Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture (The Jerusalem-Harvard lectures Book 3) by Bruner Jerome (PDF)

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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.

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⭐For sure, Jerome Bruner is an interesting guy (well, if you are interested in cognitive science). He has the unique perspective of having been at the forefront of both the information processing revolution and the constructivst (some might say postmodernist) backlash it inspired. This book collects four essays together that move quite well sequentially. Basically, the theme is that cognitive science – in its information processing zeal – has overlooked the significance of how humans make meaning of cultural symbols and how this meaning-making seems to resist being explainable in IP terms.The first essay, The Proper Study of Mankind, is somewhat of an ‘intellectual history’ account of the development of cognitive science and its information processing roots, as well as a commentary on where Bruner believes it went wrong. Bruner believes that IP has become quite similar to behaviorism in reducing everything to a kind of input and output that leaves no real room for talk of how humans make meaning of things. If I may be so bold, for Bruner, IP has become a study of semantics without semiotics or pragmatics.The second essay, Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culture, is a discussion of what we are learning (at least as Bruner was writing) about how humans come to understand other minds and how they work; we erect a ‘folk psychology’ that owes at least partially to cultural learning. We learn how others think and act, in part, based on how we hear others talk about how others think and act. (Some of this is showing to be innate, too, and Bruner doesn’t discount that. Studies in the last decade show that very early on, babies instinctively try to pick up and hand back something an experimenter drops, implying that some basic ‘theory of mind’ is already present shortly after birth.) But Bruner’s big emphasis is the cultural influences on how we think about what others do.Entry Into Meaning, third essay, is an expansion upon the second. Just as we learn our folk psychology partly from cultural surroundings, so do we learn how to narrate and think about what happens to us. We, as humans, not only think about what happens to us (or others) but why, and the attempts to make sense of those things (via some sort of implicit or explicit story) depends on what we learn about the world (and culture) we live in. What needs explaining? Well, says Bruner, usually, we usually devote our energies to explaining the unexpected – stuff that deviates from the norm. (He goes through some qualitative evidence that children pay most attention in speech to the unusual.) But that is entirely dependent on what the norm is, and that is generally a culturally-learned thing.The last essay is perhaps the weakest – Autobiography and Self. I’ve read a lot about the narrative theory of identity, and that is what Bruner is talking about here. We are, in many ways, who we say we are. Moreover, Bruner suggests that our identity is relational; it is not just who I think I am, but who I think I am in relation to others. Again, Bruner recounts some experimental data (some of his own) suggesting that parts of our identity and our characteristics often change, at least slightly, depending on who we are with. (A confident person in one setting may become less confident in another. One is not just shy, but is shy in some settings and less shy in others.)One small criticism is that in this book, Bruner seems to have a hammer that tends to make him see a lot of nails. In the last essay, for instance, he really overplays the degree to which what we tell others we are shapes who we are. To my mind, it seems that the opposite may be equally true: who we think of ourselves as being dictates what we tell others we are. And while a lot of our learning is ‘culturally mediated,’ Bruner takes this as evidence to suspect Noam Chomsky’s idea of a universal grammar (which I honestly think Bruner misunderstands or exaggerates).But those are small potatoes. I really like Bruner’s work. He is our generation’s John Dewey, for sure. And this work gets to the heart of some of Bruner’s work in the ‘interpretive turn.’

⭐Jerome Bruner is a classic. Much like John Dewey to the world of education, so is Jerome Bruner to the field of social sciences. I regularly consult his work for my research in narrative inquiry. You will find his descriptions of how we come to create meaning to be rich and contextual. A great foundational work for anyone interested in social science reading and/or research.

⭐He’s said the same things in many publications.

⭐Excellent book!!! He is great in writing about developing more than one language… at a time. A great expert in the PYP system, given in some international schools, teacher recommend it to me, and he was correct!

⭐Bruner has written to the heart of the socio-cultural education issue.This is a “must read” for any contemporary sociologist.

⭐great book for early childhood educators

⭐Very satisfied. No other comment

⭐Someday, I suspect, ACTS OF MEANING will be regarded as one of the more important psychology texts at the end of the 20th century. In it, Jerome Bruner, a founder of the “Cognitive Revolution” and witness to psychology for more than 60 years, surveys what went wrong with the revolution he helped start and where psychology ought to be in the generation ahead.The error, he argues, came when psychology adopted the metaphor of the computer as an information processing device to describe the mind. In doing so, psychology severed itself from ordinary human experience and its own 19th century roots. He proposes that humans are concerned centrally with questions of “meaning” and that the computer metaphor will never allow psychology to answer meaning questions with any conviction. Rather, a narrative metaphor — of humans as storytellers — is essential to reach the level of meaning. He further details the deficits of a decontextualized psychology which fails to take culture seriously.Bruner’s language and style are both rich and deceptively straightforward. There is a magisterial sense that he has seen psychology in all its variations and has a vision of how it can fashion an integration which does justice to that variety. His chapter notes contain a particularly wonderful set of references should a reader wish to pursue his ideas more fully. Be prepared: this is terrific stuff.

⭐A classic

⭐Not my thing. It takes the long way around and then doesn’t deliver.

⭐Bruner is a bit wordy, but had good ideas around the cultural influences on an individual’s psychology

⭐I bought this book for the master degree I’m studying, and it is very interesting

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