Abstract
This paper emphasises how higher psychological functions develop dialectically from a biological basis and how the brain changes with mental and physical activity in a specific culture due to its plasticity. A scientific psychology cannot ignore that human consciousness exists. Humans’ higher psychological functions, their language and thinking, have to be the core of human psychology. The psychological functions cannot be dissolved into biological, neurological processes. The number of human activities under biological control is greatly reduced in comparison to (other) animals. The higher psychological phenomena are humanly constructed as individuals participate in social interaction in a specific culture and are therefore cultural dependent. To understand how biology, culture and mind is dialectical related is crucial for a reasonable psychological epistemology.
Highlights
A significant problem for an understanding of human psychology is to clarify the mind/brain relationship and how biology, culture and mind are related
As human beings we develop ontogenetically from a biological organism to cultural persons
The comprehension of the humans as a machine and the brain as a computer excludes the possibility for human beings to take an effective part in its own development, and it cast out of science any self-determination approach and consciousness as something different from automatic reactions
Summary
A significant problem for an understanding of human psychology is to clarify the mind/brain relationship and how biology, culture and mind are related. One of the founding fathers of sociology and social psychology, Auguste Comte, said explicitly that the understanding of nature, society and human beings that means the work in all sciences, had to pass through three stages; 1) the theological, 2) the metaphysical, and 3) the scientific (positive). Today the socalled “evidence based methods”, resting on a simple cause– effect dichotomy and with the randomized controlled experiment as the gold standard, maintain a particular epistemology in the human sciences and contribute to the machine paradigm. This is representing a mechanistic way of constituting a human being and not a dialectical or “organic” way (Kohler, 2011). Theory of relativity and “chaos” theory are both different from the Newtonian deterministic mechanics, and especially chaos theory underlines a particular kind of indetermination (Kolstad, 2011)
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