This book is devoted to look at the role of comparative research orientation in the social sciences- and in psychology in particular as it is of relevance for basic knowledge. The task of construction of basic knowledge in the social sciences requires understanding of the general thought processes that researchers use while making comparisons between persons, groups, or societies.

The autonomous nature of human beings sets conditions for scientific methodology that other sciences do not need to take into account. Human beings individually as well as being parts of social organizations set up, follow, achieve or abandon, goals of different kinds. They operate constantly on the basis of some future-oriented goal orientation. This aspect of human life needs to be taken into account by any science that aims at understanding human beings.

Human cultural psychology -given its openness to the complex meaningfulness of psychological phenomena- is currently becoming the leading discipline in the creation of rigorous scientific methodology that unifies qualitative and quantitative research techniques into a general scheme of making sense of human beings within their cultural contexts.

Keywords: Culture. Human development. Historicity.

Readership: Readers interested in socio-cultural approach to knowledge: psychology, sociology, anthropology, history, philosophy.

Contents

PART I. COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVES UPON CULTURE AND HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 1. Knowing by comparing: Common sense and science / Extensive and inclusive forms of separation / The nature of comparisons / Structure of distinctions: values added to differences / From the particulars to general: Abstracting and generalization

Chapter 2. Multiple meanings of culture / Culture within the tradition of cross-cultural psychology / Culture within the tradition of cultural psychology

Chapter 3. Developments: Axiomatic and methodology of study / Perils of prediction / Epistemology of developmental science / Cultural and developmental sciences united: Historical roots / Lev Vygotsky's cultural-historical tradition: Looking for synthesis

PART II. SOCIAL TEXTURE OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Chapter 4. Niches of cultural embeddeness / Unity of environment, dramatisms, and social networks

Chapter 5. Created and narrated dramas

PART III. THE MENTAL TEXTURE FOR SOCIAL ACTION

Chapter 6. Thinking as a cultural process / Three logical processes in human reasoning / Overcoming uncertainties: probability as logic

Chapter 7. Mind's dramas: Social representations and rituals

PART IV. COMPLEXITY IN THE MAKING: AFFECTIVE HISTORICITY

Chapter 8. Affective fields and their development / Affect, feeling and emotion / Cultural structure of feeling-expectations: Universal semantic primitives / Development of affective fields: Coordination of person and society / Summary: Affective fields as means for modulation of distancing

Chapter 9. Historicity: Coordinating social and personal development / Study of personal development histories / Internalization and externalization / Summary: Uniqueness and generality of knowledge. General integration. Comparative methodology chasing the fluidity of culture

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