Systematic Systemics: Causality, Catalysis, and Developmental Cybernetics
This book, The Catalyzing Mind: Beyond Models of Causality, began from our quest to achieve three goals for the discipline of psychology, and more specifically, as elaborated within a semiotic cultural psychology. Cultural psychology is a new–“up and comi
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Systematic Systemics: Causality, Catalysis, and Developmental Cybernetics Kenneth R. Cabell and Jaan Valsiner
Traditionally the principle of unidirectional causal relationship has become so internalized in the thinking of the natural as well as human scientist that the notion of multilateral mutual simultaneous causal relationship was inhibited, repressed and did not occur in the scientific thinking, or when it occurred, it was discarded as unscientific, illogical or circular argument.—Maruyama 1960, p. 41
This book, The Catalyzing Mind: Beyond Models of Causality, began from our quest to achieve three goals for the discipline of psychology, and more specifically, as elaborated within a semiotic cultural psychology. Cultural psychology is a new “up and coming” (Cole 1996) research field of an interdisciplinary nature. Despite its recent emphasis in psychology, it is older than experimental psychology (beginning with Wilhelm Wundt and his opening of the first experimental psychology laboratory in 1879) dating back to the Völkerpsychologie tradition of the 1850s. The first professorship in the World that bore the name psychology was that of Moritz Lazarus in University of Berne, Switzerland, in 1860, with his Lehrstuhl in Völkerpsychologie. Unfortunately in the middle of social negotiations about how psychology “could be a science,” (Valsiner 2012) it was the experimental psychology tradition that expelled the study of complex cultural phenomena out of the realm of concerns of hardcore experimentalists who happily substituted the behavior of a white rat to stand in for the psyche of all human beings. The rat had no aesthetic attitudes towards the mazes he or she was forced “to run”, nor sophisticated ideas about investment of one’s behavioral capacities for the sake of future gains. The rat did not drink champagne, show herself in fashion shows, construct nuclear bombs or, paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Human beings did all of that—and much more. Their pilgrimage to arts, sciences, and geographic explorations were willful, complex, and often unrewarded—at least during their lifetimes. K. R. Cabell () Department of Psychology, Clark University, 950 Main Street, Worcester, MA 01610, USA e-mail: [email protected] J. Valsiner Department of Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected] K. R. Cabell, J. Valsiner (eds.), The Catalyzing Mind, Annals of Theoretical Psychology 11, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4614-8821-7_1, © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
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K. R. Cabell and J. Valsiner
It is amidst the complexity of the human condition of meaningful future-oriented conduct (in opposition to the efforts to reduce psychology to the “study of behavior”) that the need arises for developing new models of conceptual and theoretical analysis. It is precisely this sentiment—the need for new models of theoretical and conceptual analyses of higher-order, complex, psychological phenomena—that lead us to formulate the following questions for authors to focus on in this volume:
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