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 mind— thus 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 outlined—Valsiner, 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 meaningusing is the centre of the investigation. The centrality of meanings makes psychology normative—as 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.