La psicología cultural como proyecto teórico

Translated title of the contribution: Cultural psychology as a theoretical project

Jaan Valsiner*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

24 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Cultural psychology is the new effort to overcome an old problem in psychology as a science — its irrational effort to imitate the so-called ‘hard’ sciences by reducing complex phenomena to elementary constituents and attempt to ‘measure’ imaginary properties of the mind through quantitative methods applied to summary indices accumulated across various contexts. In a revolutionary move, cultural psychology reverses these social practices to replace them with a focus on the study of complexity of human psychological phenomena in their open-systemic flow in irreversible time — at all levels of (a) societal history, (b) personal life course and (c) immediate setting-specific innovations (microgenesis). The units of analysis used in cultural psychology are complex signs that entail the unity of observable and hidden parts of affective hyper-generalization by goals-oriented, meaning-constructing persons with agency. The example of one of the current theoretical frameworks — Cultural Psychology of Semiotic Dynamics — is used to illustrate the nature of cultural psychology as a basic human science.

Translated title of the contributionCultural psychology as a theoretical project
Original languageSpanish
JournalEstudios de Psicologia
Volume40
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)10-47
Number of pages38
ISSN0210-9395
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2 Jan 2019

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