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Making Personal Sense

An Account of Basic Internalization and Externalization Processes

University of Melbournelawrence{at}unimelb.edu.au

Jaan Valsiner

Clark Universityjvalsiner{at}clarku.edu

This paper presents an account of basic internalization/externalization processes as the vehicle by which socio-cultural meanings are turned into personal sense systems. Such systems guide persons’ actions in respect to their environments. Social and personal worlds constantly mutually constrain each other in ways that lead to transformations in both. Internalization and reciprocal externalization occur as the person takes in and transforms social messages and other signs in self-talk (dialogues with oneself and imagined others). The theoretical account is accompanied by the specifications of empirical criteria for observing personal dialogues, and an empirical example is provided and analyzed in terms of the unfolding of the personal sense system in a task environment. The data of dialogues between police officers and a computer program about adolescent shoplifting reveal how these respondents transformed the computer input through their internalizing/externalizing operations, by interpolating specialized knowledge and personal beliefs, taking up prior expressions, and going beyond the social material that was given in the task. This account of internalization/externalization extends sociogenetic approaches to explain how the human mind functions as both a social and a personal organized system.

Key Words: externalization • internalization • microgenesis • ontogenesis • personal and collective culture • personal sense • social meaning

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