Hyper-Generalization by the Human Mind

Abstract

Jaan Valsiner shows how human beings create cognitive and affective orders through constructions of meaning that allow them to move safely in highly complex situations and environments. He sees the human being as an “animal symbolicum” with performative needs and driven by the desire to communicate. He shows how processes of interpretation, understanding and ordering are structured and how a combination of approaches from social anthropology, semiotics, cultural psychology and psychoanalysis can contribute to a more appropriate representation of these processes and their functions. The Hans Kilian Award for the Research and Promotion of Metacultural Humanisation honours excellent achievements in interdisciplinary research and teaching in the social and cultural sciences. In addition to the keynote speech by cultural psychologist Jaan Valsiner in English, there is a foreword by Heinz-Rudi Spiegel, chairman of the board of trustees for the Hans Kilian Award, and a laudatio by Pradeep Chakkarath, co-director of the Hans Kilian and Lotte Köhler Centre for Social and Cultural Psychology and Historical Anthropology.