Abstract
Generalization from single cases to generic processes that make these cases possible has a time-honored tradition in science. Astrophysical generalizations are based on unique cases of self-organizing systems: galaxies, planetary systems, and single planets or comets. General biological principles—such as those of immunology (where one needs to explain the emergence of immunity toward ever-new viruses)—have to be applicable to each and every, known or not-yet-known, case. Explaining the role of Ivan Pavlov’s findings in physiology to lay audiences of his time (1920s), Lev Vygotsky emphasized that Pavlov’s experimental work with (few) dogs was not about dogs as a species, nor about their salivation, nor about a particular dog. Chronicle and fiction writers and portrait and landscape painters who all have left surviving records all provide us with culturally encoded evidence that can be usable in psychological investigation. The evidence from these literary sources needs to be considered as equal to direct recording of evidence from living research participants. All our generic notions—Self, patriotism, love, justice, etc.—are hyper-generalized signs of field-like kind. While ontologically these are nonexisting objects, functionally they are signs that regulate our ongoing lives in dramatic ways that sometimes lead to their end.
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- 1.
At the introduction of the guillotine, this new technology of execution was presumed to be more “humane” than the handheld sword of the human executioner (Smith 2003). The use of the notion of humanity in the business of killing—in wars or peacetime—is a remarkable cultural meaning construction by itself.
- 2.
In the sense of Alexius Meinong (1853–1920) of the “Graz School” of psychology. Meinong’s distinction between existing and nonexisting objects (that subsist, e.g., “golden mountain”) is an ontological precondition for looking at psychological regulation in terms of sign hierarchies. Signs that present the subsisting nonexisting objects in these hierarchies make the psyche capable of transcending the limits of there here-and-now setting in the meaning-making process.
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Valsiner, J. (2017). Generalization from Single Instances. In: From Methodology to Methods in Human Psychology . SpringerBriefs in Psychology(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-61064-1_8
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