The Constitution Issue: Arguments for a Psychology of the Subject

This paper moves from the idea that contemporary psychology is essentially a psychology of objects—an inquiry about conditions and processes that lead the cognitive agent to attribute qualities to mental objects whose existence is taken for granted. Mental objects are assumed as given and as such considered the starting point of the psychology inquiry. The givenness of mental objects is grounded on a metaphysical assumption of the autonomous ontological status of the external reality, namely, that it consists of objects endowed with their own substance—mental contents are inner representational equivalents to self-contained entities, which have their place in the world-out-there: banknotes, screwdrivers, pens, computers, doors, soccer teams, and so forth are considered pieces of the external reality and therefore contents of our minds. They contain representations of things because there are things that can be represented. Needless to say, it is recognized that mental representations may introduce a more or less relevant degree of transformation when the external reality is mirrored in the mind, as well as that certain representations have no equivalent in reality (i.e., they are products of imagination (Zittoun T, Gillespie A. Imagination in human and cultural development. Routledge, 2016))—yet this does not contradict the ontological assumption of substances as the ground for mental representations.