Thinking as Relational Process and Pattern in Semiotic Cultural Psychology

This study challenges traditional psychological notions of thinking as a static cognitive trait. Instead, we construe enduring thinking patterns to emerge persistently in a semiotic-relational process across three intertwined cultural-psychological lenses: worldviews (macro-level), mindsets (meso-level), and thinking styles (micro-level). The overarching field of Semiotic Cultural Psychology theory (SCPT) has been developed to focus on the embodied micro-mechanisms that bridge the intra- and interpsychological levels of reality through semiotic dynamics. Thinking as a semiotic relational process occurs in the dynamic sign-relations between the person observed, the observing person, and the "generalised other". This dynamic semiotic process happens at the personal, "I-Me" meaning-making level and at the cultural, "We-Us" level. 'Complex' relational patterns such as mutuality & integration are conceived to develop in support-amplifying semiotic loops of enhancement, while 'simpler' relational patterns such as reductionism & fragmentation are considered to develop in control-dampening semiotic loops of constraint. Using Thai food systems as a theoretical case, we consider ways Thai actors move through shifting sign positions as well as their likely semiotic mediational responses to 'crisis' situations. Thinking, in our relational sense, is not something individuals possess but something they do together semiotically, within culture, and across the evolving dynamics of cultural life.