity. Empirical evidence from a short‐term longitudinal study of toddlers' speaking and acting in everyday‐life problem‐solving situations is provided to indicate how different forms of s...

Coordination of speaking and acting in the second year of life

This book explores the development of ideas in psychology's past It is the initial volume in a series intended to shape such ideas into a valuable resource for the discipline's future Scientists, in general, are known to ignore their own history, considering it to be a graveyard of failures In "Thinking in Psychological Science", selected ideas of key figures in the cognitive, comparative, and developmental sides of psychology - Karl Duncker, Karl Buhler, Tamara Dembo, Zing-Young Kuo, C Lloyd Morgan, Alexander Chamberlain, and Arnold Gesell - are traced, and the social contexts of their ideas are given a collective analysis, focusing on the potential of these ideas for the present state of psychology Representing the scientist as "hero" has become a necessary component when applying for research monies from governmentally controlled funding agencies Yet, the reality is just the opposite: Science is not just the product of "heroes"; it is the product of many individuals who often search for solutions to basic problems throughout their lifetimes - while only a few arrive at breakthroughs Still, familiarity with the flow of thought in the efforts to solve the basic problems of humankind is necessary for any understanding of creativity This book analyzes the processes involved in the search for solutions to major theoretical problems - of development (Kuo, Gesell), action and cognition (Buhler, Dunker, Dembo), and methodology (Morgan) Ultimately, this is an exciting volume that reveals real science in the making "Thinking in Psychological Science" will be of interest to students of the social sciences and intellectual history It is ideal for graduate and upper-level undergraduate courses in psychology, the sociology of science, and cognitive science

Jaan Valsiner

Papers

A semiotic approach to creativity: Resources for re-contextualization

Culture, mind, and history: Building on the contributions of Gustav Jahoda

Talking and acting: Making change and doing development

Coordination of speaking and acting in the second year of life

Thinking in Psychological Science : Ideas and Their Makers