Part Two and Part Three contain most relevant content.
Book opens with this quote from William James:
To say that all human thinking is essentially of two kinds -reasoning on the one hand, and narrative, descriptive, contemplative thinking on the other- is to say only what every reader’s experience will corroborate.
Part One: Two Natural Kinds
Chp. One: Approaching the Literary
Freud…”The Poet and the Daydream”, urges, … that the poem in its own right can tell us much about the nature of mind, even if it fails to yield up the secret of its creation. (p. 3)
No literary sciences (any more than any natural sciences) can penetrate particular moments of inspired creation. (p. 4)
If we bring to bear upon these texts the most powerful instruments of literary, linguistic, and psychological analysis, we may yet understand not only what makes a story, but what makes it great. (p. 4)
Ex. Roland Barthes’ “writerly” texts...literary theory
…, we may still wish to discover how and in what ways the text affects the reader and, indeed, what produces such effects on the reader as do occur. (p. 4)
The usual way of approaching such issues is to invoke psychological process or mechanisms that operate in “real life”. (p. 4)
...by virtue of its tropes...by metaphor and synecdoche that evoke zestful imaginative play. (p. 4)
They fail to tell why some stories succeed and some fail to engage the reader, And above all, they fail to provide an account of the processes of reading and entering a story. (p. 4)
...and Barthes are saying, in effect, is that one can read and interpret texts in various ways, indeed in various ways simultaneously. (p. 5)
But in fact we know little about how readers actually do so -we know precious little indeed about the “reader-in-the-text” as a psychological process. (p. 5)
Do all readers assign multiple meanings to stories? And how can we characterize these multiple meanings? What kinds of category systems best capture this “meaning attribution” process, and how idiosyncratic is it? Is interpretation affected by genre, and what does genre mean psychologically (a matter to which I shall turn presently)? And how are multiple meanings triggered? What is there in the text that produces this multiple effect, and how can one characterize the susceptibility of readers to polysemy? These are the kinds of questions we must ask as psychologists of literature,... (p. 5-6)
One rereads a story in endlessly changing ways… The alternate ways of reading may battle one another, marry one another, mock one another in the reader’s mind. There is something in the telling, something in the plot that triggers this “genre conflict” in readers… The story goes nowhere and everywhere. ...Frank Kermode...sjuzet and fabula (the linear incidents that make the plot, versus the timeless, motionless underlying theme) remarks that the power of great stories is in the dialectical interaction they establish between the two: “the fusion of scandal and miracle.” So while the reader begins placing a story in one genre (and that may have powerful effects on his reading), he changes as he goes. The actual text is unchanged; the virtual text (...) changes almost moment to moment in the act of reading.
If we then ask about the nature and role of the psychological genre- the reader’s conception of what kind of story or text he is encountering or “recreating”- we are in fact asking not only a morphological question about the actual text, but also a question about the interpretive processes that are loosed by the text in the reader’s mind. (p. 7)
Note: look at On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand by J. Bruner
Top-down versus Bottom-up: two styles of approaching narrative in seminars taught by Bruner. Seminars interested in the psychological questions, literary questions, readers and writers, and texts. One group consisted of psychologists who worked ‘top-down’. The second group of playwrights, poets, novelists, critics, editors worked ‘bottom-up’.
Top-down partisans take off from a theory about story, about mind, about writers, about readers. The theory may be anchored wherever: in psychoanalysis, in structural linguistics, in a theory of memory, in the philosophy of history. Armed with an hypothesis, the top-down partisan swoops on this text and that,...of what he hopes will be a right “explanation.”... It is the way of the linguist, the social scientist, and of science generally, but it instills habits of work that always risk producing results that are insensitive to the context in which they were dug up. …
Bottom-up partisans march to a very different tune. Their approach is focused on a particular piece of work: a story, a novel, a poem, even a line. They take it as their morsel of reality and explore it to reconstruct or deconstruct it. ... the effort is to read a text for its meanings, and by doing so to elucidate the art of its author. ... their quest is not to prove or disprove a theory, but to explore the world of a particular literary work.
Partisans of the top-down approach bewail the particularity of those who proceed bottom-up….The two do not, alas, talk much to each other. ...I shall satisfy either side, and, even worse, I can see no reason to apologize for it. ...The most that I can claim is that, as with the stereoscope, depth is better achieved by looking from two points at once. (p. 9-10)
Chp. Two: Two Modes of Thought
...arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. (p.11)
Perhaps Richard Rorty is right in characterizing the mainstream of Anglo-Americanphilosophy (which, on the whole, he rejects) as preoccupied with the epistemological questions of how to to know truth -which he contrasts with the broader question of how we come to endow experience with meaning, which is the question that preoccupies the poet and the storyteller. (p. 12)
Paradigmatic or logo-scientific mode:
attempting to fulfill the ideal of a formal, mathematical system of description and explanation. (p. 12)
Its language is regulated by requirements of consistency and noncontradiction. Its domain is defined not only by observables to which its basic statements relate, but also by the set of possible worlds that can be logically generated and tested against observables - that is, it is driven by principled hypotheses. (p. 13)
We also know a fair amount about how children who are weak initially at the paradigmatic mode grow up to be fairly good at it when they can be induced to use it. The imaginative application of the paradigmatic mode leads to good theory, tight analysis, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypothesis. But paradigmatic “imagination” (or intuition) is not the same as the imagination of the novelist or poet. Rather, it is the ability to see possible formal connections before one is able to prove them in any formal way. The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily “true”) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place. Joyce thought of the particularities of the story as epiphanies of the ordinary. The paradigmatic mode, by contrast, seeks to transcend the particular by higher and higher reaching for abstraction, and in the end disclaims in principle any explanatory value at all where the particular is concerned. There is a heartlessness to logic: one goes where one’s premises and conclusions and observations take one, give or take some of the blindness that even logicians are prone to. ...Paul Ricoeur argues that narrative is built upon concern for the human condition: stories reach sad or comic or absurd denouements, while theoretical arguments are simply conclusive or inconclusive. In contrast to our knowledge of how science or logical reasoning proceed, we know precious little in any formal sense about how to make good stories. (p. 13-14)
Stories have no such need for testability. Believability in a story is of a different order than the believability of even the speculative parts of physical theory. If we apply Popper’s criterion of falsifiability to a story as a test of its goodness, we are guilty of misplaced verification. (p. 14)
William James comments in his Gifford Lectures, The Varieties of Religious Experience, that to study religion one should study the most religious man at his most religious moment. (p. 15)
My thought: to study painting one should study the painter at the moment s/he is most (deeply) painting.
I think we would do well with as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must “be” to be a story. And the one that strikes me as mostserviceable is the one with which we began: narrative deals with the vicissitudes of intention. … it has a “primitiveness” that is appealing. ...one can make a strong argument for the irreducible nature of the concept of intention… ,intention is immediately and intuitively recognizable: it seems to require for its recognition no complex or sophisticated interpretive act on the part of the beholder. (p. 17)
Look closer at Baron Michotte on perception, causality and intention as it might inform how we see into abstraction.
If it should yield positive results, then we would have to conclude that “intention and its vicissitudes” constitute a primitive category system in terms of which experience is organized, at least as primitive as the category system of causality. I say “at least”, for the fact remains that the evidence of children’s animism suggests that their more primitive category is intention -physically caused events being seen as psychically intended, as in the early experiments that earned Piaget his first worldwide acclaim (p. 18-19)
Jakobson’s literaturnost...In the telling there must be “triggers” that release responses in the reader’s mind, that transform a banal fabula into a masterpiece of literary narrative. (p. 19)
Thinking of Wollheim's triangular relationship and the various roles…
So neither vertically nor horizontally does the evocative language of poetry and story conform to the requirements of plain reference or of verifiable predication. Stories of literary merit, to be sure, are about events in a “real” world, but they render that world newly strange, rescue it from obviousness, fill it with gaps that call upon the reader, in Barthes’s sense, to become a writer, a composer of a virtual text in response to the actual. In the end, it is the reader who must write for himself what he intends to do with the actual text. (p. 24)
Wolfgang Iser… The Act of Reading… what manner of speech act is a narrative. …he says, “the reader receives it by composing it.” The text itself has structures that are “two-sided”: a verbal aspect that guides reaction and prevents it from being arbitrary, and an affective aspect that is triggered or “pre structured by the language of the text.” But the pre structure is underdetermined: fictional texts are inherently “indeterminate”.fictional texts constitute their own objects and do not copy something already in existence. For this reason they cannot have the full determinacy of real objects, and indeed, it is the element of indeterminacy that evokes the text to “communicate” with the reader, in the sense that they induce him to participate both in the production and the comprehension of this work’s intention. It is this “relative indeterminacy of a text” that “allows a spectrum of actualizations.” And so, “literary texts initiate ‘performances’ of meaning rather than actually formulating meaning themselves.” (p. 24-25)
Discourse, if Iser is right…, must depend upon forms of discourse that recruit the reader’s imagination- that enlist him in the “performance of meaning under the guidance of the text.” Discourse must make it possible for the reader to “write” his own virtual text. (p. 25)
Bruner describes three features of discourse he deems necessary for this process: presupposition, subjectification, and multiple perspective. The third is what I am most interested in and has most relevance to my research.
Roland Barthes argues in S/Z that without multiple codes of meaning a story is merely“readerly” and not “writerly”. (p. 26)
How we characterize personhood in literature according to Bruner, citing Amelie Rorty.
“Characters are delineated; their traits are sketched; they are not presumed to be strictly unified. They appear in novels by Dickens, not those by Kafka. Figures appear in cautionary tales, exemplary novels and hagiography. They present narratives of types of lives to be imitated. Selves are possessors of their properties. Individuals are centers of integrity; their rights are inalienable.” …”we are different entities as we conceive ourselves enlightened by these various views. Our powers of action are different, our relations to one another, our properties and properties, our characteristic successes or defeats, our conception of society’s proper strictures and freedoms will vary with our conceptions of ourselves as characters, persons, selves, individuals.” (p.39-40)
“When a society has changed so that individuals acquire their rights by virtue of their powers, rather than having their powers defined by their rights, the concept of person has been transformed to a concept of self.” (p. 41)
Chp. Three: Possible Castles
In the jargon of linguistics, a work of literature or of literary criticism achieves universality through context sensitivity, a work of science through context independence. (p. 50)
Let me say now what Niels Bohr told me. The idea of complementarity in quantum theory, he said, came to him as thought of the impossibility of considering his son simultaneously in the light of love and in the light of justice, the son having just voluntarily confessed that he had stolen a pipe from a local shop. His brooding set him to thinking about the vases and the faces in the trick figure-ground pictures: you can see only one at a time. And then the impossibility of thinking simultaneously about the position and the velocity of a particle occurred to him. That tale, we are told, belongs in the history of science, not in science itself. (p. 51)
I think that Popper, nonetheless, is more right than wrong. Falsification is crucial to us for one overwhelming reason. Man, we know, is infinitely capable of belief. ….we can create hypotheses that will accommodate virtually anything we encounter. It is this staggering gift for creating hypotheses that makes Popper’s auster view of science more right than wrong- that and the ease which, by the very selectivity of our senses, our minds, and our language, we accept our hypotheses as right. (p. 51)
...we know that if we are to appreciate and understand an imaginative story (or imaginative hypothesis, for that matter) we must “suspend disbelief”,...With science, we ask finally for some verification … In the domain of narrative and explication of human action, we ask instead that, upon reflection, the account correspond to some perspective we can imagine of “feel” as right. ...science, is oriented outward to an external world; …(narrative) inward toward a perspective and a point of view toward the world. They are, in effect, two forms of an illusion of reality -very different forms. But their “falsifiability” in Popper’s sense does not fully distinguish them. (p. 51-52)
When the painter Manet exclaimed, “Nature is only an hypothesis,” he could not have meant it in a Popperian spirit. … It was an invitation to create more, different, and even shocking hypotheses. (p. 52)
As for art and the humanities, they too are constrained in the kinds of hypotheses they generate, but not by constraints of testability in the scientist's’ sense, and not by the search for hypotheses that will be true across a wide range of human perspectives. Rather, the aim (...) is that the hypotheses fit different human perspectives and that they be recognizable as “true to conceivable experience”: that they have verisimilitude. (p. 52)
Aristotle in the Poetics (II.9) puts the conclusion well: “The poet’s function is to describe, not the thing that has happened, but a kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible as being probable or necessary… And if he should come to take a subject from actual history, he is none the less a poet for that; since some historic occurrences may very well be in the probably once possible order of things: and it is in that aspect of them that he is their poet.” Perhaps this is why tyrants so hate and fear poets and novelists and yes, historians. Even more they fear and hate scientists, who though they create possible worlds, leave no place in them for possible alternative personal perspectives on those worlds. (p. 53- 54)
Part Two: Language and Reality
Chp. Four: The Transactional Self
People act in accordance with their perceptions and their choices, and they reciprocate accordingly. (p. 59)
…-what it is that readies the child so early for transacting his life with others on the basis of some workable intuitions about Other Minds, and, perhaps, about Human Situations as well. The standard view (per Bruner to a great extent false- arbitrary, partial and deeply rooted in morality of our own culture - universalization reflects cultural bias) ...four principal tenets: 1.Egocentric perspective 2.Privacy 3.Unmediated conceptualism 4.Tripartism (p. 61) ...Further discussed on pages 67-68
...it is still the case that the joint and mutual use of language gives us a huge step in the direction of understanding other minds. For it is not simply that we all have forms of mental organization that are akin, but that we express these forms constantly in our transactions with one another. We can count on constant transactional calibration in language, and we have ways of calling for repairs in one another’s utterances to assure such calibration. And when we encounter those who do not share the means for this mutual calibration (as with foreigners), we regress, become suspicious, border on the paranoid, shout. (p. 62-63)
Language is also our principal means of referring. ….referring to something with the intent of directing another’s attention to it requires even at its simplest some form of negotiation, some hermeneutic process. ...One has to conclude that the subtle and systematic basis upon which linguistic reference itself rests must reflect a natural organization of mind, one into which we grow through experience rather than one we achieve by learning. (p. 63)
To create hypothetical entities and fictions, whether in science or in narrative, requires yet another power of language that, again, is early within reach of the language user. This is the capacity of language to create and stipulate realities of its own, its constitutiveness. ...Constitutiveness gives an externality and an apparent ontological status to the concepts words embody: … The constitutiveness of language, as more than one anthropologist has insisted, creates and transmits culture and locates our place in it-... (p. 65)
...learning how to use language involves both learning the culture and learning how to express intentions in congruence with the culture. This brings us to the question of how we may conceive of “culture” and in what way it provides means not only for transacting with others but for conceiving of ourselves in such transactions. (p. 65)
Late 20th century shift in definition of human culture:
…, to the idea of culture as implicit and only semi connected knowledge of the world from which, through negotiation, people arrive at satisfactory ways of acting in given contexts. (p. 65)
What of the “cultural” side of the picture? How we decide to enter into transaction with others linguistically and by what exchanges, how much we wish to do so (...), will shape our sense of what constitutes culturally acceptable transactions and our definition of our own scope and possibility in doing so - our ”selfhood”. Indeed, the images and stories that we provide for guidance to speaker with respect to when they may speak and what they may say in what situations may indeed be a first constraint on the nature of selfhood. It may be one of the many reasons why anthropologists (in contrast to psychologists) have always been attentive not only to the content by to the form of the myths and stories they encounter among their “subjects”. For stories define the range of canonical characters, the settings in which they operate, the actions that are permissible and comprehensible. And thereby they provide, so to speak, a map of possible roles and of possible worlds in which action, thought, and self-definition are permissible (or desirable). (p. 66)
…, as Victor Turner remarks, we come increasingly to play parts defined by the “dramas” of that culture. (p. 66-67)
Insofar as we account for our own actions and for the human events that occur around us principally in terms of narrative, story, drama, it is conceivable that our sensitivity to narrative provides the major link between our own sense of self and our sense of others in the social world around us. The common coin may be provided by the forms of narrative that the culture offers us. Again, life could be said to imitate art. (p. 69)
Chp. Five: The Inspiration of Vygotsky
Real Pavlov = “classical conditioning”
...neo-Pavlovian ideas….as in the form of a justification for…-particularly the work of Vygotsky….”the Second Signal System”: the world as processed through language in contrast to the world of the senses. (p. 70)
Vygotsky developed his ideas in the 1920-30s USSR, but died young, and due to politics the ideas were little known on an international level until presented at conference in Montreal, 1954. Here Bruner was introduced to Vygotsky’s work and later went on to further propagate Vygotsky’s ideas through his own work. Vygotsky’s Thought and Language was published in 1934 in Russian; first published in 1956 and first English publication 1962. Bruner wrote the introduction.
role of language in development, of the “Zone of Proximal Development”, and the role of the Second Signal System in all of this. The Second Signal System, the world encoded in language, stood for nature transformed by history and culture. …The major premise in Vygotsky’s formulation (...) was the view that man was subject to the dialectical play between nature and history, between his qualities as a creature of biology and as a product of human culture. (p. 71)
“Children solve practical tasks with the help of their speech, as well as with their eyes and hands. This unity of perception, speech and action, which ultimately produces internalization of the visual field, constitutes the central subject matter for any analysis of the origin of uniquely human forms of behavior” (Mind in Society, p. 26) Language is (...) a way of sorting out one’s thoughts about things. Thought is a mode of organizing perception and action. … the epigraph from Francis Bacon...Vygotsky begins Thought and Language...neither the hand nor the mind alone, left to itself, would amount to much. And what are these prosthetic devices that perfect them (...)?
...society provides a toolkit of concepts and ideas and theories that permit one to get to higher ground mentally. ….They provide a means for turning around upon one’s thoughts, for seeing them in a new light. This is, of course, the mind reflecting on itself. … Consciousness plays an enormous role, consciousness armed with concepts and the language for forming and transforming them.
… “Consciousness and control appear only at a late stage in the development of a function, after it has been used and practices unconsciously and spontaneously. In order to subject a function to intellectual control, we must first possess it. (Thought and Language, p. 90). This suggests that prior to the development of self-directed, conscious control, action is, so to speak, a more direct or less mediated response to the world. Consciousness or reflection is a way of keeping mind from (...) shooting from the hip. (p. 73)
...Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)... It is an account of how the more competent assist the young and less competent to reach that higher ground, ground from which to reflect more abstractly about the nature of things. To use his words, the ZPD is the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers (Mind in Society, p. 86). (p. 73)
There seems, however, to be a contradiction. On the one hand, consciousness and control can come only after the child has already got a function well and spontaneously mastered. … How can the competent adult “lend” consciousness to a child who does not “have” it on his own? What is it that makes possible this implanting of vicarious consciousness in the child by his adult tutor? It is as if there were a kind of scaffolding erected for the learner by the tutor. But how?
Nowhere in Vygotsky’s writing is there any concrete spelling out of what he means by such scaffolding. …
Philosophically…. “modernization” through collectivization and mechanization...described the growth of the child from pre scientific to scientific thinking. … transmission of mind across history is effected by successive mental sharings that assure a passing on of ideas from the more able or advanced to the less so. And the medium in which the transmission occurs is language and its products: … Writing and reading were not only practically desirable. They were to “modernize” the mind. And there was even a school of Russian symbolist painters (vividly described and well illustrated in Robert Hughes’s book on the modernist tradition) that was to convert consciousness by new techniques of graphic design. …. Language, whether in art or in science, reflected our lives in history. Yet at the same time it could propel us beyond history. (p. 73-74)
Study conducted by David Wood, Jerome Bruner and Gail Ross looking at what actually happens in tutoring when the tutor possessing specific knowledge attempts to pass on to one who does not.
All we need note here is that she turned the task into play and caught it in a narrative that gave it continuity. … she made capital out of the “zone” that exists between what people can recognize or comprehend when present before them, and what they can generate on their own - and that is the … ZPD. (p. 75-76)
Study by English psychologist Barbara Tizard…
The more likely parents are to give good answers, the more likely are children to ask interesting questions. (p. 76)
Studies of language acquisition performed by Bruner while at Oxford (~1970-80)
...Once the child alters his responding babble to a word-length vocalization, she will again raise the ante and not accept a babble, but only the shorter version. Eventually, when the name of a referent is mastered, she will shift to a game in which the given and the new are to be separated. … She remains forever on the growing edge of the child’s competence. … Vygotsky would have said, had he known of this regularity, that the mother was providing an opportunity for the child to achieve his own consciousness, that up to that point he was using her as a crutch to get beyond infant speech. (p. 77)
It was Vygotsky’s genius to recognize the importance of language acquisition as an analogue, and I think that he was led to this recognition by his deep conviction that language and its forms of use -from narrative and tale to algebra and propositional calculus- reflect our history. It was also his genius to recognize the manner in which those “possible ways” across the ZPD become historically institutionalized-...
….I think he provides the still needed provocation to find a way of understanding man as a product of culture as well as a product of nature. (p. 78)
Chp. Six: Psychological Reality
Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG):
...how the mental process of the speaker operate in order to produce (or comprehend) a sentence. … by itself (not) sufficient to provide a description of the mental process of the speaker or listener. ...context is crucial to the decoding of an utterance - as with those deictic shifters like here and there. (p. 79-80)
For it is in the nature of language, …, that it is governed by the principle of “duality of functioning” or, more simply, by top-down rules. …. This top-down interdependence, moreover, applies even to such larger-scale linguistic products as folktales, … analysis of “characters” as functions of plot. (p. 81)
To consider the psychological reality, reference three traditional aspects of language: the syntactic, the semantic (phenomena), and the pragmatic (use). (specific intro p. 81-84) and discussed further throughout this chapter.
Chp. Seven: Nelson Goodman’s Worlds
Obviously, the idea of mind as an instrument of construction is (or should be) congenial to the developmental psychologist who observes different meanings being assigned to the same “event” at different ages. The clinical psychologist must always be impressed with the “reality” with which patients endow their rich narratives. And constructivism is nowhere more compelling than in the psychology of art and creativity. Blake, Kafka, Wittgenstein, and Picasso did not find the worlds they produced. They invented them. (p. 97)
“We must obviously look for truth not in the relation of a version to something outside it that it refers to, but in characteristics of the version itself and its relationship to other versions. ...When the world is lost and correspondence along with it, the first thought is usually coherence. But the answer cannot lie in coherence alone; for a false or otherwise wrong version can hold together as well as a right one. Nor do we have any self-evident truths, absolute axioms, unlimited warranties, to distinguish right from among coherent versions; other considerations must enter into that choice.” (Goodman. Of Mind and other Matters p. 37)
… His reason for tolerating a multiplicity of worlds is a principled one: “Some truths conflict.” (p. 98)
“...Merely that a given version says something does not make what it says true; after all, some versions say the earth is flat…. (Goodman. P 30)
Goodman accommodates these “conflicting truths” by treating them as “versions...true in different worlds” (ppp. 30-31). Since “there are conflicting true versions and they cannot be true in the same world” (p. 31), there must be many worlds. These worlds do not occupy the same space or time. (p. 99)
For Goodman… science and art grow out of certain common constructional activities, guided in each case by different constraints for establishing rightness and different conventions that grow out of their “entrenchment”. The difference for him is not that the arts are “subjective” and science “objective”. Rather, each constructs its world differently, and objectivity versus subjectivity is not the distinction at issue. (p. 101)
Goodman - “symbol systems” in Languages of Art
The meaning of the symbol is given by the system of meanings in which it exists. Each system of symbols has its referential properties: fictive, figurative, and metaphoric denotations alter the referential distance they impose between a symbol and what it stands for. … But what is told and the mode of telling enter into our conception of what a work of art is about. (p. 102)
Goodman- Project Zero (1967, Harvard Graduate School of Education), research on education for the arts.
Chp. Eight: Thought and Emotion
We know the world in different ways, from different stances, and each of the ways in which we know it produces different structures or representations, or, indeed, “realities.” As we grow to adulthood (at least in Western culture), we become increasingly adept at seeing the same set of events from multiple perspectives or stances and at entertaining the results as, so to speak, alternative possible worlds. The child, we would all agree, is less adept at achieving such multiple perspectives - although it is highly dubious, as we have already seen in Chapter 4, that children are as uniformly egocentric as formerly claims. There is every reason to insist,..., that the human capacity for taking multiple perspectives must be present in some workable form in order for the child to master language. And within each of the perspectives the child can take ( or the adult can take) she is capable of imposing principles of organization that have an internal “logic” in the sense of being principled rather than simply producing results conforming to “right reason”. It was to Piaget’s everlasting credit to demonstrate that an internal logic guided the young child much as it did the scientist, and that both could be shown to adhere to a principled set of operations. (p. 109)
Yerkes-Dodson Law: first, the stronger the drive, up to a point, the faster the learning will be; beyond a certain point the drive will force loss of control and slow the learning down. Second, the more complex the task, the less drive needed to achieve the maximum point of exhilaration on the U-curve). (p. 111)
Part Three: Acting in Constructed World
Chp. Nine: The Language of Education
We are living through bewildering times where the conduct of education is concerned. (p.121)
The most general implication is that a culture is constantly in process of being recreated as it is interpreted and renegotiated by its members. In this view, a culture is as much a forum for negotiating and re-negotiating meaning and explicating action as it is a set of rules or specifications for action. Indeed, every culture maintains specialized institutions or occasions for intensifying this “forum-like” feature. … Education is (or should be) one of the principal forums for performing this function -though it is often timid in doing so. It is the forum aspect of a culture that gives its participants a role in constantly making and remaking the culture -an active role as participants rather than as performing spectators who play out their canonical roles according to rule when the appropriate cues occur. (p. 123)
...the importance of discovery learning -learning on one’s own, or as Piaget put it later (and I think better), learning by inventing. … I have come increasingly to recognize that most learning in most settings is a communal activity, a sharing of the culture. It is not just that the child must make his knowledge his own, but that he must make it his own in a community of those who share his sense of belonging to a culture. It is this that leads me to emphasize not only discovery and invention but the importance of negotiating and sharing -in a word, of joint culture creating as an object of schooling and as an appropriate step en route to becoming a member of the adult society in which one lives out one’s life. (p. 127)
Much of the process of education consists of being able to distance oneself in some way from what one knows by being able to reflect on one’s own knowledge. In most contemporary theories of cognitive development, this has been taken to mean the achievement of more abstract knowledge through Piagetian formal operations or by the use of more abstract symbolic systems. And it is doubtless true that in many spheres of knowledge, as in the sciences, one does indeed climb to “intellectually higher ground” (to use Vygotsky’s phrase) by this route. … But I think it is perilous to look at intellectual growth exclusively in this manner, for one will surely distort the meaning of intellectual maturity if one uses such a model exclusively. (p. 127-128)
I think it follows from what I have said that the language of education, if it is to be an invitation to reflection and culture creating, cannot be the so-called uncontaminated language of fact and “objectivity”. It must express stance and must invite counter-stance and in the process leave place for reflection, for metacognition. It is this that permits one to reach higher ground, this process of objectifying in language or image what one has thought and then turning around on it and reconsidering it. (p. 129)
When we talk about the process of distancing oneself from one’s thoughts, reflecting better to gain perspectives, does this not imply something about the knower? Are we not in some way talking about the forming of Self? It is a topic that makes me acutely uncomfortable. (p. 129)
...reflection implies a reflecting agent, metacognition requires a master routine that knows how and when to break away from straight processing to corrective processing procedures. Indeed, culture creating of the negotiatory kind I have been discussing involves an active participant. How shall we deal with Self?
…, and just as I believe that we construct or constitute the world, I believe too that Self is a construction, a result of action and symbolization. Like Clifford Geertz and Michelle Rosaldo, I think of Self as as text about how one is situated with respect to others and toward the world -a canonical text about powers and skills and dispositions that change as one’s situation changes from young to old, from one kind of setting to another. (p. 130)
Cites Roland Barthes’s description of how French toys create consumers of French culture. -Think of how this is done today in US/West.
“...Faced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it; there are prepared for him actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy.” (p. 131)
Research of Michael Cole, Sylvia Scribner, and co.
…, the introduction of a mode of schooling in which one “figures out things for oneself” changes one’s conception of oneself and one’s role, and also undermines the role of authority that exists generally within the culture, even to the point of being marked by modes of address reserved for those in authority. (p. 131)
“two-faced” nature of language….the double function of being both a mode of communication and a medium for representing the world about which it is communicating. How one talks comes eventually to be how one represents what one talks about. … ,as one develops a sense of one’s self, the same pattern works its way into the manner in which we interpret that “text” which is our reading of ourselves.(p. 131)
If he fails to develop any sense of what I shall call reflective intervention in the knowledge he encounters, the young person will be operating continually from the outside in -knowledge will control and guide him. If he succeeds in developing a such a sense, he will control and select knowledge as needed. If he develops a sense of self that is premised on his ability to penetrate knowledge for his own uses, and if he can share and negotiate the result of his penetrations, then he becomes a member of the culture-creating community. (p. 132)
Reflection and “distancing” are crucial aspects of achieving a sense of the range of possible stances -a metacognitive step of huge import. The language of education is the language of culture creating. (p. 133)
Chp. Ten: Developmental Theory as Culture
But truth is better understood in Nelson Goodman’s sense -as “rightness.” ….”true”only for particular contexts. That is their rightness. (p. 135)
Freud, Piaget and Vygotsky
Freud - cultural drama, freeing from the shackles of one’s own history. The ‘hero’ is aware; he understands.
Piaget- self-sufficiency found within the particular stage of development presently experienced and not in the past history of the child. Growth happens naturally.
“To learn is to invent.” (p. 141)
Vygotsky-
the mind grows neither naturally nor unassisted. It is determined neither by its history nor by the logical constraints of its present operations. Intelligence...is readiness to use culturally transmitted knowledge and procedures as prostheses of mind. (p. 141)
...the importance of a social support system for leading the child through [ZPD] (p.142)
…, language was an agent for altering the powers of thought….[becoming] the repository for new thoughts once achieved. (p. 143)
Piaget -
… language reflects thought and does not determine it in any sense. (p. 144)
Freud-
...outsmarting conventional language by “free” association. (p. 145)
When and if we pass beyond the unspoken despair in which we are now living, when we feel we are again able to control the race to destruction, a new breed of developmental theory is likely to arise. It will be motivated by the question of how to create a new generation that can prevent the world from dissolving into chaos and destroying itself. I think that its central technical concern will be how to create in the young an appreciation of the fact that many worlds are possible, that meaning and reality are created and not discovered, that negotiation is the art of constructing new meanings by which individuals can regulate their relations with each other. It will not, I think, be an image of human development that locates all the sources of change inside the individual, the solo child. For if we have learned anything from the dark passage in history through which we are now moving it is that man, surely, is not “an island, entire of itself” but a part of the culture that he inherits and then recreates. The power to recreate reality, to reinvent culture, we will come to recognize, is where a theory of development must begin its discussion of mind. (p. 149)
The paragraph above it the final chapter in this book by Bruner, based on essays, written, revised and rewritten between 1980-1986 (publication date). I read this in March 2017, approximately 31 years after it was published and less than one year since Bruner’s death. In consideration of recent events I feel we are further from the ‘new breed of developmental theory’ Bruner said will arise. But I hope, at the same time, we are moving closer to it than we were in 1985.
