Chapter 9: On Not Beating One’s Wings in The Void: Linking Contexts of Meaning-Making

The reconfiguration of psychology that is taking place under the banner of “cultural psychology” is not just a matter of psychology’s own understanding of itself and of its proper goal. It offers new possibilities for integrating our ways of understanding the matrices and contexts of meaning-making quite generally. Cultural psychology, as proposed in Jaan Valsiner’s Aalborg inaugural lecture, looks to (re)appropriate conceptual tools from very diverse sources. Of special importance, as evidenced on practically every page of his stimulating text, are the linkages to philosophy and to semiotics, and their linkages to one another (see Innis, 2012). The appropriation of conceptual tools clearly does not run in only one direction.