Acts of Meaning Quotes

“Being able to "go beyond the information" given to "figure things out" is one of the few untarnishable joys of life. One of the great triumphs of learning (and of teaching) is to get things organised in your head in a way that permits you to know more than you "ought" to. And this takes reflection, brooding about what it is that you know. The enemy of reflection is the breakneck pace - the thousand pictures.”
― Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture

“In sum, then, "thinking about thinking" has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education.”
― Jerome S. Bruner, Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture

“In answer to those who deny this version of selfhood on philosophical or "scientific" grounds, we reply simply, "But that's how it is: can't you see?”
― Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning: Four Lectures on Mind and Culture

“To get a general notion of a particular "Self" in practice, we must sample its uses in a variety of contexts, culturally specifiable contexts. [...] One viable alternative is obvious - to do the inquiry retrospectively, through autobiography. I mean, simply, an account of what one thinks one did in what settings in what ways for what felt reasons. It will inevitably be a narrative, its form will be as revealing as its substance. Our interest, rather, is only in what the person thought he did, what he thought he was doing it for, what kind of plights he thought he was in, and so on.”
― Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning

“You went to somewhere to do something with an anticipated goal in mind, something you couldn't do elsewhere and be the same Self.”
― Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning

“The central concept of a human psychology is meaning and the processes and transactions involved in the construction of meanings. To understand man you must understand how his experiences and his acts are shaped by his intentional states; the form of these intentional states is realized only through participation in the symbolic systems of the culture. Indeed, the very shape of our lives - the rough and perpetually changing draft of our autobiography that we carry in our minds - is understandable to ourselves and to others only by virtue of those cultural systems of interpretation. But culture is also constitutive of mind.”
― Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning