Adam Niemczyński

The paper is theoretical in nature. It considers the issue of development from the point of view of narrative psychology, organized according to three theses. The psychological world of a person is a unique semantic construction of meaningful elements drawn from the culture (including values, patterns of reasoning, personality patterns, developmental narratives, and other narratives). In undisturbed psycho-biological functioning, the acquisition of basic meanings occurs in the communicative environment of a developing organism (in the process of interaction with loved ones) primarily through language. At the advanced level – thanks to autobiographical reflexivity – a person can consciously direct his or her own development, minimizing some limitations: both biological (e.g. changes that come at an older age) and environmental determinism (possible distancing from selected cultural contents).

At the beginning of his scientific career Szuman (1930a) indicted the individual personality development to be the object of his psychological investigations. He put a stress on historical character of the personality development and the role of significant deeds in it. He placed psychology of human development among humanistic disciplines of investigation in his book on human personality and character (Szuman 2014). Psychology of child and adolescent development also belong to them and are irreducible to the development of human biological organism. Child’s own actions and upbringing as well as education branch the development of individual human beings out of biology without detaching it from biology nonetheless. Szuman’s historical psychology of the individual personal development did not completely abandon a stance represented in the theory of cognition called the British empiricism, although he clearly put aside positivistic philosophy of science. It is necessary to emancipate historical psychology from the obstacles of the British empiricism’s theory of cognition in order to continue its progress. Niemczyński (2017) seems to go in this direction.

Biographical narratives are not descriptions of individual persons’ mind and personality development. They are stories about the individuals’ life courses. Although the timing of developmental changes falls within the life course, one is not identical to the other. Despite the differences in perspective on narrative psychology between Elzbieta Dryll (2024) and Marian Olejnik (2024), they both seem to accept the aforementioned identity as true. Although any kind of developmental change happens within the life course, one cannot say that each of the individual changes happening within the life course is a developmental one. Biographies are life-course descriptions, and as such they are a type of literary work that lies outside of the psychological science. Biographies are objects of the socio-cultural world and may become subjects of psychological science investigations.

The paper focuses on the cognitive value of psychological knowledge about the human mind and personality development in children, adolescents and adults. It is argued that axiological engagement of developmental psychology means reference to its object of study with truth-value judgments about it. The understanding of human development entails an axiological engagement with it that is directed towards truth. Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz wrote about the significance of the anti-irrational stance in our cognition and in our actions guided by cognition toward reaching planned desirable ends within our human social world. Ajdukiewicz has pondered the epistemic value of being true or false with our knowledge; any utilitarian or pragmatic considerations or uses of it notwithstanding. It is assumed by him that one should preserve an anti-irrational stance in order to decide on the difference between true and false beliefs. It is argued that the science of psychology reduces the value of cognition to utilitarian and pragmatic values and knows next to nothing about how to identify truth and falsity of beliefs. This assertion implies an urgent need to find out how children, youth, and adults learn to deal with epistemic values of their beliefs. One should put aside the positivistic and empiricist theory of human cognition in order to open a space for a new proposal in developmental psychology. It deals with the relation of reference of beliefs of human subjects to the objects of their cognition in their social world and argues for the return to the notion of ideals in psychology in order to investigate their indispensable role in human mind and personality development.

Beyond immediate references to the introductory paper, one may find in the commentaries a set of other interesting issues. They are left to another occasion, since the focus here is on remarks inviting further elaboration on the main theses’ clarification and grounding. It goes in three directions, to (i) clarify the difference between a rejection of British empiricism as a misleading theory of human cognition and a postulate to replace it with an adequate theory of cognitive reference to the truth of believes about the objects of experience in the world of human culture and civilization, (ii) dismiss from the theory of human knowledge the belief in the construction of mind-representations of the objects of cognition, and to focus instead on the relation of reference in judgments to the independent objects of knowledge within the human world, and (iii) to ground the objective status of the ideal of truth and the other values within the world of culture and civilization arrangements.