person activates in problem solving is fundamentally unmappable (Kagan,
2002), because of its semantic nature, and its intentionality (Searle, 2001).
At the phenomenological level, psychologists will continue to experience
ambivalence as to how to confront consciousness and its subjective content
head-on, because traditionally psychological researchers are not trained to be
cognitive anthropologists or cultural psychologists of some sort. However, if
we do not deal with this layer of human psychology, we may miss an essential
constituent of mind that enables intellectual functioning (Bruner, 1990,
1997). It is important to note that at this level, the epistemic stance is largely
interpretive (i.e., concerning intentionality and meaning) rather than explan-
atory (i.e., concerning causal structures and relations). (See Geertz, 1973, for
a discussion of interpretive sciences; Dennett, 1987, for intentional stance).
Ultimately, we might still have to resort to psychological-behavioral
(functional level) explanations because it is at the this level that the person as
an intentional agent is interacting with a task environment, and the locus of
personal agency cannot be reduced to some activated brain circuits (Kagan,
2002; see also Bandura, 1986, for a delineation of reciprocal causation of en-
vironment, behavior and internal processes), nor to some sheer subjectivity.
However, without an understanding of neurobiological substrates of human
functioning, and the phenomenology of human meaning systems, psycholog-
ical-behavioral analyses may have limited power in explaining intellectual
phenomena as complex as text comprehension, scientific problem solving, or
creative insights.
Strategies for Integration: Local and Global Theories
Integration can be done in various ways. Yet they seem to fall into a contin-
uum from the most local to the most global scales (e.g., comparing Abelson,
1963, with Tomkins, 1963). The local approach focuses on specific psychologi-
cal phenomena, and conceptualize ways that specific cognitive processes in-
volved can be related to motivational and affective processes or put in proper
social or cultural contexts, what Greeno (2003) called situative analysis.
Some examples of such local integration include motivation and students’
conceptual change (Pintrich, Marx, & Boyle, 1993; see also Sinatra & Pin-
trich, 2003), motivated reasoning in social argumentation (Kunda, 1990),
emotion in social decision making (Damasio, 1994), affect infusion model for
social judgment (Forgas, 1995), affect in mathematical problem solving
(Goldin, 2000; see also Linnenbrink & Pintrich, chap. 3), emotion in scientific
cognition (Thagard, 2002), and task and ego goal conditions and cognitive
processes (Graham & Golan, 1991; see also Dweck et al., chap. 2).
In contrast to local integration efforts, global integration is more ambi-
tious and involves formulating unified frameworks for integration efforts,
that is, how human intelligent systems operate in general, and why motiva-
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