Autonomy of human mind and personality development

Abstract

Abstract A psychology of human individual development is proposed which argues against its reduction to the description and control of human behavior or to cognitive psychology in the model of information and communication technology. Instead the author’s earlier conceptualization of the autonomy of human individual development is now elaborated further. The foundational premise to this end rests in Macnamara’s (1999) explication of Brentano’s (1874) notion of intentionality, i.e., referring to something as an object. It reveals the access of the mind to the ideal objects and to the kinds which provide for identity and individuation of the objects of human cognition (Macnamara and Reyes, 1994). It converges with the anti-irrationalism postulate which was put forward by Ajdukiewicz (1934). The reduction of the mind in psychology to something else proves unable to meet the anti-irrationalism postulate, regards perception and cognition to be of one piece, and it excludes intuition and ideals. In contrast to this, the notions of the spontaneous and self-sustainable perception and the self-determined mind open a way for psychology without the reduction of it to anything else. The same route has been taken earlier (Niemczyński, 2007) with a study of personality development from adolescence to the late ages.