Chocolate and mediation

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Wed, 10 Apr 1996 06:20:10 -0700 (PDT)

Hi Robin-

Actually, my take on the posts of the past couple of weeks is that
there their seems to a number of potential "agreed upon principles"
either explicitly or implicitly stated in the XMCA group. I was
trying by my analogy to say that what you are encountering are
family resemblences but it definitely IS a family, like all ice
creams are ice cream, not meats or vegetables, and that to some
extent, choices within the domain are a matter of taste/preference.

The centrality of cultural mediation to the constitution of mind
is, I believe, the core of the family resemblence. From that follow
a set of "lemmas." Social origins or higher psychological functions
and the requirement for genetic/developmental/historical analysis
are two of them. Distribution of mind across time/people/place
is perhaps another.

I have a book coming out in the fall where I make a list of characteristics
shared by different flavors of cultural psychology which is partly relevant
and not immediately accessible to me. But it would be more intresting
if others on the list who think thre are some core ideas said what they
were in a list.
mike