Dialogical self theory (DST) has something very important to propose to mainstream psychology. This chapter outlines such a proposal, which one can call as a model of the discursive mind. Discursive mind model is based on the thesis of the cognitive system's discursive organization. Different modules contain specific cognitive-affective resources, shaped by different ways of giving meaning to personal experience. There are three fundamental assumptions of the discursive mind model: the modular character of one's knowledge structures, the social origin of one's knowledge structures, and the specificity of the knowledge structures for the social context from which they stem. According to the discursive mind model, I-positions are relatively autonomic modules of the cognitive system, which consist of script-like structures combining personal and socially shared knowledge. The model of the discursive mind assumes that the activation of different I-positions within the same person causes significant intra-individual variations in cognitive functioning.

This chapter focuses on cognitive as opposed to sensori-motor skills and on models that create or alter symbolic knowledge representations. It deals briefly with models that learn by adjusting quantitative properties of knowledge structures. Although occasionally referring to empirical studies, the chapter is primarily a review of theoretical concepts. It proceeds on the assumption that each hypothesis contains some grain of truth to be extracted and incorporated into future models. The learning mechanism is a more finegrained unit than the model or the cognitive architecture. Cognitive descriptions of processes in the mind are functional descriptions of what this or that piece of wetware is doing, what function it carries out. This perspective points to the need to understand the relation between learning mechanisms and modes of neural plasticity.