Afterword: Between Brain and Culture -The Diversity of Mind

Abstract

Abstract Throughout the history of psychology and, more recently, in cognitive science (e.g., as represented by the chapters in Johnson and Erneling, 1997, and in this book), the fifth and last of these meanings, exclusive choice, has been at the center of the debate about the scientific study of the mind. Several of the authors in this volume (e.g., Rom Harre, Jerome Bruner) point to the more than hundred-yearold opposition between Naturwissenschaften and Geisteswissenschaften and to Wundt’s division between experimental and folk psychology and then claim that we still ought to be basing our understanding of mind on some such proposed division. They, like Jans Brockmeier and David Bakhurst (part VI), support some sort of cultural psychology. By contrast, others discuss the possible reduction of all supposed aspects of cultural or folk psychology either to neurophysiology or to cognitive psychology (especially parts III and V). Still other authors propose to accept various different kinds of dualism (part II). Yet neither the approaches and theories that take their starting points from the cultural sciences nor the ones that are linked to the brain and cognitive sciences have successfully made the case that they really are capable of providing even tentative answers to all the central questions that concern the mind and its activities.