The End of Myths and Legends About the Biological and Cultural Evolution

Abstract

This chapter addresses how do language, cognition, and subjectivity relate each other. Language is constitutive of the speaking animal's being-in-the world, or in less philosophical terms, language is constitutive of humans' position or situation in the world. Since the early 20th century, cultural differences between languages have been a major topic of scientific debate in linguistics, anthropology, and psychology. The chapter explains some of the theoretical and methodical domains, which currently set much of social and cultural psychology's agenda. It focuses on the relation between language and culture with respect to discourse analysis, theory of social representations, and metaphor analysis. The chapter provides suggestions for cultural psychology's core research aims and research practice. It argues that cultural psychology, needs to clearly dissociate from an objectivistic-naturalistic, a historical understanding of its objects and of itself in order to value the originality of human creations.