Top 10 Jerome Seymour Bruner Quotes at QuotationFun

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Jerome Bruner argues that the cognitive revolution, with its current fixation on mind as "information processor," has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Only by breaking out of the limitations imposed by a computational model of mind can we grasp the special interaction through which mind both constitutes and is constituted by culture.

Acts of Meaning - The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures, 1990.

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It was, we thought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept of psychology - not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behavior, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning. It was not a revolution against behaviorism with the aim of transforming behaviorism into a better way of pursuing psychology by adding a little mentalism to it. Edward Tolman had done that, to little avail. It was an altogether more profound revolution than that. Its aim was to discover and to describe formally the meanings that human beings created out of their encounters with the world, and then to propose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated. It focused on the symbolic activities that human beings employed in constructing and making sense not only of the world, but of themselves.

Acts of Meaning - The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures, 1990.

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If the cognitive revolution erupted in 1956, the contextual revolution (at least in psychology) is occurring today.

Acts of Meaning - The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures, 1990.

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Very early on, ... emphasis began shifting from 'meaning' to 'information', from the construction of meaning to the processing of information. These are profoundly different matters. The key factor in the shift was the introduction of computation as the ruling metaphor and of computability as a necessary criterion of a good theoretical model. Information is indifferent with respect to meaning.

Acts of Meaning - The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures, 1990.

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Given pre-established meaning categories well-formed enough within a domain to provide a basis for an operating code, a properly programmed computer could perform prodigies of information processing with a minimum set of operations, and that is technological heaven. Very soon, computing became the model of the mind, and in place of the concept of meaning there emerged the concept of computability. Cognitive processes were equated with the programs that could be run on a computational device, and the success of one's efforts to 'understand', say, memory or concept attainment, was one's ability realistically to simulate such human conceptualizing or human memorizing with a computer program.

Acts of Meaning - The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures, 1990.

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To perceive is to categorize, to conceptualize is to categorize, to learn is to form categories, to make decisions is to categorize.

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Stimuli, however, do not act upon an indifferent organism.

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Perceiving, for all its nicety of functioning in the dark room under strict instructions for accuracy, comprises a highly complex series of little understood psychological processes.

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There is a deep question whether the possible meanings that emerge from an effort to explain the experience of art may not mask the real meanings of a work of art.

Art

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The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness.

Courage

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