The key problem of cultural psychology comprises a paradox: while people believe they act on the basis of their own authentic experience, cultural psychologists observe their behavior to be socially patterned. It is argued that, in order to account for those patterns, cultural psychology should take human experience as its analytical starting point. Nevertheless, there is a tendency within cultural psychology to either neglect human experience, by focusing exclusively on discourse, or to consider the structure of this experience to originate in an already produced cultural order. For an alternative approach, we turn to the enactive view of cognition developed by Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela. Their theory of autonomy can provide the epistemological basis for a cultural psychology that explains how experience can become socially patterned in the first place. Cultural life forms are then considered as consensually coordinated, embodied practices.

Key words: cultural psychology, embodiment, enactivism, epistemology, experiential reality

Enactivism is an emerging perspective both in cognitive science and in cultural psychology. Whereas the enactive approach in general has focused on sense-making as an embodied and situated activity, enactive cultural psychology emphasizes the expressive and dynamically enacted nature of cultural meaning. This chapter first situates enactivism within a tradition of expressivist thinking that has historical roots both in radical Enlightenment thought and Romantic reactions against the rationalization of human nature. It will then offer a view of our human biology that can be reconciled with an account of meaning as irreducibly normative. By emphasizing the consensual rather than the supposedly shared nature of meaningful conduct, enactivism avoids some of the classical pitfalls in thinking about culture. In the conclusion a genetic enactive psychology will be presented, which understands sense-making not as a mediated activity, but as a competence acquired through cultural training and personal stylization.

Key words: Enactivism, expression, consensual coordination, emotion, normativity, cultural training.

This paper deals with the way cultural psychology should deal with human experience. The common view about the relation between culture and experience holds that experience becomes “cultural” when people internalize or appropriate ready made cultural meanings. We contend that cultural forms themselves need to be dealt with in experiential terms. To this end we propose an “enactive” approach to cultural psychology. A central claim of enactivism is that experience is rooted within the organizational and operational autonomy of an acting system. Enactivism considers human experience to be constitutive for social and cultural phenomena. The main question of an enactive cultural psychology relates to the way human action becomes consensually coordinated. Both social psychologists who stress “sharedness” as the distinct mark of the social, and evolutionary psychologists who consider culture to derive from a uniform human mind, are criticized for overlooking the ongoing mutual tuning processes that give rise to socially and culturally patterned conduct.

Verheggen and Baerveldt’s (2007) recent paper critiques the concept of ‘sharedness’ in Social Representations Theory (SRT). However, these arguments against sharedness are themselves founded upon an implicit argument against the role of ‘representation’ in SRT. This constitutes what I call the phenomenological critique of SRT. From a discussion of Heidegger’s phenomenology one can better understand Verheggen and Baerveldt’s argument. By concentrating on anchoring and objectification, the notion of ‘representation’ can be conceived as both a ‘conscious’ and a ‘non-conscious’ account of meaning. A Heideggerian phenomenological approach can unify the conscious and non-conscious elements of SRT into a common framework. Such phenomenological appreciation of SRT can contribute to a theory of meaning for cultural psychology.

Key words: cultural psychology, enactivism, heidegger, implicit meaning, phenomenology, practical knowledge, social representations theory

Context: Political psychology rests on the assumption of the existence of a world outside and independent of consciousness. This ontological materialism is hardly spoken of within the field, as it is an unchallenged assumption among most psychologists and social scientists, including political scientists. However, the materialist paradigm frames research designs, the interpretation of data and theory building. Also, there is a bias towards psychological universals - the claim that all individual and group psychologies are equal (as compared to cultural psychology, which is critical about universalist claims), which can be understood as a consequence of the discipline’s hidden ontological core assumption. Problem: The purpose of this article is to show how the choice of a certain approach to answer a research question rests on the deeply ingrained beliefs of researchers. These beliefs are usually not part of research presentations even though they have tremendous influence on the results of the whole research process. Recipients use these necessarily biased research results as building blocks for the construction of their own realities. Method: The article is an ex-post interpretative summary of my considerations during the designing period of an earlier study in which I researched, from the perspective of political psychology, on what grounds South Indian politicians have positive, negative and ambiguous attitudes towards the “West.” Using this research project as an example, this article is a critical discussion and analysis of the ideological backdrop of political psychology, in particular the belief in a materialist ontology. Results: I argue that, instead of coming closer to any kind of an “objective” understanding of political attitudes, in political psychology we cannot help but invent new stories about the (political) world as long as our beliefs consciously or unconsciously influence our decision making in theorizing and research practice. Implications: The discussion shows exemplarily how in political psychology a researcher’s basic assumption that a physical world outside of consciousness exists determines methodology and justifies a particular set of interpretations. The unproblematized physicalist paradigm makes a researcher in political psychology necessarily a biased researcher. Constructivist content: The article is a description of how a researcher’s subjective perception and construction of the (social) world has consequences for the complete research process. Political psychology is based on the highly problematic assumption of an ontic world that exists independently of a subjective observer. It can serve as a telling example of how the preoccupation with a physicalist world explanation can lead to methodological and interpretative biases.

Key words: Cultural psychology, emotional beliefs, identity, metaphysical idealism, ontological materialism, political psychology, psychological universals, research biases, social constructivism.

I revisit the debates over absolutism versus relativism, freedom versus determination, objectivism versus subjectivism, representationalism versus nominalism, determinacy versus indeterminacy, and other manifestations of the realism versus constructivism debate in psychology. I consider the advantages and drawbacks of both extremes and suggest that although as a critique of mainstream scientific psychology the postmodern discourse has been fruitful for clinical theory and practice, at its extreme it undermines its own claims as a basis for healing because it denies the legtimacy of any authority. Referring to recent thinking in cross-cultural psychology and neuroscience, I suggest that there may be certain universal givens that form limiting constraints on how far psychologists can take indeterminacy. I suggest that psychologists hold a double vision, using each end of the realist-constructivist spectrum of positions as a limiting frame for the other.

Purpose: My first purpose is to present an epistemological and ideological analysis of various conceptions of the mind–culture relationship and to state why it is fruitless to set them against each other. My second purpose is to answer the following two questions within the framework of cultural cognitive development: (1) How do I understand and explain the interaction between two cultural actors, one of whom is myself? (2) How do I model cultural intersubjectivity? Addressing these two aims, I want to make the nature of observer participation explicit to myself, then to the reader. Design: I describe the personal schemes I use in my cross-cultural research. After defining and comparing different conceptual and methodological instruments, I go on to argue in favor of an experimental methodological approach based on a naturalistic constructivist epistemological framework. Findings: Among the potential ontological and epistemological conceptions related to the human mind, I consciously argue for a naturalistic ontology and a constructivist epistemology. In line with this philosophical view, the knowledge on the cognitive development of children pertaining to different cultures appears as my personal scheme’s production. Such production is a permanent object of debate in the scientific community and in the wider community of studied subjects. Original value: The ideas and concepts developed in the present paper are neither new nor innovative. I relate the conceptual shift from a positivist to a radical constructivist epistemology that was necessary in order for me to be able to study the relationship between culture and children’s cognitive development. Implications: While the present discussion may not be innovative from a radical constructivist point of view, it is so from the point of view of mainstream developmental psychology.

Key words: cross-cultural psychology, cultural psychology, epistemology, ideology, theory, methodology, radical constructivism

Wolfgang Wagner is a current and productive advocate of the social representation approach. He developed a version of the theory in which social representations are freed from individual minds and instead conceived of as concerted interactions. These epistemological starting points come very close to the enactive outlook on consensually coordinated actions. Yet Wagner is not radical enough in that he continues to see concerted interaction as an expression of representations that are already shared by the actors constituting a group. In our view, the ubiquitous notion of sharedness – which is also found in studies on social models, cultural patterns, schemas, scenarios, and so forth – is conceptually problematic and reveals a misapprehension of how orchestrated actions come about. Moreover, it obscures a proper understanding of what really constitutes intrinsically social behavior. Enactivism provides a much more consistent epistemology for a psychology that is intrinsically social.

Key words: cultural psychology, culture, enactivism, epistemology, sharedness, social representations

In earlier contributions to Culture & Psychology we have put forward enactivism as an epistemological alternative for representationalist accounts of meaning in relation to action and experience. Critics continue to charge enactive cultural psychology of being a solipsistic and a materialist reductionistic epistemology. We address that critique, arguing that it consistently follows from misunderstanding in particular the enactivist notion of “operational closure,” and from mixing up two observer viewpoints that must be analytically severed when describing living, cognitive systems. Moreover, Daanen (2009) argued that in particular Heidegger’s phenomenology can help to reconcile enactive cultural psychology and social representation theory. We reply that although enactivism is indeed close to phenomenology, Daanen fails to appreciate Heidegger’s much more radical break with a philosophy of consciousness to anchor meaningful Being. Consequently, representationalist accounts cannot be salvaged, least of all by invoking Heidegger.

Key words: enactive cultural psychology, enactivism, epistemology, heidegger, normativity, phenomenology, social representations