Needed for cultural psychology: Methodology in a new key

Abstract

This Editorial is a “leftover”—or maybe a “dessert”—from my recent treatise on how cultural psychology can lead the rest of the discipline out of the loops of “dust-bowl qualitative empiricism”1 that is beginning to take form in the social sciences. Cultural psychology of today operates at the intersection of these social tendencies, running the risk of being caught in the middle. One of the results of active “positivism-bashing” and witch-hunt on “dualisms” that has gone on for the past half-century is a “qualitative turn” in the social sciences. While that turn restores the focus on context-bound original phenomena as its empirical object, it remains as uninventive in the theoretical realm as its declared opponents ended up being. It has simply replaced the focus of the inductive generalization exercise from the field of quantified phenomena (as data) to that of qualitative descriptions (some “rich,” some “poor”) that leave the illusion of understanding based on our common sense, but do not lead the field into new theoretical breakthroughs. The unique feature of cultural psychology—in all of its various versions—is the focus on complex human meaning systems. Analysis of such systems requires a new look at methodology. It is demonstrated how this new look is actually a historically old one—replacing the primacy of inductive generalization by the dynamics of generalization that takes place between deductive and inductive lines, with a special hope for the use of abductive processes.