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

In contemporary sociocultural studies, the human mind is often claimed to be dialogic. Precise elaborations of models of dialogicality are rare, however. We present a process model of dialogicality that occurs within a person's self-system (autodialogue) in the context of two kinds of tasks: making sense of ordinary happenings and understanding religious miracles. We start from the assumption that the person is involved in an ongoing self-and world-reflecting meaning-making in which the semiotically mediated reflections on the world and on one's own self are constantly created, negotiated, and transformed. Once a meaning emerges in an ambiguous action setting, it is instantly worked on through a process entailing circumvention strategies, which allow the person to rigidify or qualify it. The work of these strategies is elaborated theoretically with the help of a hypothetical example of reasoning from everyday life, and is demonstrated empirically by evidence from adults'reasoning about biblical miracles. Autodialogue is shown to work through the flexible construction of circumvention strategies in any here-and-now setting.

How does autodialogue work? Miracles of meaning maintenance and circumvention strategies

This Editorial is a ‘‘leftover’’—or maybe a ‘‘dessert’’—from my recent treatise on how cultural psychology can lead the rest of the discipline out of the loops of ‘‘dust-bowl qualitative empiricism’’ 1 that is beginning to take form in the social sciences. Cultural psychology of today operates at the intersection of these social tendencies, running the risk of being caught in the middle. One of the results of active ‘‘positivism-bashing’’ and witch-hunt on ‘‘dualisms’’ that has gone on for the past half-century is a ‘‘qualitative turn’’ in the social sciences. While that turn restores the focus on context-bound original phenomena as its empirical object, it remains as uninventive in the theoretical realm as its declared opponents ended up being. It has simply replaced the focus of the inductive generalization exercise from the field of quantified phenomena (as data) to that of qualitative descriptions (some ‘‘rich,’’ some ‘‘poor’’) that leave the illusion of understanding based on our common sense, but do not lead the field into new theoretical breakthroughs. The unique feature of cultural psychology—in all of its various versions—is the focus on complex human meaning systems. Analysis of such systems requires a new look at methodology. It is demonstrated how this new look is actually a historically old one—replacing the primacy of inductive generalization by the dynamics of generalization that takes place between deductive and inductive lines, with a special hope for the use of abductive processes.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1354067X13515941

Jaan Valsiner

Papers

How does autodialogue work? Miracles of meaning maintenance and circumvention strategies

Needed for cultural psychology: Methodology in a new key

Psychology as the science of human being: The Yokohama Manifesto

Scaffolding within the structure of Dialogical Self: Hierarchical dynamics of semiotic mediation

Facilitating motivation in young adolescents: Effects of an after-school program