Conceptual questions about meaning: Divergence or complementarity between cultural-Historical positions?

Abstract

Meaning was a core concept in the development of Lev Vygotsky’s cultural-historical approach. Considering the incompleteness of his work, other authors have adopted different directions in the seminal discussion on meaning as a unit of thought and language. Based on Rychlak’s ideas, this paper proposes dialogues between three culturally based authors—González Rey, Jaan Valsiner, and Jerome Bruner—reviewing relations of complementarity and synthesis to understand the concept of meaning. We call attention to the uniqueness of each theoretical approach, avoiding the simplification of their assumptions or the intention of reducing them as if they only dealt with the same concept with different words. The comparison between authors brings about a notion of cultural, historical, narrative meaning grounded on the singular-collective dialectic, endowed with an affective dimension, and the access to which implies the adoption of a qualitative and idiographic methodology. Based on common grounds, we coordinated different understandings, and attempted to devise a concept comprising inter-focus features, while meeting the criteria for a satisfactory theoretical formulation, such as its capacity of description, explanation, and prediction, its logical consistency, its perspective or possibility of generalization, its innovation, inventiveness or fruitful heuristic and, ultimately, its simplicity or parsimony.