Acts of Meaning

Four Lectures on Mind and Culture

Jerome Bruner

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1993
• ISBN:
  9780674253056
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jerome Bruner argues that the cognitive revolution, with its current fixation on mind as "information processor, " has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Only by breaking out of the limitations imposed by a computational model of mind can we grasp the special interaction through which mind both constitutes and is constituted by culture.

Notes

1. The Proper Study of Man

1. Howard Gardner, The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Earl Hunt, “Cognitive Science: Definition, Status, and Questions,” Annual Review of Psychology 40 (1989):603–629,

2. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, with Tom Athanasiou, Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition, and Expertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: Free Press, 1986). Terry Winograd, Understanding Computers and Cognition: A New Foundation for Design (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1987).

3. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Intepretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983). George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984). Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Kenneth J. Gergen, Toward Transfonnation in Social Knowledge (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982). Kenneth J. Gergen and Keith E. Davis, The Social Construction of the Person (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1985). Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpretation in Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). Donald E. Polkinghorne, Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988).

4. Edward C. Tolman, “Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men,” Psychological Review 55 (1948): 189–208. Tolman, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (New York: Century, 1932).

5. Annual Reports of the Harvard University Center for Cognitive Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1961–1969).

6. George A. Miller, personal communication.

7. See, for example, Roy Lachman, Janet L. Lachman, and Earl C. Butterfield, Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing: An Introduction (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1979).

8. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).

9. Daniel C. Dennett, “Evolution of Consciousness,” The Jacobsen Lecture, University of London, May 13, 1988; Alan M. Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind 59 (1950). *433–460.

10. Compare Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems of Knowledge: The Managua Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), with David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClelland, and the PDP Research Group, Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, vol. 1: Foundations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). James L. McClelland, David E. Rumelhart, and the PDP Research Group, Parallel Distributed Processing: Explorations in the Microstructure of Cognition, vol. 2: Psychological and Biological Models (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).

11. Stephen P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case against Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).

12. Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentional Stance (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

13. Paul M. Churchland, “The Ontological Status of Intentional States: Nailing Folk Psychology to Its Porch,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 (1988):507–508.

14. Jerry A. Fodor, The Language of Thought (New York: Crowell, 1975). Fodor, Psychosemantics: The Problem of Meaning in the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).

15. Dennett, Intentional Stance.

16. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). And see note 3 above.

17. Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1962).

18. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 49.

19. Ibid.

20. John L. Austin, “A Plea for Excuses,” in Austin, Philosophical Papers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 175–204.

21. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

22. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).

23. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).

24. Richard E. Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human Inference: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1980).

25. Daniel Kahnemann, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Jerome S. Bruner, Jacqueline J. Goodnow, and George A. Austin, A Study of Thinking (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1956).

26. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).

27. For a particularly searching and well-informed view of this same terrain, see Michael Cole, “Cultural Psychology,” in Nebraska Symposium: 1989 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forthcoming).

28. G. A. Miller, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information,” Psychological Review 63 (1956): 81–97.

29. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

30. Hans Peter Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Wilhelm Dilthey, Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding (1911), trans. Richard M. Zaner and Kenneth L. Heiges (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).

31. See Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters, for a well-argued statement of the philosophical foundations of this position.

32. Carol Fleisher Feldman, “Thought from Language: The Linguistic Construction of Cognitive Representations,” in Jerome Bruner and Helen Haste, eds., Making Sense: The Child’s Construction of the World (London: Methuen, 1987).

33. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972–1980 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

34. Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism,” in Consequences of Pragmatism. Quotations from p. 162ff.

35. Howard Gardner, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

36. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988).

37. See, for example, Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory of Genitality, trans. Henry A. Bunker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).

38. See Debra Friedman and Michael Hechter, “The Contribution of Rational Choice Theory to Macrosociological Research,” Sociological Theory 6 (1988):201–218, for a discussion of the applicability of rational choice theory to social decision making generally.

39. I am indebted to Richard Herrnstein for providing this particular example of a “rational anomaly.”

40. Taylor, Sources of the Self

41. Edward Sapir, “Culture, Genuine and Spurious,” in Culture, Language and Personality: Selected Essays, ed. David G. Mandelbaum (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956), 78—119.

42. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972).

43. Wolfgang Kohler, The Place of Value in a World of Facts (New York: Liveright, 1938).

44. J. Kirk T. Varnedoe, “Introduction,” in Varnedoe, ed., Modern Portraits: The Self and Others (New York: Columbia University, Department of Art History and Archaeology, 1976).

45. Adrienne Rich, “Invisibility in Academe,” quoted in Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), ix.

2. Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culture

1. Gerald M. Edelman, Neural Darwinism: The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Gerald M. Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Biological Theory of Consciousness (New York: Basic Books, 1990). Vernon Reynolds, The Biology of Human Action, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman, 1980). Roger Lewin, Human Evolution: An Illustrated Introduction, 2nd ed. (Boston: Blackwell Scientific Publications, 1989). Nicholas Humphrey, The Inner Eye (Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986).

2. Hans Peter Rickman, Wilhelm Dilthey: Pioneer of the Human Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Wilhelm Dilthey, Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding (1911), trans. Richard M. Zaner and Kenneth L. Heiges (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).

3. Stephen P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The Case against Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).

4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). C. O. Frake, “The Diagnosis of Disease among the Subanun of Mindanao ” American Anthropology 63; rpt. in D. Hymes, ed., Language in Culture and Society (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 193–206. Thomas Gladwin, East Is a Big Bird: Navigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). Edwin Hutchins, “Understanding Micronesian Navigation,” in Dedre Gentner and Albert L. Stevens, eds., Mental Models (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983), 191—226.

5. Meyer Fortes, “Social and Psychological Aspects of Education in Taleland,” Africa 11, no. (1938), supplement. Margaret Mead, Coming of Age in Samoa (New York: Morrow, 1928).

6. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974).

7. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomethodology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967). Garfinkel, ed., Ethnomethodological Studies of Work (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Fritz Heider, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958). Alfred Schutz, The Problem of Social Reality, ed. M. Natanson (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1962). Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations: Selected Writings of Alfred Schutz, ed. Helmut R. Wagner (Chicago: Univ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• One: The Proper Study of Man
• Two: Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culture
• Three: Entry into Meaning
• Four: Autobiography and Self
• Notes
• Subject Index
• Name Index