Jerome Bruner: Language, Culture, Self

Canadian Psychology, Feb 2003 by Leendert Mos

It is not enough to recognize that biology constrains culture or that cognitive science cannot resolve the issue of meaning making, cultural psychology directly challenges all forms of reductionist explanation, whether neurobiological, cognitivist, or interactionist. To bring culture into psychology, "Bruner's `project,"' involves more than adding meaning to the mix of the discipline's perennial issues; rather, it is, quoting from Bruner's Acts of Meaning, "adjudicating the different construals of reality that are inevitable in any diverse society" (p. 27). Geertz warns that bringing "culture" into psychology may not be peaceful, in fact must not be, in "rethinking the embattled concept of mind he [Bruner] wishes to conjoin with it" (p. 26). For, Geertz continues:

[H]istory, culture, the body and the workings of the physical world indeed fix the character of anyone's mental life shape it, stabilize it, fill it with content. But they do so independently, partitively, concurrently, and differentially. They do notjust disappear into a resultant like so many component vectors, or come together in some nicely equilibrated frictionless concord. (p. 27)

Instead, of "hybridizing disciplines" in seeking reconciliation between radically different approaches to understanding the mind, we ought to be engaged in "reciprocally disequilibrating" these different approaches in what may be expected to yield a play of discordant discourses (p. 28). But this is a legacy Bruner established long ago and one that fits, as the editors comment in their "Introduction," in the tradition of American pragmatism, "humanistic ... ebulient, fun and profoundly moral" (p. 17).

Bruner's discerning, incisive, and generous commentary on these contributions exemplifies all these attributes - cultural psychology is an interpretative discipline that is prepared for and fulfilled, phylogenetically and ontogenetically, in the pragmatics of life. As to constructivism, "there is no platinum metre-rule that can measure whether a postulated 'reality' is adequate pragmatically. All of which is just to say that the measure of adequacy of any particular theoretical construct, like the construct itself, is a human cultural product" (p. 214). Whether understood as remarkably naive or masterfully insightful, this conclusion and the papers collected in this volume bear witness to Bruner's well-deserved reputation as a philosophical psychologist.

As a sophisticated introduction to cultural psychology, this book will do very nicely. Yet as a set of reflections on the discipline, the papers collected here remain divided in a manner that reflects the fact that Bruner's own work testifies to an incommensurability between interpretative and causal modes of explanation, even if, as the editors comment, this is for Bruner a "conclusion of sustained reflection upon empirical considerations and conceptual connections" (p. 16). Several voices in this volume instantiate and carry forward a postmodern incredulity towards any narrative of the one true way; others remind us that science, again quoting the editors, "gets at things as they really are" (p. 13). One is tempted to share the editors' confidence in Bruner's claim that mind in encountering other minds is an "artefact of our self-understanding" (p. 16). However, in one way or the other, the constructivism of cultural psychology radically confronts us with a multiplicity of life-world dialogues wherein otherness risks being neither within nor outside us. We may then well explicate how "human living arrangements work" but as "arrangements" these remain as opaque as ever.