Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self

Canadian Psychology, Feb 2003 by Leendert Mos

DAVID BAKHURST and STUART G. SHANKER (Eds.) Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self London: Sage Publications, 2001, 240 pages (ISBN 0-7619-5531-3, 49.95, Hardcover)

Ten papers bounded by an editors' "Introduction" and Jerome Bruner's commentary, "In Response," constitute a volume that is probably as complete a presentation of the seminal issues in "cultural psychology" available anywhere. It is a joy to read and a tribute to Bruner's breadth of influence in all major areas of the discipline. What is remarkable about this volume is that the reader actually lives through Bruner's influence during the past five decades and comes to an appreciation of just how much of the theoretical course of the discipline is reflected in and can be understood through Bruner's writings. However, the papers collected here are not, as the editors note, a celebration of Bruner's legacy, but rather "a lens through which to see contemporary debates in psychology and cognate disciplines, debates about mind and culture, language and communication, identity and development" (p. 1).

Two kinds of papers are collected here. First, those that do indeed celebrate Bruner's influence, and the authors of these papers present their own and others' empirical research in the theoretical and practical traditions initiated and established by Bruner. Second, there are critically reflective papers discerning of Bruner's own acknowledged "Hamlet-- like" (p. 210) attitudes towards conceptual issues, the authors of which testify to the editor's characterization of Bruner as a "philosopher of psychology" (p. 1). Notably, both kinds of papers pay tribute to Bruner as a "Compleat Educator" (Gardner, p. 129). As a friend and colleague, Howard Gardner writes of him "as he learns he teaches not just himself but others, and one of the most important lessons that he teaches is how to ask questions and how to arrive at productive answers" (p. 128). These words are echoed by David Bakhurst who comments that Bruner's "qualities as an educator" are equally revealed in the "manner of his writing" bearing the "familiar enthusiasm for empowering students to think autonomously within a living tradition of enquiry" (p. 132). Indeed, Bruner's "style" as the editors, among the other contributors, emphasize, "inspire[s] creative educational policies, more refined self-awareness and better ways of living" (p. 17).

In searching for a unifying question-theme among the richness of these contributions, I find it in Rom Harre's essay, "Norms in Life: Problems in the Representation of Rules" (chap. 9), where he writes:

I believe that the whole discipline of psychology, as a discipline, hinges on whether we should assimilate habits to causes or to monitored actions. Nothing but confusion can arise from extending the notion of cause to cover every temporal pattern of antecedent and consequent without further qualification. (p. 158)

Recognizing Bruner's contribution to and more recent critique of the discipline's "cognitive revolution," Harre supports this critique, first of behaviourism's positivism and later of cognitive psychology's realism, in an exacting argument against computational models of mind. Since neither intentionality nor normativity, as assumed characteristic of all psychological phenomena, can be captured by such cognitive processing models, Bruner's turn towards explicating the meaning of culturally mediated narratives serves to distinguish between "rule-following" and "acting in accordance with rules" in a manner that invokes the distinction between narrative performances, or what Harre calls monitored actions, and its enabling conditions (p. 154). If monitored actions require explicit concepts of meaning and rule following in their explanation, the question remains what of the habitual of narrative conventions? Writes Harre, "one of the reasons that psychology is proved difficult to found on an agreed ontology and methodology is ... that there is no simple answer to this question" (p. 159). Although it is clear that Bruner's understanding of narratives of cultural psychology eschews all causal analysis, it remains unclear whether the habitual nature of narrative conventions admits of causal explanation in a way that does not preclude its essential cultural mediation.

What is at issue here is the role of unobserved mental states and processes in the explanation of habitual behaviour or even, as other contributors note, of monitored performances. Bruner's cultural psychology juxtaposes the role of interpretation and of explanation - monitored performances assume that persons are agents who know the meaning and norms of the stories they tell and the conversations in which they engage, yet much of their joint doing and speaking is competently habitual. Are we to understand this habitual doing and speaking causally or interpretatively? It is Harre's claim, following Wittgenstein, that our understanding of habitual action, of narrative conventions wherein we act according to rule, must make reference to forms of life wherein the intentionality and normativity of discourses find their explicit evaluation. In whatever manner we may eventually come to understand the enabling conditions of narrative conventions - and Harre rejects the idea that their explanation resides in mental mechanisms - our explicit understanding of them necessarily invokes community standards.