Bo Allesøe Christensen - The Second Cognitive Revolution: A Tribute to Rom Harré

This volume is not merely a celebration of the life work of a remarkable thinker whose travels across the divide of philosophy and psychology have provided a new outlook for the latter, but also a milestone for innovating our understanding of the human mind within society. The movement of Second Cognitive Revolution in psychology led to the understanding of the normative nature of the human mindthus giving human psychology a specific focus that psychology of non-human species does not have. It leads to the investigation into uniquely human psychology (as the Yokohama Manifesto outlinedValsiner, Marsico, Chaudhary, Sato and Dazzani 2016). It opens the door to a new science of general principles of psychology where the universal human propensity for meaning- making and meaning- using is the centre of the investigation. The centrality of meanings makes psychology normativeas the meanings are suggestive of directions for how to feel about something. So, the simple question asked in very many cases how satisfied are you with X ?implies the normative decoding of the expectation that the respondent feels into X with the direction of satisfaction and that feeling can be talked about in terms of some imaginary quantity.

Psychology has been a normative science in two ways. First, its human psychological phenomena are guided by social norms which grow out of our cultural histories. Moral imperatives linger behind our ordinary mundane discussions, actions and imagining of futures. These norms are constantly created and recreated, and they may be explicit or hiddenbut they always are there, in our conduct and reflections upon it.

Second, the ways in which psychology approaches its subject matter are normatively structured. As Rom Harr himself (Chap. in this volume, p. 173184) noted:

The first cognitive revolution was announced by Jerry Bruner and George Miller in the 1960s. It amounted to the giving of permission to psychologists to use words like thinking, remembering (as something a person does) and so on in the planning and interpreting of psychological research into topics of significance. As Bruner ruefully remarked this was inadequate as a revolutionary declaration because it was quickly hi-jacked by computational modellers and neuropsychology, dead ends satisfying only to those who tried to develop a plausible psychology on an inadequate model of science (added emphasis).

The normativity of the field of psychology is demonstrated by the reference to giving permissionit is indeed the case that psychologists over the last two centuries have negotiated socially the borders of permissibility to use one or another word to refer to what they studyall in the name of one meta-word science . In the beginning of the twentieth century, the word thinking became outlawed both in American psychology (Watson 1913) and in Russian physiology (Pavlov fining his co-workers for using mind-related terms). So, in the 1950s, it became rehabilitatedbut to our days one can observe avoidance in using the word thoughts in cognitive psychology (where the clumsy but scientific-looking equivalent cognitions is used instead). Psychology over the twentieth century has been a normative language gamewith vocabularies changed as a result of changes in the social power relations but the problem of knowing remaining unresolved.