ABSTRACT
Understanding psychological development is perhaps one of the most difficult tasks for a science, because such understanding is itself a result of development of the means—semiotically mediated reflexivity—that make it possible. Psychology is independently dependent (Winegar, Renninger, & Valsiner, 1989) on the meaning complexes of ordinary language—for better (see Siegfried, 1994) or worse (Valsiner, 1985). Ordinary language may guide psychologists toward the use of richness of personal characteristics (Allport & Odbert, 1936), whereas the lexicon available for making sense of development may be underdeveloped (Van Geert, 1988). Last (but not least), the whole social institution of psychology as a discipline is a result of semiotic construction, in which interdisciplinary boundaries are erected by way of naming of the discipline and its component tendencies, as well as defining (and redefining) core notions (e.g., objectivity; Danziger, 1990).
