Guest Column

Psychology and Semiotics
By Jaan Valsiner

Some things in life just do not make sense. Coming out of the creative environment of Tartu University in Estonia of the 1970s --where semiotics was one of the main frameworks for our intellectual growth-- the separation of semiotics and psychology has always seemed awkward to me. Yet it is the case all over the world-as I encountered that divide in all my subsequent years in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Somehow the discourses about signs do not link with psychology's favorite stories about behavior, cognition, or affect.

In some ways that divide is parallel to another: psychology adamantly separates itself from art and literature, as if Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Anais Nin, or Remedios Varo have less to say about human psyche than the accepted sources of psychological evidence-- lever-pressing rats in mazes, or college undergraduates putting pencil marks into boxes of multiple choice tests. Yet the glorious invention of behaviorist objectivity-the laboratory rat-is itself a semiotic construction. The rats themselves may of course remain little animals as they are-but any interpretation of aspects of their behavior as if those represent basic human psychological functions is an act of semiogenesis conducted by the researchers. Similarly, the "objectivity" of the experimental evidence is a flavour generated by semiosis-Einstein's look at what experiments do (and can't do) is an example of relativity of acceptance of semiotic construction of crucial evidence for theory (Hentschel, 1992).

Psychologists do not see the semiogenetic features of the psychological issues they try to understand. Of course there are historical reasons for such semio-myopia. Psychology has carefully eliminated the human side of its phenomena- volition, imagination, religious feelings, etc.-from its focus over the 20th century. As a result. the separation of semiotics and psychology is a curious artifact of that century. Based on the work of the same sets of scholars- Charles S. Peirce, Karl Bühler, Lev Vygotsky, Heinz Werner, Jakob von Uexküll-both semiotics and psychology have proceeded on their parallel trajectories. Similarly a divide has existed between zoosemiotics, ecosemiotics, and comparative psychology. Disciplines that by the logic of their inquiry should be embedded in close interdisciplinary encounters have stayed away from one another. Of course the social segregation of Wissenschaft- so called "humanities" versus "sciences"-has had its role in such artificial separation. Yet even in this contrast that separates the two basically flawed-science at its best is close to the beauty of poetry and art.

In earlier times, complex psychological phenomena charmed psychologists. They have often found psychological processes involved in relating with art to be interesting-yet not approachable by standard methods. The question of aesthetic phenomena was crucial for psychology as science in early 20th century, as the work of James Mark Baldwin, John Dewey, and Lev Vygotsky indicates. Likewise, early psychologists struggled with understanding of unusual psychic phenomena.

Psychology is --in some sense-- an illegitimate offspring (in older times the word was bastard) of sciences and arts. The science of the "soul" is difficult to conceptualize in the age of mechanical rationalism. Our cognitive science specializes in problem solving and decision making-rather than on problem creation and ambivalences of living under conditions where all decisions possible are uncertain. "Quick fix" rather than making sense of fatalism of subjective living is the focus of psychology. Psychology has escaped the vicinity of "the soul"-and gone astray in its separation from phenomenology of the mind and language and concentration on the ephemeral observable called behavior. Nobody in psychology knows what behavior is-yet it seems to grant psychologists the magic of being "true science"-which is another nice expression of no clear meaning. Nowadays behavior becomes substituted by cognition-with similar results. At times it is a synonym for thought, at others-a mystical rational process of our minds. These expressions-seen semiotically-are hyper-generalized signs (Valsiner, 2006) that guide the social construction of knowledge. Such signs "capture" our meaning and value system in full and without doubt-we construct them to guide our own selves.

Human psychology is fully semiotic-both in its phenomena and its methods of study. My highly subjective claim about psychology's missing its phenomena is in itself a semiotically constructed phenomenon of my personal-cultural kind (see Valsiner, 2000a). As such, it leads to decisions that are of impact for how psychology conducts its epistemological exercises. Opponents of such moves can easily declare that my kind of psychology is "in principle wrong". But how can the latter point be investigated? For instance, an effort to study my heretic claims made here about the unity of semiotics and psychology-by interview, a "standardized test", experiment, or even through physiological methods-leads to new semiotic constructions. By scanning my brain by fMRI to see what has "gone wrong" in this psychologist's professional identity system will render further semiotic constructions on the basis of interpretations of the complex pictures on the computer screen. Likewise, a test score, or an interpretation of a hesitation in the interviewee's speech, are examples of semiosis. Or maybe I am suffering from the SDS - "Semiotic Desire Syndrome"? Our society these days is filled with all kinds of syndromes, so we can invent a new one-and thus prove again the underlying semiotic nature of such construction. All psychological data are signs (Valsiner, 2000b)-and so are the "syndromes", "problems", "risks" etc. that we invent with remarkable ease.

The traditions of cultural psychology that re-surged in the 1990s constitute a powerful example of how some of the psychology attempts to transcend its limits-including integration with semiotics. Yet there is the problem-methodologies of the two disciplines do not relate with each other well. Psychologists' axiomatic quantification urge overlooks the possibility for seeing the emergence of new signs in situations of psychological adaptation to life tasks.

For example, consider how personality-or the self-can be studied. In psychology this study is streamlined to involve personality questionnaires. This is evident in the ease with which participants giving answers to personality questionnaires can quickly give simple replies to very complex questions (Valsiner, Diriwächter & Sauck, 2005), for instance-a personality test item. What could either "true" or "false" statement about the following meaning complex tell us?

"I frequently have to fight against showing that I am bashful"
Personality psychologists trust in the accumulation of such simple (true/false) responses over many items in a test. Yet each of such items is more than a mere statement a person can easily endorse or reject. Yet here we have an implicit social meaning-construction setting in place. To give a quick answer ("true" or "false") to such complex question is possible only if some interpersonal meta-contract-between the researcher and the participants-is set up. The researcher and the participant play a game in which the researcher can ask any complex question and the subject give any first answer that comes to mind. Neither of the two are eager to go in depth of pondering of what "bashful" or "frequently" mean in this sentence, and what is the basis for the leading suggestion that the person "has to fight against" it-in the realm of "showing" (versus "being"). It is clear that most of psychology's verbal questioning methods are semiotic meaning-construction exercises that are practiced under meta-contracts of "research"-rather than alleys that lead to understanding the complexity of human meaning-making processes. As such-psychology's personality "measurement techniques" are themselves semiotic constructions-rather than tools that "reveal" any "deep features" of human personality. Personality is being studied on the basis of indeterminate medium-level generality self-statements made by participants and accumulated (but not interpreted) by researchers.
An alternative surely exists-why not analyze the notion of personality (or self) directly as a sign complex created by the person under cultural guidance? The results of such direct semiotic approach to personality may remain faithful to the complexity of psychological reality (Valsiner, 1998).

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Jaan Valsiner is a cultural psychologist with a consistently developmental axiomatic base that is brought to analyses of any psychological or social phenomena. He studied psychology at the University of Tartu in Estonia in the 1970s where he established his general interests in human semiotic processes. He is the founding editor (1995) of the Sage journal, Culture & Psychology. He is currently professor of psychology at the Department of Psychology, Clark University, USA, where he also edits a journal in history of psychology-From Past to Future: Clark Papers in the History of Psychology. He has published 10 books, the most recent of which are The guided mind (Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press, 1998), Culture and human development (London: Sage, 2000) and Comparative study of human cultural development (Madrid: Fundacion Infancia y Aprendizaje, 2001). He edited (with Kevin Connolly) the Handbook of Developmental Psychology (London: Sage, 2003). He has established the new journal on individual case analyses-- International Journal of Idiographic Science (2005-www.valsiner.com). In 1995 he was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize in Germany for his interdisciplinary work on human development. He has been a visiting professor in Japan, Australia, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands.

Department of Psychology
Clark University
Worcester, Ma. 01610, USA

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The separation of psychology from semiotics has guaranteed that the notion of psychology as a behavioral science is a failure, and our "cognitive revolution" has failed to set the record straight. Human beings are sign makers- and users. Unless that axiom is the starting point for psychology, its further efforts will necessarily fail. Psychology is itself a constructed sign complex. The very act of investigating oneself entails the making of signs out of our daily lives. Psychological phenomena-feelings, thoughts, governments, economics-as those are exemplified, are all signs. So are psychologists' data-tests, experiments, interviews, and the like. Human psyche lives in a semiosphere-and creates it.

But what is left of (and for) psychology, in this case? Actually-very much. The new area of cultural psychology includes a direction that integrates semiotics and psychology (Valsiner, 2001, 2004). From a semiotic perspective, psychology is the science of the sign-mediated prediction efforts of the unpredictable stream of consciousness, and of the efforts to control the uncontrollable ways of being. The central role of signs in the processes of feeling, thinking, and acting can bring semiotics and psychology into an interdisciplinary synthesis. Will that synthesis happen in the future? Maybe.

References

Hentschel, K. (1992). Einstein's attitude towards experiments: testing relativity theory 1907-1927. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 23, 4, 593-624.

Valsiner, J. (1998). The guided mind. Cambridge, Ma.: Harvard University Press.

Valsiner, J. (2000a). Culture and human development. London: Sage

Valsiner, J. (2000b). Data as representations: contextualizing qualitative and quantitative research strategies. Social Science Information, 39, 1, 99-113

Valsiner, J. (2001). The first six years: Culture's adventures in psychology. Culture & Psychology, 7, 1, 5-48.

Valsiner, J. (2004). Three years later: Culture in psychology-between social positioning and producing new knowledge. Culture & Psychology, 10, 1, 5-27.

Valsiner, J. (2006 in press). Human Development as Migration: Striving towards the unknown In L. M. Simão, & J. Valsiner (Eds.) Otherness in Question: Labyrinths of the self. Greenwich, Ct.: Information Age Publishers

Valsiner, J., Diriwächter, R., & Sauck, C. (2005). Diversity in unity: standard questions and nonstandard interpretations. . In R. Bibace, J. D. Laird, K. L.