Jerome Bruner

Language, Culture and Self

David Bakhurst, Stuart G Shanker, David Bakhurst, Stuart G Shanker, Author

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2001
• Print ISBN:
  9780761955313
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781473971837
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Jerome Bruner is one of the grand figures of psychology. From his role as a founder of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s to his recent advocacy of cultural psychology, Bruner?s influence has been dramatic and far-reaching. Such is the breadth of his vision that Bruner?s work has inspired thinkers in many of the major areas of psychology and has had a powerful impact on adjacent disciplines. His writings on language acquisition, culture and education are of profound and enduring importance. Focusing on the dominant themes of language, culture and self, this volume provides a comprehensive exploration of Bruner?s fertile ideas and a considered appraisal of his legacy.

With a distinguished list of contributors including Jerome Bruner himself, the result is an outstanding volume of interest to students and scholars in psychology, philosophy, cognitive science, anthropology, linguistics, and education.

Among the contributors are Judy Dunn, Howard Gardner, Clifford Geertz, Rom Harré, David Olson, Edward Reed, Talbot Taylor, Michael Tomasello, and John Shotter. The volume is framed by an editorial introduction that considers the distinctively philosophical dimensions of Bruner?s thought, and a final chapter by Bruner himself in which he re-examines prominent themes in his work in light of issues raised by the contributors.

The volume will be invaluable to students and researchers in the fields of psychology, cognitive science, education, and the philosophy of mind.

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IMBALANCING ACT: JEROME BRUNER’S CULTURAL PSYCHOLOGY

Clifford Geertz

Rethinking the cognitive revolution

What does one say when one says ‘psychology’? James, Wundt, Binet or Pavlov? Freud, Lashley, Skinner or Vygotsky? Kohler, Lewin, Lévy-Bruhl, Bateson? Chomsky or Piaget? Daniel Dennett or Oliver Sacks? Herbert Simon? Since it was truly launched as a discipline and a profession in the last half of the nineteenth century, mainly by Germans, the self-proclaimed ‘science of the mind’ has not just been troubled with a proliferation of theories, methods, arguments and techniques. That was only to be expected. It has also been driven in wildly different directions by wildly different notions as to what it is, as we say, ‘about’ – what sort of knowledge, of what sort of reality, to what sort of end it is supposed to produce. From the outside, at least, it does not look like a single field, divided into schools and specialities in the usual way. It looks like an assortment of disparate and disconnected enquiries classed together because they all make reference in some way or other to something or other called ‘mental functioning’. Dozens of characters in search of a play.

From inside it doubtless looks a bit more ordered, if only because of the byzantine academic structure that has grown up around it (the American Psychological Association has 49 divisions), but surely no less miscellaneous. The wide swings between behaviourist, psychometric, cognitivist, depth-psychological, topological, developmentalist, neurological, evolutionist and culturalist conceptions of the subject have made being a psychologist an unsettled occupation, subject not only to fashion, as are all the human sciences, but to sudden and frequent reversals of course. Paradigms, wholly new ways of going about things, come along not by the century, but by the decade; sometimes, it almost seems, by the month. It takes either a preternaturally focused, dogmatic individual, who can shut out any ideas but his or her own, or a mercurial, hopelessly inquisitive one, who can keep dozens of them in play at once, to remain upright amidst this tumble of programmes, promises and proclamations.

There are, in psychology, a great many more of the resolved and implacable, esprit de système types (Pavlov, Freud, Skinner, Piaget, Chomsky), than there are of the agile and adaptable, esprit de finesse ones (James, Bateson, Sacks). But it is among the latter that Jerome Bruner clearly belongs. In a breathless, lurching, yet somehow deeply consecutive career spanning nearly 60 years, Bruner has brushed against almost every line of thought in psychology and transformed a number of them.

That career began at Harvard in the 1940s, during the heyday of behaviourism, rat-running, the repetition of nonsense syllables, the discrimination of sensory differences, and the measurement of galvanic responses. But, dissatisfied with the piling up of experimental ‘findings’ on peripheral matters (his first professional study involved conditioning ‘helplessness’ in a rat imprisoned on an electrified grill), he quickly joined a growing band of equally restless colleagues, within psychology and without, to become one of the leaders of the so-called ‘cognitive revolution’.

By the late 1950s, this revolution was underway, and ‘bringing the mind back in’ became the battle cry for a whole generation of psychologists, linguists, brain modellers, ethnologists and computer scientists, as well as a few empirically minded philosophers. For them, the primary objects of study were not stimulus strengths and response patterns, but mental actions – attending, thinking, understanding, imagining, remembering, feeling, knowing. With a like-minded colleague, Leo Postman, Bruner launched a famous series of ‘New Look’ perception experiments to demonstrate the power of mental selectivity in seeing, hearing and recognizing something. Poorer children see the same coin as larger than richer ones do; college students are either very much slower (‘defensive’) or very much quicker (‘vigilant’) to recognize threatening words than they are to recognize unthreatening ones. With two of his students, he carried out a landmark study of abstract reasoning. How do people, in fact rather than in logic, test their hypotheses? How do they decide what is relevant to explanation and what is not? And in 1960, he and the psycholinguist George Miller, another restless soul, founded Harvard’s interdisciplinary Center for Cognitive Studies, through which virtually all of the leading figures in the field, established or in the making, passed and which set off an explosion of similar centres and similar work both in the US and abroad. ‘We certainly generated a point of view, even a fad or two’, Bruner wrote of his and his colleagues’ work during this period in his (as it turns out, premature) autobiography, In Search of Mind. ‘About ideas, how can one tell?’ (1983: 126).

After a while, Bruner himself became disenchanted with the cognitive revolution, or at least with what it had become. At the beginning of his ‘goodbye to all that’ proclamation of a new direction, Acts of Meaning, Bruner writes:

That revolution was intended to bring ‘mind’ back into the human sciences after a long cold winter of objectivism.... [But it] has now been diverted into issues that are marginal to the impulse that brought it into being. Indeed, it has been technicalized in a manner that even undermines that original impulse. This is not to say that it has failed: far from it, for cognitive science must surely be among the leading growth shares on the academic bourse. It may rather be that it has become diverted by success, a success whose technological virtuosity has cost dear. Some critics ... even argue that the new cognitive science, the child of the revolution, has gained its technical successes at the price of dehumanizing the very concept of mind it had sought to reestablish in psychology, and that it has thereby estranged much of psychology from the other human sciences and the humanities. (1990: 1)

In saving the cognitive revolution from itself, distancing it from high-tech reductionism (brain is hardware, mind is software, thinking is the software processing information on the hardware), Bruner has raised, over the past decade or so, yet another banner heralding yet another dispensation: ‘cultural psychology’. What now comes to the centre of attention is the individual’s engagement with established systems of shared meaning, with the beliefs, the values, and the understandings of those already in place in society as he or she is thrown in amongst them. For Bruner, the critical ‘test frame’ for this point of view is education – the field of practices within which such engagement is, in the first instance, effected. Rather than a psychology that sees the mind as a programmable mechanism, we need one that sees it as a social achievement. Education

is not simply a technical business of well-managed information processing, nor even simply a matter of applying ‘learning theories’ to the classroom or using the results of subject-centered ‘achievement testing’. It is a complex pursuit of fitting a culture to the needs of its members and their ways of knowing to the needs of the culture. (Bruner, 1996: 43)

Bringing the mind into focus

Bruner’s concern with education and educational policy dates from the studies of mental development in infants and very young children that, in his growing resistance to machine cognitivism, he began to carry out in the mid-1960s, just – such are the workings of the Zeitgeist – as the Head Start programme was coming grandly into being. These studies led him to an ‘outside-in’ view of such development, one which concerns itself with ‘the kind of world needed to make it possible to use mind (or heart!) effectively – what kinds of symbol systems, what kinds of accounts of the past, what arts and sciences ...’ (Bruner, 1996: 9). The unfolding of the critical features of human thinking, joint attention with others to objects and actions, attribution of beliefs, desires and emotions to others, grasping the general significance of situations, a sense of selfhood – what Bruner calls ‘the entry into meaning’ – begins very early in the development process, prior not just to formal schooling but to walking and the acquisition of language:

Infants, it turned out, were much smarter, more cognitively proactive rather than reactive, more attentive to the immediate social world around them, than had been previously suspected. They emphatically did not inhabit a world of ‘buzzing, blooming confusion’: they seemed to be in search of predictive stability from the very start. (Bruner, 1996: 71–2)

The Head Start programme began with a rather different – in some ways complementary, in others contrastive – view of early development based on a rather different set of scientific investigations: those showing that laboratory animals raised in ‘impoverished environments’, ones with few challenges and reduced stimulation, did less well than ‘normals’ on such standard learning and problem-solving tasks as maze-running and food-finding. Transferred, more metaphorically than experimentally, to schooling and to schoolchildren, this led to the so-called ‘cultural deprivation hypothesis’. Children raised in an ‘impoverished’ cultural environment, in the ghetto or wherever, would, for that reason, do less well in school. Hence the need for corrective action to enrich their environment early on, before the damage was done. Hence Head Start.

Aside from the fact that correcting for ‘cultural deprivation’ depends on knowing what such deprivation consists of (what it has most often been taken to consist of is departure from the standards of an idealized, middle-class, ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ American culture), such an approach seems to assume that ‘cultural enrichment’ is a good to be provided to the deprived child by the wider society, like a hot lunch or a smallpox injection. The child is seen to be lacking something, not seeking something; regarded as receiving culture from elsewhere, not as constructing it in situ out of the materials and interactions immediately to hand. Bruner was a sometime adviser to Head Start, and he is still a defender of its very real successes and its possibilities for extension and reform (it is, after all, an ‘outside-in’ programme). But he argues that the results of his sort of research into the mental development of children – grown by now into a field in itself, turning up more and more evidence of the conceptual powers of children – renders the ‘deprivation’ approach obsolete. Seeing even the infant and the preschooler as active agents bent on mastery of a particular form of life, on developing a workable way of being in the world, demands a rethinking of the entire educational process. It is not so much a matter of providing something the child lacks, as enabling something the child already has: the desire to make sense of self and others, the drive to understand what the devil is going on.

For Bruner, the critical enabling factor, the thing that brings the mind to focus, is culture – ‘the way of life and thought that we construct, negotiate, institutionalize, and finally (after it is all settled) end up calling “reality” to comfort ourselves’ (1996: 87). Any theory of education that hopes to reform it, and there hardly is any other kind, needs to train its attention on the social production of meaning. The terms upon which society and child – the ‘reality’ already there and the scuttling intellect thrust bodily into it – engage one another are in good part worked out in the classroom, or at least they are in our school-conscious society. It is there that mentality is most deliberately fashioned, subjectivity most systematically produced, and intersubjectivity – the ability to ‘read other minds’ – most carefully nurtured. In the favourable case, not perhaps entirely common, the child, ‘seen as an epistemologist as well as a learner’, moves into an ongoing community of discoursing adults and chattering children where ‘she ... gradually comes to appreciate that she is acting not directly on “the world” but on beliefs she holds about that world’ (1996: 57, 49).

This turn towards concern with the ways in which the understandings abroad in the larger society are used by the schoolchild to find her feet, to build up an inner sense of who she is, what others are up to, what is likely to happen, what can be done about things, opens Bruner’s ‘cultural psychology’ to a host of issues normally addressed by other disciplines – history, literature, law, philosophy, linguistics, and especially that other hopelessly miscellaneous and inconstant science, anthropology. Such a psychology, rather like anthropology, has an eclectic perspective and a vast ambition built directly into it. It seems to take all experience for its object, to draw on all scholarship for its means. With so many doors to open, and so many keys with which to open them, it would be folly to try to open all of them at once – that way lies knowing less and less about more and more. Sensitive as always to the practicalities of research, the door Bruner wants to open (not altogether surprisingly, given recent developments in ‘discourse theory’, ‘speech-act analysis’, ‘the interpretation of cultures’, and ‘the hermeneutics of everyday life’) is narrative.

Telling stories, about ourselves and about others, to ourselves and to others, is ‘the most natural and the earliest way in which we organize our experience and our knowledge’ (Bruner, 1996: 121). But you would hardly know it from standard educational theory, trained as it is upon tests and recipes:

It has been the convention of most schools to treat the art of narrative – song, drama, fiction, theater, whatever – as more ‘decoration’ than necessity, as something with which to grace leisure, sometimes even as something morally exemplary. Despite that, we frame the accounts of our cultural origins and our most cherished beliefs in story form, and it is not just the ‘content’ of these stories that grip us, but their narrative artifice. Our immediate experience, what happened yesterday or the day before, is framed in the same storied way. Even more striking, we represent our lives (to ourselves as well as to others) in the form of narrative. It is not surprising that psychoanalysts now recognize that personhood implicates narrative, ‘neurosis’ being a reflection of either an insufficient, incomplete, or inappropriate story about oneself. Recall that when Peter Pan asks Wendy to return to Never Never Land with him, he gives as his reason that she could teach the Lost Boys there how to tell stories. If they knew how to tell them, the Lost Boys might be able to grow up. (Bruner, 1996: 40)

Growing up among narratives – one’s own, those of teachers, school-mates, parents, janitors, and various other sorts of what Saul Bellow once mordantly referred to as ‘reality instructors’ – is the essential scene of education. ‘We live in a sea of stories’, as Bruner puts it (1996: 147). Learning how to swim in such a sea, how to construct, understand, classify, check out, see through and use stories to find out how things work or what they come to, is what the school, and beyond the school the whole ‘culture of education’, is, at base, all about. The heart of the matter, what the learner learns whatever the teacher teaches, is ‘that human beings make sense of the world by telling stories about it – by using the narrative mode for construing reality’ (Bruner, 1996: 130). Tales are tools, ‘instrument[s] of mind on behalf of meaning making’ (1996: 41).

Constructing a cultural psychology

Bruner’s most recent work is, then, dedicated to tracing the implications of this view of narrative as ‘both a mode of thought and an expression of a culture’s world view’ (Bruner, 1996: xiv). He has launched enquiries into the teaching of science, into ‘folk pedagogy’, into the collaborative nature of learning, and into the child’s construction of ‘a theory of mind’ to explain and understand other minds. Autism as the inability to develop such a theory of mind, the formal features of narrative, culture as praxis, and the respective approaches to education of Vygotsky, Piaget and Pierre Bourdieu (all related to Bruner’s own, but also in tension with it), have all been discussed, at least in passing. So have recent developments in primatology, cross-cultural studies of education, IQ testing, ‘metacognition’ (‘thinking about one’s thinking’), relativism and the uses of neurology. It is all rather on the wing; a wondrous lot goes by wondrously fast.

This is not so serious a fault, if it is a fault at all, in what is still a series of forays designed to open up a territory rather than to chart and settle it. But it does leave even the sympathetic critic at a bit of a loss as to where it is all going, what ‘cultural psychology’ amounts to as a field among fields, a continuing enterprise with a budget of issues and an agenda for confronting them. One can, of course, get something of a sense of this by consulting Bruner’s dozens upon dozens of technical investigations or by hunting down his even more numerous citations to studies by colleagues.

But since most of this ‘literature’, wrapped in statistics and enfolded in protocols, is scattered through professional journals and disciplinary symposia, few besides specialists are likely to find the patience for such a task. Genuine treatises, more summary, and thus more accessible, synthesizing works, authored by students, co-workers and followers of Bruner, are beginning to appear in increasing numbers, from which one can get a somewhat clearer picture of where the whole enterprise is at the moment and what progress it is making.¹ And in the final section of his most recent book, a section called, with uncertain surety, ‘Psychology’s Next Chapter’, Bruner himself undertakes to lay out the directions in which cultural psychology should move and to describe how it should relate itself to other approaches to ‘the study of mind’. As usual, his attitude is conciliatory, eclectic, energetic, upbeat:

Can a cultural psychology ... simply stand apart from the kind of biologically rooted, individually oriented, laboratory dominated psychology that we have known in the past? Must the more situated study of mind-in-culture, more interpretively anthropological in spirit, jettison all that we have learned before? Some writers ... propose that our past was a mistake, a misunderstanding of what psychology is about.... [But] I would like to urge an end to [an] ‘either-or’ approach to the question of what psychology should be in the future, whether it should be entirely biological, exclusively computa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Bruner’s Way
• 1. Imbalancing Act: Jerome Bruner’s Cultural Psychology
• 2. Bruner on Language Acquisition
• 3. The House that Bruner Built
• 4. Bruner and Condillac on Learning How to Talk
• 5. Emotion, Pragmatics and Social Understanding in the Preschool Years
• 6. Education: the Bridge from Culture to Mind
• 7. Towards a Cultural Ecology of Instruction
• 8. Infancy and the Birth of Competence: Bruner and Comparative-Developmental Research
• 9. Norms in Life: Problems in the Representation of Rules
• 10. Towards a Third Revolution in Psychology: From Inner Mental Representations to Dialogically-Structured Social Practices
• 11. Memory, Identity and the Future of Cultural Psychology
• 12. In Response
• Index