Unity of the real and the non-real: Imagination in action and talk

Humans have awkward ways of relating with the world in comparison to other species. Instead of just representing the objects we encounter, while looking for the satisfaction of our needs, and responding to their entreaties accordingly, we anticipate, invent, and pre-adapt to these encounters, through culturally suggested imaginative, narrative, and creative processes that lead to the production of meaningful actions and artifacts. Far from being merely intra-psychological, these processes are socioculturally embedded in everyday contexts of activity, following dialogical imaginative, narrative, and creative logics that are not antithetical to rationality. In this contribution, the authors will try to develop a theoretically integrated view of future-goal-oriented higher mental functions, claiming for the primacy of production and anticipation over reproduction and representation as distinctive features of the human mind. This view also sets crucial methodological challenges that will be discussed, providing suggestions to study the processes through complex products of human activity.