Toward a cogenetic cultural psychology

Abstract

The dialogue between cultural psychology and phenomenological and semiotic philosophy seems to be extremely promising. I have tried to present some relevant aspects of this dialogue and to use them as cornerstones to elaborate a metatheoretical and epistemological discourse about the way of building and understanding concepts. Semiotic approaches show how humans, as meaning-making beings, experience the world in the form of totalities that emerge from primary distinctions in the continuum of experience. First, drawing on cogenetic logic, I argue that any epistemological model that aims to account for developmental processes must emerge from a triadic system, rather than following the procedures of a binary logic, in order to have any correspondence between concept building and phenomenological world in psychology. Then, I sketch an epistemological approach called method of complementary negation that could help cultural psychology to build more developmental abstract models of very concrete human phenomena.