title: A Plea for Scientific Ambitions: Reply to Commentaries from Martin Wieser, Nikolai Veresov, Asger Neumann, and Peter Krøjgaard.
abstract: The paper is a reply to commentaries to "Activity theories and the Ontology of Psychology: Learning from Danish and Russian Experiences" (Mammen and Mironenko 2015). At the same time it is an attempt to reply to more general issues raised by the commentators and an attempt to further develop some general ideas from our paper with a focus on the introduction of the new analytical concepts sense and choice categories. These concepts have been elaborated in an axiomatic frame in (Mammen 2016) and the present paper is thus also pointing forwards to that and supporting it with examples from research on adult human relations of love and affection and on infant cognitive development. A few examples from myth and literature are referred to also. The ambition is to introduce new analytical tools across schools and domains of psychology which open for theoretical inclusion of new phenomena and re-structuring of well-known ones. The hope is to surmount some problems, as e.g. the dilemma between dualism and reductionism, which have been obstacles in the search for conceptual and methodological coherence in psychology. In the first place the hope is also to sharpen the analytical, critical and practical potential of psychology as a science. The ambition is not, here and now, to develop a comprehensive general theory as a container for the huge amount of empirical results collected using very heterogeneous criteria for what belongs to the domain of psychology and very heterogeneous conceptual frames. Here we still need some patience following the lesson from natural science, step by step including new domains as the conceptual and practical frames are expanding, but on the other hand not excluding anything apriori.
authors.affiliation: Niels Bohr Professorship Centre for Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark. jensmammen@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Jens
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Mammen
mesh_terms: D002657:Child Development; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D012426:Russia
keywords: Activity theory; Dualism; Infant cognitive development; Love and affection; Natural science; Reductionism; Semiotics; Sense and choice categories