The dialogue between cultural psychology and phenomenological and semiotic philosophy seems to be extremely promising. I have tried to present some relevant aspects of this dialogue and to use them as cornerstones to elaborate a metatheoretical and epistemological discourse about the way of building and understanding concepts. Semiotic approaches show how humans, as meaning-making beings, experience the world in the form of totalities that emerge from primary distinctions in the continuum of experience. First, drawing on cogenetic logic, I argue that any epistemological model that aims to account for developmental processes must emerge from a triadic system, rather than following the procedures of a binary logic, in order to have any correspondence between concept building and phenomenological world in psychology. Then, I sketch an epistemological approach called method of complementary negation that could help cultural psychology to build more developmental abstract models of very concrete human phenomena.

This article focuses on bordering as a fundamental semiotic process of human psychological functioning. First, we discuss similarities between semiosis and bordering and explore their relationships. In the perspective of cultural psychology of semiotic dynamics, psychic life is a process of purposeful production and interpretation of signs, carried out through cycles of culturally guided, selective internalization and externalization. Signs and borders are not only entities “out there”: they emerge in the purposeful movement of the organism in the course of future-oriented action in everyday life. Second, we discuss borders in mind and society as particular types of signs, through which humans regulate their own and others’ conduct. Finally, we propose a general genetic law of bordering development: borders are first conceived as tools created and established by humans as interpsychic activities. Later, the sign is internalized and begins to regulate psychological functioning. It also becomes a psychological tool for dealing with other humans and with the environment.

This special issue originates from an international workshop on “Vico and imagination,” that took place at Aalborg University in 2014, within a research project on Giambattista Vico and the epistemology of psychology. Imagination has inexplicably been relegated to the background in contemporary psychology, despite the fact that imaginative processes are involved in even the most mundane activities. In this editorial, I first present the rationale and the content of the articles and commentaries. Then I outline a brief history of the concept of imagination before Vico, drawing some consequences for contemporary psychology. Finally, I provide the proposal for a new research program on imagination as a higher psychological function that enables us to manipulate complex meanings of both linguistic and iconic forms in the process of experiencing.