Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Linking Philosophy and Cultural Psychology

   • Robert E. Innis

   Pages 1-8

3. Beyond the Kodak Fixation: Contexts, Situations, and Backgrounds

   • Robert E. Innis

   Pages 9-29

4. Semiotic Framing of Thresholds of Sense

   • Robert E. Innis

   Pages 31-48

5. Feeling, Abstraction, Symbolization: Langer’s Aesthetic Model of Minding

   • Robert E. Innis

   Pages 49-67

6. Affectivation: Life-Giving Signs

   • Robert E. Innis

   Pages 69-84

7. Back Matter

   Pages 85-129

   PDF

This Brief provides an in-depth discussion of five major points of intersection between philosophy and cultural psychology. The first chapter frames central analytical and normative threads, foregrounding the focal notion of thresholds of sense. The second chapter explores the nature of contexts, situations, and backgrounds of meaning-making following the lead of John Dewey, Ben-Ami Scharfstein, and Gernot Böhme. Chapter three examines the complementary analytical power of the semiotic resources developed in the work of Peirce, Bühler, and Cassirer. Chapter four shows the heuristic fertility and psychological bearing of Susanne Langer's feeling-based aesthetic model of minding. The final chapter establishes affectivation as the inescapable consequence of human beings giving life to themselves by giving life to signs. The Brief concludes with three commentaries from leading researchers in the area.
 
The chapters weave together interlocking themes: thenature of embodied perception, the variety of contexts and semiotic frameworks and their schematization of thresholds of meaning-making, the role of art and theories of imagination both in cultural psychology and in philosophy, and the centrality of feeling in all forms of meaning-making. 


Between Philosophy and Cultural Psychology will be of interest to cognitive and cultural psychologists as well as researchers and upper-graduate students in philosophy and related psychology fields. 

• Philosophical Semiotics
• Pragmatism
• John Dewey
• Susanne Langer
• C.S. Peirce
• Form
• Symbol
• Embodiment
• Contexts
• Affectivation
• Thresholds
• Normativity
• Feelings

• University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, USA

  Robert E. Innis

Robert E. Innis is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He has been Humboldt Fellow at the University of Cologne, Fulbright Professor at the University of Copenhagen, and Obel Foundation Visiting Professor at Aalborg University in the Center for Cultural Psychology. His books include Karl Bühler: Semiotic Foundations of Language Theory, Consciousness and the Play of Signs, Pragmatism and the Forms of Sense, Susanne Langer in Focus: The Symbolic Mind, and Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology. He has published many articles and chapters dealing with the relations between philosophy, semiotics, and psychology and the aesthetic dimensions of life.

Policies and ethics