Bruner Acts of Meaning

THE JERUSALEM-HARVARD LECTURES
Sponsored by che Hebrew University of Jerusalem

and Harvard Universiry Press
JEROME BRUNER
•
Acts of M
HARVARD UNIVERSIT PRESS
Cambridge,
London, England
one
<:opyright C 1990 by tbc Presidcnt and Fdlowa
ofHarvard~
All rights racrvcd
Primcd in thc Unitcd Statcs of Amcrica
Bruner, Jcromc S. (Jcrome Scymour)

Acts of mcaning I Jeromc Bruncr.
p. an. - (Tbc Jeruaalcm·Harvard lectura)
Includea bibliographical rcfermccs and index.
ISBN 0-674-00360-8 (alk. papcr)
ISBN 0-674-00361-6 (pbk.)
1. Mcaning (Psychology)
2. <Agnitive psycho&ogy-History.
3. Ethnopsychology.
1. Tidc. II. Scries.
BF4SS.B74 1990
lSO--dclO 90-40485
CIP
Dcsigned by Gwcn Frankfddt

To Carol
Contents
Preface ix.
Acknowledgments xv
ONE
The Proper Srudy of Man 1
TWO
Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culrure 33
THREE
Entry into Meaning 67
FOU.R.
Autobiography and Self 99
Notcs 141
Subject Index 171
Name Index 177

Preface
B OOKS are like mountaintops jutting out of the sea.

Self-contained islands though they may seem, they are
upthrusts of an underlying geography that is at once local
and, for all that, a part of a universal pattern. And so, while
they inevitably reflect a time and a placc, they are part of a
morc general intellectual geography. This book is no ex-
ception.
1 have written it at a time when psychology, the science of
mind as William James once called it, has become fragmented
as never before in its history. lt has lost its center and risks
losing the cohesion needed ro assure the intemal exchange
that might justify a division of labor between its parts. And
the parts, each with its own organizational identity, its own
theoretical apparatus, and often its own journals, have become
specialties whose products become less and less exportable.
Too often they seal themselves within their own rhetoric and
within their own parish of authoriries. This self-sealing risks
making each part (and the aggregate thar increasingly consti-
rutes psychology's patchquilt whole) ever morc remote from
other inquiries dedicated to the understanding of mind and
IX
• Preface •
the human condition-inquiries in the humanities or ín the

other social sciences.
There may be good reasons for what has happened, and
perhaps it even reflects a needed ''paradigm shift" in the hu-
man sciences. The ''biological" side of psychology has aban-
doned its old base to join forces with the neurosciences. And
the newly minted "cognitive sciences" have absorbed many of
those who used to work in the vineyards of perception, mem-
ory, thinking, all of these now conceivcd as varicties of "in-
formation processing." These new alignments may be for the
good: they could bring new and unexpected theorctical vigor
to thc task of understanding man.
But in spite of the splitting and fragmentation that seem to
be occurring, I do not think either that psychology is coming
to an end or that it is permanently condemned to live in
segregated parishes. For psychology as an enterprise long pre-
dates its "official" conversion into a set of self-contained divi-
sions. Its great questions are still alive. The founding of
Wundt's "experimental" laboratory at Leipzig in 1879 did not
cancel those questions; it only clothed them in new dress-thc
"new" positivist style so dear to the hearts of our late-
nineteenth-century forebears. Even Wundt in his later ycars
recognized how constricting the new "laboratory" style could
be, and in formulating a "cultural psychology" urged that we
embrace a morc historical, interpretive approach to under-
standing man's cultural products.
We are still drawing rich sustenance from our more distant,
pre-positivist past: Chomsky acknowledges his debt to Des-
cartes, Piaget is inconceivable without Kant, Vygotsky with-
out Hegel and Marx, and the once towering bastion of"leam-
ing theory" was constructed on foundations laid by John
x
• Preface •
Locke. And had Freud's followers fought free of the model of

"bioenergetics" that was thc shallowest aspect of his theory,
psychoanalysis might have continued to grow in theoretical
stature. The more recent cognitive revolution was inconceiv-
able without the supporting philosophical climate of its time.
And, indeed, if one looks beyond the boundaries of "official"
psychology to our sister disciplines in the human sciences, one
is struck by the lively renewal of interest in the classical ques-
tions raised in the cenrury since Leipzig by Nietzsche and
Peirce, by Austin and Wittgenstein, by Jakobson and de Saus-
sure, by Husserl and Cassirer, by Foucault and Searle.
It is not surprising, then, that a reaction has set in against
the narrowing and "sealing in" that are affiicting psychology.
The wider intellectual community comes increasingly to ig-
nore our journals, which seem to outsiders principally to con-
tain intellecrually unsiruated little studies, each a response to
a handful of like little studies. Inside psychology there is a
worried restlessness about the state of our discipline, and the
beginning of a ncw search for means of rcformulating it. ln
spite of the prevailing ethos of "neat little studies," and of
what Gordon Allport once called methodolatry, the great psy-
chological questions are being raised once again-questions
about the narure of mind and its processes, questions abom
how we construct our meanings and our realities, questions
about the shaping of mind by history and culrure.
And thcse questions, often pursued more vigorously outside
than inside "official" psychology, are being reformulated with
a subtlety and rigor that yield rich and generative answers. We
know far better now how to approach the Great Comparisons
whose resolutions have always challenged psychology: the
comparison of man and his evolutionary forebears, man as
Xl
• Preface •
inunarure child and man at full marurity, man in full health

and man affiicted by mental illness or alienation, "human na-
rure" as expressed ín different culrures, and indeed even the
comparison between man in flesh and blood with the ma-
chines constructed to simulate him. Each and every one of
these inquiries has prospered when we have been willing to
ask questions about such taboo topics as mind, intentional
states, meaning, reality construction, mental rules, culrural
forms, and the lik.e. Occam's razor, warning us not to multiply
our conceprual entities more than "necessary," was surely not
intended to ban mind from the mental sciences. Nor were
John Sruart Mill's principles of induction meant to quell all
forms of intellectual curiosity save those which could be slaked
by the controlkd c:xpcriment.
This book is written against the background of psychology
today, with its confusions, its dislocations, its new simplifica-
tions. I have called it Acts of Meaning in order to emphasize
its major theme: the narure and culrural shaping of meaning-
making, and the central place it plays in human action. lt is
not just an autobiographical quirk that I should be writing
such a book now, though the reader will soon find that it
"projecrs'' my own long history as a psychologist. But all sin-
gle voices are abstractcd from dialogues, as Bakhtin teaches
us. 1 have had the great good forrune to be a long-term partici-
pant ín thc dialogues that form and reform psychology. And
what 1 shall have to say in the chapters that follow reflects my
view of where the dialogue stands today.
This is not intended to be a "comprehensive" srudy of all
and every aspect of the meaning-making process. That would
be impossible in any case. Rather, it is an effort to illustrate
what a psychology looks like when it concerns itself centrally
Xll
• Preface •
with meaning, how it inevitably becomes a cultural psychol-

ogy and how it must venture beyond the conventional aims
of positivist science with its ideals of reductionism, causa/. expla-
nation and prediction. The three need not be treated like the
Trinity. For when we deal with meaning and culture, we inevi-
tably move toward another ideal. To reduce meaning or cul-
ture to a material base, to say that they "depend," say, on the
left hemisphere, is to trivialize both in the service of misplaced
concreteness. To insist upon explanation in tenns of "causes"
simply bars us írom trying to understand how human beings
interpret their worlds and how we interpret their acts of inter-
pretarion. And if we take the object of psychology (as of any
intellecrual enterprise) to be the achievement of understand-
ing, why is it necessary under all conditions for us to under-
stand in advance of the phenomena to be observed-which is
all that predicrion is? Are not plausible interpretations prefera-
ble to causal explanations, parricularly when the achievement
of a causal explanarion forces us to artificialize what we are
studying to a point almost beyond recognition as representa-
tive of human life?
The srudy of the human mind is so difficult, so caught in
the dilemma of being both the object and the agent of its own
study, that it cannot limit its inquiries to ways of thinking
that grew out of yesterday's physics. Rather, the task is so
compellingly important that it deserves all the rich variety of
insight that we can bring to the understanding of what man
makes of his world, of his fellow beings, and of himself. That
is the spirit in which we should proceed.
Xlll
Acknowledgments
I CANNOT begin to mention all the people and institu-

tions who shaped this book. For in many ways, it repre-
sents not only my most current thinking but also, as it were,
a ~'return of the repressed." Some of the influences, conse-
quently, are ín the dis tant past, like the Departtnent of Social
Relations at Harvard where, for a decade beginning in the
mid- l 950s, 1 was nourished by the company of such as Clyde
Kluckhohn and Gordon Allport, T alcott Parsons and Henry
Murray. It was a department with a purpose, and each month
we met as a seminar to elucidate that purpose: how to recon-
cile views of Man as a unique individual with views of him
both as an expression of culture and as a biological organism.
The debates of those Wednesday evenings reverberate in the
pages that follow.
Then there was "Soc Sci 8," Conceptions of Man, in which
George Miller and I tried to persuadc a generation of Harvard
and Radcliffe undergraduates that to know Man you must see
him against the background of the animal kingdom írom
which he evolved, in the context of the culture and language
that provide the symbolic world in which he lives, and in the
light of the growth processes that bring these two powerful
X\'
• Acknowledgments •
forces into concert. We had become convinced by then that

psychology couJd not do the job on its own. And so we set
up our own version of an interdisciplinary human science in
General Education, and for most of the l 960s, from Septem-
ber through May each year, we managed to stay just a step
ahead of our undergraduates.
And in the midst of this, the Center for Cognirive Studies
was founded, about which much morc will be said in the
opening chapter. 1 mention it here only to express a debt to
yet another community that helped convince me (by this time
hardly against my will) that the boundaries that separated such
fields as psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and philoso-
phy were matters of administrative convenience rather than of
intcllcctual substancc.
Then there were those longtime conversational partners
who constitute one's Generalized Other-George Miller, Da-
vid Krech, Alexander Luria, Barbel Inhelder, Clifford Geertz,
Albert Guerard, Roman Jakobson, Morton White, Elting
Morison, David Olson. And still the list is incomplete, for 1
have left out my former students-from recent New York,
through middle Oxford, to early Harvard.
Several friends read early drafts of this book and provided
useful suggestions: Michael Cole, Howard Gardner, Robert
Lifton, Daniel Robinson, and Donald Spence. 1 am very
grateful for their help.
1 owe an especial debt to my hosts in Jerusalem who, in
December 1989, made life so thoroughly agreeable when 1
delivered the Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures at the Hebrew Uni-
versity there-parricuJarly President Amnon Pazi, Rector
Yoram Ben-Porath, Professor Shmuel Eisenstadt, and Ms.
Liat Mayberg. The lectures 1 gave in Jerusalem generated the
XVl
• Acknowledgments •
first draft of this book. 1 have rarely lectured to so intensely

involved or so informed an audience as assembled those De-
cember aftemoons on Mount Scopus. Their conunents and
questions started me on the road to fruitful revision. 1 also
wish gratefully to acknowledge a grant from the Spencer
Foundation that supported the work on which this volume is
based.
At last I am able to express my gratitude to my publisher,
Arthur Rosenthal, who, over the years, has censored any men-
tion of his name írom prefaces by me and other grateful au-
thors. It is finally possible to escape his blue penci!, for he is
now about to leave the directorship of Harvard University
Press to preside over other matters clsewhere. Arthur Rosen-
thal as a publisher is a reward for hard work, a way of life.
And as if that were not enough, there was the Press in its
other embodiments: Angela von der Lippe, always skillfully
encouraging, and Camille Smith, a manuscript editor with
patience and imagination.
I have dedicated this book to Carol Fleisher Feldman, my
wife and colleague. lt will come as no surprise to anyone.
XVll
Acts of Meaning
• CHAPTER ONE •
The Proper Study of Man
I WANT TO BEGIN with the Cognitive Revolution as my

point of departure. That revolution was intended to bring
"mind" back into the human sciences after a long cold winter
of objectivism. But mine will not be the usual account of
progress marching ever forward. 1 For, at least in my view, that
revolution has now been diverted inro issues that are marginal
to the impulse that brought it into being. Indeed, it has been
technicalized in a manner that even undermines that original
impulse. This is not to say that it has failed: far from it, for
cognitive science must surely be among the leading growth
shares on the academic bourse. It may rather be that it has
become diverted by success, a success whose technological
virtuosity has cost dear. Some critics, perhaps unkindly, even
argue that the new cognitive science, the child of the revolu-
tion, has gained its technical successes at the price of dehu-
manizing the very concept of mind it had sought to reestablish
in psychology, and that it has thereby estranged much of psy-
chology from the other human sciences and the hurnanities. 2
1 shall have more to say on these matters shortly. But before
going on, let me give you the plan of this chapter and the ones
that follow. Once our retrospective glance at the revolution is
1
• Acts of Meaning •
done, 1 then want to tum directly to a preliminary exploration

of a renewed cognitive revolution-a more interpretive ap-
proach to cognition concemed with "meaning-making," one
that has been proliferating these last several years in anthro-
pology, linguistics, philosophy, literary theory, psychology,
and, it would ahnost seem, wherever one looks these days. 3 1
rather suspect that this vigorous growth is an effort to recap-
ture the original momentum of the first cognitive revolution.
ln later chapters, 1 shall try to fill in this preliminary sketch
with some concrete illustration of research on the boundaries
between psychology and its neighbors in the humanities and
the social sciences, research that recaptures what I have called
the originating impulse of the cognitive revolution.
Now let me tell you first what 1 and my friends thought the
revolution was about back there in the late l 950s. lt was, wc
thought, an all-out etfort to establish meaning as the central
concept of psychology-not stimuli and responses, not overtly
observable behavior, not biological drives and their transfor-
mation, but meaning. It was not a revolution against behavior-
ism 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. 4 lt was an
altogether more profound revolution than that. lts 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 pro-
cesses were implicated. lt focused upon the symbolic activities
that human beings employed in constructing and in making
sense not only of the world, but of themselves. lts aim was to
prompt psychology to join forces with its sister interpretive
disciplines in the humanities and in the social scienccs. lndced,
2
• The Proper Study of Man •
beneath the surface of the more computationally oriented cog-

nitive science, this is precisely what has been happening-first
slowly and now with increasing momentum. And so today
one finds flourishing centers of culrural psychology, cognitive
and interpretive anthropology, cognitive linguistics, and
above all, a thriving worldwide enterprise that occupies itself
as never before since Kant with the philosophy of mind and
of language. It is probably a sign of the times that the two
Jerusalem-Harvard Lecturers in the academic year 1989-90
represent, each in his own way, this very tradition-Professor
Geertz in anthropology and myself in psychology.
The cognitive revolution as originally conceived virrually
required that psychology join forces with anthropology and
linguistics, philosophy and history, even with the discipline of
law. It is no surprise and certainly not an accident that ín
those early years the advisory board of the Center for Cogni-
tive Studies at Harvard included a philosopher, W. V. Quine,
an intellecrual historian, H. Sruart Hughes, and a linguist,
Roman Jakobson. Or that among the Center's Fellows could
be numbered almost as many philosophers, anthropologists,
and linguists as there were proper psychologists-among
them such exponents of the new constructivism as Nelson
Goodman. As for the law, 1 must report that several distin-
guished members of that faculty camc occasionally to our col-
loquia. One of them, Paul Freund, admitted he came because
we at the Center, it seemed to him, were interested in how
rules (like rules of grammar, rather than scientific laws) af-
fected human action and that, after all, is what jurisprudence
is about. 5
1 think it should be clear to you by now that we were not
out to "reform" behaviorism, but to replace it. As my col-
3
league George Miller put it some years later, 'We nailed our
new credo to the door, and waited to see what would happen.
All went very well, so well, in fact, that in the end we may
have been the victims of our success." 6
lt would make an absorbing essay in the intellecrual history
of the last quarter-cenrury to trace what happened to the origi-
nating impulse of the cognitive revolution, how it became
fractionated and technicalized. The full story had best be left
to the intellecrual historians. Ali we need note now are a few
signposts along the way, just enough of them to give a sense
of the intellecrual terrain on which we were all marching.
Very early on, for example, emphasis began shifting from
"meaning" to "information," from the amstruction of meaning
to the processing of information. These are profoundly different
maners. 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. ln computational
terms, informarion comprises an already precoded message in
the system. Meaning is preassigned to messages. It is not an
outcome of computation nor is it relevant to computation
save in the arbitrary sense of assignment.
Information processing inscribes messages at or fetches
them from an address in memory on instructions from a cen-
tral control unit, or it holds them temporarily in a buffer store,
and then manipulates them in prescribed ways: it lists, orders,
combines, compares precoded information. The system that
does all of these things is blind with respect to whether what is
stored is words from Shakespeare's sonnets or numbers from a
random number table. According to classic information the-
ory, a messagc is informative if it reduces alternative choices.
4
This implies a code of established possible choices. The cate-

gories of possibility and the instances they comprise are pro-
cessed according to the "syntax" of the system, its possible
movcs. Insofar as information in this dispensation can deal
with meaning it is in the dictionary sense only: accessing
stored lexical information according to a coded address.
There are other "meaning-like" operations such as permuting
a set of entries in order to test the resultants against a criterion,
as in anagrams or Scrabble. But information processing can-
not deal with anything beyond well-defined and arbitrary en-
tries that can enter into specific relationships that arc strictly
governed by a program of elementary operations. Such a sys-
tem cannot cope with vagueness, with polysemy, with meta-
phoric or connotative connections. When it seems to be doing
so, it is a monkey in the British Museum, beating out the
problem by a bone-crushing algorithm or taking a flyer on a
risky heuristic. Information processing needs advance plan-
ning and precise rules. 7 It predudes such iU-formed questions
as "How is the world organized in the mind of a Muslim
fundamentalist?" or "How does th~ concept of Self differ in
Homeric Greece and in the postindustrial world?" And it fa-
vors questions like ''What is the optimum strategy for provid-
ing control information to an operator to ensure that a vehicle
wiU be kept in a predetermined orbit?" We shall have much
morc to say later about meaning and the processes that create
it. They are surprisingly remote írom what is conventionally
called "information processing."
It is not surprising, given that an Information Revolution
was occurring throughout the postindustrial world, that such
an emphasis should have developed. Psychology and the social
sciences generally have always been sensitive, often oversensi-
5
tive, to the needs of the society that gives them shelter. And
it has always been rather an intellecrual reflex of academic
psychology to redefine man and his mind ín the light of new
social requirements. Nor is it surprising that under such con-
ditions interest should have shifted away, accordingly, írom
mind and meaning to computers and information. For com-
puters and computational theory had by the early l 950s be-
come the root metaphor for information processing. Given
preestablished meaning categories well-formed enough within
a domain to provide a basis for an operating code, a properly
programmed computer could perform prodigies of informa-
tion processing with a minimum set of operations, and that
is technological heaven. Very soon, computing became the
model of the mind, and in placc of the concept of meaning
thcre emerged the concept of computability. Cognitive pro-
cesses were equated with the programs that could be run on
a computational device, and the success of one's effort to "un-
derstand," say, memory or concept attainment, was one's abil-
ity realistically to simulate such human conceprualizing or hu-
man memorizing with a computer program. 8 This line of
thinking was enormously aided by Turing's revolutionary in-
sight that any computational program, no matter how com-
plex, could be "imitated" by a much simpler Universal Turing
Machine computing with a finite set of quite primitive opera-
tions. If one falls into the habit of thinking of those complex
programs as ''virrual minds" (to borrow Daniel Dennett's
phrase), then it takes only a small but crucial step to go the
whole way to believing that "real minds„ and their processes,
like "virtual" ones and theirs, could be "explained" in the samc
way. 9
This new reductionism provided an astonishingly libertar-
6
ian program for the new cognitive science that was being
born. lt was so permissive, indeed, that even the old S-R
learning theorist and associationist student of memory could
come right back into the fold of the cognitive revolution so
long as they wrapped their old concepts in the new terms of
information processing. One did not have to truck with "men-
tal" processes or with meaning at all. ln place of stimuli and
responses, there was input and output, with reinforcement
laundered of its affective taint by being converted into a con-
trol element that fed information about thc outcome of an
operation back into the system. So long as there was a com-
putable program, there was "mind."
At first this pun version of mind did not seem to provoke
the traditional antimentalist panic among the seemingly con-
verted bchaviorists. ln good time, though, new versions of
old classically familiar controversies began to reemerge, partic-
ularly in connection with debates about the so-called architec-
ture of cognition: whether it was to be conceived as a set of
grammar-like hierarchically nesting rule structures for accept-
ing, rejecting, or combining input, or whether, rather, it could
be conceived of as a bottom-up connectionist network with
completely distributed control asin the PDP (Parallel Distrib-
uted Processing) models, a model much like the old associa-
tionist doctrine, minus Herbart's creative synthesis. The first
simulatcd the top-clown, rationalist-mentalist tradition in psy-
chology and moved easily back and forth between "real"
minds and ''virtual" ones; the second was a new version of
what Gordon Allport used to mock in his lectures as "dust-
bowl empiricism." East Coast computationalism dealt with
such mindlike terms as rules, grammars, and the like. The
West Coasters wanted no part of such simulated mentalism.
7
Soon, the battleground began looking increasingly traditional

and familiar, though the vehicles that were racing over it had
much more speed and much more formalistic horsepower. But
whether their maneuvers had to do with the mind or only
with the theory of computation remained a question that both
sides regarded as infinitely postponable. Time would tell, the
questioners were assured, whether a sow's ear could be turned
into a silk purse. 10
It was inevitable that with computation as the metaphor
of the new cognitive science and with computability as the
necessary if not sufficient criterion of a workable theory within
the new science, the old malaise about mentalism would re-
cmerge. With mind equated to progr~ what should the
status of mental states ~ld-fashioned mcntal states identi-
fiable not by their programmatic characteristics ina computa-
tional system but by their subjective marking? There could be
no place for "mind" in such a system-"mind" in the sense of
intentional states like believing, desiring, intending, grasping
a meaning. The cry soon rose to ban such intentional states
from the new science. And surely no book published even in
the heyday of early behaviorism could match the antimentalist
zeal of Stephen Stich's From Folk Psychology to Cognitipe Sci.-
ena. 11 There were, to be sure, statesmanlike efforts to make
peace bctween the fuddy-duddy, mentalistic cognitivists and
the brave new antimentalists. But they all took the farm of
either humoring or cajoling the mentalists. Dennett proposed,
for example, that we should simply act as if people had inten-
tional states that caused them to behave in certain ways; later
we'd find out we didn't need such fuzzy notions. 12 Paul
Churchland grudgingly admitted that, while it was interest-
ingly problematic why people hung on so tenaciously to their
8
• The Propcr Study of Man •
plainly wrong mentalism, that was something to be explained

rather than taken for granted. Perhaps, as Churchland put it,
folk psychology seems to describe how things acrually go, but
how could a belief, desire, or attirude be a cause of anything
in the physical world-that is, in the world of computation? 13
Mind in the subjective sense was either an epiphenomenon
that the computational system outputted under certain condi-
tions, in which case it could not be a cause of anything, or it
was just a way that people talked about behavior after it had
occurred (also an output), in which case it was just more
behavior and simply needed further linguistic analysis. And
yes, 1 must include Jerry Fodor's nativism: it could also be a
spinoff of innate processes built into the system, in which case
it was an effect rather than a cause. 14
With the new attack on menta! statcs and intentionality
came a related attack on the concept of agency. Cognitive
scientists, in the main, have no quarrel with the idea that
behavior is directed, even directed toward goals. If direction is
governed by the results of computing the utility of alternative
outcomes, this is perfectly bearable and, indeed, it is the cen-
terpiece of "rational choice theory." But cognitive science in
its new mood, despite all its hospitality toward goal-directed
behavior, is still chary of a concept of agency. For "agency"
implies the conduct of action under the sway of intentional
states. So action based on belief, desire, and moral commit-
ment-unless it is purely stipulative in Dennett's sense---is
now regarded as something to be eschewed by right-minded
cognitive scientists. It is like free will among the deter-
minists. 15 There were brave holdouts against the new anti-
intentionalism, like the philosophers John Searle and Charles
Taylor, or the psychologist Kenneth Gergen, or the anthro-
9
• Acts of Mcaning •
pologist Clifford Geertz, but their views were marginalized

by the majoritarians of mainstrcam computationalism. 16
1 am fully aware that 1 may be giving an exaggerated picrure
of what happened to the cognitive revolution once it became
subordinated to the idea! of computability in the edifice of
cognitive science. 1 note that whenever a proper cognitivc
scientist uses the expression "artificial intelligence" (even if it
is only once), it is almost invariably followed by the capitalized
initials "AI" in parentheses: "(AI)." 1 rak.e this act of abbrevia-
tion to indicate one of two things. The abbreviated form sug-
gests the shortening required by Zipf's Law: the length of a
word or expression is inverse to its frequency-"television"
evenrually reduced to "1V"-with the abbreviation "(AI)"
celebrating its comparable ubiquitousness and market penctra-
tion. The boast of AI is that it is about alJ mindli.ke artifacts,
even about mind itself, if mind only be considered as yet an-
other artifact, one that conforms to principles of computation.
Or the abbreviation, on the other hand, may be a sign of
embarrassment: either becausc there is an aura of obsccnity
about the artificialization of something so narural as intelli-
gence (in Ireland, by the way, AI is the embarrassed abbrevia-
tion for artificial insemination), or because AI is an abbrevia-
tion of what, in its full form, might seem an oxymoron (the
liveliness of intelligence coupled with the flatness of artificial-
ity). The implied boast of Zipf's Law and the embarrassment
of cover-up are both merited. There is no question that cogni-
tive science has made a contribution to our understanding of
how information is moved about and proccssed. Nor can there
be much doubt on reflection that it has left largely unexplained
and even somewhat obscured the very large issues that in-
spired the cognirive revolution in the first placc. So let us
10
• The Proper Study of Man
return to the question of how to construct a mental science

around the concept of meaning and the processes by which
meanings are created and negotiated within a community.
11 Begin with the concept of culture itself.-particularly its

constitutive role. What was obvious from the start was per-
haps too obvious to be fully appreciated, at least by us psy-
chologists who by habit and by tradition think in rather indi-
vidualistic terms. The symbolic systems that individuals used
in constructing meaning were systems that were already in
place, already "therc," deeply entrenched in culture and lan-
guage. They constituted a very special kind of communal tool
kit whose tools, once used, made the user a reflection of the
community. We psychologists concentrated on how individu-
als "acquired" these systems, how they made them their own,
much as we would ask how organisms in general acquired
skilled adaptations to the natural envirorunent. We even be-
came interested (again in an individualistic way) in man's spe-
cific innate readiness for language. But with a few exceptions,
notably Vygotsky, we did not pursue the impact of languagc
use on the naturc of man as a species. 17 We were slow to
grasp fully what the emergence of culture meant for human
adaptation and for human functioning. lt was not just thc
increased size and power of the human brain, not just bipedal-
ism and its freeing of the hands. These were merely morpho-
logical steps in evolution that would not have mattered savc
for the concurrent emergence of shared symbolic systems, of
traditionalized ways of living and working together-in short,
of human culture.
Thc dividc in human evolution was crossed when culturc
11
became the major factor in giving form to the minds of those

living under its sway. A product of history rather than of
nature, culture now became the world to which we had to
adapt and the tool kit for doing so. Once the divide was
crossed, it was no longer a question of a "natural" mind sim-
ply acquiring language as an additive. Nor was it a question
of a culture tuning or modulating biological needs. As Clifford
Geertz puts it, without the constituting role of culture we are
"unworkable monstrosities . . . incomplete or unfinished ani-
mals who complete or finish ourselves through culture." 18
These are all by now rather banal condusions in anthropol-
ogy, but not in psychology. There are three good reasons to
mention them here at the very start of our discussion. The first
is a deep mcthodological point: the constitutive argument. lt
is man's panicipation in culture and the realization ofhis men-
tal powcrs through culture that make it impossible to construct
a human psychology on the hasis of the individual alone. As
my colleague of many years ago Clyde Kluckhohn used to
insist, human beings do not terminate at their own skins; they
arc expressions of a culture. To treat the world as an indiffer-
cnt flow of information to be processed by individuals each
on his or her own terms is to lose sight of how individuals
are förmed and how they function. Or to quote Geertz again,
"there is no such thing as human nature independent of
culture." 19
The second reason follows from this and is no less compel-
ling. Given that psychology is so immersed in culture, it must
be organized around those meaning-making and meaning-
using processes that connect man to culture. This does not
commit us to more subjectivity in psychology; it is just the
reverse. By virtue of participation in culture, meaning is ren-
12
dered public and shared. Our culturally adapted way of life

depends upon shared meanings and shared concepts and de-
pends as well upon shared modes of discourse for negotiating
differences in meaning and interpretation. As 1 shall try to
relate in the third chapter, the child does not enter the life of
his or her group as a private and autistic sport of primary
processes, but rather as a participant in a larger public process
in which public meanings are negotiated. And in this process,
meanings are not to his own advantage unless he can get them
shared by others. Even such seemingly private phenomena as
"secrets" (itself a culturally defined category) tum out once
revealed to be publicly interpretable and even banal-just as
pattemed as matters openly admitted. There are even stan-
dardized means for "making excuses" for our exceptionality
when the intended meanings of our acts become unclear, stan-
dard ways of making meaning public and thereby relegitimiz-
ing what we are up to. 20 However ambiguous or polysemous
our discourse may be, we are still able to bring our meanings
into the public domain and negotiate them there. That is to
say, we live publicly by public meanings and by shared proce-
dures of interpretation and negotiation. Interpretation, how-
ever "thick" it may become, must be publicly accessible or the
culture falls into disarray and its individual members with it.
The third reason why culture must be a central concept
for psychology lies in the power of what 1 shall call "folk
psychology." Folk psychology, to which 1 shall dcvotc thc
second chapter, is a culture's account of what makes human
beings tick. lt includes a theory of mind, one's own and oth-
ers', a theory of motivation, and the rest. 1 should call it "eth-
nopsychology" to make the term parallel to such expressions
as "ethnobotany," "ethnopharmacology," and those other na-
13
ivc disciplines that are evenrually displaced by scientific knowl-

edge. But folk psychology, though it changes, does not get
displaced by scientific paradigms. for it deals with the nature,
causes, and consequences of those intentional states-beliefs,
desires, intcntions, comminnents-that most scicntific psy-
chology dismisses in its effort to explain human action from
a point of view that is outside human subjectivity, formulated
in Thomas Nagel's deft phrasc as a "view from nowhere."21
So folk psychology continues to dominate the transactions of
everyday life. And though it changes, it resists being tamed
into objectivity. For it is rooted in a languagc and a shared
conceptual structure that arc steeped in intentional statcs-in
beliefs, desires, and commitments. And because it is a reflec-
tion of culrure, it partakes in thc culture's way of valuing as
well as its way of knowing. ln fact, it must do so, for the
cuJrure's normatively oricnted instirutions-its laws, its educa-
tional insrirutions, its family strucrures-scrve to enforce folk
psychology. Indeed, folk psychology in its tum servcs to jus-
tify such enforcemcnt. But that is a story for later.
Falk psychology is not once for all. lt alters with the cul-
turc's changing rcsponscs to the world and to the people in
it. lt is worth asking how the vicws of such intellcctual heroes
as Darwin, Marx, and Freud gradually become transformed
and absorbed into folk psychology, and 1 say this to make
plain that (as wc shall sce in the final chapter) cultural psychol-
ogy is often indistinguishable from culrural history.
Antimentalisric fury about folk psychology simply misses
the point. The idea of jettisoning it in the interest of getting
rid of menta! states in our everyday explanations of human
behavior is tantamount to throwing away thc very phenom-
ena that psychology needs to explain. lt is in terms of folk-
14
psychological categories that we experience ourselves and

others. It is through folk psychology that people anticipate
and judge one another, draw conclusions about the worth-
whileness of their lives, and so on. Its power over human
menta! functioning and human life is that it provides the very
means by which culture shapes human beings to its require-
ments. Scientific psychology, after all, is part of that same
cultural process, and its stance toward folk psychology has
consequences for the culture in which it exists-a matter to
which we shall come presently.
111 But I am going too far too fast, and riding roughshod
over the cautions that most often make behavioral scientists
shy away from a meaning-centered, culturally oriented psy-
chology. These were the very cautions, 1 suspect, that made
it easy for the Cognitive Revolution to shy away from some
of its original aims. They arc principally about rwo issues,
both of them "founding issues" of scientific psychology. One
concems the restriction and sanitization of subjective states
not so much as the data of psychology, for operationalism
permits us to accept these as "discriminatory responses," for
example, but as explanatory concepts. And certainly what I just
proposed about the mediating role of meaning and culrure
and their embodiment in folk psychology seems to commit
the "sin" of elevating subjectivity to an explanatory status. We
psychologists were bom in positivism and do not like such
intentional-state notions as belief, desire, and intention as ex-
planations. The other caution relates to relativism and the role
of universals. A culrurally based psychology sounds as if it
must surely mire down into a relativism requiring a different
15
theory of psychology for each culture we study. Let me con-

sider each of these cautions in rum.
Much of the distrust of subjectivism in our explanatory con-
cepts has to do, 1 think, with the alleged discrepancy between
what people say and what they actually do. A culturally sensi-
tive psychology (espccially one that gives a central role to folk
psychology as a mediating factor) is and must be based not
only upon what people actually do, but what they say they do
and what they say caused them to do what they did. It is also
concemed with what people say others did and why. And
above all, it is concemed with what people say their worlds
are like. Since the rejection of introspcction as a core method
of psychology, we have been taught to treat such "said" ac-
counts as untrustworthy, even in some odd philosophical way
as untrue. Our preoccupation with verificationist criteria of
meaning, as Richard Rorty has pointed out, has made us dev-
otees of prediction as the criterion of "good" science, includ-
ing "good psychology. "22 Therefore, we judge what people
say about themselves and their worlds or about others and
theirs almost exdusively in terms of whether it predicts or
provides a verifiable description of what they do, did, or will
do. Ifit fails to do so, then with a Humean ferocity, we treat
what was said as "naught but error and illusion." Or, perhaps,
as merely "symptoms" that, when properly interpreted, will
lead us to the true "cause" of the behavior whose prediction
was our proper target.
Even Freud, with his sometime devotion to the idea of
"psychic reality," fostered this cast of mind-since, as Paul
Ricoeur so trenchantly puts it, Freud adhered at times to
a nineteenth-century physicalist model that frowned on
intentional-state explanations. 23 So it is part of our heritage as
16
post-Freudian modem men and women to cock a snoot at

what people say. It is "merely'' manifest content. Real causes
may not even be accessible to ordinary consciousness. We
know all about ego defense and rationalization. As for knowl-
edge of Self, it is a compromise symptom hardened in the
interplay between inhibition and anxiety, a formation that, if
it is to be known at all, must be archaeologically excavated
with the tools of psychoanalysis.
Or in more contemporary terms, as in the careful studies
reported by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, it is plain that
people can describe correctly neither the basis of their choices
nor the biases that skew the distribution of those choices. 24
And if even more powerful proof of this generalization were
needed, it could be found in the work of Amos Tversky and
Daniel Kahnemann who, indeed, cite as a precursor a well-
known volurne by Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin. 25
There is a curious twist to the charge that "what people say
is not necessarily what they do." lt implies that what people
do is more important, more "real," than what they say, or that
the latter is important only for what it can reveal about the
former. lt is as if the psychologist wanted to wash his hands
altogether of mental states and their organization, as if to
assert that "saying," after all, is only about what one thinks,
feels, believes, experiences. How curious that there are so few
stud.ies that go in the other d.irection: how does what one IÚJes
reveal what one thinks or fecls or bdicves? This in spitc of
the fact that our folk psychology is suggestively rich in such
categories as "hypocrisy," "insincerity," and the like.
This one-sided emphasis of scientific psychology is indeed
curious in light of our everyday ways of dealing with the
relationship between saying and doing. To begin with, when
17
pcople act in an offensive fashion, our first step in coping is

to find out whether what they seem to have done is what
they really intended to do-to get some line on whether their
menta! state (as revealed by saying) and their deed (as reveaJed
by doing) were in concordance or not. And if they say they
didn't intend to do it, we exonerate them. If they intended
thcir offensive act, we may then try to "reason with
thcm"-that is, to "talk them out of behaving in that way."
Or they may try to talk us out of our distaste for their action
by "giving an cxcuse," which is a verbaJ way of explicating
and thercby legirimizing their behavior as exempt from blame.
When people go on being offensive to a sufficiently large num-
bcr of othcrs, somebody may even try to convince them to go
to a psychiatrist who, through a ta/.king cure, wiU try to get
their behal'ior straightened out.
Indeed, the meaning placed on most acts by the participants
in any everyday encounter depends upon what they say to one
another in advance, concurrently, or after they have acted. Or
what they are able to presuppose about what the other would
say, given a particular context. All of this is self-evident, not
only at the infonnaJ levei of diaJogue, but at the forma! levei
of privileged diaJogue as codified, for example, ín the legaJ
system. The law of contracts is entirely about the relationship
bctween performance and what was said. And so too, ín a less
fonna! way, is the conduct of marriage, kinship, friendship,
and colleagueship.
It works ín both directions. The meaníng of talk is power-
fully detennined by the train of action in which it occurs-
"Smile when you say that!"-just as the meaning of action is
ínterprctablc only by reference to what the actors say they are
up to-"So sorry" for an ínadvertent bumping. After aJI, it
18
has now been a quarter-century since John Austin's introduc-

tion of speech act theory. 26 To those who want to concentrate
upon whether what people say predicts what they will do, the
only proper answer is that to separate the two in that way is
to do bad philosophy, bad anthropology, bad psychology,
and impossible law. Saying and doing represent a functionally
inseparable unit ina culturally oriented psychology. When, in
the next chapter, we come to discuss some of the "working
maxims" of folk psychology, this will be a crucial consider-
ation.
A culturally oriented psychology neither dismisses what
people say about their mental states, nor treats their state-
ments only as if they were predictive indices of overt behavior.
What it takes as central, rather, is that the relationship betwcen
action and saying (or experiencing) is, in the ordinary condua
oflift, interpretable. It takes the position that there is a publicly
interprctable congruence between saying, doing, and the cir-
cumstances in which the saying and doing occur. That is to
say, there are agreed-upon canonical relationships between the
meaning of what we say and what we do in given circum-
stances, and such relationships govem how we conduct our
lives with one another. There are procedures of negotiation,
moreover, for getting back on the track when these canonical
relations arc violated. This is what makes interpretation and
meaning central to a cultural psychology-or to any psychol-
ogy or mental science, for that matter.
A cultural psychology, almost by definition, will not be
preoccupied with "behavior" but with "action," its intention-
ally based counterpart, and more specifically, with situated ac-
tWn-action situated in a cultural setting, and in the mutually
interacting intentional states of the participants. Which is not
19
to say that a cultural psychology necd dispensc forcvcrmorc

with laboratory cxperiments or with thc search for hwnan
universals, a matter to which we rum now.
IV I have urged that psychology stop trying to be "mean-

ing free" in its system of explanation. The very people and
culturcs that are its subjcct arc govcrned by sharcd meanings
and values. People commit their lives to their pursuit and
fulfillmcnt, die for them. It has been argued that psychology
must be culturc-free if it is some day to discover a set of
transcendent human universals--even if these universals are
hedged by specifications about "cross-cultural" variations. 27
Let me propose a way of conceiving of hwnan universals that
is consistent with cultural psychology, yet escapes both the
indeterminacies of relativism and thc trivialities of cross-
cultural psychology. Cultural psychology is not just a cross-
cultural psychology that provides a few paramcters to account
for local variations in univcrsal laws of behavior. Nor, as wc
shall sec presently, does it condemn one to a rubbery rela-
tivism.
The solution to the issue of universals lies in exposing a
widely held and rathcr old-fashioncd fallacy that the hwnan
scicnces inhcrited from thc nineteenth cenrury, a view about
thc relation between biology and culture. ln that version, cuJ-
ture was conceivcd as an "'overlay" on biologically determined
human nature. The causes of human behavior were assumed
to lie in that biological substrate. What 1 want to argue instead
is that culture and the quest for meaning within culture arc
the proper causes of human action. The biological substrate,
the so-called univcrsals of hurnan nature, is not a cause of
20
action but, at most, a constraint upon it or a condition for it.

The engine in the car does not "cause" us to drive to the
supermarket for the week's shopping, any more than our bio-
logical reproductive system "causes" us with very high odds
to marry somebody írom our own social dass, ethnic group,
and so on. Granted that without engine-powered cars we
would not drive to supermarkets, nor perhaps would there be
marriage ín the absence of a reproductivc: system.
But "constraint'' puts the matter too negatively. For biolog-
ically imposed limits on human functioning are also challenges
to cultural invention. The tool kit of any culture can be de-
scribed as a set of prosthetic devices by which human beings
can exceed or even redefine the "natural limits" of human
functioning. Human tools are precisely of this order-soft
ones and hard ones alike. There is, for example, a constraining
biological limit on immediate memory-George Miller's fa-
mous "seven plus or minus two."28 But we have constructed
symbolic devices for exceeding this limit: coding systems like
octal digits, mnemonic devices, language tricks. Recall that
Miller's main point in that landmark paper was that by conver-
sion of input through such coding systems we, as enculturated
human beings, are enabled to cope with seven chunks of infor-
mation rather than with seven bi.ts. Our knowledge, then, be-
comes enculturated knowledge, indefinable save in a culturally
based system of notation. ln the process, we have broken
through the original bounds set by the so-called biology of
memory. Biology constrains, but not forevermore.
Or take the so-called natural human motives. It would be
silly to deny that people get hungry or sexy or that there is
a biological substrate for such states. But the devout Jew's
commitment to fasting on Yom Kippur or the devout Mus-
21
lim's commitment to Ramadan is not captured by a recital of

the physiology of hunger. And the incest taboo is powerful
and directive in a way that gonadotrophins are not. Nor is
cultural commitment to certain foods or certain eating occa-
sions simply a "conversion" of biological drives into psycho-
logical preferences. Our desires and our actions in their behalf
are mediated by symbolic means. As Charles Taylor puts it in
his brilliant new book, Sources of the Self, commitment is not
just a preference. It is a belief, an "ontology" as he calls it,
that a certain mode of life meríts or deserves support, even
though we find it difficult to live up to it. Our lives, as we
shall see in the fourth chapter, are given over to fin ding such
fulfillment as we can in terms of these ways of life--suffering
to do so if necessary.
Obviously, there arc also constraints on commitment to
modes of life that are more biological than cultural. Physical
exhaustion, hunger, sickness, and pain can brcak our connec-
tions or stem their growth. Elaine Scarry points out in her
moving book The Body in Pain that the power of pain (as in
torture) is that it obliterates our connection with the personal-
cultural world and wipes out the meaningful context that gives
direction to our hopes and strivings. 29 lt narrows human con-
sciousness to the point where, as torturers know, man literally
becomes a beast. And even at that, pain does not always
succeed, so powerfuJ are the links to those meanings that give
sense to life. The ghastly bestialization of the Holocaust and
its death camps was designed as much to dehumanize as to
kill, and it was this that made it the darkest moment in human
history. Men have killed one another before, though ncver on
such a scale or with such bureaucratization. But never has
22
1 Thc rropcr Brudy of Man •
there been such a concerted effort to dehwnanize through

suffering, pain, and unbearable humiliation.
lt was to the credit of Wilhelm Dilthey and his Geisteswissen-
schaft, his culturally based hwnan science, that he recognized
the power of culture to nurture and guide a new and ever-
changing species. 30 1 want to ally myself with his aspirations.
What 1 want to argue in this book is that it is culture and the
search for meaning that is the shaping hand, biology that is
the constraint, and that, as we have seen, culture even has it
in its power to loosen that constraint.
But lest this seem like a preface to a new optimism about
humankind and its future, let me make one point before turn-
ing, as promised, to the issue of relativism. For all its genera-
tive inventiveness, human culture is not necessarily benign
nor is it notably malleable in response to troubles. It is still
customary, as in the fashion of ancient traditions, to lay the
blame for the failings of human culture on "human na-
rure"-whether as instincts, as original sin, or whatever. Even
Freud, with his shrewd eye for human folly, often fell into
this trap, notably in his doctrine of instinct. But this is surely
a convenient and self-assuaging form of apologetics. Can we
really invoke our biological heritage to account, say, for the
invasive bureaucratization of life in our times, with its resul-
tant erosion of selthood and compassion? To invoke biological
devils or the "Old Ned" is to dodge responsibility for what
we ourselves have created. Por all our power to construct
symbolic cultures and to set in placc the institutional forces
needed for their execution, we do not seem very adept at
steering our creations toward the ends we profess to desire.
We do better to question our ingenuity in constructing and
23
rcconstructing communal ways of life than to invoke thc fail-

ure of thc human genome. Which is not to say that communal
ways of life arc easily changed, even in the absence of biologi-
cal constraint:s, but only to focus attention where it belongs,
not upon our biological limitations, but upon our cultural
inventivcness.
V And this inevitably brings us to the issue of relativism.

For what can we mean when we say that we are not very
"adept" or "ingenious" in constructing our social worlds?
Who judges so, and by what standards? If culture forms mind,
and if minds make such value judgments, are we not locked
into an incscapable rclativism? We had better examine what
this might mean. It is the epistemological side of relativism,
rather than the evaluativc, that must concem us first. Is what
we know "absolute," or is it always rdative to some perspec-
tive, some point of view? Is there an "aboriginal reality," or
as Nelson Goodrnan would put it, is reality a construction? 31
Most thinking pcople today would opt for some mild perspec-
tival position. But very few are prepared to abandon the no-
tion of a singuJar aboriginal reality altogethcr. Indeed, Carol
Feldman has even proposed a would-be human univcrsal
whose principal thesis is that we endow the conclusions of
our cognitive reckonings with a special, "extemal" ontological
status. 32 Our thoughts, so to speak, arc "in here." Our conclu-
sions are "out there." She calls this altogether human failing
"ontic <lumping," and she has never had to look far for instan-
tiations ofher universal. Yct, in most human interaction, "real-
ities" arc the results of prolonged and intricate processes of
construction and ncgotiation deeply imbedded in the culture.
24
Are the consequences of practicing such constructivism and

of recognizing that we do so as dire as they are made to
seem? Does such a practice really lead to an "anything goes"
relativism? Constructivism's basic claim is simply that knowl-
edge is "right" or "wrong" in light of the perspective we have
chosen to assume. Rights and wrongs of this kind-however
well we can test them--do not sum to absolute truths and
falsities. The best we can hope for is that we be aware of our
own perspective and those of others when we make our claims
of "rightness'' and "wrongness." Put this way, constructivism
hardly seems exotic at all. lt is what legal scholars refer to as
"the interpretive tum," or as one of them put it, a turning
away from "authoritative meaning."
Richard Rorty, in his exploration of the consequences of
pragmatism, argues that interpretivism is part of a deep, slow
movement to strip philosophy of its "foWldational'' status. 33
He characterizes pragmatism-and the view that 1 have been
expressing falls into that category-as "simply anti-essential-
ism applied to notions like 'truth,' 'knowledge,' 'language,'
'morality' and other similar objects of philosophical theoriz-
ing," and he illustrates it by reference to William James's defi-
nition of the "true" as "what is good in the way of belief." ln
support of James, Rorty remarks, "his point is that it is of no
use being told that truth is 'correspondence with reality' . . .
One can, to be sure, pair off bits of what one takes the world
to be in such a way that the sentences one believes have inter-
nal structures isomorphic to relations between things in the
world." But once one goes beyond such simple statements as
"the cat is on the mat" and begins dealing with universals or
hypothcticals or theories, such pairings become "messy and
ad hoc." Such pairing exercises help very little in determining
25
"why or whether our present view of the world is, roughly,

the one we should hold." To push such an exercise to the limit,
Rorty rightly insists, is "to want truth to have an essence," to
be true in some absolute sense. But to say something useful
about truth, he goes on, is to "explorc practice rather than
thcory . . . action rather than contemplation." Abstract state-
ments like "History is the story of the class struggle" are not
to be judged by limiting oneself to questions like "Does that
assertion get it right?" Pragmatic, perspectival questions
would be more in order: "What would it be like to believe
that?" or "What would I be committing myself to ifi believed
that?" And this is very far from the kind of Kantian essential-
ism that searches for principles that establish the defining es-
sence of "knowledge" or "representation" or "rationality."34
Let me illustrate with a little case study. We want to know
more about intellectual prowess. So we decide, unthinkingly,
to use school performance as our measure for assessing "it"
and predicting "its" development. After all, where intellectual
prowess is concemed, school performance is of the essence.
Then, in the light of our chosen perspective, Blacks in America
have less "prowess" than Whites, who in their tum have
slightly less than Asians. What kind of finding is that, asks the
pragmatic critic? If goodwill prevails in the ensuing debate, a
process of what can only be called deconstructing and recon-
structing will occur. What does school performance mean, and
how does it relate to other forms of performance? And about
intellectual prowess, what does "it" mean? Is it singular or
plural, and may not its very definition depend upon some
subtle process by which a culture selects certain traits to
honor, reward, and cultivate-as Howard Gardner has pro-
posed?35 Or, viewed polirically, has school performance itself
26
been rigged by choice of curriculum in such a way as to legiti-

mize the offspring of the "haves" while marginalizing those
of the "have nots"? Very soon, the issue of what "intellectual
prowess" is will be replaced by questions of how we wish to
use the concept in the light of a variety of circumstances-po-
litical, social, economic, even scientific.
That is a typical constructivist debate and a typical prag-
matic procedure for resolving it. Is it relativism? Is it the
dreaded form of relativism where every belief is as good as
every other? Does anybody really hold such a view, or is rela-
tivism, rather, something conjured up by essentialist philoso-
phers to shore up their faith ín the "unvarnished truth"-an
imaginary playmate forever assigned the role of spoiler in the
game of pure reason? I think Rorty is right whcn he says that
relativism is not the stumbling block for constructivism and
pragmatism. Asking the pragmatist's questions-How does
this view affect my view of the world or my commianents to
it?-surely does not lead to "anything goes." It may lead to
an unpacking of presuppositions, the better to explore one's
commianents.
ln his thoughtful book The Predicament of Culture, James
Clifford notes that cultures, if they cver were homogeneous,
are no longer so, and that the study of anthropology perforce
becomes an instrument in the management of divcrsity. 36 It
may even be the case that arguments írom essences and írom
"aboriginal reality," by cloaking tradition with the mantle of
"realit:y," are means for creating cultural stagnation and alien-
ation. But what of the charge that constructivism weakens or
undermines commianent?
If knowlcdgc is relatíve to perspective, what now of the
value issue, of onc's choice of perspcctive? Is that "merely" a
27
matter of preference? Arc values only preferences? If not, how

da we choose between values? There are two seductively mis-
Jeading psychological views on this question--one of them
seemingly rationalist ín apparatus, the other romantically irra-
tionalist. The latter holds that values arc a function of gut
reactions, displaced psychic confl.icts, temperament, and the
lik.e. Insofar as the irrationalists take culture into account, it
is as a source of supply, a cafeteria of values from which one
chooses as a function of one's individual drives or confl.icts.
V alues are not seen in terms of how they relate the individual
to the culture, and their stability is accounted for by such
fixatives as reinforcement schedules, neurotic rigidity, and
so on. 37
The rationalists take a quite different view, one derived
principally from economic theory, best exemplified, perhaps,
by rational choice theory. 38 According to rational choice the-
ory, we express our values in our choices, situation by situa-
tion, guided by such rational models as utility theory, optimi-
zation ruJes, minimization of chagrin, or whatever. These
choices (under appropriate conditions) reveal notable regular-
ities, ones very reminiscent of the kinds of functions one ob-
serves in operant conditioning experiments with pigeons. But
for a psychologist, the literature on "rational choice" is princi-
pally interesting for its vivid anomalies, its violations of the
ruJes of utility. (Utility is the multiplicative resultant of the
value of a particular choice and its subjective probability of
being successfully executed, and it has been the comerstone
of formai economic theory since Adam Smith.) Consider the
anomalies. Richard Herrnstein, for example, describes one
amusingly called "dearer by the dozen" in which it can be
shown that people prefer to buy season symphony tickets even
28
when they know they will probably go to only half the con-
39
certs. The way to handle the anomaly is to assign "snob-
bery" or "committnent" or "laziness" a value in the choice
situation. The value assigned is one that makes the result con-
form to utility theory. And this, of course, gives the game
away. If you accept utility theory (or one of its variants) you
simply assign values to choices in a manner that makes choice
behavior conform to its tenets. Rational choice theory has
little or nothing to say about how values arise--whether they
are gut reactions, whether historically determined, or what.
Both the irrationalist and the rationalist approaches to val-
ues miss one crucial point: values inhere in committnent to
"ways of life," and ways of life in their complex interaction
constitute a culture. We neither shoot our values from the
hip, choice-situation by choice-situation, nor are they the
product of isolated individuals with strong drives and compel-
ling neuroses. Rather, they are communal and consequential
in terms of our relations to a cultural community. They fulfil1
functions for us in that community. The values underlying a
way of life, as Charles Taylor points out, are only lightly open
to "radical refl.ection." 40 They become incorporated in one's
self identity and, at the same time, they locate one in a culture.
To the degree that a culture, in Sapir's sense, is not "spurious,"
the value committnents of its members provide either the hasis
for the satisfactory conduct of a way of life or, at least, a hasis
for negotiation. 41
But the pluralism of modem life and the rapid changes it
imposes, one can argue, create conflicts in committnent, con-
flicts in values, and therefore conflicts about the "righmess"
of various claims to knowledge about values. We simply do
not know how to predict the "future of committnent" under
29
these circumstances. But it is whimsical to suppose that, under

present world conditions, a dogged insistence upon the notion
of "absolute value" will make the uncertainties go away. All
one can hope for is a viable pluralism backed by a willingness
to negotiate d.ifferences in world-view.
Which leads directly to one last general point 1 must
make-one further reason why 1 believe that a cultural psy-
chology such as I am proposing need not fret about the specter
of relativism. It concems open-mindedness-whether in poli-
tics, science, literature, philosophy, or the arts. 1 take open-
mindedness to be a willingness to construe knowledge and
values from multiple perspectives without loss of commitment
to one's own values. Open-mindedness is the keystone of what
we call a democratic culture. We have leamed, with much
pain, that democratic culture is neither divinely ordained nor
is it to be taken for granted as perennially durable. Like all
cultures, it is premised upon values that generate distincrive
ways of life and corresponding conceptions of reality. Though
it values the refreshments of surprise, it is not always proof
against the shocks that open-mindedness sometimes inflicts.
Its vcry open-mindedness generates its own enemies, for there
is surely a biological constraint on appetites for novelty. 1 take
the constructivism of cultural psychology to be a profound
exprcssion of democratic culture. 42 lt demands that we be
conscious of how we come to our knowledge and as conscious
as we can be about the values that lead us to our perspectives.
It asks that we be accountable for how and what we know.
But it does not insist that there is only one way of constructing
meaning, or one right way. It is based upon values that, 1
belicve, fit it best to deal with the changes and disruptions
that have become so much a feature of modern life.
30
• •
VJ Let me retum finally to the adversarial stance of posi-

tivist "scientific psychology" toward "folk psychology." Scien-
tific psychology insists quite properly upon its right to attack,
debate, and even replace the tenets of folk psychology. It in-
sists upon its right to deny the causal efficacy of mental states
and of culture itself. At its furthest reach, indeed, it even as-
signs such concepts as ''freedom" and "dignity" to the realm
of illusion, though they are central to the belief system of a
democratic culture. At this far reach, it is sometimes said of
psychology that it is anticultural, antihistorical, and that its
reductionism is anti-intellectual. Perhaps. But it is also true
that the "village atheist" zeal of many extreme positivists has
enlivened debates about the nature of man, and that their
insistence on "objective" or "opcrational" research procedures
has had a healthily astringent effect on our speculations. Yet
there remains a niggling worry.
1 recall the first of Wolfgang Kohler's William James Lec-
tures at Harvard, The Place of V alues in a W orld of Facts. 43
Kohler reports an imaginary conversation with a friend who
complains of the "Nothing But" quality of psychology: that
human nature is portrayed there as nothing but the concatena-
tion of conditioned reflexes, associative bonds, transformed
animal drives. And he worries, this imaginary friend, what
happens when the postman and the prime minister also come
to think this way. My worry too is what happens when the
sitter comes to think he looks like his portrait. Remember
Picasso's reply to Gertrude Stein's friends when they told him
that she thought his portrait of her was not a good resem-
blance. "Tell her to wait," he said. "lt will be." But the other
possibility, of course, is that the sitter will become alienated
31
from that kind of painter. 44 As Adrienne Rich puts it, "When

someone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes the
world and you are not in it, there is a moment of psychic
disequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and saw
nothing." 45
lntellectuaJs in a democratic society constitute a community
of cultural critics. Psychologists, alas, have rarely seen them-
selves that way, largely because they are so caught up in the
self-image generated by positivist science. Psychology, on this
view, dcals only in objective truths and eschews cultural criti-
cism. But even scientific psychology will fare better when it
recognizcs that its truths, lik.e all truths about the human
condition, arc relative to the point of view that it takes toward
that condition. And it will achieve a morc effcctivc stancc
toward the culture at large when it comes to recognize that
thc folk psychology of ordinary people is not Just a set of self-
assuaging illusions, but the culture's beliefs and working
hypothescs about what makes it possible and fulfilling for peo-
ple to livc togcther, even with great personal sacrifice. It is
where psychology starts and wherein it is inseparable from
anthropology and the other cultural sciences. Folk psychology
nceds explaining, not explaining away.
32
• CHAPTER TWO •
Falk Psychology as an Instrument

of Culture
I N THE FIRST CHAPTER 1 recounted how the cognitive

revolution had been diverted from its originating impulse
by the computational metaphor, and 1 argued in favor of a
renewal and refreshment of the original revolution, a revolu-
tion inspired by the conviction that the central concept of a
human psychology is meaning and lhe processes and transac-
tions involved in the construction of meanings.
This conviction is based upon two connected arguments.
Thc first is that to understand man you must understand how
his experiences and his acts are shaped by his intentional states,
and the second is that 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 interpreta-
tion. But culture is also constitutive of mind. By virtue of this
actualization in culture, meaning achieves a form that is public
and communal rather than private and autistic. Only by replac-
ing this transactional model of mind with an isolating individ-
ualistic one have Anglo-American philosophers been able to
33
make Other Minds seem so opaque and impenetrable. When

we enter human life, it is as if we walk on stage into a play
whose enactment is already in progress-a play whose some-
what open plot determines what parts we may play and to-
ward what denouements we may be heading. Others on stage
already have a sense of what the play is about, enough of a
sense to make negotiation with a newcomer possible.
The view 1 am proposing reverses the traditional relation
of biology and culrure with respect to human narure. lt is the
character of man's biological inheritance, 1 asserted, that it
does not direct or shape human action and experience, does
not serve as the universal cause. Rather, it imposes constraints
on action, constraints whose effects are modifiable. Culrures
characteristically devise "prosthetic devices" that permit us to
transcend "raw" biological limits-for example, the limits on
memory capacity or the limits on our auditory range. The
reverse view 1 am proposing is that it is culrure, not biology,
that shapes human life and the human mind, that gives mean-
ing to action by siruating its underlying intentional states in
an interpretive system. It does this by imposing the pattems
inherent in the culrure's symbolic system.s-its language and
d.iscourse modes, the forms of logical and narrative explica-
tion, and the pattems of murually dependent communal life.
Indeed, neuroscientists and physical anthopologists are com-
ing increasingly to the view that culrural requirements and
opportunities played a critical role in selecting neural charac-
teristics in the evolution of man-a view most recently es-
poused by Gerald Edelman on neuroanatomical grounds, by
Vemon Reynolds on the basis of physical anthropological evi-
dcnce, and by Roger Lewin and Nicholas Humphrey with
reference to primate evolutionary data. 1
34
• Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culture •
Those are the bare bones of the argument in favor of what

1 have called a "cultural" psychology-an effort to recapnrre
not only the originating impulse of the Cognitive Revolution
but also the program that Dilthey a century ago called the
Geisteswissenschaften, the sciences of menta! life. 2 ln this chap-
ter, we shall be principally concemed with one crucial feanrre
of cultural psychology. 1 have called it "folk psychology," or
you may prefer "folk social science" or even, simply, "common
sense." Ali culnrres have as one of their most powerful consti-
tutive instruments a folk psychology, a set of more or less
connected, more or less normative descriptions about how
human beings "tick," what our own and other minds are like,
what one can expect situated action to be lik.e, what are possi-
ble modes of life, how one commits oneself to them, and so
on. We leam our culture's folk psychology early, leam it as
we leam to use the very language we acquire and to conduct
the interpersonal transactions required in communal life.
Let me give you the bare bones of the argument I shall
develop. 1 want first to explain what 1 mean by "folk psychol-
ogy" as a system by which people organize their experience
in, knowledge about, and transactions with the social world.
I shall have to say a little about the history of the idea to make
clearer its role in a cultural psychology. Then I shall tum to
some of the crucial constituents of folk psychology, and that
will evenrually lead me to consider what kind of a cognitive
system is a folk psychology. Since its organizing principle is
narrative rather than conceptual, 1 shall have to consider the
nature of narrative and how it is built around established or
canonical expectations and the mental management of devia-
tions from such expectations. Thus armed, we shall look more
closely at how narrative organizes experience, using human
35
mcmory as our example. And finally, I shall want to explicate

the "meaning-making" process in the light of the foregoing.
11 Coined in derision by the new cognitive scientists for

its hospitality toward such intentional states as beliefs, desires,
and meanings, the expression "folk psychology" could not be
more appropriate for the uses to which 1 want to put it. 3 Let
mc sketch out its intellectual history briefly, for it will hclp
put things in a broader context.
Its current usage bcgan with a sophisticated revival of inter-
est in "the savage mind" and particularly with the structure
of indigenous classification systems. C. 0. Frake published a
celcbratcd study of thc system for classifying skin diseases
among the Subanun of Mindanao, and there followed de-
tailed studies by others on ethnobotany, ethnonavigation, and
the like. The ethnonavigation study detailed how Marshall
Islanders navigated their outrigger sailing canoes to and from
the Puluwat Atoll across bodies of open water by the use of
stars, surface water signs, floating plants, chip logs, and odd
fonns of divination. It looked at navigation as seen and under-
stood by a Puluwat navigator. 4
But even before the prefix ethno- was affixed to these efforts,
anthropologists had been interested in the underlying organi-
zation of experience among nonliterate people--why some
peoples, such as the Talensee studied by Meyer Fortes in the
l 930s, had no time-bound crisis definitions. Things happened
when they were "ready." And there were even earlier studies:
Margaret Mead's, for example, raising such questions as why
life stages such as adolescence were so differently defined
among the Samoans. 5
36
Since, in the main, anthropologists had never been much

smitten (with a few conspicuous exceptions) by the ideal of
an objective, positivist science, they soon enough were led
to the question of whether the shape of consciousness and
experience of people in different cultures differed to a degree
and in a manner that created a major problem of translation.
Could one render the experience of the Puluwat navigator
into the language and thought of the Western anthropolo-
gist--or that of the Westem anthropologist into that of the
Nilotic Nuer whose religion Edward Evans-Pritchard had
studied? (When Evans-Pritchard had finished interviewing his
informants about their religious beliefs, he courteously asked
them whether they would like to ask him any questions about
his. One of them asked shyly about the divinity that he wore
on his wrist, consulted each time he seemed to make a major
decision. Evans-Pritchard, a devout Catholic, was as surprised
by the difficulty he had in explaining to his interlocutors that
his wristwatch was not a deity as he was by the question thcy
had asked in the first instance. )6
Somewhat later, a group of young sociologists led by Har-
old Garfinkel, mindful of the sorts of problems in epistemol-
ogy such issues raised, took the radical step of proposing that
in place of the classic sociological method-positing social
classes, roles, and so on ex hypothesi--the social sciences might
proceed by the rules of"ethnomethodology," creating a social
science by reference to the social and political and human
distinctions that people under srudy made in their everyday
lives. ln effect, Garfinkel and his colleagues were proposing
an ethnosociology. And at about the same time, the psycholo-
gist Fritz Heider began arguing persuasively that, since human
beings reacted to one another in terms of their own psychology
37
(rather than, so to speak, the psychowgist's psychology), we

might do better to study the nature and origins of the "naive"
psychology that gave meaning to their experience. ln fact,
neither Garfinkel's nor Heider's proposals were all that
new. Garfinkel gave credit to the distinguished economist-
sociologist Alfred Schutz, whose systematic writings, inspired
by Continental phenomenology, had foreshadowed both Gar-
finkel's and Heider's programs as an antipositivist reform of
the human sciences. 7
There is a powerful institutional argument in the Schutzian
claim-if 1 may so label the position we are considering. It is
that rultural institutions are constructed in a manner to reflect
commonsense beliefs about human behavior. However much
the village athcism of a B. F. Skinner attempts to cxplain away
human freedom and dignity, there remains the reality of the
law of torts, the principle of contracts freely agreed to, and
the obdurate solidity of jails, courthouses, property markers,
and the rest. Stich (perhaps the most radical critic of folk
psychology) chides Skinner for trying to "explain" such com-
monsense terms as desire, intention, and belief: they should,
he insists, simply be ignored and not divert us from the
grander task of establishing a psychology without intentional
states. 8 But to ignore the institutionalized meanings attributed
to human acts is about as effective as ignoring the state trooper
who stands coolly by our car window and informs us that we
have been traveling recklessly at ninety miles an hour and asks
to sec our license. "Reckless," "license," "state trooper"-all
derive from the institutional matrix that society constructs to
enforce a panicular version of what constitutes reality. They
are cultural meanings that guide and control our individual
acts.
38
• Folk PsycholoID' as an Instrument of Culrure •
III Since 1 am proposing that a folk psychology must be

at the base of any cultural psychology, let me as a "participant
observer" sample some major constituents of our own folk
psychology to illustrate what 1 have in mind. These are, please
note, simply constituents: that is to say, they are the elementary
beliefs or premises that enter into the narratives about human
plights of which folk psychology consists. An obvious premise
of our folk psychology, for example, is that people have beliefs
and desires: we beli.eve that the world is organized in certain
ways, that we want certain things, that some things matter
morc than others, and so on. We believe (or "know'') that
people hold beliefs not only about the present but about the
past and future, beliefs that relate us to time conceived of in
a particular way--our way, not the way of Fortes's Talensee
or Mead's Samoans. We believe, moreover, that our beliefs
should cohere in some way, that people should not believe
(or want) seemingly irreconcilable things, although the princi-
ple of coherence is slightly fuzzy. lndeed, we also believe that
people's beliefs and desires become sufficiently coherent and
well organized as to merit being called "commitments" or
"ways of life," and such coherences are seen as "dispositions"
that characterize persons: loyal wife, devoted father, faithful
friend. Personhood is itself a constituent concept of our folk
psychology, and as Charles Taylor notes, it is attributed selec-
tively, often withheld from those in an outgroup. 9 Note that
it is only when constituent beliefs in a folk psychology are
violated that narratives are constructed-a point about which
1 shall have much more to say presently. 1 mention it here to
alert the reader to the canonical status of folk psychology: that
it summarizes not simply how things are but (often implicitly)
39
how they shouJd be. When things "are as they shouJd be," the
narratives of folk psychology are unnecessary.
Folk psychology also posits a world outside ourselvcs that
modifies the expression of our desires and belicfs. This world
is the context in which our acts are situated, and states of the
world may provide reasons far our desires and beliefs-like
Hillary climbing Everest because it was therc, to takc an ex-
treme instance of supply creating demand. But we also know
that desires may lead us to find meanings in contexts where
others might not. lt is idiosyncratic but explicablc that some
people like to cross the Sahara on foot or thc Atlantic in a
small boat. This reciprocal relation between perceived states
ofthe world and one's desires, each affecting the other, creates
a subtlc dramatism about hwnan action which also infarms
the narrative structure of folk psychology. Whcn anybody is
seen to believe or desire or act in a way that fails to take the
state of the world into account, to commit a truly gratuitous
act, hc is judgcd to be falk-psychologically insane unless he as
an agcnt can be narratively reconstrued as being in the grip
of a mitigating quandary or of crushing circumstances. It may
takc a searching judicial trial in real life or a whole novel in
fiction (as with André Gide's Lafcadio's Adventure) to cffcct
such a reconstrual. 10 But falk psychology has room far such
reconstruals: "truth is stranger than fiction." ln falk psychol-
ogy, then, people are assumed to havc world knowlcdgc that
takes thc form of beliefs, and arc assumed to use that world
knowlcdge in carrying out any program of desire or action.
The division between an "inner" world of expericnce and
an "outcr" one that is autonomous of experience creates threc
domains, each of which requires a differcnt fonn of interpreta-
tion. u The first is a domain under the control of our own
40
intentional states: a domain where Self as agcnt opcratcs

with world knowledge and with desires that are expressed in a
manner congruent with context and belief. The third class of
events is produced "írom outside" in a manner not under our
own control. lt is the domain of "nature." ln the first domain
we are in some manner "responsible" for the course of events;
in the third not.
There is a second class of events that is problematic, com-
prising some indeterminate mix of the first and third, and it
requires a morc elaborate form of interpretation in order to
allocate proper causal shares to individual agency and to "na-
ture." If folk psychology embodies the interpretive principles
of the first domain, and folk physics-cum-biology the third,
then the second is ordinarily seen to be governed either by
some form of magic or, in contemporary Western culture, by
the scientism of physicalist, reductionist psychology or Artifi-
cial lntelligencc. Among the Puluwat navigators, the introduc-
tion of a compass as a gift from the anthropologist (which
they found interesting but which they rejected as superfluous)
had them living briefly in the second domain. 12
At their core, all folk psychologies contain a surprisingly
complex notion of an agentive Self. A revealing but by no
means atypical example is found among the Ilongot, a nonlit-
erate people studied by Michelle and Renato Rosaldo. What
makes for complexity is the shaping by culture of persona!
requircmcnts-that fully agentive Ilongot male selfbood, for
example, can be achieved only when an "enemy's" head is
tak.en in an appropriate state of anger, or abstractly, that
full sclfbood involves the correct admixture of passion and
knowledgc. ln one of the last papers she wrote before her
untimely death working in the field, entitled "Toward an An-
41
thropology of Self and Feeling," Michelle Rosaldo argues that

notions like "self" or "affect" "grow not írom 'inner' essence
relatively indepcndent of thc social world, but írom cxpcrience
in a world of meanings, images, and social bonds, in which
all pcrsons arc inevitably involved. " 13
ln a particularly penetrating article on the American self,
Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius propose that we think not of
" Self but of Possible Selves along with a Now Self. "Possible
sclves represent individuals' ideas of what they might become,
what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of
bccoming." Although not specifically intended to do so, their
analysis highlights the extent to which American selfhood re-
flects the value placed in American culrure on "keeping your
options open." Contcmporaneously, there began a trickle of
clinical papers on the alarming rise of Multiple Personality
Disorders as a principally American pathology, a gender-
linked one at that. A reccnt review of the phenomenon by
Nicholas Humphrey and Daniel Dennett even suggests that
thc pathology is engendcred by therapists who accept the view
that self is divisible and who, in the course of therapy, inadver-
tently offer this model of selfhood to their patients as a means
of containing and alleviating their contlicts. Sigmund Freud
himself remarked in "The Relation of the Poet to Daydream-
ing'' that each of us is a cast of characters, but Freud had them
lockcd with.in a single play or novcl where, as an ensemble,
they could enact the drama of neurosis on a single stage. 14
1 havc given these two rather extended examples of the way
Self is conceived in folk psychologics in two disparate cultures
to rcemphasize a critical point about the organizing principle
of folk psychology as being narrative in narurc rather than
logical or categorical. Folk psychology is about human agents
42
doing things on the basis of their beliefs and desires, striving

for goals, meeting obstacles which they best or which best
them, all of this extended over time. It is about llongot young
men finding enough anger in themselves to take a head, and
how they fare in that daunting effort; about young American
women with confticting and guilt-producing demands on
their senses of identity finally resolving their dilemma (possi-
bly with their doctors' unwitting help) by turning into an ego
and an alter, and about the struggle to get the two back into
communication.
IV We must now conccntrate morc directly on narra-

tive--what it is, how it differs from other forms of discourse
and other modes of organizing experience, what functions it
may serve, why it has such a grip on the human imagination.
For we shall need to understand these matters better if we are
to grasp the nature and power of folk psychology. Let me,
then, in a preliminary way, set forth some of the properties
of narrative.
Perhaps its principal property is its inherent sequentiality:
a narrative is composed of a unique sequence of events, menta!
states, happenings involving human beings as characters or
actors. These are its constituents. But these constituents do
not, as it were, have a life or meaning of their own. Their
meaning is given by their place in the overall configuration of
the sequence as a whole-its plot or fabula. The act of grasp-
ing a narrative, then, is a dual one: the interpreter has to grasp
the narrative's configuring plot in order to make sense of its
constituents, which he must relate to that plot. But the plot
configuration must itself be extracted from the succession
43
of events. Paul Ricoeur, paraphrasing the British historian-

philosopher W. B. Gallie, puts the matter succinctly:
a story describes a sequence of actions and experiences of a
certain nwnber of characters, whcther real or imaginary. These
characters are representcd in siruations which change . . . [to]
which they react. Thcse changes, in rum, reveal hiddcn aspects
of the siruations and the charactcrs, giving rise to a new predic-
ament which calls for thought or action or both. The response
to this predicament brings the story to its condusion. 15
1 shall have much more to say later about these changes, pre-
dicaments, and the rest, but this will suffice for now.
A second feature of narrative is that it can be "real" or
"imaginary" without loss of its power as a story. That is to
say, the sense and the reference of story bear ari anomalous
relationship to each other. The story's indifference to extralin-
guistic reality underlines the fact that it has a structure that is
intemal to discourse. ln other words, the sequence of its sen-
tences, rather than the truth or falsity of any of those sen-
tences, is what determines its overall configuration or plot. lt
is this unique sequentiality that is indispensable to a story's
significance and to the mode of mental organization in terms
of which it is grasped. Efforts to dethrone this "rule of se-
quence" as the hallmark of narrative have al1 yielded accounts
of narrative that sacrifice its uniqueness to some other goal.
Carl Hempel's celebrated essay "The Function of General
Laws in History" is typical. By trying to "dechronologize"
diachronic historical accounts into synchronic "social-science"
propositions, Hempel succeeds only in losing particularity, in
confusing interpretation and explanation, and in falsely rele-
gating the narrator's rhetorical voice to the domain of "objec-
tivity. "16
44
f olk r~ychology dl an In~trumcnt of Gulrurc 1
'
The fact that the historian's "empirical" account and the
novelist's imaginative story share the narrative form is, on re-
flection, rather startling. It has challenged thoughtful students
both of imaginative literature and of history since Aristotle.
Why the same form for fact and fiction? Does the first mimic
the second or vice versa? How does narrative acquire its form?
One answer, of course, is "tradition." Andit is hard to deny
that the forms of narrative are, as it were, sedimentary residues
of traditional ways of telling, as with Albert Lord's thesis that
all narrative is rooted in our ancient heritage of storytelling.
ln a related vein, Northrop Frye asserted that literature shapes
itself out of its own traditions so that even its innovations
grow out of traditional roots. Paul Ricoeur also sees tradition
as providing what he calls "the impossible logic of narrative
structures" through which myriad sequences are tied together
to make narratives. 17
But while convention and tradition surely play an important
role in giving narrative its structures, 1 confess to a certain
malaise with all thoroughgoing traditionalisms. Is it unreason-
able to suppose that there is some human "readiness" for nar-
rative that is responsible for conserving and elaborating such
a tradition in the first place--whether, in Kantian terms, as
"an art hidden in the human soul," whether as a feature of
our language capacity, whether even as a psychological capac-
ity like, say, our readiness to convert the world of visual input
into figure and ground? By this I do not intend that wc ''store"
specific archetypal stories or myths, as C. G. Jung has pro-
posed. 18 That seems like misplaced concreteness. Rather, 1
mean a readiness or predisposition to organize experience into
a narrative form, into plot structures and the rest. 1 shall set
forth some evidence for such a hypothesis in the next chapter.
45
lt seems to me that such a view is irresistible. And other

scholars who have addressed the issue of narrative have been
tempted along this path.
Most of the efforts to find such a "readiness" have been
derived from Aristotle's notion of mimesis. Aristotle used the
idea in the Poetics in order to describe the manner in which
drama imitated "life," seeming to imply, thereby, that narra-
tive, somchow, consisted of reporting things as they had hap-
pcned, the order of narrative thus being determined by the
order of events in a life. But a close reading of the Poetics
suggests that he had something else in mind. Mimesis was the
capturing of "life in action," an elaboration and amelioration
of what happened. Even Paul Ricoeur, perhaps the deepest
and most indefatigable modem student of narrative, has diffi-
culties with the idea. Ricoeur filces to note the kinship between
"being in history" and "telling about it," noting that the two
have a certain "mutual belongingness." "The form of life to
which narrative discourse belongs is our historical condition
itself." Yct he too has trouble sustaining his figure of speech.
"Mimesis," he tells us, "is a kind of metaphor of reality." "It
refers to reality not in order to copy it, but in order to give
it a new reading." It is by virtue of this metaphoric relation-
ship, he then argues, that narrative can proceed even with
"the suspension of the referential claim of ordinary lan-
guage"-that is, without obligation to "match" a world of
extralinguistic reality. 19
If the mimetic function is interpretive of "life in action,"
then it is a very complex form of what C. S. Peirce long
ago called an "interpretant," a symbolic schema for mediat-
ing between sign and "world"-an interpretant that exists at
some higher levei than the word or the sentence, in the
46
• Folk PsycholoöY as an Instnunent of Culture •
realm of discourse itself. 20 We have still to consider where the

capacity to create such complex symbolic interpretants comes
from, ifit is not merely art copying life. And that is what we
shall have to concern ourselves with in the following chapter.
But there are other matters that must engage us first.
V Another crucial feature of narrative, as already noted in

passing, is that it specializes in the forging of linlcs between
the exceptional and the ordinary. To this matter now. Let me
begin with a seeming dilemma. Folk psychology is invested
in canonicality. It focuses upon the expectable and/or the usual
in the human condition. It endows these with legitimacy or
authority. 21 Yet it has powerful means that arc purpose-built
for rendering the exceptional and the unusual into compre-
hensible form. For as I insisted in the opening chapter, the
viability of a culture inheres ín its capacity for resolving con-
flicts, for explicating differences and renegotiating communal
meanings. The "negotiated meanings" discussed by social an-
thropologists or culture critics as essential to the conduct of
a culture are made possible by narrative's apparatus for dealing
simultaneously with canonicality and exceptionality. Thus,
while a culture must contain a set of norms, it must also
contain a set of interpretive procedures for rendering depar-
tures from those norms meaningful in terms of established
patterns of belief. It is narrative and narrative interpretation
upon which folk psychology depends for achieving this kind
of meaning. Stories achieve their meanings by explicating de-
viations írom the ordinary in a comprehensible form-by pro-
viding the "impossible logic" discussed in the preceding sec-
tion. We had better examine this matter more closely now.
47
Bcgin with the "ordinary," what people take for granted

about the behavior that is going on around them. ln every
culture, for example, we take for granted that people behave
in a manner appropriate to the setting in which they find
themselves. Indeed, Roger Barker dedicated twenty years of
perceptive research to demonstrating the power of this seem-
ingly banal social rule. 22 People are expected to behave situa-
tionally whatever their "roles," whether they are introverted
or extraverted, whatever their scores on the MMPI, whatever
thcir politics. As Barker put it, when people go into the post
office, they behave "post-office."
The "situation rule" holds for speaking as well as for acting.
Paul Grice's Cooperative Principle captures the idea well.
Grice proposed four maxims about how conversational ex-
changes are and/or should be conducted-maxims of quality,
quantity, and manner: our replies to one another should be
brief, pcrspicuous, relevant, and truthful. Departures from
these maxims create surplus meaning by producing what Grice
calls "conversational implicatures," triggers that set off
searches for a "meaning'' in the exceptional, for meanings that
inhere in the nature of their departure from ordinary usage. 23
Whcn people behave in accordance with Barker's principle
of situatedness or with Grice's maxims of conversational ex-
change, we do not ask why: the behavior is simply taken for
granted as in need of no further explanation. Because it is
ordinary, it is experienced as canonical and therefore as self-
cxplanatory. We take it for granted that if you ask somebody
where R. H. Macy's is, they will give you relevant, correct,
perspicuous, and brief directions; that kind of response re-
quires no explanation. People will think it exceedingly odd if
48
' f olk P~ychology a~ an In~trwncnt of Culrur~ •
you do question why people are behaving in this way-"post-
office" in the post office, and brief, perspicuous, relevant, and
sincere in answering requests for directions. Pressed to come
up with an account of what already seems self-explanatory,
interlocutors will reply with either a quantifier ("Everybody
does that") and/or a deontic modal ("That's what you're sup-
posed to do"). The brunt of their explanation will be to indicate
the appropriateness of the context as a location for the act in
question.
ln contrast, when you encounter an exception to the ordi-
nary, and ask somebody what is happening, the person you
ask will virtually always tell a story that contains reasons (or
some other specification of an intentional state). The story,
moreover, will almost invariably be an account of a possible
world in which the encountered exception is somehow made
to make sense or to have "meaning." If somebody comes into
the post office, unfurls the Stars and Stripes, and commences
to wave it, your folk.-psychological interlocutor will tell you,
in response to your puzzled question, that today is probably
some national holiday that he himself had forgonen, that the
local American Legion Post may be having a fundraiser, or
even simply that the man with the flag is some kind of nation-
alistic nut whose imagination has been touched by something
in this moming's tabloid.
All such stories seem to be designed to give the exceptional
behavior meaning in a manner that implicates both an inten-
tional state in the protagonist (a belief or desire) and some
canonical element in the culture (national holiday, fundraiser,
fringe nationalism). The fanctian of the story is to find an inten-
tümaJ, state that mitigates or at least makes comprehensible a devia-
49
tion from a canonical culturaJ pattern. lt is this achievement that

gives a story verisimilitude. It may also give it a peacekeeping
function, but that matter can wait until a later chapter.
VJ Having considered three characteristics of narra-

tive-its sequentiality, its factual "inctifference," and its unique
way of managing departures from the canonical-we must
turn now to its dramatic quality. Kenneth Burke's dassic ctis-
cussion of "dramatism," as he called it nearly a half-century
ago, still serves well as a starting point. 24 Weil-förmed stories,
Burke proposed, are composed of a pentad of an Actor, an
Action, a Goal, a Scene, and an Instrument-plus Trouble.
Trouble consists of an imbalance between any of the five ele-
ments of the pentad: an Action toward a Goal is inappropriate
in a particular Scene, as with Don Quixote's antic maneuvers
in search of chivaJric ends; an Actor does not fit the Scene, as
with Portnoy in Jerusalem or Nora inA Doll's House; or there
is a dual Scene as in spy thrillers, or a confusion of Goals as
with Emma Bovary.
Dramatism, in Burke's sense, focuses upon deviations írom
the canonical that have moral consequences--deviations re-
lated to legitimacy, moral comminnent, values. Stories must
necessarily, then, relate to what is morally valued, morally
appropriatc, or morally uncertain. The very notion ofTrouble
presupposes that Actions should fit Goals appropriately,
Scenes be suited to Instruments, and so on. Stories, carried
to completion, are explorations in the limits of legitimacy, as
Hayden White has pointed out. 25 They come out "lifelike,"
with a Trouble morally explicated if not redressed. And if
imbalances hang ambiguously, as they often do in posnnodem
50
fiction, it is because narrators seek to subvert the conventional

mcans through which stories take a moral stand. To teli a
story is inescapably to take a moral stance, even ifit is a moral
stance against moral stances.
There is another fearure of well-formed narrative, what I
have called elsewhere its "dual landscape."26 That is to say,
events and actions in a putative "real world" occur concur-
rently with menta! events in the consciousness of the protago-
nists. A discordant linkage between the two, like Trouble in
the Burkean pentad, provides motive force to narrative-as
with Pyramis and Thisbe, Romeo and Juliet, Oedipus and his
wife/mother Jocasta. For stories have to do with how protago-
nists interpret things, what things mean to them. This is built
into the circumstance of story-that it involves both a culrural
convention and a deviation írom it that is explicable in terms
of an individual intentional state. This gives stories not only
a moral status but an epistemic one.
Modernist literary narrative, to use Erich Kahler's phrase,
has taken an "inward tum" by dethroning the omniscient nar-
rator who knew both about the world "as it was" and about
what his protagonists were making of it. 27 By getting rid of
him, the modem novel has sharpened contemporary sensibil-
ity to the confl.ict inherent in two people trying to know the
"outer" world írom different perspectives. It is a point worth
noting, for it illustrates the extent to which different historical
culrures deal with the relation between the two "landscapes."
Erich Auerbach, who traces the history of the representation
of reality in Westem literarure in his Mimesis, begins with
the narratorially certain realities of the Odyssey and ends with
Virginia Woolf's attenuated phenomenology in To the Light-
house. 28 It is worth more than a passing thought that írom,
51
say, Flaubert and Conrad to the present, the Trouble that

drives literary narrative has become, as it wcre, morc epistc-
mic, more caught up in the clash of altemative meanings, less
involved in the settled realities of a landscape of action. And
pcrhaps this is true of mundane narrative as well. ln this re-
spcct, life must surely have imitatcd art by now.
lt begins to be clear why narrative is such a natural vehiclc
for folk psychology. It deals (almost from thc child's first talk,
as we shall sec in the next chapter) with the stuff of human
action and human intentionality. lt mediates between the ca-
nonical world of culture and the morc idiosyncratic world of
beliefs, desires, and hopes. lt renders the exceptional compre-
hensible and keeps the uncanny at bay-save as the uncanny
is needed as a trope. It rciterates thc norms of the society
without being didactic. And, as presently will be clear, it pro-
vidcs a basis for rhetoric without confrontation. lt can cven
teach, conserve mcmory, or alter the past.
VII 1 have said very little thus far about the structural
kinship or the affinity between "fictional" and "empirical"
narratives, a matter 1 raised earlier in considering the indiffer-
ence of narrative with respcct to reference. Given the special-
ization of ordinary languages in establishing binary contrasts,
why do none of them impose a once-for-all, sharp grammatical
or lexical distinction betwcen true stories and imaginative
ones? As if to mock the distinction, fiction often dresses itself
in the "rhetoric of the real" to achieve its imaginative verisimil-
itude. And we know from studies of the autobiographical
farm particularly that fictional forms often provide the struc-
52
turai lines in terms of which "real lives" are organized. Indeed,

most Westem languages retain words in their lexicon that
seem perversely to subvert the distinction between Dichtung
and Wahrheit: st<lria in Italian, histoire in French, story in En-
glish. If truth and possibility are inextricable in narrative, this
would put the narratives of folk psychology into a strange
light, leaving the listener, as it were, bemused about what is
of the world and what of the imagination. And, indeed, such
is frequently the case: is a particular narrative explication sim-
ply a "good story," or is it the "real thing''? I want to pause
briefly over this curious blurriness, for I think it reveals some-
thing important about folk psychology.
Go back to our earlier discussion of mimesis. Recall Ri-
coeur's claim that "story" (whether factual or imaginative)
invites reconsttllal of what might have happened. Wolfgang
Iser makes the same point when he remarks that a characteris-
tic of fiction is that it places events in a wider "horiwn" of
possibilities. 29 ln ActuaJ Mind.s, Possible W orlds, I tried to show
how the language of skillful narrative differs írom that of skill-
ful exposition in its employment of "subjunctivizing transfor-
mations." These are lexical and grammatical usages that high-
light subjcctive states, attcnuating circumstances, altemative
possibilities. A short story by James Joyce contrasted sharply
with an exemplary ethnographic account by Martha Weigel
of Penitente blood brotherhood not only in the authors' use
of these "subjunctifiers" but also in the reader's incorporation
of them in talking about what had been read. The "story"
ended up in memory even morc subjunctivized than it had
been written; the "exposition" ended up there much as given
in the text. To make a story good, it would seem, you must
53
make it somewhat uncertain, somehow open to variant read-

ings, rather subject to the vagaries of intentional states, unde-
tennined.
A story that succeeds in achieving such requisite uncertainty
or subjunctivity-that achieves what the Russian Formalist
critics referred to as its "literariness," its literatumost-must
serve some rather special functions for those who fali under
its sway. Unfortunately, we know very little about this matter,
but 1 would like to offer some purely speculative hypotheses
about it, if the skeptical reader will bear with me.
The tirst is that "subjunctive" stories are easier to enter into,
easier to identify with. Such stories, as it were, can be tried
on for psychological size, accepted if they fit, rejected if they
pinch idcntity or compete with establishcd commitments. Tbc
child's "omnipotence of thought," I suspect, remains suffi-
ciently unwithered during adulthood for us to leap through
thc proscenium to become (if only for a moment) whoever
may be on stage in whatever plight they may find themselves.
Story, in a word, is vicarious experiencc, and the treasury of
narratives into which we can enter includes, ambiguously, ei-
ther "reports of real experience" or offerings of culturally
shaped imagination.
The second hypothesis has to do with learning to distin-
guish, to use Yeats's phrase, "the dancer from the dance." A
story is somebody's story. Despite past literary efforts to stylize
the narrator into an "omniscient 1," stories inevitably have a
narratorial voice: evcnts are seen through a particular set of
persona! prisms. And particularly when stories take the form,
as they so often do (as we shall see in the following chapter),
of justitications or "excuses," their rhetorical voice is plain.
They do not have the "sudden death" quality of objectively
54
framed expositions where things are portrayed as "as they are."

When we want to bring an account of something into the
domain of negotiated meanings, we say of it, ironically, that
it was a "good story." Stories, then, arc especially viable instru-
ments for social negotiation. And their starus, even when they
are hawked as "true" stories, remains forever in the domain
midway between the real and the imaginary. The perpetual
revisionism of historians, the emergence of"docudramas," the
literary invention of "faction," the pillow talk of parents trying
to make revised sense of their children's doings-all of these
bear testimony to this shadowy epistemology of the story.
Indeed, the existence of story as a farm is a perpetual guaran-
tee that humankind will "go meta" on received versions of
reality. May that not be why dictators must take such draco-
nian measures against a culture's novelists?
And one last speculation. It is easier to live with altemative
versions of a story than with altemative premises in a "scien-
tific" account. 1 do not know ín any deep psychological sense
why this should be so, although I have a suspicion. We know
írom our own experience in telling consequential stories about
ourselves that there is an ineluctably "human" side to making
sense. And we are prepared to accept another version as "only
human." The Enlightenment spirit that led Carl Hempel,
mentioned earlier, to propose that history should be "re-
duced" to testable propositional forms, lost sight of the nego-
tiatory and hermeneutic function of history.
VJJJ 1 want to tum now to the role of narrativized folk

psychology in what, broadly, might be called the "organiza-
tion of experience." Two matters interest me particularly. One
55
of them, rather traditional, is usually called framing or schema-

tizing, the other is ajfect regulation. Framing provides a means
of "constructing'' a world, of characterizing its flow, of seg-
menting events within that world, and so on. If we were not
able to do such framing, we would be lost in a murk of chaotic
experience and probably would not have survived as a species
m any case.
The typical form of framing experience (and our memory
of it) is in narrative form, and Jean Mandler has done us the
service of drawing together the evidence showing that what
does not get structured narratively suffers loss in memory. 30
Framing pursues experience into memory, where, as we have
known since the dassic studies of Bartlett, it is systematically
altered to conform to our canonical representations of the
social world, or ifit cannot be so altered, it is either forgotten
or highlighted in its exceptionality.
This is all a familiar story, but it has been somewhat trivial-
ized by being made to seem like a completely individual phe-
nomenon-merely a matter of the laying down of traces and
schemata within each individual brain, as it were. Bartlett,
now long gone, has himself been rccently accused by critics
of having abandoned an initially "cultural„ view of the framing
of memory in favor of a more individualistic psychological
one. The shift from a less well known artide of 1923 to the
renowned book of 1932 is discussed in an essay by John
Shotter. Shotter insists very strongly that framing is socúú,
designed for the sharing of memory within a culture rather
than simply to ensure individual storage. 31 He cites the re-
doubtable social critic and anthropologist Mary Douglas as
saying, "The author of the best book on remembering forgot
his first convictions [and] became absorbed into the institu-
56
tional framework of Cambridge U ni versity psychology, and

restricted by the conditions of the experimental laboratory. " 32
But Bartlett surely did not forget the "cultural" part of what
he had set out to explore. ln a final section of his celebrated
book, dealing with the "social psychology of remembering,"
he says:
Every social group is organized and held togethcr by some
specific psychological tendency or group of tcndencies, which
give the group a bias in its dcalings with extemal circumstances.
Thc bias constructs the spccial pcrsistent fearures of group
culture ... [and this] immediatcly settle[ s] what the individual
will obscrve in his environmcnt and what he will connect from
his past life with this direct response. lt does this markedly in
two ways. First, by providing that sctting of interest, excite-
mcnt, and emotion which favors thc development of speci.fic
images, and second.ly, by providing a pcrsistent framcwork of
institutions and customs which acts as a schcmatic basis for
constructivc memory. 33
About the "schematizing" power of institutions to which
he refers, let me restate a point I made earlier. Experience in
and memory of the social world are powerfully structured not
only by deeply intemalized and narrativized conceptions of
folk psychology but also by the historically rooted institutions
that a culture elaborates to support and enforce them. Scott
Fitzgerald was right when he said that the very rich are "differ-
ent," and not just because they have fortunes: thcy are sem as
differcnt, and, indeed, act accordingly. Even "scicnce'' rein-
forces these perceptions and thcir memory transformations, as
we know from such recent books as Cynthia Fuchs Epstcin's
Deceptive Distinaúms, which demonstrates how gender stereo-
typcs were systematically highlighted and exaggerated by the
57
sclective choice of research instruments to measure them. 34

The very structure of our lexicon, while it may not force us
to code human events in a particular way, certainly predisposes
us to be culturally canonical.
Now consider those culturally imposed ways of directing
and regulating affect in the interest of cultural cohesion to
which Bartlett refers. He insists in R.nnembering that what is
most characteristic of "memory schemata" as he conceives
them is that they are under the control of an affective "atti-
tude." Indeed, he remarks that any "conflicting tendencies"
likely to disrupt individual poise or to menace social life arc
likely to destabilize memory organization as well. It is as if
unity of affect (in contrast to "conflict") is a condition for
economical schcmatization of memory.
Indeed, Bartlett goes further than that. ln the actual effort
to remember something, he notes, what most often comes
first to mind is an affect or a charged "attitude"-that "it'' was
something unpleasant, something that led to embarrassment,
something that was exciting. The affect is rather like a general
thumbprint of the schema to be reconstructed. "The recall is
then a construction made largely on the basis of this attitude,
and its general effect is that of a justification of the attitude."
Remembering serves, on this view, to justify an affect, an
attitudc. The act of recall is "loaded," then, fulfilling a "rhetor-
ical" function in the process of reconstructing the past. It is a
reconstruction designed to justify. The rhetoric, as it were,
even determines the form of"invention" we slip into in recon-
structing tbc past: "The confident subject justifies himself.-at-
tains a rationalization, so to speak-by setting down more
detail than was actually present; while the cautious, hesitating
subject reacts in the opposite manner, and finds his justifica-
58
tion by diminishing rather than increasing the details pre-

sented [in the experiment]. " 35
But 1 would want to add an interpersonal or cultural dimen-
sion to Bartlett's account. We are not only trying to convince
ourselves with our memory reconstructions. Recalling the past
also serves a dialogic function. The rememberer's interlocutor
(whether present in the flesh or in the abstract form of a
reference group) exerts a subtle but steady pressure. That is
surely the brunt of Bartlett's own brilliant experiments on
serial reproduction, in which an initially culturally alien Amer-
indian tale comes out culturally conventionalized when passed
in succession from one Cambridge undergraduate to another.
ln Bartlett's phrase, we create "sympathetic weather'' in our
memory reconstructions. But it is sympathetic weather not
only for ourselves but for our interlocutors.
ln a word, the very processes involved in "having and hold-
ing" experience are informed by schemata steeped in folk psy-
chological conceptions of our world-the constituent beliefs
and the larger-scale narratives that contain them in those tem-
poral configurations or plots to which reference was made
earlier.
lX But narrative is not just plot structure or dramatism.

Nor is it just "historicity" or diachronicity. lt is also a way of
using language. For it seems to depend for its cffcctivencss,
as 1 have already noted in discussing its "subjunctivity," upon
its "literariness"-even in the recounting of everyday tales. To
a striking degree, it relies upon the power of tropes-upon
metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, implicature, and the rest.
Without them it loses its power to "expand the horizon of
59
possibilities," to explore the full range of connections between

the exceptional and the ordinary. 36 Indeed, recall that Ricoeur
cven speaks of mimesis as a "metaphor of reality."
Narrative, moreover, must be concrete: it must "ascend to
the particular," as Karl Marx once put it. 37 Once it achieves
its particularities, it converts them into tropes: its Agents,
Actions, Sccnes, Goals, and lnstruments (and its Troublcs as
well) arc converted into emblems. Schweitzer becomcs "com-
passion," Talleyrand "shrewdness," Napoleon's Russian cam-
paign the tragedy of overreached ambition, the Congress of
Vienna an cxercise in imperial wheeling and dealing.
There is one overriding property that all such "emblems"
share that makes them different from logical propositions. Im-
pcnetrable to both inference and induction, they resist logical
procedurcs for establishing what they mean. They must, as we
say, be mterpreted. Read thrcc oflbsen's plays: The WildDuck,
A Doll's House, and Hedda Gabkr. There is no way of arriving
logically at their "truth conditions." They cannot be decom-
posed into a sct of atomic propositions that would allow the
application of logical operations. Nor can their "gists" be ex-
tracted unambiguously. Is the returned son in The Wiúi Duck
an emblem of envy, of idealism, or, as he hints darkly in his
closing lines, does he stand for all those "destined to be the
thirteenth guest at dinner"? Is Nora inA Doll's House a prema-
ture fcm.inist, a frustrated narcissist, or a woman paying the
high price for respectability? And Hedda: Is this a story about
the spoiled child of a famous father, about the death implicit
in the hope for perfection, about the inevitable complicity in
self-deception? The interpretation we offer, whether historical
or literary or judicial, is, as we have already noted, always
normative. You cannot argue any of these interpretations
60
without taking a moral stance and a rhetorical posture. Any

more than you can univocally interpret the stories on both
sides of a family quarrel or the "arguments" on both sides of
a First Amendment case before the U.S. Supreme Court. In-
deed, the very speech act implied in "telling a story"-whether
írom life or írom the imagination-warns the beholder that
its meaning cannot be established by Frege-Russell rules relat-
ing to sense and reference. 38 We interpret stories by their veri-
similitude, their "truth likeness," or more accurately, their
"lifelikeness."
Interpretive meanings of the kind we are considering are
metaphoric, allusive, very sensitive to context. Yet they are the
coin of culture and of its narrativized folk psychology. Mean-
ing in this sense differs in some fundamental way írom what
philosophers in the dominant Anglo-American tradition have
meant by "meaning." Does this imply that "cultural meaning"
must be, therefore, a totally impressionistic or literary cate-
gory? If this were so, then the portents would not be good
for a cultural psychology that had the "looser" concept of
meaning at its center. But I do not think this is so, and 1 must
now explain.
At the beginning of this century, Anglo-American philoso-
phy turned its back on what is traditionally called "psycholo-
gism." There must be no confusion between the process of
thinking, on the one side, and "pure thought" on the other.
The former is totally irrelevant to the realm of meaning in its
philosophical sense: it is subjective, private, context-sensitive,
and idiosyncratic, whereas pure thoughts, embodied in prop-
ositions, are shared, public, and amenable to rigorous scru-
tiny. Early Anglo-American philosophers (and I include
Gottlob Frege among them, for he inspired the movement)
61
looked with deep suspicion upon natural language, and chose

to conduct their enterprise ín the decontextuaiized medium
of formai logic. 39 Nobody doubted that there was a genuine
problem about how índividuai minds came to grasp idiosyn-
cratic meanings, but that was not the central philosophical
problem. The philosophical problem, rather, was to determine
the meanings of sentences or propositions as written. This was
to be done by establishíng thcir reference and sense: reference
by detemúning the conditions for a sentence's truth, sense by
establishing what other sentcnces it might relate to. Truth was
objective: sentences are true or false whether we recognize
them as such or not. Sense ín general was índependent of
any particular or private sense-a matter that was never fully
dcvcloped, probably because it could not be. Under this dis-
pensarion, meaning became a philosopher's tool, a formai in-
strument of logical analysis.
Decontextualized sentences in the formai logicai tradition
are as if uttered from nowhere by nobody-texts on their
own, "unsponsored." 40 Establishíng the meaning of such texts
involves a highly abstract set of formai operations. Many psy-
chologists, linguists, anthropologists, and increasíng numbers
of philosophers complained that the dependence of meaning
upon "verification" condirions left the broader, human con-
cept of meaning as related to use virtually untouched.
Led by speech-act theorists inspired by John Austin directly
and Wittgensteín índirectly, students of mind have centered
their efforts during the last thirty years upon restoring the
communicative context back ínto discussions of meaníng. 41
While utterances were treated ín the classicai tradition as de-
contextualized or unsponsored locurions, they could also be
treated ín a principled way as expressíng a speaker's communi-
62
• Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culturc •
cative intention. And, in the same spirit, one could then in-
quire whether the speaker's meaning was grasped or "taken
up" by a hearer and what detennined that uptake. As we all
know, uptake depends upon the speaker and listener's sharing
a set of conventions for communicating different types of
meaning. Nor were these meanings limited to matters of refer-
ence and truth.
Utterances embodied many more intentions than merely to
refer: to request, to promise, to warn, and even, at times, to
perfonn a ritual cultural function, as in the act of christening.
The shared conventions that fitted a speaker's utterance to
the occasions of its use were not truth conditions but felicity
conditions: rules not only about the propositional content of an
utterance but about required contextual preconditions, about
sincerity in the transaction, and about essential conditions de-
fining the nature of the speech act (for example, to "'promise"
you must be able to deliver). Later, Paul Grice enriched the
account by noting that all of these conventions were further
constrained by the Cooperative Principle to which 1 alluded
earlier-a set of ma:xims about the brcvity, relevance, perspicu-
ousness, and sincerity of conversational exchanges. 42 And
írom this grew the powerful idea that meaning is also gener-
ated by the breaching of these ma:xims in conventionalized
ways.
With the introduction of felicity conditions and the Gricean
ma:xims, the "unsponsored text" on the logician's blackboard
made placc for situated speech bearing the illocutionary force
of an utterer's intent. Meaning in situated speech became cul-
tural and conventional. And its analysis became empirically
based and principled rather than merely intuitíve. lt is in this
spirit that 1 have proposed the restoration of meaning-making
63
as the central process of a cultural psychology, of a rcfreshed

Cognitive Revolution. 1 think the concept of "meaning"
understood in this principled way has reconnected linguistic
conventions with the web of conventions that constitute a
culture.
One last word about meaning, particularly as it may be
contingent upon a grasp of any narrative of which it is a part.
1 have introduced the concept of narrative in deference to
the obvious fact that, in understanding cultural phenomena,
people do not deal with the world event by event or with text
scntence by sentence. They frame events and sentences in
larger structures, whether in the schemata of Bartlett's mem-
ory theory, the "plans" of Schank and Abelson, or the "frames"
proposed by Van Dijk. 43 These larger strucrures provide an
interpretive context for the components they encompass. So,
for example, Elizabeth Bruss and Wolfgang lser each give a
principled description of the "super"-specch-act that consti-
tutes a fictional story, or Philippe Lejeune describes systemati-
cally what one undertakes as a writer or reader in entering
upon what he has christcned "the autobiographical pact. " 44
Or one can imagine specifying the conditions on the meanings
of particular utterances that follow the initial statement "Let
us pray." Under its dispensation, the utterance "Give us this
day our daily brea~" is not to be taken as a request but, say,
as an act of reverence or trust. And, if it is to be understood
in its context, it must be interpreted as a trope.
1 believe that we shall be able to interpret meanings and
meaning-making in a principled manner only in the degree to
which we are able to specify the structure and coherence of
the larger contexts in which specific meanings are created and
64
transmitted. And that is why 1 have chosen to end this chapter

with a clarification of the issue of meaning. It simply will not
do to reject the theoretical centrality of meaning for psychol-
ogy on the grounds that it is "vague." lts vagueness was in
the eye of yesterday's formalistic logician. We are beyond that
now.
65
• CHAPTER THREE •
Entry into Meaning
I N THE LAST CHAPTER 1 was particularly concerned to

describe what 1 called "folk psychology"-perhaps "folk
human science" would have been a better term. I wanted to
show how human beings, in interacting with one another,
form a sense of the canonical and ordinary as a background
against which to interpret and gi-ve narrative meaning to
breaches in and deviations írom "norma!" states of the human
condition. Such narrative explications have the effect of fram-
ing the idiosyncratic in a "lifelike" fashion that can promote
negotiation and avoid confrontational disruption and strife. I
presented the case, finally, for a view of cultural meaning-
making as a system concerned not solely with sense and refer-
ence but with "felicity conditions"-the conditions by which
differences in meaning can be resolved by invoking mitigating
circumstances that account for divergent interpretations of
"reality."
This method of negotiating and renegotiating meanings by
the mediation of narrative interpretation is, it seems to mc,
one of the crowning achievements of human development in
the ontogenetic, cultural, and phylogenetic senses of that ex-
pression. Culturally, it is enormously aided, of course, by a
67
community's stored narrative resources and its equally pre-

cious tool kit of interpretive techniques: its myths, its typology
of human plights, but also its traditions for locating and re-
solving divergent narratives. And phylogenetically, as we shall
see in a moment, it is supported in evolution by the emergence
in higher primates (even before Homo) of a primordial cogni-
tive capacity to recognize and, indeed, to exploit the beliefs
and desires of conspecifics-a cognitive capacity that David
Premack first called "a theory of mind." 1
ln this chapter, I propose to examine some of the ways in
which the young human being achieves (or realizes) the power
of narrative, the ability not only to mark what is culturally
canonical but to account for deviations that can be incorpo-
rated in narrative. The achicvement of this skill, as 1 shall try
to show, is not simply a mental achievement, but an achieve-
ment of social practicc that lends stability to the child's social
life. For one of the most powerful forms of social stability,
ranking with the well-known system of exchange to which
Lévi-Strauss has brought our attention, is the human propen-
sity to share stories of human diversity and to make their
interpretations congruent with the divergent moral commit-
ments and instirutional obligations that prevail in every
culrure. 2
IJ But we have a long way to travel before we can deal in

such grand generalities. For I propose to discuss how quite
young human beings "enter into meaning," how they learn to
make sense, particularly narrative sense, of the world around
them. The newborn, we say, cannot grasp "meanings." Yet in
very short order (and we shall say that this dates from the
68
• Entry into Meaning •
beginning of language use), he or she is able to do so. So 1

want to begin this account with a necessary digression into
what, for lack of a better term, 1 must call the ''biology of
meaning."
The expression at first seems an oxymoron, for meaning
itself is a cuJturally mediated phenomenon that depends upon
the prior existence of a shared symbol system. So how can
there be a "biology'' of meaning? Since C. S. Peirce, we recog-
nizc that meaning depends not only upon a sign and a referent
but also upon an interpretant-a representation of the world
in terms of which the sign-referent relationship is mediated. 3
Recall that Peirce distinguished among icon, index, and sym-
bol, the icon bearing a "resemblance" relationship to its refer-
ent as with a picture, the index a contingent one as in the
relation between smoke and fire, and the symbol depending
upon a system of signs such that the relation of a sign to its
referent is arbitrary and govemed only by its position within
the system of signs that defines what it "stands for." ln this
sense, symbols depend upon the existence of a "language" that
contains an ordered or rule-govemed system of signs.
Symbolic meaning, then, depends in some critical fashion
upon the human capacity to intemalize such a language and
to use its system of signs as an interpretant in this "standing
for" relationship. The only way ín which one might conceive
of a biology of meaning, on this view, is by reference to some
sort of precursor system that readies the prelinguistic organ-
ism to traflic in language, some son of protolinguistic system.
To so conceive the matter would be to invoke innateness, to
claim that we have an innate gift for language.
Such appeals to innateness are not new, and they can take
many different forms. A generation ago, for example, Noam
69
Chomsky proposed an innate "language acquisition device"

that operated by accepting only those linguistic inputs in the
infant's immediate environment that conformed to a postu-
lated deep structure characteristic of al1 human languages. 4
His notion of deep structure was entirely syntactical and had
nothing to do with "meaning" or even with the actual uses of
language. It was an entirely linguistic capacity, a cmnpetence
for language. His case rested on the child's alleged ability to
grasp the rules of sentence formation and transformation upon
exposure to entirely linguistic evidence, even evidence that
was not quite sufficient for doing so, evidence that was "de-
generate'' or "semigrammatical." It made no difference what
the sentences meant or how they were used.
ln the years since, therc has been much ink spilled over
Chomsky's claim about innate syntactic readiness. We need
not review the history of this controversy, for it concerns us
only indirectly. At very least, his claim had the effect of awak-
ening all of us írom the sleepy empiricism that had dominated
speculation about language acquisition since Augustine. An~
besides, it led to a torrent of empirical research on the condi-
tions surrounding the child's acquisition of a mother tongue. 5
From this vast research literature emerged three claims about
early acquisition, all of which can guide us in our search for
a biology of meaning.
The first is that the child's acquisition of language requires
far more assistance írom and interaction with caregivers than
Chomsky (and many others) had suspected. Language is ac-
quired not in the role of spectator but through use. Being
"exposed" to a flow of language is not nearly so important as
using it in the midst of "doing." Leaming a language, to
borrow John Austin's celebrated phrase, is leaming "how to
70
do things with words." The child is not learning simply what

to say but how, where, to whom, and under what circum-
stances. 6 It is certainly a legitimate occupation for linguists to
examine only the parsing rules that characterize what a child
says írom week to week, but in no sense can it provide an
account of the conditions upon which languagc acquisition
depends.
Thc second condusion is deeply important, and it can be
statcd simply. Certain communicativc functions or intentions
are well in placc before the child has mastered the formai
language for expressing thcm linguistically. At very least, these
include indicating, labeling, rcquesting, and misleading.
Looked at naturalistically, it would scem as if thc child were
partly motivated to master language in order better to fulfill
these functions in vivo. Indeed, there are certain generalized
communicative skills crucial to language that also secm in
placc before language proper begins that arc latcr incorporatcd
into the child's specch once it begins: joint attcntion to a
putative referent, rum taking, mutual exchangc, to mention
the most prominent.
The third conclusion is really a dense summary of thc
first two: the acquisition of a first language is very context-
sensitive, by which is meant that it progresses far better when
the child already grasps in somc prelinguistic way the signifi-
cance of what is being talked about or of the situation in
which the talk is occurring. With an appreciation of context,
the child seems better able to grasp not only the lexicon but
the appropriatc aspects of thc grammar of a language.
This leads us right back to our initial query: how does the
child ''grasp the significance" of situations (or contexts) in a
way that can help him or her master the lexicon and grammar
71
that fit those situations? What kind of Peircean interpretant

can be operating that permits such a grasp? Let me postpone
trying to answer this question för a moment in order that 1
may first makc clear what I hope to accomplish.
ln thc light of the last two decades of research (and particu-
larly with respect to the three generalizations to which this
research lcads us) 1 shall propose a very different approach
írom Chomsky's in dcaling with human readiness for lan-
guage. Without intending to belittle the importance of syntac-
tical fönn in language, I shall concentrate almost exclusively
upon fanction and what I have already called the grasp of
context. The subtlety and complexity of syntactic rules lead me
to believe that such rules can only be leamed instrumentally, as
instn.unents for carrying out certain priorly operative func-
tions and objectives. Nowhere in the higher anirnal kingdom
arc highly skilled and recombinable acts ever learned "auto-
matically '' or by rote, even when they are nurtured by strongly
developed biological predispositions-not sexual behavior,
not free feeding, not aggression and agonistic bchavior, not
even spacing. 7 For their full development, they all depend
upon being practiced and shaped by use.
Not surprisingly, then, 1 think the case för how we "enter
language" must rest upon a selcctivc set of prelinguistic
"readinesses for meaning." That is to say, there are certain
classes of meaning to which human beings arc innately tuned
and för which thcy actively scarch. Prior to language, thcse
exist in primitive fönn as protolinguistic representations of
the world whose full realization depends upon the cultural
tool of language. Let it be dear that this in no sensc denies the
daim that there may also be what Derek Bickerton, föllowing
Chomsky, calls a "bioprogram" that alerts us to certain syntac-
72
ricai structures. 8 If there is such a bioprogram, its triggering

depends not only upon the presence of appropriate exemplars
in the linguistic environment of the child but also upon the
child's "context sensitivity'' that can come only írom the kinds
of culturally relevant meaning readinesses that 1 am proposing.
lt is only after some language has been acquired in the formai
sense, that one can acquire further language as a "bystander."
Its initial mastery can come only írom participation in lan-
guage as an instrument of communication.
What then is this prelinguistic readiness for selective dasses
of meaning? We have characterized it as a form of menta!
representation. But what is it a representation of? 1 believe it
is a highly malleable yet innate rcpresentation that is triggered
by the acts and expressions of others and by certain basic social
contexts in which human beings interact. ln a word, we come
initially equipped, if not with a "theory" of mind, then surely
with a set of predispositions to construe the social world in a
particular way and to act upon our construals. This amounts
to saying that we come into the world already equipped with
a primitive form of folk psychology. We shall retum shortly
to the nature of the predispositions that constitute it.
I am not the first to suggest that such a form of social
"meaning readiness" is a product of our evolutionary past.
Indeed, Nicholas Humphrey has proposed that man's readi-
ness for culture may depend upon some such differential
"tunedness" to others. And Roger Lewin, reviewing the pri-
mate literature of the last decades, concludes that it is probably
sensitivity to the requirements of living in groups that pro-
vides the criterion for evolutionary selection in high primates. 9
Certainly reviews of shifting and opportunistic primate social
coalitions and of the use of "deceit" and "disinformation" in
73
maintaining and augmenting these coalitions speak to prehu-

man origins of the kinds of folk-psychological representations
that 1 am proposing. 10
1 want to illustrate first what 1 mean by the claim that a
protolinguistic grasp of folk psychology is well ín place as a
feature of praxis before the child is able to express or compre-
hcnd the same matters by language. Practical understanding
exprcsses itself first in the child's regulation of social interac-
tion. 1 draw my illustrative material principally from a wcll-
argued dcmonstration cxperimcnt reccntly rcportcd by Mi-
chael Chandlcr and his colleagues.
"To hold to a 'theory of mind'," thcy notc, "is to subscribe
to a spccial sort of explanatory framewor~ common to the
folk psychology of most ordinary adults, according to which
certain dasses of behavior arc understood to be predicated
upon the particuJar beliefs and desires subscribed to by those
whose actions are in qucstion." 11 There has been a lively debate
in thc burgeoning literature on "developing thcories of mind"
as to whcther childrcn have such theories before ihe age of
four. 12 And as is so often the case in studies of development
in children, much of the dcbate has centered on "how you
measure it." If you use a procedure that requires a child to
"explain" that somebody did something because he or she
believed falsely that something was the case, and particularly if
the child is not involved in the action in question, then chil-
dren fail in the task until they are four years old. Before that
age they seem quite unable to ascribe appropriate actions
based on others' false beliefs. 13
But new evidence provided by Chand.Jer and his colleagues
demonstrates that if children arc put into a situation where
they thcmselves must prevcnt somebody else from finding
74
something that they themselves have hidden, then even two-

to-three-year-olds will withhold relevant information írom
the searcher, and even create and then supply the searcher
with such false information as misleading footprints that lead
away írom the hidden treasure. The hide-and-seek task, the
authors note, "clearly engaged the subject's own self-interests
and ... pitted them against those of another real person„ and
"allowed them to directly evidence in action rather than teli
about ... false beliefs of others. " 14 Nobody doubts that four-
or six-year-olds have more marure theories of mind that can
encompass what others who are not engaged with them are
thinking or desiring. The point, rather, is that even before
language takes over as the instrument of interaction one can-
not interact humanly with others without some protolinguistic
"theory of mind." It is inherent in human social behavior and
it will express itself in a form appropriate to even a low level
of marurity-as when, for example, the nine-month-old looks
out along the trajectory of an adult's "point'' and, finding
nothing there, tums back to check not only the adult's direc-
tion of point but the line of visual regard as well. And from
this folk-psychological antecedent there evenrually emerge
such linguistic accomplishments as demonstratives, labeling,
and the like. 15 Once the child masters through interaction the
appropriate prelinguistic forms for managing ostensive refer-
ence, he or she can move beyond them to operate, as it were,
within thc confines of language proper.
111 This is not to say that the linguistic forms "grow out
of" the prelinguistic practices. It is, I think, impossible in
principle to establish any formal continuity between an earlier
75
"preverbal" and a later functionally "equivalent" linguistic

fönn. ln what sense, for example, is the invcrtcd request syn-
tax of English (as in "Can 1 have the applc?") "continuous"
with thc outstretchcd manual rcqucst gesturc that predates it?
Thc most we can say in this case is that the two, the gesture
and thc inverted syntactic structurc, fulfill the same function
of "rcquesting." Surcly thc arbitrary rcvcrsal of pronoun and
verb is not "requestive" in its own right-neither iconically
nor idexically. Syntactic rules bear an arbitrary relationship to
the functions thcy fulfill. And therc arc many diffcrcnt syntac-
tic rules for fulfilling thc same function in different languages.
But that is not the whole story. Indeed, it is only half of it.
Even granting that grammatical rules are arbitrary with respect
to how they fu1fil1 particuJar functions, may it not be the case
that the order of a&IJUisition of grammatical forms reflects a
priority, as it wcre, in communicative nceds-a priority that
reflects a "!9her-level requirement of communicating. The
analogy is thc mastery of a language's phonology. Phonemes
are mastcred not for themselves but because they constitute
the building blocks of the language's lexemcs: they are mas-
tcred in the process of mastering lexemic elements. 1 should
like to make thc comparable argumcnt that grammatical forms
and distinctions arc not mastercd eithcr for their own sake
or mcrely in thc intcrest of "morc efficient communication."
Scntences as grammatical entities, while the fetish of the for-
mai grammarian, arc not the "natural" units of communica-
tion. The natural forms are discourse units that fu1fil1 eithcr a
"pragmatic" or a "mathctic" discourse function, to use Halli-
day's terms. 16 Pragmatic functions typically involvc getting
others to act in our behalf; mathetic ones have to do with, so
to speak, "making dear one's thoughts about the world," to
76
use John Dewey's old expression. Both use scntences, but nei-
ther is linúted in any way within the bounds of a sentence.
Discourse functions, however, require that certain grammati-
cal forms (however arbitrary) be accessible for their realiza-
tion, just as "words" in the lexicon depend for their use upon
certain arbitrary phonological distinctions being in place.
1 have been at great pains to argue (and will argue further
later in this chapter) that one of the most ubiquitous and
powerful discourse forms in human communication is narra-
tive. Narrative structure is even inherent in the praxis of social
interaction before it achieves linguistic expression. 1 want now
to make the more radical claim that it is a "push" to construct
narrative that determines the order of priority in which gram-
matical forms are mastered by the young child. 17
Narrative requires, as mentioned in the preceding chapter,
four crucial grammatical constiruents if it is to be effectively
carried out. It requires, first, a means for emphasizing human
action or "agentivity"-action directed toward goals con-
trolled by agents. It requires, second.ly, that a sequential order
be established and maintained-that events and states be "lin-
earized" in a standard way. Narrative, thirdly, also requires a
sensitivity to what is canonical and what violates canonicality
in human interaction. Finally, narrative requires something
approximating a narrator's perspective: it cannot, in the jargon
of narratology, be "voiceless."
If a push to narrative is operative at the discourse levei,
then the order of the acquisition of grammatical forms should
reflect these four requirements. How well does it do so? For-
tunately for our quest, much of the work on original languagc
acquisition is described in the meaning-bearing, semantic-
relations categories of case grammar. This permits us to assess
77
the kinds of meaning categories to which the young child is

initially most sensitive.
Once young children come to grasp the basic idea of refer-
ence necessary for any language use-that is, once they can
name, can note recurrence, and can register terminarion of
existence--their principal linguistic interest centers on human
aaúm and its outcomes, particularly human interaction. Agent-
and-action, action-and-object, agent-and-object, action-and-
location, and possessor-and-possession make up the major
part of the semanric relations that appear in the first stage of
speech. 18 These forms appear not only in referring acts but
also in requesting, in effecting exchanges in possession, in
giving, and in commenting upon the interaction of others.
The young child, moreover, is early and profoundly sensitive
to "goals" and their achievement-and to variants of such
expressions as "all gone" for complerion and "uh oh" for in-
completion. People and their actions dominate the child's in-
terest and attention. This is the first requirement of narrative. 19
A second requirement is early readiness to mark the unusual
and to leave the usual unmarked-to concentrate attention
and information processing on the otlbeat. Young children,
indeed, are so easily captivated by the unusual that those of
us who conduct research with infants come to count on it. Its
power makes possible the "habituation experiment." Infants
reliably perk up in the presence of the unusual: they look morc
fixedly, stop sucking, show cardiac deceleration, and so on. 20
It is not surprising, then, that when they begin acquiring lan-
guage they are much more likely to devote their linguistic
efforts to what is unusual in their world. They not only perk
up in the presence of, but also gesture toward, vocalize, and
finally talk about what is unusual. As Roman Jakobson told
78
us many years ago, the very act of speaking is an act of marking

the unusual írom the usual. Patricia Greenfield and Joshua
Smith were among the first to demonstrate this important
point empirically. 21
As for the third requirement, "linearizing" and the standard-
ized maintenance of sequence, this is built into the structure
of every known grammar. 22 Even at that, it should also be
noted that a large part of the known natural grammars of
the world render this linearizing task easier by employing the
phenomenologically order-preserving SVO (subject-verb-
object: "somebody does something") order for indicative sen-
tences. Besides, the SVO forms in a language are the oncs
first mastered in most cases. Children early start mastering
grammatical and lexical fonns for "binding" the sequences
they recount-by the use of temporals like "then" and "later,"
and eventually by the use of causals, a matter we shall encow1-
ter again presently.
As for the fourth property of narrative, voice or "perspec-
tive" (of which we shall also encounter interesting examples
later), 1 suspect it is etfected principally by crying and other
atfective expressions, and also by stress levei and similar pro-
sodic features in early speech, rather than by either lexical or
grammatical means. But it is surely handled early, as Daniel
Stem abundantly demonstrates in his work on "the first rela-
rionship. " 23
These four grammatical/lexical/prosodic features, among
the earliest to appear, provide the child with an abundant and
early armament of narrative tools. My argument, admittedly
a radical one, is simply that it is the human push to organize
experience narratively that assures the high priority of these
features in the program of language acquisition. It is surely
79
worth noting, even if it is almost too self-evident to do so,

that children, as a result, produce and comprehend stories, arc
comforted and alarmed by them, long before they are capable
of handling the most fundamental Piagetian logical proposi-
tions that can be put into linguistic form. Indeed, we even
know from the pathbreaking studies of A. R. Luria and of
Margaret Donaldson that logical propositions are most easily
comprehended by the child when they are imbedded in an
ongoing story. The great Russian folklore morphologist,
Vladimir Propp, was among the first to note that the "parts"
of a story are, as he put it, fanctions of the story rather than
autonomous "themes" or "elements." So one is tempted to
ask on the basis of such work as Luria's and Donaldson's
whether narratives may not also serve as carly interpretants
for "logical" propositions before the child has the menta!
equipment to handle them by such later-developing logical
calculi as adult humans can muster. 24
But while 1 am arguing that a "protolinguistic" readiness
for narrative organization and discourse sets the priority for
the order of grammatical acquisition, 1 am not saying that the
narrative forms of the culture to which the child early lays
claim have no empowering effect on the child's narrative dis-
course. My argument, rather, and 1 hope to be able to demon-
strate it many times over in the remainder of this chapter, is
that while we have an "innate" and primitive predisposition
to narrative organization that allows us quickly and easily to
comprehend and use it, the culture soon equips us with new
powers of narration through its tool kit and through the tradi-
tions of telling and interpreting in which we soon come to
participate.
80
IV ln what follows, 1 want to deal with several different

aspects of the socialization of the child's later narrative prac-
tices. Let me provide some program notes in advance. 1 want
first, rather as an existence proof, to demonstrate the power
of noncanonica1 events to trigger narrativizing even in quite
young child.ren. Then 1 want very briefly to show how dense
and ubiquitous "model" narratives are in the young child's
immediate environment. That done, 1 want next to examine
two striking examples of the socialization of narrative in the
young child-to show narratively in vivo what ChandJer and
his colleagues demonstrated in VÍ'trO in their experimenta1
study. 25 Child.ren come to recognize very early on, these exam-
ples will show, that what they have done or plan to do will
be interpreted not only by the act itself but by how they tell
about it. Logos and praxis are culturally inseparable. The cul-
tura1 sctting of one's own actions forces one to be a narrator.
The object of the exercise ahead is not only to examine the
child's involvement in narrative but to show how greatly this
involvement matters to life in the culture.
The demonstration study is a very simple and elegant little
experiment with kindergarten children conducted by Joan Lu-
cariello. 26 lts sole aim was to find out what kinds of things
tripped off narrative activity in young child.ren between four
and five years old. Lucariello told the child.ren a story, either
about a standard children's birthday party with presents and
candJes to be blown out or, in another version, about a visít
by a child's same-age cousin and their playing together. Some
of the birthday stories violated canonicality-the birthday girl
was unhappy, or she poured water on the candJes rather than
blowing them out, and so on. The violations were designed
81
to introduce imbalances into the Burkean pentad discussed in

thc previous chapter: between an Agent and an Action or
between an Agent and a Scene. There were also comparable
variants of the little cousin tale, but since there is no canonical
version for such a tale, the variants lacked a real feature of
"violarion," though they seemed slightly ofibeat. After the
story, the experimenter asked the children some questions
about what had happened in the story they had heard. The
first finding was that the anricanonical stories produced a spate
of narrarive invenrion by comparison with the canonical
one-ten times as many elaborarions. One young subject ex-
plained the birthday girl's unhappiness by saying she'd proba-
bly forgotten the day and didn't have the right dress to wear,
another talked about a quarrel with her mother, and so on.
Asked point blank why the girl was happy in the canonical
version, the young subjects were rather nonplussed. All they
could think of to say was that it was her birthday, and in some
cases they simply shrugged, as if in embarrassment about a
grownup's feigned innocence. Even the slightly offbeat ver-
sions of the noncanonical "playing cousins" story evoked four
times more narrarive elaborations than the rather more banal
standard one. The elaborarions typically took the form dis-
cusscd in an earlier chapter: they invoked an intentional state
(like the birthday girl's confusion about dates) in juxtaposirion
with a cultural given (the requirement of having a good dress
for a party). The narrarives were right on target: making sense
of a cultural aberrarion by appeal to a subjective state ín a
protagonist.
1 have not told you about these findings to surprise you. lt
is their obviousness that interests me. Four-year-olds may not
know much about the culture, but they know what's canonical
82
and are eager to provide a tale to account for what is not. Nor
is it surprising that they know as much as they do, as a study
by Peggy Miller demonstrates. 27
lt concerns the narrative environments of young children
in blue-collar Baltimore. Miller recorded conversations at
home between mothers and their preschool children, as well
as between mothers and other adults within easy earshot of
the child. ln that intimate environment, the flow of stories
recreating everyday experiences is, to paraphrase Miller, "re-
lentless." On average, in every hour of recorded conversation
there are 8.5 narratives, one every seven minutes, of which
three-quarters are told by the mother. They are simple narra-
tives of a kind widely in everyday use in American talk. It is
a form that is usually to be found in child speech by the age
of three. lt involves a simple orientation, a linear depiction
with a precipitating event, a resolution, and sometimes a
coda. 28 Since already spoken, they can be understood. A quar-
ter of them are about the child's own doings.
A very considerable number deal with violence, aggression,
or threats, and a not inconsiderable number deal explicitly
with death, with child abuse, with wife-beatings, and even
with shootings. This lack of censorship, this parading of
the "harsh realities," is very much part of lower-class Black
culture's deliberate emphasis on "toughening'' children and
readying them early for life. Shirley Brice Heath has reported
this same phenomenon in srudies of Black children in rural
small towns. 29
The stories, moreover, almost always portray the narrator
in a good light. The narrator's triumphs very often take the
form of getting the better of somebody in dialogue, and this
is exemplified by the use of reported speech, reported speech
83
that is not only dramatic but rhetorically appropriate for a

direct and tough presentation of self, asin this fragment: "And
she says, 'Look at that big nosed B-I-T-C-H.' And 1 turned and
1 says, 'Uh, you talkin to me?' I sai~ 'ARE YOU TALKIN TO
ME?' I says, 'Weil, you fat slob, I put you ina skillet and strip
you down ro normal size, if you mess with me.' " 30 The corpus
contains few examples of "telling stories on oneself." The em-
phasis is on the perils to Agentivity in a tough world and how
one copes in that world by deed and by word. And in the few
instances where Miller was fortunate enough to record young
children retelling stories that had been earlier recorded in the
adult version, the children exaggerated both the drama and
the dramatizing paralinguistic features of the originals.
1 do not mean to single out blue-collar children in Balti-
more as having a special narrative environment. All narrative
environments are specializcd for culrural need.s, all stylize the
narrator as a form of Self, all define kinds of relations between
narrator and interlocutor. 1 could have used Shirley Brice
Hcath's account of literal, bowdlerized narrating in White
small-town Roadville. 31 Any dosely examined sample of such
narrative environments will tell much the same story of the
ubiquitousness of narratives in the world of children (and the
world of adults, for that matter) and of its functional impor-
tance in bringing children into the culture.
V Now we can rum to the uses to which children put

their narratives, and there is no better place to begin than with
Judy Dunn's book The B1"9innings of Social Understanding.
"Children," Dunn says, "have rarely been studied in the world
in which these developments take place, or in a context in
84
which we can be sensitive to the subtleties of their social un-

derstanding. " 32 But hers is not simply a naturalist's plea for
"ecological situatedness" in psychological research. Her point,
rather, is that social understanding, however abstract it may
eventually become, always begins as praxis in particular con-
texts in which the child is a protagonirt-an agent, a victim,
an accomplice. The child learns to play a part in everyday
family "drama" before there is ever any telling or justifying or
excusing required. What is permissible and what not, what
leads to what outcomes-these are first learned in action. The
transformation of such enactive knowledge into language
comes only later, and as we already know from previous dis-
cussion, the child is linguistically sensitive to just such action-
tagged "referential targets." But there is something else that
characterizes the speech acts of young children talking about
the interactions in which they arc involved, something that
Dunn brings to our attention, that is especially important.
Young children often hear accounts of their own interac-
tions from older siblings or parents, accounts that are consti-
tuted in terms of the familiar Burkean pentad: an Agcnt's
Action toward a Goal by some lnstrumentality in a particular
constraining Scene. 33 But the account is given in a form that
runs counter to their own interpretation and interest. It is
often from the point of view of another protagonist's goal
that may be either in confl.ict with their own version of "what
happened" or at variance with their version of "the Trouble."
Narrative accounts, under thcse circumstances, are no longer
neutral. They have rhetorical aims or illocutionary intentions
that are not merely expository but rather partisan, designed
to put the case if not adversarially then at least convincingly
in behalf of a particular interpretation. ln those early family
85
conflicts, narrative becomes an instrument for telling not only

what happened but also why it justified the action recounted.
As with narrative generally, "what happened" is tailored to
meet the conditions on "so what."
Dunn sees this as a reflection, so to speak, of "family poli-
tics," a politics not ofhigh Freudian drama but of daily neces-
sity. The child, in the nature of things, has her own desires,
but given her reliance upon the family for affection, these
desires often create conflict when they collide with the wishes
of parents and siblings. The child's task when conflict arises is
to balance her own desires against her comnútment to others
in the family. And she learns very soon that action is not
enough to achieve this end. Telling the right story, putting
hcr actions and goals in a legítimizíng light, is just as impor-
tant. Getting what you want very often means getting the
right story. As John Austin told us many years ago in his
famous essay "A Plca for Excuses," a justification rests on a
story of mitigating circumstances. 34 But to get the story right,
to pit yours successfully against your younger brother's, re-
quires knowing what constirutes the canonically acceptable
version. A "right'' story is one that connects your version
through mitigation with the canonical version.
So, like the young children in Baltimore, these children too
come to understand "everyday'' narrative not only as a form
of recounting but also as a form of rhetoric. By their third
and fourth years, we see them learning how to use their narra-
tives to cajole, to deceive, to flatter, to justify, to get what
they can without provoking a confrontation with those they
love. And they are en route as well to becoming connoisseurs
of story genres that do the same. To put the matter in terms
of speech-act theory, knowing the generative structure of nar-
86
• Entry into Meanin •
0
rative enables them to construct locutions to fit the require-
ments of a wide range of illocutionary intentions. This same
sct of skills also equips these young children with a more
discerning empathy. They often are able to interpret for their
parents the meanings and intentions of younger siblings who
are trying to make a case for themselves-especially when
thcre is no confiict of interest involved.
To recapitulate, then, a grasp of quotidian "family dra.ma"
comes first in the form of praxis. The child, as we already
know, soon masters the linguistic forms for referring to ac-
tions and their consequences as they occur. She learns soon
after that what you do is drastically affected by how you rc-
count what you are doing, will do, or have done. Narrating
becomes not only an expository act buta rhetorical one. To
narrate in a way that puts your case convincingly requires not
only language but a mastery of the canonical forms, for one
must make one's actions seem an extension of the canonical,
transformed by mitigating circumstances. ln the process of
achicving these skills, the child leams to use some of the less
anractive tools of the rhetorical trade--deceit, flattery, and
the rest. But she also leams many of the useful forms of inter-
pretation and thereby develops a more penetrating empathy.
And so she enters upon human culture.
VI Now move backward in developmental time-to

Emily, whose soliloquies, recorded between her eighteenth
month and third year, became the subject of a boo~ N awatives
from the Crib. 35 For all her tender years, she was in the midst
of life. A brother, Stephen, was bom and displaced her not
only from her solo role in the family but from her very room
87
and crib. If, as Vladimir Propp once remarked, folktales begin

in Jack and displacement, this was surely a "narratogenic" time
for Emily. 36 And shortly after the arrival of her brother, she
was introduced to the boisterous life of nursery school. With
both parents working, there were babysitters as well-all
against the background of an ill-planncd city whcre even the
carpool pickups could become tense and erratic. "ln the midst
of life" is not an cxaggeration.
It was our good fortune that Emily was steadily improving
in her use of her native languagc while all these momentous
events in her life were taking placc. For it allowed us to ob-
serve the growth of her language not only as a communicative
instrument but also as a vehicle for reflecting aloud when
hcr busy days werc ovcr. Her soliloquies wcrc rich. lndecd,
contrary to an "established" Vygotskyan principle, they were
grammatically morc complex, more cxtended in utterance
Iength, and less "hcre-and-now" than hcr conversational
speech-probably because when talking to herself she did not
havc to fit her speech into the interstices of an interrupting
interlocutor's remarks.
Why do any of us talk to ourselves? And why especially a
young chilei, albeit a somcwhat precocious young child? John
Dcwey proposcd that language provides a way of sorting out
our thoughts about the world, and there are chapters in N ar-
ratives from the Crib confirming his conjecture. We shall come
back to such matters presently. Emily also talks to her stuffcd
animals and gives variorum recitals of favorite books that have
been read to her or of songs she has learned. About a quarter
ofher soliloquies were straightforward narrative accounts: au-
tobiographical narratives about what she had been doing or
88
what she thought she would be up to tomorrow. Listening

to the tapes and reading the transcripts repeatedly, we were
struck by the constitutive function of her monologic narrative.
She was not simply reporting; she was trying to make sense
of her everyday life. She seemed to be in search of an integral
strucrure that could encompass what she had done with what
she folt with what she believed.
Because the lexico-grammatical speech of almost all children
improves steadily during the early years of life, we too easily
take it for granted that language acquisition is "autonomous."
According to this dogma, part of the Chomskian heritage
discussed earlier, language acquisition needs no motive other
than itself, no particularly specialized support írom the envi-
ronment, nothing except the unfolding of some sort of self-
charged "bioprogram." But looking dosely at the transcripts
and listening to the tapes, there were times when we had the
irresistible impression that Emily's leaps forward in speech
were fueled by a need to construct meaning, more particularly
narrative meaning. Granted that the achievement of meaning
requires the use of a grammar and a lexicon, the search for it
may not. Lois Bloom, like us, remarked at the condusion of
one of her own studies that, for example, the child's mastery
of causal expressions seemed to be driven by an interest in the
reasons why people did things. ln the same sense, Emily's
push to better grammatical construction and a morc extended
lexicon seemed to be impelled by a need to get things orga-
nized in an appropriate serial order, to get them marked for
their specialness, to take some sort of stance on them. No
doubt, in time children become interested in language for its
own sake, almost as a form of play. Like Ruth Weir's An-
89
thony, Emily seemed to be "only playing with language" in

some of her later monologues, but even then there seemed to
be something else as well. 37 So what might it be?
We say in developmental linguistics that "function precedes
fönn." There are, för examplc, gestural fönns of rcquesting
and indicating well before there is lexico-grammatical speech
för expressing these functions, and prelinguistic intentions to
request or indicate seem to guide the search för and hasten
the mastery of the appropriate linguistic förms. And so it must
be with the child's push to give meaning or "structure" to
experience. Much of Emily's early acquisition seemed to be
driven by a need to fix and to express narrative structure-the
order of human events and what difference they made to the
narrator/protagonist. 1 know this is not the standard version
of language acquisition, but let me spell out the details.
The three most notable and earliest accomplishments in
Emily's narrative soWoquies were all in the interest of fixing
her narratives more firmly into language. First, there was a
steady mastery of linguistic forms to achieve morc linear and
tighter sequencing in her accounts of "what happened." Her
early accounts began by stringing together happenings by the
use of simple conjunctions, moved then to reliance upon tem-
porals like and then, and passed finally to the use of causals
like her ubiquitous because. Why is she so finicky about order-
ing, even to the extent of correcting herself at times about
who or what preceded or followed whom or what? After all,
she is only talking to herself. William Labov comments in his
landmark paper on narrative structure that the meaning of
"what happened" is strictly determined by the order and fönn
of its sequence. 38 It is this meaning that Emily seems to be
after.
90
Secon~ her interest in and achievement of forms for distin-

guishing the canonical or ordinary from the unusual showed
rapid progress. Words like sometimes and always came into her
sofiloquies by her second year, and were used with delibera-
tion and stress. She showed a conswning interest in what she
took to be steady, reliable, and ordinary, and knowledge of
this ordinariness served as a background for explicating the
exceptional. She worked deliberately to get such matters clear.
ln this respect, she is much like the children in Dunn's Cam-
bridge study.
Moreover, once Emily had established and expressed what
was quantitatively reliable, she began introducing a note of
deontic necessity. Got to entered her lexicon and served to
mark those events that were not only frequent but, as it were,
comme ü faut, as when she announced in one soliloquy after an
air trip to her grandmother's that you "got to have luggage" to
get on an airplane. And it was at this point in her development
that she began using the timeless present tensc for marking
ritual canonical events. It no longer sufficed to recount a Sun-
day breakfast as Daddy dili make some cornbread far Emmy have.
Sundays were now a species of timeless event: when you wake
up, but on Sunday mornings sometimes we wake up . . . sometime
we wake up morning. Such timeless accounts double in relative
frequency between 22 and 33 months. They have a special
significance to which we shall turn presently.
Third and finally, there was Emily's introduction of per-
sonal perspective and evaluation into her narrative accounts,
the standard way of adding a landscape of consciousness to
the landscape of action in narrative. She did this increasingly
over the period during which we monitored her soliloquies,
most usually in the form of expressing her feelings about what
91
she was recounting. But she also set out an episternic perspec-
tive, as for example about her not being able to figure out
why her father was not accepted in the local marathon. She
seemed to distinguish quite clearly in her late soliloquies be-
tween her own doubts (J think maybe ... ) and states of uncer-
tainty in the world (sometimes Carl come play). The two have
distinctive meanings in her soliloquies: one is about the state
of mind of the Actor-Narrator (that is, the autobiographer);
the other is about the Scene. They are both perspectival. Both
deal with the "so what'' of the recounted happenings.
The engine of all this linguistic effort is not so much a push
toward logical coherence, though that is not absent. It is,
rather, a need to "get the story right": who did what to whom
where, was it thc "rcal" and stcady thing or a rogue happen-
ing, and how do 1 feel about it. Her language aided but did
not compel her to talk and think in this way. She was using a
genre, one that came to her easily and, perhaps, naturally. But
she already had another genre in hand that she was using
and perfecting, as we learn írom Carol Feldman's analysis of
Emily's problem-solving soliloquies. 39 ln these, Emily occu-
pies herself with the shifting world of categories and causa-
tion, of attributes and identities, with the domain of "reasons
why." This genre, as Feldman describes it, "has a tidy and
intricate pattern of puzzles posed, considerations raised, and
solutions achieved." Take the following example of Ernily's
trying to figure out why her father had been turned down for
that marathon:
Today Daddy went, trying to get into the race, but the people
said no so he has to watch it on television. 1 don't know why
that is, maybe cause there's too many people. 1 think that's
why, why he couldn't go in it ... 1wish1 can watch him. 1
92
wish 1 could watch him. But they said no, no, no, Daddy,
Daddy, Daddy. No, no, no. Have to, have to watch on tele-
VlSlOn.
Eventually, of course, Emily (like the rest of us) learns to

interdigitate these two basic genres, using each to darify or
adumbrate on the other. Here, again at 32 months, is a strik-
ing example. Note that the narrative portion is still principally
concemed with canonicality rather than exceptionality, but
note that the canonicality is being imposed upon a still some-
what troubling event: being left by a parent, albeit at nursery
school:
Tomorrow when we wake up from bed, first me and Daddy
and Momrny, you, eat breakfast eat breakfast, like we usuaJly
do, and then we're going to p-1-a-y, and thcn soon as Daddy
comes, Carl's going to comc ovcr and then wc're going to play
a littlc while. And then Carl and Emily arc both going down
thc car with somcbody, and /wc're going to ride to nursery
school/ [whispered], and then whcn wc get there, wc're all
going to get out of the car, and go into nursery school, and
Daddy's going to give us kisses, then go, and then say, and
then he will say goodlrye, then he's going to go to worL.
and we're going to play at nursery school. Won't that be funny?
And then irnmediately she shifts into her puzzle-solving genre:

Because sometimes 1 go to nursery school cause it's a nursery
school day. Sometimes I stay with Tanta aU week. And some-
times we play Mom and Dad. But usually, sometimes, I um,
oh go to nursery school.
So Emily by her third year masters the forms for putting
sequence, canonicality, and perspective at the service of her
push to narrativize her experience. The genre serves to orga-
93
nize her experience of human interactions in a lifelike, story-

like way. Her narrative environment is, in its own way, as
distinctive as the environments of the Black ghetto children
in Baltimore. ln her case, we leam from her pre-soliloquy
exchanges with her parents, there is enormous stress on "get-
ting things right," on being able to give "reasons," and on
understanding the options open to her. Her parents, after
all, are academics. Like the children in Dunn's Cambridge,
moreover, Emily also leams to talk and to think rhetorically, to
design her utterances more convincingly to express her stance.
ln time, as we saw, she imports another genre into her
narratives-problem-solving. And in short order, this generic
importation becomes like an obbligato in her narratives. 1 use
the musical terms advisedly: an obbligato, as the Oxford Dic-
tionary puts it, is something ~'that cannot be omitted . . . a
part essential to the completeness of the composition." It is
not that narrative and paradigmatic modes of discourse fuse,
for they do not. It is, rather, that the logical or paradigmatic
mode is brought to bear on the task of explicating the breach
in the narrative. The explication is in the form of "reasons,"
and it is interesting that these reasons are often stated in the
timeless present tense, better to distinguish them from the
course of events in the past. But when reasons are used in this
way, they must be made to seem not only logical but lifelike
as well, for the requirements of narrative still dominate. This
is the critical intersection where verifiability and verisimilitude
seem to come together. To bring off a successful convergence
is to bring off good rhetoric. The next big advances in our
understanding of language acquisition will probably be
achieved when that dark subject is enlightened by develop-
mental research.
94
VJJ The view 1 have been proposing is an interpretivist

one, interpretivist in its view of the activities of those who
practice the hwnan sciences and of those whom they srudy.
It takes thc position that what makes a cultural community is
not just shared beliefs about what people are like and what the
world is like or how things should be valued. There must
obviously be some consensus to ensure the achievement of
civility. But what may be just as important to the coherence
of a culrure is the existence of interpretive procedures for adju-
dicating the different construals of reality that are inevitable
in any diverse society. Michelle Rosaldo is surely right about
the solidarity created by a cultural stock of story plights and
story characters. 40 But 1 doubt it suffices. Let me explain.
lt is probably the case that hwnan beings forever suffer
confücts of interest, with attendant grudges, factions, coali-
tions, and shifting alliances. But what is interesting about
these fractious phenomena is not how much they separatc us
but how much more often they are neuttalized or forgiven or
excused. The primatologist Frans de Waal warns that etholo-
gists have tended to exaggerate the aggressiveness of primates
(including man) while undervaluing (and underobserving) the
myriad means by which these higher species keep peace. 4 t ln
human beings, with thcir astonishing narrative gift, one of the
principal forms of peacekeeping is the human gift for present-
ing, dramatizing, and explicating the mitigating circumstances
surrounding conflict-threatening breaches in the ordinariness
of life. The objective of such narrative is not to reconcile, not
to legitimize, not even to excuse, but rather to explicate. And
the explications offered in the ordinary telling of such narra-
tives are not always forgiving of the protagonist depicted.
95
Rather, it is the narrator who usuallv comes off best. But

however that may be, narrativizing makes the happening com-
prehensible against the back.ground of ordinariness we take as
the basic state of life-even if what has been made comprehen-
sible is no more lovable as a result. To be in a viable culture
is to be bound in a set of connecting stories, connecting even
though the stories may not represent a consensus.
When there is a breakdown in a culture (or even within a
microculture like the family) it can usually be traced to one of
several things. The first is a deep disagreement about what
constitutes the ordinary and canonical in life and what the
exceptional or divergent. And this we know in our time írom
what one might call the "battle of life-styles," exacerbated by
intergenerarional conflict. A second threat inheres in the rhe-
torical overspecialization of narrative, when stories become so
ideologically or self-servingly motivated that distrust displaces
interpretation, and "what happened" is discounted as fabrica-
tion. On the large scale, this is what happens under a totalitar-
ian regime, and contemporary novelists of Central Europe
have documented it with painful exquisiteness-Milan Kun-
dera, Danilo Kis, and many others. 42 The same phenomenon
expresses itself in modern bureaucracy, where all except the
official story of what is happening is silenced or stonewalled.
And finally, there is breakdown that results írom sheer impov-
erishment of narrative resources-in the permanent underclass
of the urban ghetto, in the second and third generation of
the Palestinian refugee compound, in the hunger-preoccupied
villages of semipermanently drought-stricken villages in sub-
Saharan Africa. It is not that there is a total loss in putting
story form to experience, but that the "worst scenario" story
96
comes so to dominate daily life that variation seems no longcr

to be possible.
1 hope this does not seem too far afield írom the detailed
analysis of early narrativizing with which thc bulk of this chap-
ter has becn concerned. 1 have wanted to mak.e it clear that
our capacity to render experience in terms of narrative is not
just child's play, but an instrument for mak.ing meaning that
dominates much of life in culture-from soWoquies at bed-
time to the weighing of testimony in our legal system. ln the
end, indecd, it is not so startling that Ronald Dworkin should
liken the process of lcgal interpretation to literary interpreta-
tion and that many students of jurisprudence have joined him
in this view. 43 Our sense of the normative is nourished in
narrative, but so is our sense of breach and of exception. Sto-
ries mak.e "reality" a mitigated reality. Children, l think, are
predisposed naturally and by circwrutance to start their narra-
tive careers in that spirit. And we equip them with models
and procedural tool kits for perfecting those skills. Without
those skills we could never endure the conflicts and contradic-
tions that social life generates. W e would become unfit for the
life of culture.
97
• CHAPTER FOUR •
Autobiography and Self
W HAT 1 SHOULD LIKE to do in this final chapter is to

illustrate what 1 have been calling "cultural psychol-
ogy." 1 want to do this by applying its way of thought to a
classically central concept in psychology. The concept 1 have
chosen for this exercise is "the Self''-as central, classical, and
intractable as any in our conceptual lexicon. Does a cultural
psychology shed any light on this difficult topic?
As a quaJia of "direct'' human experience, Self has a pecu-
liarly tortured history. Some of the theoretical trouble it has
generated, I suspect, can be attributed to the "essentialism"
that has often marked the quest for its elucidation, as if Self
were a substance or an essence that preexisted our effort to
describe it, as if all one had to do was to inspect it in order
to discover its nature. But the very notion of doing this is itself
suspect on many grounds. What finally led E. B. Titchener's
favorite intellectual son, Edwin G. Boring, to give up the
whole introspective enterprise was precisely this-that, as hc
taught us as graduate students, introspection is at best "early
retrospection," and subject to the same kinds of selectivity and
construction as any other kind of memory. 1 Introspection is
as subject to "top down" schematization as memory.
99
So what emerged as an alternative to the idea of a directly

observable Self was the notion of a conceptual Self, self as a
concept crcated by reflection, a conccpt constructed much as
we construct other concepts. But "self-realism" lingered on. 2
For the question now became whether the concept of Self thus
constructed was a true concept, whether it reflected the "real"
or essential self. PsychoanaJysis, of course, was a principaJ
essentialist sinner: its topography of ego, superego, and id
was the rea/. thing, and the method of psychoanalysis was the
electron microscope that laid it bare.
Ontological questions about the "conceptual Self" were
soon replaced by a more interesting set of concerns: By what
processes and in reference to what kinds of experience do
human beings fonnulate their own concept of Self, and what
kinds of Self do they fonnulate? Does "Self" comprise (as
William James had implied) an "extended" self incorporating
one's family, friends, possessions, and so on? 3 Or, as Hazel
Markus and Paula Nurius suggested, arc we a colony of Possi-
ble Selves, induding some that arc feared and some hoped
for, all crowding to take possession of a Now Self? 4
I suspect that there was also somcthing even morc pervasive
in the intellectual climate that led to the demisc of realism in
our view of the Self. It occurred during a half-century that had
also wimessed the comparable rise of antirealism in modem
physics, of skeptical perspectivalism in modem philosophy, of
constructivism in the social sciences, the proposal of "para-
digm shifts" in intellectual history. With metaphysics increas-
ingly out of fashion, epistemology became, as it were, its secu-
lar counterpart: so long as ontologicaJ ideas could be
converted into issues in thc nature of knowing, they were
100
• Autobiography and Self •
palatable. ln consequence, thc Essential Self gave way to thc

Conceprual Self with hardly a shot fired. 5
Freed of the shackles of ontological realis~ a new set of
concems about thc narure of Self began to emerge, rathcr
more "transactional„ concems. Is not Self a transactional rela-
tionship between a speaker and an Other, indeed, a General-
ized Other? 6 Is it not a way of framing one's consciousness,
one's position, one's identity, one's commitmcnt with rcspect
to another? Self, in this dispensation, becomes "dialogue de-
pendent,„ designed as much for the recipient of our discourse
as for intrapsychic purposes. 7 But these efforts at a cultural
psychology had a very limited effect on psychology in gencral.
1 think that what kept psychology from continuing to de-
velop steadily along thcse promising lines was its stubbom
antiphilosophical stance that kept it isolated from currents
of thought in its ncighboring disciplines in the human sci-
ences. Rathcr than finding common cause with our neighbors
in defining such central ideas as "mind" or "Self," wc in psy-
chology preferred to rely upon standardized research para-
digms to "define" our "own" concepts. We take these rescarch
paradigms to be the operations that define the concept we
are srudying-tests, experirnental procedures, and the like. ln
time, these methods become proprietary, as it were, and come
rigidly to define the phenomenon in qucstion: "Intelligence is
what intelligence tests measure." And so with the srudy of
Self: "it" is whatevcr is measured by tests of the self-concept.
So there has grown up a thriving testing industry built around
a set of narrowly defined self-concepts each with its own test,
and with a recent two-volume handbook given over more to
methodological complcxities than to substantive issucs. 8 Each
101
test crcates its own disconnccted modulc of rcsearch, each to

be ta.ken as an "aspect'' of some larger notion of Self that is
left unspecified.
Even thc bcst of this work has suffcrcd from being yoked
to its own testing paradigm. T ake, for example, the aspect of
Self embodied in studies of "levei of aspiration"-measured
by asking subjects to prcdict how well they would do on a
task after having succeeded or failed on a similar task on previ-
ous trials. Initially formulated by Kurt Lew~ the idea was at
least theoretically located in his system of thought. It gener-
ated much research, some of it quite interesting. 1 suspect it
died of its singular laboratory paradigm. It had becomc too
procedurally "hardened" to be broadened, say, into a general
theory of "self-csteem," and it was surely too insulatcd to be
incorporated into a morc general theory of Self. 9 Besidcs, it
grew without much of a mind for the broader conceptual
developments that were taking placc in the othcr human sci-
enccs-antipositivism, transactionalism, and emphasis upon
context.
This has changed now~r at least, it is in process of chang-
ing. But it will help us to appreciate this change, 1 think, to
track a comparablc changc in another germinal conccpt of
psychology, one that on the surfacc might scem quite separate
from the concept of self. It might serve to show how dcvelop-
ments within the broader intellectual community can eventu-
ally work their way even into those narrow channels in which
our standard experimental paradigms navigate. Let me take as
my exemplary casc the recent history of the concept of"leam-
ing" and try to show how evcntually it bccamc absorbed into
the broader culture of ideas, as it came to be redefined as the
study of "the acquisition of knowledge." lt contains fascinat-
102
ing little parallels (or are they counterparts?) to our topie of

Self.
One has to begin with "animal learning'' because that was
the paradigmatic amphitheater in which, for at least a halt:
century, the major embattled issues of leaming theory were
fought out. Within that sphere, contending theories built their
models of the learning process on particular paradigm proce-
dures for studying learning, even to the extent of devising
ones that met the specialized requirement of working with a
particular species. Clark Hull and his students, for example,
chose the multiple T-maze as their favored instrument. lt was
well-suited to the rat and to the measurement of the cumula-
tive effects of terminal reinforcement in reducing errors. Hul-
lian theory, in effect, was designed to accommodate the find-
ings generated by this research paradigm. ln spite of its
draconian behaviorism, "Yale learning theory" had even to
generate a mechanistic simulacrum of teleology to explain why
errors nearer to the end of the maze (where the reward was)
were eliminated sooner in learning. One lived with one's para-
digm! Edward Tolman, more cognitive and "purposivist" in
his approach, also used rats and mazes (almost as if to carry
the game into Hull's court), but he and his students favored
open-strip mazes in a rich visual envirorunent rather than the
closed-in alley mazes favored by Hull at Yale. The Californians
wanted their animals to have access to a wider range of cues,
especially spatial ones outside the maze. Tolman's theory, not
surprisingly, ended up likening learning to the construction
of a map, a "cognitive map" that represented the world of
possible "means-end relations." Hull's ended with a theory
that treated the cumularive effects of reinforcement in
"strengthening'' responses to stimuli. ln the language of those
103
times, Tolman's was a "map room" theory, Hull's a "switch-

board" theory. 10
Now obviously, research on anything will yield findings that
mirror its procedures for observing or measuring. Science al-
ways invents a conforming reality in just that way. When we
"confirm" our theory by "observations," we devise procedures
that will favor the theory's plausibility. Anyone who objects
can poach on our theory by devising variants of our very own
procedures to demonstrate exceptions and "disproofs." And
that was how the battles of teaming theory were fought. So,
for example, 1. Krechevsky could show that Yale behavior
theory had to be wrong by demonstrating that rats in T-mazes
were impelled by seemingly self-generated "hypotheses" of
many kinds, including right-rurning or left-turning ones, and
that reinforcements only worked for responses driven by
hypotheses that were in force at the time-which meant that
reinforcement was really only ''confirmation of a hypothesis."
But radical shifts rarely result from such infighting, though
the difference between a theory of response reinforcement and
a theory of hypothesis confirmation was by no means trivial.
ln retrospect, indeed, the battle over "hypothesis versus
chance reinforcement" might even seem like a precursor to the
cognitive revolution. But so long as the locus classicus of the
dispute was the rat maze, open strip or closed alley, it re-
mained a precursor without consequences.
ln the end, "learning theory" die~ or perhaps it would be
better to say it withered away, leaving behind principally
traces of technology. Boredom played its usual healthy role:
the debates became too specialized to be of much general
interest. But two historical movements were already in prog-
ress that, in a decade or two, would marginalize "classical"
104
teaming theory. One was the cognitive revotution, the other

transactionalism. The cognitive revolution simply absorbed
the concept oflearning into the broader concept of"the acqui-
sition of knowtedge." Even the efforts of teaming theory to
broaden its base by attempting to reduce theories of personal-
ity to its terms were brought to a halt-a matter that váll
concem us again later. Before that revolution, theories of per-
sonality had concentrated almost exclusively upon motivation,
affect, and their transformations-matters that seemed to be
within reach of leaming theory. Indeed, there was a period in
the l 940s when such "leaming theory translations became
almost a cottage industry." 11 But with the advent ofthe cogni-
tive revolution, emphasis in personality theory also shifted to
more cognitive matters-for example, what kinds of"personal
constructs" people used for making sense of their worlds and
ofthemselves. 12
But the second historical movement to which I alluded
above had not yet reached psychology-the new transactional
contextualism that was expressing itself in sociotogy and an-
thropology in such doctrines as "ethnomethodology" and the
other developments discussed in Chapter 2. It was the view
that human action could not be fully or properly accounted
for from the inside out-by reference only to intrapsychic
dispositions, traits, learning capacities, motives, or whatever.
Action required for its explication that it be situated, that it
be conceived of as continuous with a cultural world. The reali-
ties that people constructed were social realities, negotiated
with others, distributed between them. The social world in
which we lived was, so to speak, neither "in the head" nor
"out there" in some positivistic aboriginal form. And both
mind and the Self were part of that social world. If the cogni-
105
tive revolution cruptcd in l 956, thc comcxrual revolution (at

least in psychology) is occurring today.
Consider first how contextualism affects ideas about knowl-
cdge and how we acquirc it. As Ray Pea, David Perkins, and
others now put it, a "pcrson's" knowlcdgc is not just in one's
own head, in "person solo," but in the notes that one has
put into accessible notebooks, in the books with undcrlincd
passages on one's shelvcs, in thc handbooks onc has lcarncd
how to consult, in the information sources one has hitched
up to the computer, in the fricnds one can call up to get a
reference or a "steer," and so on almost endlessly. All of thcsc,
as Perkins points out, are parts of the knowlcdgc fiow of
which one has become a part. And that fiow even includes
thosc highly conventionalized forms of rhetoric that we use
for justifying and cxplaining what wc arc doing, each tailored
to and "scaffolded" by the occasion of use. Coming to know
anything, in this sense, is both situated and (to usc thc
Pea-Perkins term) distributed. 13 To overlook this siruated-
distributed nature of knowledge and knowing is to lose sight
not only of the culrural nature of knowledge but of the corre-
spondingly cultural nature of knowledge acquisition.
Ann Brown and Joscph Campionc add anothcr dimension
to this picture of distribution. Schools, they note, are thcm-
selves "communiries of lcarning or thinking" in which there
arc procedures, modcls, feedback channels, and the like that
detennine how, what, how much, and in what form a child
"leams." The word learns dcservcs its quotation marks, sincc
what the learning child is doing is participating in a kind of
cultural gcography that sustains and shapcs what hc or shc is
doing, and without which there would, as it were, be no learn-
ing. As David Pcrkins puts it at the end of his discussion,
106
perhaps the "proper person is better conceived . . . not as the

pure and enduring nucleus but [as] the sum and swarm of
participations." 14 At one stroke, the "leaming theories" of the
l 930s are put into a new distributive perspective. 15
The incoming tide was soon lapping around psychology's
quest for Self. 16 Is Self to be taken as an enduring, subjective
nucleus, or might it too be better conceived as ''distributed"?
ln fact, the "distributive" conception of Self was not that new
outside psychology: it had a long tradition in historical and
anthropological scholarship, that is, in the ancient tradition of
interpretive history and in the newer but growing tradition
of interpretivism in cultural anthropology. 1 have in mind, of
course, works lik.e Karl Joachim Weintraub's historical study
of individuality, The Value ofthe Individual, and E. R. Dodd's
classic The Greeks and the lrrational, and morc rccently, Mi-
chelle Rosaldo's anthropological study of "Self" among the
llongot and Fred Myers's of the Pintupi "Self." And one
should mention work addressing more particular historical
questions such as Brian Stock's query about whether the intro-
duction of "silent reading" might not have changed Western
conceptions of Self or the work of the French Annales school
on the history of private life. Later we shall be conccrned
with the monumental studies of the latter addressing thc deep
question of whether the "history of privacy " in thc Western
world might not also be considered an exercise in understand-
ing the emergence of the Western Self. 17 What all these works
have in common is the aim (and virtue) of locating Self not
in the fastness of immediate private consciousness but in a
cultural-historical situation as well. Nor, as already noted, are
contemporary social philosophers far behind in this regard.
For no sooner had they begun to question the previously
107
accepted hold of positivist verificationism on the social sci-

ences-the notion that there is an "objective" and free-
standing reality whose truth can be discovered by appropriate
methods-than it became clear that Self too must be treated
as a construction that, so to speak, proceeds from the outside
in as well as from the inside out, from culture to mind as well
as from mind to culture.
If not "verifiable" in the positivist psychologist's hard-nosed
sense, at least these frankly interpretive anthropological and
historical studies could be scrutinized far their plausibility.
And even so austere a guardian of the methodological purity
of psychology as Lee Cronbach reminds us that "Validity is
subjective rather than objective: the plausibility of the conclu-
sion is what cormts. And plausibility, to twist a clíché, lies in
the ear of the beholder." 18 Validity, in short, is an interpretive
concept, not an exercise in research design.
Let me sketch briefly how this new thrust seems to have
formd its way into mainstream contemporary conceptions of
the Self. I shall not be able to do full justice to it here, but 1
can say enough to indicate why (at least in my view) it marks
a new tum in what is meant by a cultural psychology, one 1
hope to be able to illustrate further in the second half of this
chapter.
The new view initially erupted as a protest against a spe-
cious objectivism both in social psychology and in the study
of personality. Kenneth Gergen was one of the earliest among
the social psychologists to sense how social psychology might
be changed by the adoption of an interpretivist, constructivist,
and "distributive" view of psychological phenomen~ and
some of his earliest work was directed specifically toward the
construction of Self. ln this work of two decades ago, he set
108
Autobiography and Self
out to show how people's self-esteem and their self-concept

changed in sheer reaction to the kinds of people they found
themselves among, and changed even morc in response to the
positive or negative remarks that people made to them. Even
if they were asked merely to play a particular public role in a
group, their self-image often changed ina fashion to be con-
gruent with that role. Indeed, in the presence of others who
were older or seen to be more powerful than they were, people
would report on "Self" in a quite different and diminished
way írom their manner of seeing themselves when in the prcs-
ence of younger or less-esteemed people. And interacting with
egotists led them to see themselves one way, with the self-
effacing, another. 19 ln the distributive sense, then, the Self can
be seen as a product of the situations in which it operates, the
"swarms of its participations," as Perkins puts it.
Gergen insisted, moreover, that these "results" could in no
way be generalized beyond the historical occasions in which
they were obtained. "None of these findings should be viewed
as trans-historically reliable. Each depended to a major extent
upon the investigator's knowledge of what conceptual shifts
were subject to alteration within a given historical context."20
But, he added, there are two generalities that need, nonethe-
less, to be taken into account in interpreting findings such as
these: both of them universals having to do with man's way
of oricnting toward culture and the past. The first is human
reftexiv#y, our capacity to turn around on the past and alter
the present in its light, or to alter the past in the light of the
present. Neither the past nor the present stays fixed in the
face of this reflexivity. The "immense repository" of our past
encounters may be rendered salient in different ways as we
review them reflexively, or may be changed by reconceptual-
109
ization. 21 The second universal is our "dazz.ling" intellectual

capacity to envision alternatives-to conceive of other ways of
being, of acting, of striving. So while it may be the case that
in some sense we arc "creatures of history," in another sense
we arc autonomous agents as well. The Self, then, lik.e any
other aspect of human nature, stands both as a guardian of
permanence and as a barometer responding to the local cul-
tural weather. The culture, as well, provides us with guides
and stratagems for finding a niche between stability and
change: it exhorts, forbids, lures, denies, rewards the commit-
ments that the Self undertakes. And the Self, using its capaci-
ties for reflection and for envisaging altematives, escapes or
embraces or reevaluates and reformulates what the culture has
on offcr. Any effort to undcrstand the nature and origins of
Self is, then, an interpretive effort akin to that used by a histo-
rian or an anthropologist trying to understand a "period" or
a "people." And ironically enough, once an official history or
anthropology has been proclaimed in a culture and enters
the public domain, that very fact alters the process of Self-
construction. Not surprisingly, the first of Gergen's essays to
catch the attention of his fellow social psychologists was enti-
tled "Social Psychology as History. " 22
Gergen-like Garfink.el, Schutz, and the others whose
"ethno-" programs in sociology and anthropology we encoun-
tered in Chapter 2-was initially interested in the "rules" by
which we construct and negotiate social realities. The ego or
Self was envisaged as some mix of decisionmaker, strategist,
and gamesman figuring its commitments, even induding the
commitment, to use Erving Goffinan's phrase, of how to pre-
sent Self to Others. This was an exceedingly calculating and
intellectual view of Self, and I think that it reflected some
110
of thc rationalism of the early cognitive revolution. 23 lt was

probably the rising revolt against verificationist epistemology
that freed social scientists to explore other ways of conceiving
of Self aside from looking at it as a reckoning agent governed
by logical rules. But that brings us to the next part of the
story.
By the late l 970s and early l 980s, the notion of Self as
a storyteller came on the scene-the Self telling stories that
included a delineation of Self as part of the story. 1 suspect
that literary theory and new theories of narrative cognition
provoked the shift. But this is not the place to examine that
interesting transition in the human sciences. 24 ln any case, it
was not long before narrative was at the center of the stage.
Donald Spence was surely (along with Roy Schafer, to
whom wc shall come prescntly) among the first on the scene. 25
Speaking írom within psychoanalysis, Spence addressed the
question of whether a patient in analysis recuvered the past
from memory in the sense in which an archaeologist digs up
artifacts of a buried civilization, or whether, rather, analysis
enabled onc to create a new narrative that, though it might be
only a screen memory or even a fiction, was still close enough
to the real thing to start a reconstructive process going. The
"truth" that mattered, so went his argument, was not the his-
torical truth but something he chose to call the na1Tative truth.
Such narrativc truth, screen memory or fiction though it
might be, succeeds if it fits the patient's "real" story, if it
somehow manages to capture within its code the patient's real
trouble. 26
For Spence, then, the ego (or Self) is cast in the role of a
storyteller, a constructor of narratives about a life. The ana-
lyst's task is to help the patient in the construction of this
111
narrative, a narrative with a Self at its center. There is an

unresolved difficulty in this account. For, according to Spence,
neither the analyst nor the analysand can know what the "real"
trouble is. ln his view it is "there" but "indescribable." "An
interpretation, we might say, provides a useful gloss on some-
thing that is, by definition, indescribable. "27 ln spite of this
lingering positivism (or possibly because of it), Spence's book
rcceived wide attention inside as well as outside psychoanalytic
circles. lt was widely interpreted to mean that the principal
task of psychoanalysis and of "ego functioning'' was the con-
struction of a life story that fit the patient's present circum-
stances, and never mind whether it was "archaeologically true
to memory" or not. Indeed, it was precisely in this spirit that
David Polonoff picked up the debate a few years later, at-
tempting to establish the claim that the "Self of a life" was a
product of our narrative rather than some fixed but hidden
"thing" that was its referent. The object of a self-narrative was
not its fit to some hidden "reality'' but its achievement of
"extcmal and intemal coherence, livability, and adequacy. '' Self-
deception was a failure to achieve this, not a failure to corre-
spond with an unspecifiable "reality."28
Roy Schafer took a more radical stance than Spence. For
he was concemed not only, as it were, with the substance or
content of constructed life-Selves, but also with their mode of
construction. He says, for example:
We are forever telling stories about ourselves. ln telling thesc
self-stories to othen we may, for most purposes, be said to be
perfonning straightforward narrative actions. ln saying that we
also tell them to ourselves, however, we are enclosing one story
within anothcr. This is the story that there is a self to tell
something to, a someone else serving as audience who is one-
112
self or one's self. When the stories we tell others about our-
selves concem these other selves of ours, when we say for exam-
ple "1 am not master of myself," we are again enclosing onc
story within another. On this view, the self is a telling. From
time to rime and from person to person this telling varies in the
dcgree to which it is unified, stable, and acceptable to informed
observers as reliable and valid. 29
He goes on to note that others are also rendered narratively,

so that our narrative about ourselves told to another is, in
effect, "doubly narrative." "As a project ín persona! develop-
ment, persona! analysis changes the leading questions that one
addresses to the tale of one's life and the lives of important
others." The challenge to analyst and analysand then becomes,
"let's see how we can retell it in a way that allows you to
understand the origins, meanings, and significance of your
present difficuJties and to do so in a way that mak.es change
conceivable and attainable." 30 And in the process, the analyst
and analysand concentrate not only on the content but on the
form of the narrative (Schafer calls it the "action" of the narra-
tive) in which the telling itself is treated as the object to be
described rather than being treated, so to speak., as a "transpar-
ent medium." The narrative's opaqueness, its circumstantial-
ity, its genre, are tak.en to be as important as or, in any case,
inseparable from its content. The analysand's Self, then, be-
comes not only a mak.er of tales, but one with a distinctive
style. And under the circumstances, the analyst, it would seem,
comes increasingly to serve in the role of helpful editor or
provisional amanuensis. ln any case, the analyst becomes com-
plicit in the constructional process. And so begins a process
through which a distributive Self is elaborated.
ln much the same spirit, psychologists began to ask whether
113
the wider circle of people about whom any person cares or in

whom he or she confides might also be complicit in our narra-
tives and our Self-constructions. Might not the complicit cir-
cle, then, be something like a "distributed Self," much as one's
notes and looking-up procedures become part of one's distrib-
uted knowledge. And just as knowledge thereby gets caught
in the net of culture, so too Self becomes enmeshed in a net
of others. lt is this distributive picture of Self that came to
prevail among "social constructionists" and "interpretive so-
cial scien tists. " 31
The "narrative turn" had some surprising effects. lt gave
new punch to already lively disclaimers about the universality
of the so-called Western conception of Selfhood, the view of
"the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated
motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of
awareness, emotion, judgment, and action, organized into a
distinctive whole and set contrastively against such other
wholes and against a social and natural background. " 32
Though Self-as-strategic-reckoner is a view that can, in some
fashion, make claim to universality by appealing to the univer-
sality of reason, universality is not so obvious when storytell-
ing is invoked. Stories are many and varied; reason is governed
by a compelling and single logic.
Once one takes a narrative view, one can ask why one story
rather than another. And just such questioning soon led to
the suspicion that "official" or "enforced" conceptions of Self
might be used to establish political or hegemonic control by
one group over another. E ven within Western culture, a bus-
tlingly active male view of Self may, in fact, marginalize
women by making their Selves seem inferior. Feminist critics
have written copiously in the last several years on the manner
114
in which women's autobiography has been marginalized by

the adoption of an all-male canon of autobiographical
writing. 33
Indeed, the "new" recognition that people narrativize their
experience of the world and of their own role in it has eYen
forced social scientists to reconsider how they use their princi-
pal instrument of rcsearch-the interview. The sociologist El-
liot Mishler reminds us that in most interviews we expect
respondents to answer our questions in the categorical form
required in formai exchanges rather than in the narratives of
natural conversation. We expect answers like "Meeting the
financial strains" in response to "What were the hardest times
early in your marriage?" As interviewers, we typically interrupt
our respondents when they break into stories, or in any case
we do not code the stories: they do not fit our conventional
catcgories. So the human Selves that emerge from our inter-
views become artificialized by our interviewing method.
Mishler illustrates the point with an interview where a respon-
dent tells vividly what "paying his debts on time" meant to
his self-esteem early in his marriage. He does so literally with-
out ever answering the question about "hardest times in his
marriage" at all. 34
Perhaps the current state of play is most succinctly put by
Donald Polkinghome ín his Narrative Knowing ami the Hu-
man Sciences. Speaking of Self, he rcmarks:
The tools being used by tbc human disciplines to gain access
to the self-concept arc, in gcneral, the traditional research im-
plcments designed for formai science to locate and measurc
objects and things . . . We achieve our persona! identities and
self-concept tbrough tbe use of tbc narrative configuration, and
make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an
115
expression of a single unfolding and dcvcloping story. We arc

in the middle of our stories and cannot be sure how thcy will
end; wc arc constantly having to rcvise the plot as new events
arc added to our lives. Self, then, is not a static thing or a
substance, but a configuring of persona! events into an histori-
cal unity which indudes not only what one has been but also
anticipations of what one will be. 35
11 So what then of a cultural psychology of the kind 1 have

been proposing? How would it go about posing the problem
of the Self? Surely, the new developments just recounted
would be congenial to it. It secms to me that a cultural psy-
chology imposes two closely related requirements on the study
of Self. One of them is that such studies must focus upon the
meanings in terms of \vhich Self is defined both by the individ-
ual and by the culture in which he or she participates. But
this does not suffice if we are to understand how a "Self" is
negotiated, for Self is not simply the resultant of contempla-
tive reflection. The second requirement, then, is to attend to
the practices in which "the meanings of Self" arc achieved and
put to use. These, in effect, provide us with a more ''distrib-
uted" view of Self.
Let me consider each of these. We have already considered
how individuals define their own Selves. By a cultur~s dcfini-
tion of Selfhood, part of my first rcquirement, 1 mean more
than what contemporary Others, as it were, take as their work-
ing definition of Selves in general and of a particular Self (as
in Gergen's interesting studies mentioned earlier). For there
is a historical dimension as well. If Gergen's Self is "Self from
the outside in," thc historical Self is "Self from the past to the
present." ln our own culture, for example, views of Self are
116
shaped and buttresscd by our Judeo-Christian theology and

by the new Hurnanism that emerged in the Renaissance. They
are shaped as well by a society, an economy, and a language,
aU of which have historical "realities" which, though opcn to
revision, have created a scaffold that supports our practices as
hurnan agents. Our very conception of Selfhood is configured
by the Iegal guarantees of its inviolability-as in habeas corpus
and the Fourth Amendment to the U .S. Constitution, which
carefully delineates our right to privacy. A cultural psychology
that failcd to takc such matters into account would be perpetu-
ating the antihistorical, anticultural bias that has created so
much of the difficulty in contemporary psychology. 36
Return now to the second criterion of a cultural psychol-
ogy-that it explorc not only meaning but its uses in practicc.
What could be meant by the "practice" of Self? 1n practice it
was common at universities during the troubled late Sixties,
for example, for studcnts to request leavc to go otf and live
for a tenn or a year in, say, a Vermont village or a cabin in
the Maine woods in order to "get away írom it all" so that
they could "find themselves." These beliefs, desires, or reasons
about Self and how to "find" it were as real to all involvcd as
the college regulations that thwarted them, as real too as the
psychic geography of those rcgions in which young people
then thought they could find the "isolation'' they sought. This
was Self in use, its "meaning in praxis.'' It was Self distributed
in action, in projects, in practice. You Jvent to somewhere to do
something with an anticipated golÚ in mind, something you
couldn't do elsewhere and be the same Self. Moreover, you
talked with others about it in a certain way. To be viable in
a cultural psychology, concepts ("Self" indudcd) must carry
specification about how they are to be used both in action
117
and in the discourse that surrounds action. If I may use a

literary example, it is like the young captain in Conrad's "The
Secret Sharer" who must test his sense of autonomy by sailing
his ship dangerously and skillfully close in off the dark and
looming rock of Koh-ring so that Leggatt, the Doppelganger
whom the captain has hidden on board though he knows he
was charged with the murder of a cowardly seaman on his
own ship, can slip overboard and escape ashore, "a free man,
a proud swimmer." 37 ln the end, it is not the young captain's
"autonomy" as a trait in isolation that mattcrs in understand-
ing his behavior, but how that sense of autonomy is narrati-
vized into his life. And just as 1 commented two chapters back
about the interpretive indeterminateness of Ibsen's three plays,
so there is no ontologically final interprctation possible of the
young captain's act. For there are no causes to be grasped
with certainty where the act of creating meaning is concemed,
only acts, expressions, and contexts to be interpreted. And
that brings us to the heart of the matter.
A cultural psychology is an interpretive psychology, in
much the sense that history and anthropology and linguistics
are interpretive disciplines. But that does not mean that it
need be unprincipled or without methods, even hard-nosed
ones. lt seeks out the rules that human beings bring to bear
in creating meanings in cultural contexts. These contexts arc
always contexts of practice: it is always necessary to ask what
people are doing or trying to do in that contcxt. This is not a
subtle point, that meaning grows out of use, but in spite
of its being frequently sloganized, its implications are often
unsuspected.
When is "Self" invoked, in what form, and to what end?
Most people, to take a general case, do not regard gravity as
118
acting on their Selves (save perhaps in extreme cases). But if

somebody else grabs them or pushes them or forcibly takes
their purse, they will feel their Selves to have been "violated„
and will invoke Self in their description of what happened.
Agentivity is involved, their own and somebody else's. lt is
much as I set it forth in the chapter on folk psychology. The
range of what people include as under the influence of their
own agentivity will, as we know írom studies of "locus of
control," vary írom person to person and, as we also know,
vary with one's felt position within the culture. 38 Moreover,
we feel some situations to be "impersonal," and in thosc situa-
tions we believe that our own Selves and the Selves of others
are not operative and not "legitimately'' invocable. To get a
genera/. notion of a particular "Self" in practice, we must sam-
ple its uses in a variety of contexts, culturally specifiable con-
texts.
ln pursuit of this aim, we obviously cannot track people
through life and observe or interrogate them each step of the
way. Even ifwe could, doing so would transform the meaning
of what thcy were up to. Ami, in any case, we would not
know how to put the bits and pieces together at the end of the
inquiry. One viable altemative is obvious-to do the inquiry
rctrospectively, through autobiography. And I do not mean an
autobiography in the sense of a "record" (for there is no such
thing). I mean, simply, an account of what one thinks one did
in what settings in what ways for what felt reasons. It will
incvitably be a narrative, as Polkinghorne remarked, and, to
pick up Schafer's point, its form will be as revealing as its
substance. It docs not matter whether the account conforms
to what othcrs might say who were witncsses, nor arc wc in
pursuit of such ontologically obscure issues as whether the
119
account is "self-deceptive" or "true." Our interest, rather, is

only in what the person thought he did, what he thought he
was doing it for, what kinds of plights he thought he was in,
and so on.
111 Let me demonstrate all too briefly how one can go

about such a srudy of Self with requisite interpretive rigor. 1
must begin somewhat autobiographically. Some years ago, my
colleagues and 1 became interested in the nature of narrative
as text and as mode of thought. Like others, we had concen-
trated on how people reproduced stories whose texts were
available for comparison. Eventually, and naturally, we be-
came interested in how people would tell stories on their own,
quite apart from what they had heard. Thinking that their
own lives might providc a good material for such telling, we
set out to collect a few spontaneous autobiographies. We let
each subject be guided by what Philippe Lejeune calls "a
rough draft, perpetually reshaped, of the story of his life," and
very soon we discovered that we were listening to people in
the act of constructing a longitudinal version of Self. 39 What
we were observing was by no means a "free" construction. It
was constrained by the events of a lifc, to be sure, but it was
also powerfully constrained by the demands of the story the
teller was in process of constructing. It was inevitably a story
of development, but the forms that it took (while recognizably
cultural in their form) were far more varied than we had ever
expectcd.
As stories of development, these "spontaneous autobiogra-
phies" were constituted of smaller stories (of events, happen-
ings, projects}, each of which achieved its significance by vir-
120
• Autobiography and Sdf •
ruc of being part of a largcr-scalc "lifr. ,, ln this rcspcct thcy

sharcd a uni\'crsal frarurc of all narrativcs. Thc largcr overall
narrativcs wcrc told in casily rccognizablc gcnrcs-thc talc of
a victim, a Bildungsroman, antihcro forms, W andertmlf storics,
black comcdy, and so cm. Thc storicd cvcnts that thcy com-
priscd madc scnsc only in tcrms of thc largcr picrurc. At thc
center of cach account dwellcd a protagonist Self in proccss
of constnICtion: \vhcthcr acti\·c agcnt, passivc cxpcricnccr, or
vchiclc of somc ill-dcfincd dcstiny. And at critical juncrurcs,
"rurning points" cmcrgcd, again culrurally rccognizablc, pro-
duccd almost invariablv bv an acccss of ncw consciousncss
arouscd by \'ictory or ddcat, by bctrayal of trust, and so on.
lt soon bccamc apparcnt not only that lifc imitatcd art but
thar it did so by choosing art's gcnrcs and its othcr dcviccs of
storytclling as its modcs of cxprcssion.
Thcrc is somcthing curious about autobiography. It is an
account gi\'cn by a narrator in thc here and now about a
protagonist bcaring his namc who cxistcd in thc thcrc and
thcn, thc story tcrminating in thc prcscnt when thc protago-
nist fuscs with thc narrator. Thc narrativc cpisodcs that com-
posc thc lifc story arc typically Labovian in strucrurc, with
strict adhcrcncc to scqucncc and to justification by cxccption-
ality. But thc largcr story rcvcals a strong rhctorical strand, as
if justifying why it was ncccssary (not causally, but morally,
socially, psychologically) that thc lifc had gonc a particular
way. Thc Self as narrator not only rccounts but justifics. And
thc Self as protagonist is always, as it wcrc, pointing to thc
fururc. Whcn somcbody says, as if summing up a childhood,
"I was a prctty rcbellious kid," it can usually be takcn as a
prophccy as much as a summa~'·
Thcrc is an cnormous amount of work going on here and
12 l
now as the story is being put together. Not surprising, then,

that in the dozens of autobiographies we have collected and
analyzed, between a third and a half of the "nuclear proposi-
tions" are in the present tense-the narrator not telling about
the past, which is almost always told in the past tense, but
deciding what to make of the past narratively at the moment
of telling.
The presuppositions that we lace into the telling of our lives
are deep and virtually limitless. They are in every line: "modest
childhood," "dreamy kid," and so on. And why things are
included remains mostly implicit, the unspoken pact in force
being that you, the mostly listening interviewer, will figure
that out for yourself. And if you should ask that reasons be
made explicit, your question will surely steer the account in
a direction that it would have not taken otherwise. For the
interviewer becomes part of that "swarm of participations"
that distributes Self across its occasions of use.
This dense undcrgrowth of presupposition in autobiogra-
phy made our task difficult, but in reaction we hit upon a few
happy defcnsive ideas. The best of them was to concentrate
upon membcrs of the same family. That way we would have
a better sense of what it meant when one membcr said "We
were a close family." But that pragmatic decision brought
other gifts that we could never have foreseen. A family, after
all, is (as writers on the subject are fond of putting it) the
vicar of the culture and, as well, a microcosm of it. So rather
than continuing to collect autobiographies from isolated indi-
viduals, we decided to concentrate on si.x members of the same
family. What started as a matter of convenience ended as a
principle of research.
And so the Goodhertzes: mother and father in their early
122
sixties with two grown sons and two grown daughters. We

interviewed them individually and independently about their
lives, spent a year doing a prelirninary analysis of their individ-
ual autobiographies, and then brought them back together as
a family for a "discussion session," lasting more than three
hours, to talk about ''what it's like growing up a Goodhertz."
Fortunately, we videotaped that session, for families without
their gestures and some indication of whom they are looking
at are like sunsets without color.
We also thought we could dig out presuppositions buried
in the life stories by a close study of the language used in
them. A narrative, after all, is not just a plot, a fabula, but a
way of telling, a sjuzet. So we analyzed the discourse itself,
finding the revealing words, the signature expressions, the tell-
tale grammatical forms. And we counted deontic and episte-
mic modals to see how much each member of the family
leaned on contingency and necessity in putting structure into
their accounts. We examined the contexts of use of menta!
verbs to enrich our picture of Goodhertz subjectivity. Fortu-
nately, counts and specific searches can easily be done by com-
puter. But hints about how to interpret them are something
else again. There, our best guide was literary and discourse
linguistics.
IV Our interviewing procedure was informal, and dc-

signed to encourage meaning-making by narrative recounting
rather than the more categorical responses one obtains in stan-
dard interviews. We explained at the start of each interview
that we were interested in spontaneous autobiography and in
how people go about telling their lives, in their own ways. 40
123
We-my colleague Susan Weisser, a professor ofEnglish liter-

ature, and 1-made known our longtime interest in the topic
and made plain that we were not interested in making judg-
ments or in doing therapy, that we were interested in "lives."
Then Dr. Weisser conducted each interview in her office on
her own over a period of several months.
Despite the epistemological burdens that modem theorists
of autobiography have discussed over the last fifteen years,
ordinary people, or even extraordinary ones, once into the
task, have little difficulty with telling their stories. No doubt
the stories we heard were designed in some measure for our
interest in how people tell about their lives. Nor were we
under any illusion that an interviewer could be neutral during
the interviews: Dr. Wcisser laughed when something funny
was told, responded appropriately to events recounted with
the usual "hmms" and "Goodness me's " and even asked for
'
darification when something said was genuinely undear to
her. For her to have done otherwise would surely have vio-
lated thc rules of ordinary dialogue. Dr. Weisser is a woman
in her forties, warm and informally friendly, quite evidently
fascinated both personally and professionally by "lives," and
she acted in character. Our subjects obviously responded ina
fashion that reflected her "appreciative" style and, no doubt,
would have reacted differently to an interviewer who was, say,
more "formai" or whose persona was different in some other
way or, simply, who was a man rather than a woman. Indeed,
an elaborate research study can (and should) be generated
around issucs of this order, but we decided that such a project
was not an appropriate one for a first venture. Obviously,
"the-story-of-a-life" as told to a particular person is in some
deep sense a joint product of the teller and the told. Selves,
124
whatever metaphysical stand one takes about the "reality," can

only be revealed in a transaction between a teller and a told,
and as Mishler reminds us, whatever topíc one approaches by
interviewing must be evaluated in the light of that transac-
tion. 41 That much said, all that one can counsel is the exercise
of a certain interpretive caution.
We made up a list of a dozen "prompt questions" to ask
when subjects had come to the end of their first spontaneous
account, from a quarter-hour to an hour into the inter-
view-questions always put in the same order. They ranged
from initially very open-ended ones, lik.e "How would you say
your parents regarded you as a child?" to such later prompting
queries as ''Was there anything in your life that you would
say was quite untypical of you?" or "If you had to describe
your life as a novel or a play or a story, what would you say
it was most like?" The interviews lasted from an hour to nearly
two hours and were, of course, recorded. Ali six of the Good-
hertzes, in one context or another, later remarked spontane-
ously that they had enjoyed the interview and/or that they had
found it personally very informative. Several said that they
had been quite surprised by what came out. This last, by the
way, is very common in autobiographical interviewing and
speaks in an interesting way to the constructional nature of
"telling about your life."
As for the "family session," 1 began it by tclling them we
had been studying their autobiographies and were now fasci-
nated to hear their views of what it was likc to grow up a
Goodhertz. The session went on for threc hours without there
being any occasion for us to introduce any of the prompts
that we had cautiously designed just in case. lt was still going
strong when we ended it, having decided in advance that three
125
hours was enough. We met around a seminar table, with cof-

fee and refreshments available. It was not an interview, though
certainly the Goodhertzes were always aware of our presence
and in some sense speaking to us even if they seemed to be
addressing their comrnents to one another as often as to us.
Indeed there were times when we, the investigators, seemed
to be ignored altogether.
We knew that they were a "close" family who boasted of
their freedom to "discuss anything and everything'' as a family.
And they were sufficiently unselfconscious that their conversa-
tion around the table even took some confrontational turns,
particularly on intergenerational issues. At one point, Debby,
the youngest daughter, in her mid-twenties but still consid-
ercd "thc baby of thc family ," attacked her parents as "racist,"
for their attitudes toward a Black former boyfriend. Her
mother replied that if God had intended for the races to mix,
He would not have made them in different colors. Lik.e any-
body invested in keeping an atmosphere congenial I took ad-
vantage of the pause that ensued to announce that a new pot
of coffee had arrived. I realized only later that 1 was "behaving
family." For as Clifford Geertz had counseled me when we
were starting, families are systems for keeping people from
being pulled centrifugally by inevitably conflicting interests,
and this family had two techniques for doing so. Onc was by
adroit interpersonal management: joking, diversion, and the
rest-as in my "coffce" announcement. The other was by fall-
ing into and playing established family roles, even to the use
of canonical family stories that serve to highlight those roles.
Every family has a store of these, and this one uses them
deftly, as we shall see presently.
126
V Let me give you a very quick sketch of the Goodhertz

family, enough so that what follows will be comprehensible.
George Goodhertz heads the family: a self-made man in his
sixties, a beating contractor dedicated to work but just as
proud of his role as a trusted man in the community to whom
friends tum in trouble, whether for advice or for small loans.
His father, by his testimony, was "a drinker" and a poor pro-
vider, and when he deserted the family, George was taken into
a parochial school without fees. He tells us that he became a
favorite of the nuns, who responded to his eagerness to help
around the placc. He became a Catholic, the family before
then having had only a vague Protestant connection. He says
he is no longer a believer, though he is keenly conscious of
the moral obligations he learned in the church and tries to
live by them. He is a reflective man, though he never finished
high school, and the language of his autobiography contains
a high density of words or phrases differentiating what "seems
to be" írom what "is." He is effective and self-contained, but
worries that he has missed intimacy in his life. By falsifying
his birthday, he joined the army underage, and left five years
later, still under twenty-five, as a master sergeant. But he does
not think of himself in any sense as a tough guy, though he's
convinced you have to be "street smart" to make out in this
world.
Rose, his wife, is a second-generation ltalian-American,
very family oriented, much involved with old friends in the
Brooklyn neighborhood where they've lived for thirty years,
"a Catholic and a Democrat." Like her husband, she is the
child of a father who, in her words, was "of the old school":
127
a boaster, a drinker, a poor provider, and unfaithful. The two

of them, husband and wife, share a dedication to giving their
children a better life than they themselves had. She enjoys her
reputation in the family as stubbom. When the children were
grown she "went back to work"-bookkeeper for her hus-
band, but for pay. Not as reflective as her husband, she has a
strong belief in fate, a fate that can be influenced by one's own
efforts, as in "with the help of fate, I raised my children so
that none of them was ever on drugs." The transcript of her
autobiographical interview is full of the language of indicative
realism, and low in efforts to "interpret meaning." "Is" takes
pride of place over "seems."
The eldest child, Carl, active in the Catholic Peace Move-
ment as a high school student, is the first in the family to have
gone to college-to a Catholic college, upon graduation from
which he went on to take his Ph.D. in sensory physiology
from a decidedly secular university "out of town." He is re-
flective, sequential, and didactic in his autobiographical ac-
count, the spirit of it caught by such expressions as "had 1
known then what 1 know now." Aware of how far he has
gone beyond the family in his education, he still keeps close
contact with them. But he says toward the end of his autobi-
ography, Icarus-like and only half self-mocking, "What's a
boy from Brooklyn doing way up here?" He believes in his
"specialness," a specialness that allows him to see through cant
and hypocrisy and to go his own way. He is the natural ally
of his sister Debby, the least linear, and most spontaneous
in the family. He is unmarried in his latter thirties, lives in
Manhattan where he works at a research job, but is usually
home for Sunday dinners in Brooklyn.
Nina is the next in line. An obedient, fat child by her testi-
128
mony, she says she became more rebellious when her fathcr
disapproved of her lively dressing and outgoingness. "I was
supposed to wear blacks and browns and be quiet." She soon
married a man who became alcoholic, had a daughter by him,
separated, and moved back home. Then she discovered entre-
preneurship, successfully selling homemade chocolates to local
stores. Her life changed, she tells us. Armed with a new con-
fidence, she got a job marketing a telephone answering service,
soon after got into her own service, and is now doing very
well. Asked at the end of her autobiographical interview what
she would most like out of life, she answered laughingly,
"More." Nina laughs easily, and uses her laughter to help her
parents and siblings over tense places. Her laughing effort
at reconciliation can be overheard in the background during
Debby's confrontation with her parents over racism. Whethcr
feigned or genuine, self-mockery is one of her ways of endear-
ing herself to her family. At the time of the family session she
had been remarried and divorced again in the year since we
had seen her, and she announced this to us in her "jolly large
woman" self-mocking way with, "1 guess marriage is my
hobby now." For all her entrepreneurship, she is very strongly
identified with her family and her daughter and sees herself as
in her mother's mold.
Harry is the bad-luck story in the family. He tried hardest
to please, but was plainly not a happy child. He over-ate so
excessively as a small child that, as told in one of those canoni-
cal family stories, his mother put a DO NOT FEED sign around
his neck when he went out into the neighborhood. Harry's
autobiographical narrative is somehow dysphasic. He is poor
at prescrving the order of events, his intentions come across
unclearly, and he is confusingly exophoric in reference in the
129
sense that the text does not always reveal what he is referring
to. He married a local girl when he was quite young, and to
make her feel more "at home" he encouraged her to see her old
friends, including an old boyfriend, and this caused trouble. ln
time, she "stole" the money he had collected from his bowling
club. He "roughed her up" for that, he tells us. They had a
child, divorced shortly after, and it is not clear from his report
how she managed to do hím out of visitation rights. ln any
case, while under all this sttess, he blew up at a customer while
on his city job and was dismissed or suspended. When he told
us his story, he was involved in two lawsuits: one to get the
right to visit his son, the other to get his job back. Life was on
hold. His account had the largest proportion of incomplete,
nonparsable sentences of any of them, and the least strucrured
narrative. ln a most touching way, both in interviews and in
the family session, there was real deference and caring for
Harry. "I think he's the nicest one of all of us," his mother
said.
Debby had the induJged child.h~ she said, of the young-
est in the fanúly-youngest by several years. She had many
friends in the neighborhoo~ was much liked, and then went
to a local college where she hated the anonymity. Personalness
is what she cares most about, personalness but not of a kind
that gets you stuck in the old routines of the neighbor-
hood-"just getting married and ending up cooped up by
four walls with four kids." She wants "experience," wants to
know the world. Her ideal is "spontaneity'' and "lightness."
She has chosen to go into acting and is now in drama school.
Working on new roles, she says, is what excites her. Her auto-
biography is a succession of vividly described impressions, put
130
together as a set of variations on the themes of experience,

intimacy, and spontaneity. ln what one reader of her account
called her "postmodem style," she is as orderly as Carl in the
sense of relating themes to one another, but while his is a
causal, linear account, hers is a metaphorically linked flow of
themes, blending one into the other. Causal expressions arc
relatively rare, but their lack is made up for by a vividness and
concreteness of evocative detail. She is accepted in the family
for what she is: warm, spontaneous, loyal to her family, but
deficient in "street smarts." Shc cares about being an actress,
but her ambition seems more persona! than worldly.
Every face-to-face culture has its occasions of "joint atten-
tion" where members come together to "catch up" on the state
of things, to recalibrate their feelings toward one another, and,
as it were, to reaffirm the canon. Families arc no cxccption:
Thanksgiving or Christmas dinners, Passover Seders, wed-
dings, and so on. The Goodhertzes' "closeness," they felt, was
based on having meals together often. They lived within easy
reach of one another (save for Carl) and "sat around the table
together," to use their phrase, at least once a week. They
boasted that nothing was barred around that table. And they
had been sitting around it since the children were small. There
was also an unwritten rule that you could return home in
trouble and reclaim your old room. N ina retumed there with
her daughter after her divorces; so did Harry after his unhappy
breakup. At the time of her autobiographical interview,
Debby was still living there. When later she moved out to be
nearer her drama school in another part of Brooklyn, her sister
teased her good-naturedly about bringing her laundry back
home for washing.
131
VI Let me now return to the issue that I initially set out

to address: the shaping and distribution of Self in the practices
of a family, with the family acting as the vicar of the cuJture.
I shall onlv be able to deal with one theme-the distinction
"
that all the Goodhertzes make between public and private, a
cultural distinction that finds its way from the outside society
into a family's ideology and is finally embodied in the Selves
of its members. My object is not so much to "report" findings
as to give a sense of how research can be conducted in the
spirit of cultural psychology.
As you will doubtless have gathered, the contrast between
"home" and (to use Goodhertz language) "the real world" is
central to this family and to each member of it. Of the
"themes" discussed in both the autobiographies and the family
session, tb.is is the dominant one. It leads in frequency of
mention, it is entailed most often in the resolution of imbal-
ances in the Burkean pentad that comprise the "stories" they
tell, and it is the issue most likely to create what in an earlier
chapter I referred to as "Trouble" with a capital T. It is also
the theme that generates the highest frequency of deontic
propositions-statements about what should be, what can be
counted upon, what one is obliged to rak.e into account.
The distinction has taken many forms in different eras. Its
expression in this family is a contemporary expression. For
the Goodhertz autobiographical texts are, as it were, as much
historical and sociological documents as they are persona!
ones. Indeed, this family's "persona!" history even reflects in
some profound way the history of immigration in America-
of immigrants from Italy to America on one side of the family,
and from upstate to the city on the other. George and Rose
132
Goodhertz both lived through childhoods that, ín their own

words, were marred by near-poverty and its mean conse-
quences. Both were so eager to guard their children from such
a childhood that, without íntending to do so, they exaggerated
the contrast between "home" and "real world" to a poínt
where it created tension for the childrcn-tension about "safe
versus dangerous" and about "boring versus exciting." Both
parents stressed that their deepest wish was to "spare" their
children a childhood like theirs.
But there is also a sociological truth of the matter, where
the distinction is concemed. Contemporary New Yorkers see
and ttdk about their city as crime-ridden, drug-ridden, notably
íncivil, exploitative, an~ at the same time, exciting and inno-
vative. The very expression "street smarts" is New Yorkese,
an ínvitation to distinguish between public and private in a
particular way. It expresses both history and sociology, as well
as índividual psychology. Cultural psychology, obviously, is
not bent on "confusíng'' the different levels of analysis repre-
sented by these three fields, each with its necessarily different
data bases. Yet one of its principal aims is to explore the
manner in which each provides a context for the others.
"Home" for the Goodhertzes is intimacy, trust, mutual aid,
forgiveness, openness. It is a prescription for commitment, a
way of relating to others, a mode of discourse, even a kind of
affect. As one would expect, it is also embodied ín emblematic
stories that family members tell about "the family," narratives
that illustrate symbolic plights and symbolic resolutions (or
amusing nonresolutions). Each member has his or her own
stories to teli. Debby, for example, specializes ín ones about
helplessness, even "dwnb animal helplessness," as unlocking
Goodhertz family sympathy. There is "her'' story of the wíng-
133
broke seagull, alighting helplessly in the Goodhertz yard,

whose exaggerated pampering by the family until he dies is
told years after as an absurdist exaggeration of what "soft
touches" they all are. She told it at the family meeting; they
all embroidered. Or there is her autobiographical account of
the chicken fallen írom a truck on the Brooklyn-Queens Ex-
pressway, with a narrative twist symbolizing her grownup alle-
giance to the same ideal. Her friend refuses to stop the car for
her to rescue it: "We'll all be killed." She fumes: the "real
world," the horrendous BQE, has canceled human kind.ness.
Carl's "real world" is more deliberate in its cruelty and hy-
pocrisy, more corrupt than Debby's. He is told by the high
school football coach to "get" an opposing end, "get him out
of the gamc. „ Hc quits the team altogether-quietly and with
no fanfare. He adjusts to his version of the "real world" by
6.nding like-minded, sympathetic endaves in it-the Catholic
Peace Movement, a settlement house where he gave his free
time as a college student. ln graduate school, rather than be
put off by "cutthroat competition," and "faculty separateness,"
he tries to get things so that "we can all sit down and talk
about things like equals"-the key metaphor of the family at
home. ln his stories, "standing up" to the pressures requires
something special. "We're a moral family," he announced at
the family session, quite out of the blue.
Each has his or her own narrative version of the confiict,
even the reserved Mr. Goodhertz recounting his tale of inti-
macy thwarted by his demands for trustworthiness and confi-
dentiality from friends. Or another confrontation at the family
session, one plainly on the way to becoming a "story." Debby
blasts her father for not having shown more sympathy when,
some months before, she told him on the phone of the death
134
of a friend. He says, "Look, l really didn't know her. ln this

world you can't be tom apart by everything." He knows he
is treading perilously close to the bristling frontier between
fatherly intimacy and rea1-world street smarts. After a11, as a
hard-hat true-blue patriot and former master sergeant, he gave
Carl his blessing as a Vietnam draft evader. And Debby keeps
returning to the theme of "losing herself," by which she means
getting overly involved in her career.
All of which is not to say that the Goodhertzes have given
up ambitions in the "rea1 world." They have not. But to a
striking degree, their feelings of self-legitimacy derive not
from "succeeding out there" but from their identification with
and participation in the "home" world of trust and intimacy.
And in this sense, this family surely mirrors what many writers
refer to as the contemporary "privatization" of meaning and
of Self. ln the family sessions as in the autobiographies, there
is little question that, as they depict it, the "rea1 Self" is not
the "outside persona" but the feelings and beliefs attached to
the values of privacy, intimacy, mutua1 exchange. The Good-
hertz Selves, ifi may use an emblematic metaphor, are distrib-
uted around that famous dinner table. When Dr. Weisscr and
l were vaguely invited by Mrs. Goodhertz to have an Italian
dinner with them at home, we took it for the semiotic act that
it was: we had become rea1 pcople too, resident selves of the
world that is "home."
The prime structure of Self in each of the Goodhertzes is
just this division between the legitimizing "rea1 Self" and the
instrumenta1 "street-smart'' Self that protects them from the
"rea1 world." The two are in an uneasy balance with each
other. A story from Carl's autobiography provides a poignant
illustration. ln California for the summer, he meets a girl with
135
whom he has an affair. "A lorus eater" is how he describes

her. She tells him one evcning, chatting in bed, to stop driving
himself so hard. Next morning carly he gets up, gathers his
things, takes the first plane back to New York-all before she
wakens. 1t is not dolce far niente that he wants, but the com-
forting discomfon of living with his self-defining conflict.
Vll Now we must return to a historical perspective. We

forget at our peril as psychologists that, as recently as the
eighteenth cenrury, the private domain was not so real, not
so self-defining, not so stabilizing as the public world of work
and power. As the English historian Keith Thomas reminds
us in his thoughtful review of the third volume of the AnnaJ.es
school's A History of Private Lift:
ln later pcriods of European history, privacy was equated with
sccrecy, conccalment, and a shamcful desire to shclter from the
gazc of the conununity. As one sevcnteenth-century prcacher
put it, "The murdcrcr and thc adultcrcr arc alike dcsirous of
privacy." ln the cighteenth ccntury Dcnis Diderot saw thc pro-
liferation of fumiture containing secret compartments as a sign
ofthc agc's mora! dctcrioration ... For Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
a society with no privacy would be a society with no vice.•2
The lives and Selves we have been exploring arc, to be sure,
shaped by intrapsychic forces operating in the here and now.
The distinction that they share, the sharp difference between
Home and thc Real World, is their distinction, and they have
appropriated it into their own lives. lt is in every sense vi-
brantly contempora1y. But to let the matter rest at that is to
rob the Goodhertzes of history and to impoverish our own
understanding of their lives and their plight. For individually
136
and as a family they are, always have been, and can never
escape being expressions of social and historical forces. What-
ever constituted those "forces," whatever view one may tak.e
of historical forces, they were converted into human mean-
ings, into language, into narraáves, and found their way into
the minds of men and women. ln the end, it was this conver-
sion process that created folk psychology and the experienced
world of culture.
A cultural psychology tak.es these matters as its domain. lt
does not do so, as 1 have been at pains to repeat morc than a
few times, by ruling out or by denying the existence ofbiolog-
ical limits and physical and even economic necessiáes. On the
other hand, it insists that the "methodology of causation" can
neither capture the social and persona! richness of lives in a
culture nor begin to plumb their historical depth. lt is only
through the application of interpretation that we, as psycholo-
gists, can do justice to the world of culture.
Vili Let me draw these four chapters to a condusion.

1 began by decrying the C.Ogniáve Revoluáon for abandoning
"mcaning-mak.ing" as its central concem, opting for "informa-
áon processing'' and computation instead. ln the second chap-
ter 1 urged that we tak.e into account in our studies of the
hwnan condition what 1 called "folk psychology," the cultur-
ally shaped notions in terms of which people organize their
vicws of thcmselvcs, of othcrs, and of thc world in which they
live. Folk psychology, 1 insisted, is an essential base not only
of persona! meaning but of cultural cohesion. For it is in
support of its tenets that we create our institutions, with folk
psychology changing, in its tum, in response to insátuáonal
137
Notes
Index
Notes
1. The Proper Study of Man

l. Howard Gardner, The Mind's New Science: A History ofthe Cog-
nitive Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985). Earl Hunt,
"Cognitive Science: Definition, Status, and Questions," Annual
Review of Psychology 40 (1989):60~29.
2. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Stuart E. Dreyfus, with Tom Athana-
sio~ Mind over Machine: The Power of Human Intuition and
Fxpertise in the Era of the Computer (New York: Free Press,
1986). Terry Winograd, Understanding Computm and Cogni-
tion: A New Foundation far Design (Reading, Mass.: Addison-
Wesley, 1987).
3. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation ofCultures (New York: Basic
Books, 1973). Clifford Geertz, Local Know/edge: Further Essays
in Intepretive Anthropowgy (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chi-
cago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). John R. Searlc, In-
tentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy ofMind (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1983). Nelson Goodman, OfMindand
Other Mattm (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1984). Wolfgang Iser, The Act ofReading: A Theory ofAesthetic
Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
Kenneth J. Gergen, Toward Transfarmation in Social Knowledge
141
• Notes to Pages 2-8 •
(New York: Springer-Verlag, 1982). Kenneth J. Gergen and

Keith E. Davis, The Social ConstruaWn ofthe Pmon (New York:
Springer-Verlag, 1985). Donald P. Spcnce, Narrative Truth
ami Historiaú Truth: Meaning and lnterpretation in PsychORmdy-
sis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982). Donald E. Polkinghome,
Narrative Krwwing and the Human Sciences (Albany: SUNY
Press, 1988).
4. Edward C. Tolman, "Cognitive Maps in Rats and Men," Psycho-
IDgical Review 55 (1948):189-208. Tolman, Purposive Behavior
in Animals and Men (New York: Century, 1932).
5. Annual Repom of the Harvard Univmity Center for Cognitive
Studies (Cambridge, Mass., 1961-1969).
6. George A. Miller, persona! communication.
7. See, for example, Roy Lachman, Janet L. Lachman, and Earl
C. Butterfiel~ Cognitive Psychology and Information Processing:
An Introduction (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associatcs,
1979).
8. Herbert A. Simon, The Sciences of the Artificial, 2nd ed. (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).
9. Daniel C. Dennett, "Evolution of Consciousness," The Jacob-
sen Lecture, University of London, May 13, 1988; Alan M.
Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence," Mind 59
( 1950) :433-460.
10. Compare Noam Chomsky, Language and the Problems ofKnowl-
edge: The Managua Lectures (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1988), with David E. Rumelhart, James L. McClclland, and
the PDP Rcsearch Group, Parallel Distributed Processing: ExplD-
rations in the Microstructure of CognitWn, vol. 1: Foundations
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986). James L. McClelland,
David E. Rumelhart, and the PDP Research Group, Parallel
Distributed Processing: ExplDrations in the Microstructure ofCogni-
tion, vol. 2: Psychologiaú ami BiolDgiaú Mode/s (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).
142
11. Stephen P. Stich, From Folk Psychowgy to Cognitive Science: The

Case against Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).
12. Daniel C. Dennett, The Intentiomú Stance (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1987).
13. Paul M. Churchland, "The Ontological Status of lntentional
States: Nailing Folk Psychology to Its Porch," BehaviDrRl and
Brain Sciences 11 (1988):507-508.
14. Jerry A. Fodor, The Language ofThought (New York: Crowell,
1975). Fodor, Psychosmumtics: The Problem of Meaning in the
Philosophy ofMind (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987).
15. Dcnnett, I ntentionlll Stance.
16. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989). And see note 3 above.
17. Lev S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge, Mass.:
MIT Press, 1962).
18. Geertz, Interpretation of Cultures, p. 49.
19. Ibid.
20. John L. Austin, "A Plea for Excuses," in Austin, Philosophicai
Papers, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 175-204.
21. Thomas Nagel, The View from Nuwhere (New York: Oxford
U niversi ty Press, 1986).
22. Richard Rorty, PhiJosophy and the Mirror ofNature (Princeton:
Princeton U niversi ty Press, 1979).
23. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation,
trans. Denis Savage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
24. Richard E. Nisbett and Lee Ross, Human lnference: Strategies
and Shortcomings of Socúú ]udgment (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.:
Prentice-Hall, 1980).
25. Daniel Kahnemann, Paul Slovic, and Amos Tversky, ]udgment
under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1982). Jerome S. Bruner, Jacqueline J. Good-
now, and George A. Austin, A Study ofThinking (New York:
John Wiley and Sons, 1956).
143
26. John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Wordf (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1962).
27. For a particularly searching and well-informed view of this samc
terrain, see Michael Cole, "Cultural Psychology," ín Nebraska
Symposium: 1989 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, forth-
coming).
28. G. A. Miller, "The Magical Nurnber Seven, Pius or Minus Two:
Some Limits on Our Capacity for Proccssing Information,"
Psycho/ogica/, R.eview 63 ( 1956): 81-97.
29. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of
the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
30. Hans Peter Rickman, Wilhelm Düthey: Pioneer of the Human
Studies (Berkeley: University of Califomia Prcss, 1979). Wil-
helm Dilthey, Descri.ptive Psychology and Historica/, Understanding
( 1911 ), trans. Richard M. Zancr and Kcnncth L. Hcigcs (Thc
Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).
31. See Goodman, Of Mind and Other Mattm, for a wcll-argued
statement of thc philosophical foundations of this position.
32. Carol Fleishcr Feldman, "Thought from Language: The Lin-
guistic Construction of Cognitive Representations," in Jerome
Bruner and Hden Haste, eds., Making Sense: The Chüd's Con-
struaion of the World (London: Methuen, 1987).
33. Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism: Essays, 1972-1980
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).
34. Richard Rorty, "Pragmatism, Relativism, and Irrationalism," in
Consequences of Pragmatism. Quotations írom p. 162ff.
35. Howard Gardner, Frames ofMind: The Theory ofMultiple Intelli-
gences (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
36. James Clifford, The Predicammt of Culture: Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
U niversity Press, 1988).
37. See, for examplc, Sandor Ferenczi, Thalassa: A Theory ofGenita/,-
ity, trans. Henry A. Bunker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).
144
38. See Debra Friedman and Michael Hechter, "The Contribution

of Rational Choice Theory to Macrosociological Research," So-
ciological Theory 6 ( 1988) :201-218, for a discussion of the ap-
plicability of rational choice theory to social decision making
generally.
39. 1 am indebted to Richard Hermstein for providing this particu-
lar example of a "rational anomaly."
40. Taylor, Sources of the Self.
41. Edward Sapir, "Culturc, Gcnuine and Spurious," in Culture,
Language and Penona/.ity: Seleaed Essays, ed. David G. Mandel-
baum (Berkeley: UniversityofCaliforniaPress, 1956), 78-119.
42. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedmn and Dignity (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1972).
43. Wolfgang Kohler, The Place of Va/.ue ina World of Faas (New
York: Liveright, 1938).
44. J. Kirk T. V arnedoe, "lntroduction," in Varnedoe, ed., Modem
Portraits: The Selfand Othen (New York: Columbia University,
Department of Art History and Archaeology, 1976).
45. Adrienne Rich, "Invisibility in Academe,„ quoted in Renato
Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Socia/. Analysis
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), ix.
2. Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culrure

1. Gerald M. Edelman, Neura/. Darwinirm: The Theory ofNeurona/.
Group Selection (New York: Basic Books, 1987). Gcrald M.
Edelman, The Remembered Present: A Bwlogical Theory of Con-
scWu.sness (New York: Basic Books, 1990). Vemon Reynolds,
The Bwlogy of Human Action, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: W. H.
Freeman, 1980). Roger Lewin, Human Evolution: An lllus-
trated Introduction, 2nd ed. (Boston: Blackwell Scicntific Publi-
cations, 1989). Nicholas Humphrey, The Inner Eye (Boston:
Faber and Faber, 1986).
145
• Notes to Pagcs 35-38 •
2. Hans Peter Rickman, Wilhelm Düthey: Pioneer of the Human

Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979). Wil-
helm Dilthey, Descriptive Psychology ami H istorical Understanding
(1911), trans. Richard M. Zaner and Kenneth L. Heiges (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1977).
3. Stephen P. Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science: The
Case against Belief (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1983).
4. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1966). C. 0. Frake, "The Diagnosis of Disease
among the Subanun of Mindanao," American Anthropology 63;
rpt. in D. Hymes, ed., Language in Culture and Society (New
York: Harper and Row, 1964), 193-206. Thomas Gladwin,
East Is a Bi!f Bird: N avigation and Logic on Puluwat Atoll (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970). Edwin Hutch-
ins, "Understanding Micronesian Navigation," in Dedre Gent-
ner and Albert L. Stevens, eds., Menta/ Models (Hillsdale, N .J.:
Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1983), 191-226.
5. Meyer Fortes, "Social and Psychological Aspects of Education
in Taleland," A.frica 11, no. (1938), supplement. Margaret
Mead, Coming of.Age in Samoa (New York: Morrow, 1928).
6. E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Nuer Reli!fion (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1974).
7. Harold Garfinkel, Studies in Ethnomahodology (Englewood
Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1967). Garfinkel, ed., Ethnometh-
odological Studies of Work (London and New York: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1986). F ritz Heider, The Psychology ofI nterper-
sonal Relations (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1958). Alfred
Schutz, The Problem of Socia/. Reality, ed. M. Natanson (The
Hague: Nijhoff, 1962). Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social
Relations: Selected Writings of Alfred Schutz, ed. Helmut R.
Wagner (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1970). A more
contemporary, anthropologically oriented view of these matters
is presented by Richard A. Shweder, "Cultural Psychology:
What Is lt?" in J. W. Stigler, R. A. Shweder, and G. Herdt,
146
eds., Cultural Psychology: The Chicago Symposium on Culture and

Human Denlopment (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1989).
8. B. F. Skinner, Beyond Freedom ami Dignity (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1972). Stich, From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Science.
9. Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989).
10. André Gide, LaftadW's Adventure (New York: Random House,
1925).
11. Daniel C. Dennett and John C. Haugeland, "Intentionality," in
Richard L. Gregory, ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mimi
(Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),
383--386.
12. Gladwin, Ea.rt Is a Big Bírd.
13. Michelle Rosaldo, "Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feel-
ing," in Richard A. Shweder and Robert A. LeVine, eds., Cul-
ture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984), 137-157, p. 139. For
background to this paper, see also Michelle Rosaldo, Knowledge
and PRSSion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Lift (Cambridge
and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Renato
Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society
and History (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1980).
14. Hazel Markus and Paula Nurius, "Possible Selves," American
Psychologist 41 (1986):954-969, p. 954. Nicholas Humphrey
and Daniel Dennett, "Speaking for Ourselves: An Assessment
of Multiple Personality Disorder," Raritan: A Quarterly Review
(Spring 1989):68-98. Sigmund Freud, "The Rdation of thc
Poet to Day-Dreaming," in Colleaed Papers, vol. IV, ed. Emest
Jones (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 173-183.
15. Paul Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," in Ricoeur, Herme-
neutics and the Human Sciences, ed. and trans. John B. Thomp-
son (Cambridge: Cambridge University Prcss, 1981), 277.
16. Carl Hempel, "The Function of General Laws in History," in
147
• Notes to Page 45 •
Hcmpd, Aspects of Scienti.fic Explanatúm ami Ot/Jer Essays ín the

Philosophy of Science (New York: Frce Press, 1942). Ricocur
again providcs a succinct summ;ll)'. Hempcl argucs, hc notes,
that "any singular cvents can be deduced from two prcmisscs.
The first describes the initial conditions: antecedent cvcnts, pre-
vailing conditions, etc. The second asserts a regularity, a univcr-
sal hypothcsis which, whcn vcrificd, mcrits thc namc oflaw. If
thc two prcmisscs can be propcrly cstablishcd, thcn thc cvcnt
undcr considcration can be logically dcduccd, and is said,
thereby, to be explained." Ricoeur, "The Narrarivc Function,"
p. 275. Hcmpcl admits, of coursc, that history has trouble es-
tablishing such premisscs, that it must work mostly with explan-
atory sketches. But that is not really the point. The point,
rather, is whcthcr sequcnces and plots arc rclcvant to thc histo-
rian's task. lt is not only W. B. Gallic who objccts, but such
working historians as, say, Lawrencc Stone, who sccs the narra-
rive form as one of history's ccntral tools, arguing that history
is dcscriptivc and intcrprctive, rather than analytic and "cxplana-
tory." W. B. Gallic, Philosophy ami Historical Understanding
(New York: Schockcn Books, 1964); Lawrcnce Stone, "Thc
Revival of Narrative: Refiections on a New Old History," Past
ami Present 85 ( 1979): 3-24. Stonc insists, besidcs, that history
must be involved in a "rhctoric" through which "pregnant prin-
ciplcs" arc argued as dcmonstrativc in the particulars-as whcn
Thucydidcs secks to show the scquence of cvents through which
the Peloponnesian W ar had disastrous eftects on Greek society
andpolis.
17. Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales, Harvard Studies in Compara-
tivc Litcraturc, 24 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1960). Northrop Frye, Anatomy ofCriticism: Four Essays
(Princeton: Princcton University Prcss, 1957). Ricoeur, "The
Narrativc Function," p. 287.
18. C. G. Jung, Collected Works, vol. 9, pt. 1: Archet)'pts and the
Colleaive Unconscious (New York: Bollingen, 1959).
148
19. Aristotlc, Poetics, trans. James Hutton (New York: Norton,

1982). Ricoeur, "The Narrative Function," pp. 288, 292.
20. "'A sign, or representamen, is somcthing which stands to some-
body for somcthing in some rcspect or capacity. lt addresses
somcbody, that is, creates in the mind of that person an equiva-
lent sign, or perhaps a morc developed sign. That sign which
it crcates 1 call the interpretant of the first sign. The sign stands
for something, its obJect. lt stands for the object, not in all
rcspects, but in refercncc to a sort of idea, which 1 have some-
timcs called the ground of thc representamen. 'Idea' is here to
be understood in a sort of Platonic sense very familiar in every-
day talk; 1 mcan in that sense in which we say that one man
catches another man's idea." C. S. Peirce, Collected Papers of
Charles Sanders Peirce, vol. 2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versicy Prcss, 1960), 228.
21. Why the expectable or the usual should thus be endowed with
"value" or legitimacy is an interesting question. Perhaps the
most intcrcsting answer has been offered by G. W. Allport,
Persomúity: A Psychological Interpretation (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1937), in his theory of "functional auton-
omy." Hc proposed that habits, once established, takc on the
role of motives: the seasoned sailor develops a desire to go to
sea, and so on. William James makes the same point in his
celebrated chapter "Habit" in The Principles of Psychology (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). Emile Durk-
heim is probably making a similar point in proposing thar a
community's shared beliefs achieve not only "exteriority" but
also constraint in the sense of regulating desire. Durkheim, The
Elementary Fomzs ofthe Religious Lift, trans. Joseph Ward Swain
(New York: Collicr Books, 1961).
22. Rogcr G. Barkcr, Habitats, Environments, and Human Behavior
(San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1978).
23. H. Paul Gricc, Studies ín the Way of Words (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989).
149
• Note to Page 50 •
24. Kcnneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prenricc-

Hall, 1945). 1 am indebted to David Shulman of the Insrirute
of Asian and African Srudics ofthc Hebrew University ofJeru-
salcm for poinring out what may be an cthnocentric bias in this
account. He raiscs the intercsting qucsrion whethcr Kenneth
Burke's account of the rhetoric of narrarive may not be too
"homeostaric" to be universal. '''One could imagine-well, in
fact there's no reason to imagine, since examplcs do exist in
India-a narrative that begins with an initial imbalancc or dis-
harmony, procecds to resolve it, and then concludcs by rcstor-
ing the original problematic state. Closure would thcn be a
rcstatement of some dynamic, perhaps spiralling cydc of trans-
formation. What comcs to mind is the Sakunta/a of Kalidasa,
the most famous drama in Sanskrit literature: whilc Sanskrit
poetics handlcs this play ín a different way (more stable and
integrated closure), my own reading of it would be something
like I'vc outlined here. Incidentally, the ramifications for cogni-
tion are explicitly brought to the surface in the final act of this
work, where the protagonist comparcs his own mental universe
to that of a man who, while staring at a real elcphant that is
standing right in front of hím, says, 'This is not an elephant';
and only later, as the elephant begins to move away, docs a
slight doubt arise in his mind; unril finally, when the elephant
has disappearcd, the man observes the footprints it lcft bchind
and dedares with certainty, 'An elephant w.eu here'" {persona!
lettcr, 15 December 1989). It may well be that Burkc's "drama-
tism" could be conceived (as Shulman implics) as a cirdc or
cydc and that, depending upon tradition, one could start at any
point in the cycle, the only requirement being that the story
run thc full cyde round. For a further discussion of this point,
sec Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Serious-
ness of Play (New York: Performing Arts Journal Publications,
1982).
150
25. Hayden Whitc, "Thc Valuc ofNarrativity in the Rcpresentation

of Reality," in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 1-24.
26. Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge,
Mass.: Haivard Univcrsity Press, 1986).
27. Erich Kahlcr, The Inward Turn of Narrative, trans. Richard
Winston and Clara Winston (Princeton: Princeton Univcrsity
Press, 1973).
28. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation ofReality in West-
ern Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1953).
29. Wolfgang Iscr, The Aa ofReading: A Theory ofAesthetic Response
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Iser's morc
rccent Prospecting: From Reader Response to Liternry Anthrupowgy
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Prcss, 1989) devclops
this point morc fully.
30. Jean Mandler, Stories, Scripts, and Sr.enes: Aspects ofSchema Theory
(Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1984).
31. John Shottcr, "Thc Social Construction of Forgetting and
Rcmcmbcring," in David Middleton and Derek Edwards,
eds., Collective Mmwry (London: Sage Publications, 1990),
120-138.
32. Thc books in question, of course, arc F. C. Bartlett, Psychol-
ogy ami Primitive Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1923), and his dassic Remembering: A Study in Experi-
mental and Social Psychowgy (Cambridge: Cambridge Univcrsity
Press, 1932). Mary Douglas makes hcr daim in her Huw Institu-
tions Think (London: Routledgc and Kcgan Paul, 1987), p. 25.
33. Bartlctt, Remembering, p. 255.
34. Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Deceptive Distinaions: Sex, Gender, and
the SocUú Order (New Haven: Yale University Prcss, 1988).
35. Bartlett, Remembering, p. 21.
36. Iser, The Aa of Reading.
151
37. Marx cited by Oliver Sacks in his introduction to A. R. Luria,

The Man with a Shattered Mind: The History of a Brain W ound
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987).
38. For a useful discussion of thc limits of scnse and rcfercnce in
defining meaning, sce Umberto Eco, Marco Santambrogio,
and Patrizia Violi, eds., Meaning and Mental Representations
(Bloomington: Indiana University Prcss, 1988).
39. Sec particularly Marca Santambrogio and Patrizia Violi, "Intro-
duction," ín Eco, Santambrogio, and Violi, Meaning and Men-
ta/, Representations, 3-22.
40. Roy Harris, "How Does Writing Rescructurc Thought?" Lan-
guage and Communicatúm 9 (1989):99-106.
41. John L. Ausrin, How to Do Things with Worm (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard Univcrsity Press, 1962). Ludwig Wittgenstein,
The Blue and Brown Books (New York: Harpcr and Row, 1958).
Wittgenstein, Philosophical. lnvestigations, trans. G. E. M. An-
scombc (New York: Macmillan, 1953).
42. H. Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Worm (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1989). For a concise discussion, see
Stcphcn C. Lcvinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1983).
43. Bartlett, Remembering. Roger Schank and Robert Abelson,
Scripts, Plans, GoaJs, and Undentanding (Hillsdale, N.J.: Law-
rence Erlbaum Associates, 1977), 70. T. A. Van Dijk, Macro-
structures: An lnterdisciplinary Study of Gl.obal Struaures in Dis-
course, Interaaion, and Cognition (Hillsdalc, N.J.: Lawrencc
Erlbaum Associates, 1980), 233-235.
44. Elizabeth W. Bruss, BeautifuJ Theories: The Spectade ofDiscourse
in Contemporary Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity Prcss, 1982). Iser, The Act of Reading. Philippe Lcjeunc,
On Autobiography, trans. Kathcrine Leary (Minncapolis: Uni-
vcrsicy of Minnesota Press, 1989).
152
3. Entry into Meaning

1. David Premack and G. Woodruff, "Docs thc Chimpanzec Have
a Theory of Mind?" Behavioral and Brain Scimces 1 (1978):
515-526.
2. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology (New York: Basic
Books, 1963).
3. See Chapter 2, note 20.
4. See, for example, Noam Chomsky, Language and Mind (New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1968).
5. The reader intcrcsted in pursuing this issuc further is refcrred
to the thoughtful accounts of, for example: Derek Bickerton,
Roots of Language (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Karoma, 1981); Steven
Pinker, Learnability and Cognition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1989); Dan Isaac Slobin, ed., The Crosslinguistic Study of
Language Acquisition, 2 vols. (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erl-
baum Associatcs, 1985); Kenneth Wexler and Peter W. Culi-
cover, Formai Principles of Language Acquisition (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Prcss, 1980).
6. A sample of volumcs stimulated by Austin's How to Do Things
with Word!" would include Jerome S. Bruner, Child's Talk:
Learning to Use Language (New York: W. W. Norton, 1983);
Herbert H. Clark and Eve V. Clark, Psychology and Language:
An Introduction to Psycholinguistics (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1977); M. A. K. Halliday, Learning How toMean
(London: Arnold, 1975); and P. M. Greenfield and J. Smith,
The Structure of Communication in Early Language Development
(New York: Academic Prcss, 1976).
7. See, for example, Robert A. Hinde, Individuals, Relationships
and Culture: Links between Ethology and the Social Sciences (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Frank A.
Beach, ed., Human Sexuality in Four Penpeaives (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977).
153
8. J. S. Bruner and Carol F. Feldman, "Where Does Language

Come From?" (review of Derek Bickerton, The Roots of Lan-
guage), New York Review of Books, no. 29 (June 24, 1982):
3~36.
9. Nicholas Humphrey, The lnner Eye (Boston: Faber and Faber,
1986). Roger Lewin, ln the Age of Mankind (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1988).
10. A. Whiren and R. W. Byme, "'TacticaJ Deception in Primates,"
Behavioral and Brain Sciences 11 ( 1988):233-273. R. W. Mitch-
ell, "A Framework for Discussing Deceprion," in R. W. Mitch-
ell and N. S. Thompson, Deception: Perspeaives on Human and
Non-human Deceit (Albany: Stare University of New York
Press, 1986).
11. M. Chandlcr, A. S. Fritz, and S. Hala, "Small-Scale Deceit:
Deccption as a Markcr of Two-, Three-, and Four-year-olds'
Theorics of Mind/' Chüd Development 60 (1989):1263.
12. Sec, for example, J. W. Astington, P. L. Harris, and D. R.
Olson, eds., Developing Theories ofMind (New York: Cambridge
Universitv Press, 1988).
13. This finding was originally rcported by H. Wimmer and J. Per-
ner, "Beliefs about Beliefs: Representation and Constraining
Function ofWrong Belicfs in Young Children's Understanding
of Deccption," Cognition 13 ( 1983): 103-128. lt has been repli-
cated many times. See Astington, Harris, and Olson, eds., De-
veloping Theories ofMind.
14. Chand.ler, Fritz, and Hala, "Small-Scale Deceit," 1275.
15. M. Scaife and J. S. Bruner, "The Capacity for Joint Visual
Attention in the Infant," N ature 253 ( 1975): 265-266. George
Buttcrworth and M. Castillo, "Coordination of Auditory and
Visual Space in Newbom Human Infants," Perception 5 ( 1976):
155-160. A. Ninio and J. S. Bruner, "The Achievement and
Antccedents of Labelling," Journal of Chüd Language 5
(1978):1-15.
154
16. Halliday, Learning How to Mean.

17. 1 am aware that the more usual claim is that grammatical forms
are mastered according to their "syntactical" or ''computational"
simplicity-the shallower the derivational depth or the simpler
the computation, the easier leamed. For one view sec Kenneth
Wexler and Peter W. Culicovcr, Forma/ Principles of Language
ACIJuisition (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Prcss, 1980); for another,
Steven Pinker, Language Learnabüity and Language Develop-
ment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). Such an
idea may be formally attractive, but all examples thus far pro-
posed exhibit the same fatal fiaw. There is no way of establish-
ing "simplicity" or "computability" independently of one's the-
ory of grammar or computation. The test of the "theory,"
accordingly, is self-determincd by the thcory one is testing. Thc
general effort is reminiscent of the early effort to establish the
greater "simplicity" of "untransformed" scntences as comparcd
to those "transformcd" by negative, passive, or query transfor-
mations-the simpler requiring less mental processing time
than the morc complex. Not only werc the predictions wrong;
they were deeply and incorrigibly so. They failed, for example,
to take context into account in their view of "sentence process-
ing" and could not even begin to explain why negatively trans-
formed sentences, encountered in a "contcxt of plausible de-
nial," were much morc quick.ly comprehended than ordinary,
untransformed indicative ones of the same number of clements.
See P. C. Wason, "The Contexts of Plausible Denial," Journa/.
of Verba/. Leaming and Verba/. Behal'Wr 4 ( 1965): 7-11. Also sec
Ndson Goodman's discussion of "simplicity" in his The Struc-
ture of Appeuance (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 1951).
18. Roger Brown,A Firrt Language: The Early Stages (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973).
19. At least one distinguished linguist, Charles Fillmore, has even
155
gone so far as to speculate that case grammar in terms of which

language is organizcd-thc familiar classes of agent, action, pa-
tient, object, dircction, locatíon, and thc like-is an abstract
linguisric rendering of some prior conceprual grasp of the
"arguments of action" that scrvc to organize our experience
about human activity. Sec Charles Fillmorc, "Thc Case for
Case," in E. Bach and R. T. Harms, eds., Universal.s in Linguis-
tic Theory (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968),
1-88, and Fillmore, "The Casc for Case Reopcned," in P. Cole
and J. M. Sadock, eds., Syntax ami Semantics: Grammaticat Re-
latWns, vol. 8 (New York and London: Acadcmic Prcss, 1977),
59-81.
20. See, for cxamplc, J. S. Bruner, "Pacifier-Produccd Visual Buf-
fering in Human Infants," DevelopmentaJ Psychobiology 6 ( 1973):
45-51. William Kessen, P. Salapatek, and M. Haith, "Visual
Response of Human Newbom to Lincar Contour," Journal of
F.xperimmtaJ Chüd Psychology 13 (1972):9-20. I. Kalnins and
J. S. Bruner, "The Coordination of Visual Observation and
Instrumental Behavior in Early Infancy," Perception 2
(1973):307-314. Kathleen M. Berg, W. Keith Berg, and Fran-
ces K. Graham, "Infant Hcart Rate Rcsponse as a Function of
Stimulus and Statc," Psychophysiology 8 (1971):30-44.
21. "Markedness," in Selected Writings of Roman Jaltobstm, vol. 8,
ch. 2, pt. 4 (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton Dc
Gruyter, 1988). Greenfield and Smith, The Structure ofCommu-
nication in Early Language Development.
22. Willcm J. M. Leveit, Spealnng: From Intention to Articulation
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Prcss, 1989). Joseph H. Greenberg,
cd., UniPmal.s of Human Language (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1978). Brown, A First Language.
23. Daniel N. Stern, The First RelatWnship: Infant ami Mother
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977). Sec also
Olga K. Garnica, "Some Prosodic and Paralinguistic Fearures
156
of Spcech to Young Children," in Cathcrine E. Snow and

Charles A. Ferguson, eds., Talking to Children: Language Input
andAcquisitüm (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1977), 63-88, and Ann Fcmald et al., "A Cross-
Language Srudy of Prosodic Modifications in Mothers' and Fa-
thers' Spcech to Preverbal Infants," ]ournal of Child Language,
m press.
24. A. R. Luria, The Role of Speech in the Regulation ofNonnal and
Abnormal Behavior (New York: Liveright, 1961). Margaret
Donaldson, Children's Minds (New York: Norton, 1978). V.
Propp, The Morpho/ogy of the Folktale (Austin: Univcrsity of
Texas Press, 1968).
25. Chandler, Fritz, and Hala, "Small-Scale Deceit."
26. Persona! communication.
27. Peggy J. Miller, Amy, Wendy, and Beth: Learning Language
in South Baltimore (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982).
Peggy J. Miller and Linda L. Sperry, "The Socialization of
Anger and Aggression," Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 33 ( 1987):
1-31. Pcggy J. Miller and Linda L. Spcrry, "Early Talk about
the Past: The Origins of Conversarional Stories of Pcrsonal
Experience," ]ourtud of Chüd Language 15 (1988):293-315.
Peggy J. Miller, "Persona! Storics as Rcsourccs for the Culture-
Acquiring Child," paper prcsented at Socicty for Culrural An-
thropology, Phoenix, Arizona, November 18, 1988.
28. Sec Peggy J. Miller and Barbara Byhouwer Moore, "Narrativc
Conjunctions of Carc-Giver and Child: A Comparative Pcr-
spective on Socialization through Storics," Ethos 17, no. 4
(1989):428-449. The narrative form in question was first de-
scribcd by W. Labov and J. Waletzky, "Narrativc Analysis: Oral
Vcrsions of Persona! Experience," in J. Heim, cd., Essays in the
Verbal and Visua/Arts (Seattle: Univcrsity ofWashington Press,
1967), 12-44.
29. Shirlcy Brice Heath, Ways with Wordr: Language, Lift, and
157
Work in Communities and C/assrooms (Cambridge and New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
30. Miller and Moore, "Narrative Conjunctions of Care-Givers and
Child," 436.
31. Heath, Ways with Words'.
32. Judy Dunn, The BttJinnings ofSociaJ Undentanding (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 5.
33. Kcnneth Burkc, A Grammar of Motives (New York: Prcnticc-
Hall, 1945).
34. John L. Austin, "A Plca for Excuses," in Austin, PhilosophicaJ
P11pers, 2nd cd. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 175-204.
35. Katherine Nclson, ed., Narratives .from the Crib (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Prcss, 1989).
36. Vladimir Propp, Theory ami History of Folklore, trans. Ariadna
Y. Martin and Richard P. Martin (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984).
37. Ruth Weir, Language in the Crib (Thc Haguc: Mouton, 1962).
38. Labov and Waletzky, "Narrative Analysis."
39. Carol Fleisher Feldman, "Monologue as Problem-solving Nar-
rativc," in Nclson, cd., Narratives front the Crib.
40. Michelle Rosaldo, KMWltdge and PllSSion: lkmgot Notúms ofSelf
and Social Lift (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge Univcr-
sity Press, 1980).
41. Frans de Waal, Peacmuiking anwng Primates (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard U ni versi ty Prcss, 1989).
42. Milan Kundera, The Book ofLaughter and Forgetting, trans. Mi-
chael Henry Heim (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980). Kun-
dcra, The Unbearable Lightness of Bting, trans. Michad Henry
Heim (New York: Harper and Row, 1984). Danilo Kis, A
Tomb for Boris Davidovich, trans. Duska Mikic-Mitchell (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978).
43. Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986). For further adumbration of the rolc
158
of narrative in the law, see Michigan Law Review 87, no. 8

(August 1989), an issue given over entirely to the topic of
"Legal Storytelling." 1 am particularly indebted to Martha Mi-
now of the Harvard Law School for bringing this work to my
anention, and also to Peggy Davis, David Richards, and Tony
Amsterdam of the New York University Law School for dis-
cussing its significance with me.
4. Autobiography and Self

1. Edwin G. Boring, The Physica/, Dimensions ofConsciousness (New
York: Dover, 1963).
2. The "rcalism„ of Self is probably built into folk psychology as
a spinoff of the notion of agcncy. lt is surely built into English
language usage, though in a strikingly idiosyncratic way. We
say "Control yourself." But we do not say "bring yourself to
dinncr next Wednesday." And typically, we permit Self to be
both subject and objccr of sentences with mental as with action
verbs: lt is permissible ro say that "you cur yoursclf," where the
final rerm conventionally translates into some part of the body;
but it is cqually permissible to say "you doubt yoursclf," which
aftcr all is a tall order of folk metaphysics for a languagc to
accepr without cavil. The midd.le case is occupied by such ex-
pressions as "1 hurt myself" rather than simply "1 hurt." But in
this instancc thc two forms are usually used to distinguish the
punctate from the durative. So far as 1 have been able to deter-
rnine, there has been no fully systematic srudy of the linguisric
and cognitive prerequisites for the use of persona! pronouns as
reflexive predicates. One is surely needed. But for some interesr-
ing reflections on the embodiment of self-realism in such usagc,
sec Peter Strawson, Individuals (London: Methuen, 1959);
George A. Miller and Philip N. Johnson-Laird, Language and
Perception (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni-
159
vcrsity Press, 1976); and Bemard Williams, Problems of the Self

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
3. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Macmillan,
1890).
4. Sec Hazcl Markus and Paula Nurius, "Possible Selves," Ameri-
can Psychologist 41 (1986):954-969. Other, somewhat similar
models of self havc bccn proposed. Examplcs include Anthony
R. Pratkanis, Stcvcn J. Brccklcr, and Anthony G. Grcenwald,
eds„Attitude Struaure ami Functúm (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence
Erlbaum Associates, 1989); Robbie Case, Intellectua/. Deve/Qp-
ment: Birth to Adulthood (Orlando: Acadcmic Prcss, 1985);
Tory E. Higgins, "Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self
and Affect," Psychological Revi.ew 94 (l 987): 319-340.
5. lt is well instantiated in thc work of Richard Rorty: Conse-
qumces of PrR!Jmatism (Minneapolis: Univcrsity of Minnesota
Press, 1982); Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979). The "sleeper effect" of
Nie~che's perspcctivalism is discussed in Alexander Nehamas,
Niewche: Lift RS Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1985). But the impact of pcrspectivalism on psy-
chology a1so stems from the antircalism in Ernst Mach, The
Analysis ofSensatüms, and the Relation ofthe Physical to the Psychi-
cal (Chicago: Open Court, 1914). Karl Popper's skepticism also
had a strong impact-c.g., ObJective Knowledge: An Evolutionary
Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Prcss, 1972 )-as of course did
Thomas Kuhn's discussion of paradigm shifts in science in The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1962). My own gcncration cvcn had a "cult tcxt"
on thc matter: Hans V aihingcr's The Phüasoplry of ~ If': A
System ofthe Theoretical, Practical, and Religious Fictions ofMan-
kind, 2nd ed„ trans. C. K. Ogden (London: Routledge and
Kcgan Paul, 1935). Pcrcy Bridgman's opcrationism also went
a long way toward undermining the simplistic naive realism of
160
earlier science: The Logic ofModern Physics (New York: Macmil-

lan, 1927).
6. George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1934).
7. One may note the parallel dcvelopment of this idea in the work
of Mikhail Bakhtin on "heteroglossia"-The Dialogic Imagina-
tion: Four Ess11ys, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1981)-and of Lcv Vygotsky on tbc "internal-
ization" of dialogue in thc creation of "inner speech" and
thought-Thought ami Language (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press, 1962).
8. Ruth C. Wylic, The SelfConcept, vol. l: A Review ofMethodologi-
ctd Considerations amlMemuring Instrumen'tS (Lincoln: Univer-
sity of Nebraska Press, 1974); vol. 2: Theory and Research on
Selected Topics (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979).
Also Wylie, .1.l1emures ofSelfConcept (Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1989).
9. K. Lewin, T. Dcmbo, L. Fcstingcr, and P. Scars, "Levei of
Aspiration," in J. McV. Hunt, ed., Personali'ty and the Behavior
Disorders (New York: Ronald, 1944).
10. Sec Clark L. Hull, Principles ofBehavior (New York: Applcton-
Cenrury, 1943); Edward C. Tolrnan, Purposive Behavior in Ani-
maJs amlMen (New York: Appleton-Century, 1932).
A comparably deep division separated those thcories of lcarn-
ing which fall under the rubric of "conditioning." Pavlov srud-
ied salivating in harncssed dogs who had just heard a sound or
light that presaged delivery of a bit of food. That came to be
called "dassical conditioning." B. F. Skinner, rejccting such a
passive approach, introduced the idea of an "operant rc-
sponse"-a pigeon pecking, say, at a button discriminately
marked one way when it would deliver a grain of com, and not
so marked when it would not. Skinner's opcrant and Pavlov's
dassical conditioning, of course, yield very different picturcs of
161
what lcarning is likc. Thc formcr is rcplctc with inhibition and

disinhibition, sprcad of cxcitation, and so on. Thc lattcr con-
ccms itself with thc conditions that incrcasc or dccrcasc thc
likelihood of a rcsponsc.
Karl Zcner demonstrated that if you lct Pavlovian dogs out
of their hamess and lct thcm wander about thc laboratory, thc
onsct of conditioncd salivation was quitc diffcrcnt írom thc way
it had bcen found to work in thc rigid conditions of thc Mos-
cow Insritute. If getting back to thc food tray rcquircd somc
tricky dctouring, for cxamplc, thc dogs sccmcd to havc othcr
things than salivaring on thcir "minds." Thcn Habart Mowrcr
dcmonstrated that classical and opcrant conditioning opcratcd
under different conditions, the formcr for autonornically mcdi-
ated behavior, the lattcr for morc "voluntary" rcsponscs.
It was to Tolman's credit that he cvcntually publishcd a classic
paper cntitled "Thcrc Is Morc than Onc Kind of Lcaming,"
PsychologicaJ Review 56 (1949):144-155. But the "paradigm
locking" persistcd, for cach theorist conccivcd thc hasit form of
teaming to be the one gcncratcd by his or hcr cxperimcntal
paradigm, with the upsctting cxccption to be "cxplaincd away."
The disrinction betwecn "map room" and "switchboard" thc-
ories is discussed in Tolman's "Cognitive Maps in Rats and
Men," PsychologicaJ Review 55 ( 1948): 189-208.
11. Typical studics of this typc includc those rcportcd in Ncal E.
Miller, "Experimental Srudics in Conflict," in J. McV. Hunt,
cd„ Penona/.ity and the Behavior Disorden (New York: Ronald,
1944); and such spccific rcsearch studics as 0. Habart Mowrcr,
"Anxicty Reduction and Lcaming," / ourna/. of&perimental- Psy-
chology 27 (1940):497-516; Edward C. Tolman, "A Stimulus-
Expectancy Need-Cathexis Psychology," Science 101 ( 1945):
160-166; John Dollard and N. E. Miller, Penonal-ity and Psycho-
therapy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950).
162
11. J\ rypicJl cumplc from rhil pcriod WíW Gtorbt 1\1 l\'lly'~ rwo-
votume The Psychology of Pmonal Construas (New York: Nor-
ton) which appeared ín 1955, a year before the by-now-
standard date for the "openíng'' of the cognitive revolution. 1
reviewed it in Contemporary Psychology 1, no. 12 (1956):355-
358, and hailed it as the first "effort to construct a theory of
personality from a theory of knowledge: how people come to
know the world by bínding its diverse appearances into orga-
nized construct systems" (p. 355).
13. See Roy Pea and D. M. Kurland, "On the Cognitive Effects of
Learning Computer Programming," New Ideas in Psychology 2
(1984):137-168; R. Pea, "Distributed Intelligence and Educa-
tion," in D. Perkins, J. Schwartz, and M. M. West, eds., Teach-
ing far Understanding in the Age ofTechnology (in preparation);
D. N. Perkins, "Person Pius: A Distributed View ofThinking
and Learning," paper delivered at the Symposium on Distrib-
uted Learning at the annual meeting of the A.E.R.A., Boston,
April 18, 1990. While the notion of distributed teaming has,
as it were, been around for a long time-anthropologists partic-
ularly have been mindful of it as, too, has Michael Cole, as ín
his "Cultural Psychology: A Once and Future Discipline," in
J. J. Berman, ed., Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 1989:
Cross-Cultural Perspectives (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, forthcoming)-the idea has been given new force in its
application to man's relation to new informational technologies.
See, particularly, John Seeley Brown, Alan Collins, and P. Du-
guid, "Situated Cognirion and the Culture ofLearning," Educa-
tional Researcher 18:32-42.
14. Ann L. Brown, "Distributed Expertise in the Classroom," paper
delivered at the Symposium on Distributed Learning at thc
A.E.R.A., Boston, 1990. For a fuller account of this work,
sec also Ann Brown and Joseph Campione, "Communitics of
163
Lcarning and Thinking: Or a Contcxt by Any Other Name,"

H1m1an Development, forthcoming. The quotation is from Per-
kins, "Person Pius," p. 24.
15. Of coursc it was atso contcxtuat considerations that shut down
the amphitheatcr of "animal teaming'' in which battles over
leaming theory wcrc classically fought. The ethologists made it
clear that in an evolutionary sense learning was geared to partic-
utar conditions ín thc cnvironmcnts of particular species. lt
could not be treated in isolation, separate from habitats and
from instinctual predispositions that had been selected in cvotu-
tion to match thosc habitats. Lcaming, whatcver form it might
take, was always biased and filtered in terms of those predisposi-
rions which had been selectcd by evotution, and one could not
takc account of it without spccifying a grcat dcal morc than
that an animal was "cxposed" to a particular cnvironmcnt. So
again, teaming and the leamer coutd not be isolated from the
animal's habitat or, for that matter, from the cvolutionary his-
tory that had madc thc habitat "adaptivc" to thc animal's prcdis-
positions. Sec, particularly, Niko Tinbergen, The Animal in Its
World, vols. 1and2 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972,
1973).
16. [ do not mean to imply thac the idea of "distributivc" thinking
had been abscnt from psychology altogethcr. Vygotsky had
some such notion in mind in his formulation of pedagogy and
in thc rolc hc assigncd history in the shaping of thought (sec
his Thought ami Language). David Wood and I were also grop-
ing for a way of characterizing the "scaffolding" of intellectual
activity that takcs placc in knowlcdgc cxchangcs: Wood,
Bruner, and Gail Ross, "The Role of Tutoring in Problcm
Solving," ]ournal of Child Psychology ami Psychiatry 17
(1976):89-100. And a distributional view early characterized
thc work of Michacl Cole and Sylvia Scribncr, c.g„ Culture and
Thought: An lntroduaion (New York: Wiley, 1974).
164
• Notcs to Pagcs 107-111
17. Karl Joachim \V cintraub, T/Je V 11/ue of t/Je fodiPid1ml: Self 1111d
Cúnmzst11ncc in Autobio._lfmpl~v (Chicago: UniYcrsity of Chicago
Pn:ss, 1978); E. R. Dodds, Tbc Graks mzd the frmtio1111/ ( lkrkc-
lcy: Unin:rsity of Califrm1ia Prcss, 1951 ); Michdk Rosaldo,
K noll'led.w 11nd Passion: Il01t17ot Notions of Se~( 1111d Soci11/ Lijc
(Cambridge and :\e\\' York: Camhridgc Lrni,-crsity Prcss,
1980); and frcd Mycrs, Pintttpi c:ormtry, Pintttpi Sc/f(\\'ashing-
ton: Smithsonian Institution Prcss, 1986). four \'olumcs of A
History of Pril'llte Lijc haYc hccn publishcd to datc by Har\'ard
Univcrsity Prcss: thc first in 1987 undcr tbc cditorsbip of Paul
V C\'nc,
„
From 1'11111111
...
Rom e to Rvzmztium;
•
tbc sccond in 1988 hv•
Gcorgcs Duhy, RePcl11tiom of tbc Medieml Hlorld; thc third in
1989 hy Rogcr Cbarticr, Passions of t/Je Ren11issa11cc; thc fourrh
in 1990 by Michdlc Pcrrot, Frnm t/Je Fi1·es of ReJ>Olution to tbe
Great vVar. Onc morc is in prcparation.
18. Lee J. Cronhach, Dest17nÚtlf El'llluations ofEducationa/ 11nd Soci11/
Prqlfmms (San francisco: Josscy-Bass, 1982 ), p. 1.08.
19. Sec Kcnnctb J. Gcrgcn, Toll'11rd Trmzsjim1111tio11 in Soci11/ K 11011'/-
et{lfe ( :\'cw York: Springer-\' crlag, 1982 ), pp. l 7ff. Thc original
rcscarch is rcportcd in sc\'cral papcrs rcfrrrcd to in that volumc,
particularly Gcrgcn and :vt. (;. Taylor, "Social Expcctancy ami
Sdf-Prcscncation in a Status H inarcby," Jottnzal ofE\periment11l
Soci11J J>~vcholo._lf.Y 5 ( 1969): 79-92; and S. J. Morse ami K. J.
Gcrgcn, "Social Comparison, Sdf-Consistcncy, and thc Prcscn-
tation of sc1t: „ J01'1?ll1Í ~( J>emm11lity 1111d Soci11J J>~vc/Jolo._lf.Y 16
( 1970): 148-159.
20. (;crgcn, Toll'11rd Tm11~fimn11tion in Soci11/ K 11011'/edJrt. p. 18.
21. Gcrgcn, of coursc, was intlucnccd in this Yicw hy Barrlctt's
Rememberi1tlf· discusscd in Chaptcr 2.
22. Kcnncth Gcrgcn, "Social Psychology as History," Jo11nial of
J>ersonalitv„ 11nd Social J>svcho/017v 26 ( 1973):309-320.
„ '-.
23. I do not say this nitically. Onc of thc ohjcctÍ\'CS of thc carly
cognitiYc "rcvolutionarics" was to rcplacc rhc mindkss imagc
165
of man that had cmcrgcd during thc long rcign of bchaviorism.

Indeed, 1 was among those rationalists, as witness the central
importance of the concept of strategy in Bruner, J. J. Goodnow,
and G. A. Ausrin, A Study of Thinlting (New York: Wilcy,
1956).
24. Among the critical publications that set the climate for that
period were, surely, the following: W. J. T. Mitchcll, ed., On
Narrative (Chicago: University of Chicago Prcss, 1981); Paul
Rabinow and William Sullivan, eds., lnterpretive Social Scimce:
A R.eader (Berkeley: University ofCalifomia Press, 1979); Clif-
ford Gccrtz, Interpretation ofCultures (New York: Basic Books,
1973); Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature
(Princeton: Princeton Univcrsity Press, 1979); and the writings
of such French post-strucruralist critics as Roland Barthes and
Michcl Foucault.
25. Donald Spence, Narrative Truth and Historiaú Truth: Meaning
ami Interpretation in Psychoamdysis (New York: Norton, 1984).
As a mattcr of historical intcrcst, it is vcry plain that Roland
Barthes had a strong influence on Spcncc's formulation: his
word is cited in support of Spence's central idea of the role of
altcmative codcs in interprctation.
26. Spcncc intcnds by "codc" somcthing approximating Roland
Barthes's idea of various semiotic codcs, discusscd at length in
Barthes's booklmage, MusicJ Text (New York: Hill and Wang,
1977), codes that cxtract different kinds of mcanings from a
tcxt. But Spence was by no means trying to expunge from psy-
choanalysis the idea of "real" or "archaeological" memories.
Narrative truths, rather, rcprescnt (in thc classical psychoana-
lytic sense) compromises that result from "the conflict bctwccn
what is true and what is tellable" {Narrati:ve Truth, p. 62).
lndeed, Spence's standon the "reality" of untellable memories
suggests that, while be is a "hcuristic constructivist" whcrc
memory is concerned, hc is by no means willing to give up a
166
positivist's belief in the existence of "real" memories. This places

hirn in an anomalous position with rcspcct to classic psychoana-
lysts who, in thc main, accusc him of jettisoning the "reality"
of an id in which traumatic memories are stored, indccd, likc
well-preserved archaeological specirnens.
27. Spence, Narrative Truth, p. 63.
28. David Polonoff, "Self-Dcccption," Social Research 54 ( 1987):
53. A view very similar to Polonoff's is also widcspread in
contemporary autobiographical theory. For a particularly lucid
exposition of it, sec Janct Varncr Dunn,Autobiography: Toward
a Poetics of&perience (Philadelphia: Univcrsity of Pennsylvania
Press, 1982).
29. Roy Schafer, "Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue," in
W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago: Univcrsity of
Chicago Press, 1981), p. 31.
30. Ibid., p. 38.
31. See, for example, the collcction of papers in Thcodorc G. Sar-
bin's edited volume Narrative Psychology: The Stori.ed Nature of
Human Condua (New York: Praeger, 1986). A striking in-
stancc of this new approach is contained in Michellc Rosaldo's
Knowledge and Passion, discussed in Chapter 2. ln certain rc-
spects, this new "interpretivist" trend can be traccd back to
George Herbert Mead, particularly to his Mind, Self, and Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1934). But in certain
other respects, Mead was so wedded to the classic late-
nineteenth-ccntury vicw of thc intcraction of "organism" and
"cnvironmcnt" that it is better, in my opinion, to consider him
as a closing chapter on conccptualism in the latc history of
positivism than as an opcning chaptcr in the new intcrprctivism.
Sec, for example, Mead's discussion of"Organism, Community,
and Environment" in Mind, Self, and Society, pp. 245ff.
32. Clifford Gecrtz, "From thc Nativc's Point of View: On thc
Nature of Anthropological Understanding," in P. Rabinow and
167
W. M. Sullivan, eds., Interpretive Socia/. Science (Berkeley: Uni-

versity of California Press, 1979), pp. 225-241, quotation on
p. 229. lt is interesting that a decade later E. E. Sampson begins
a discussion cntitled "The Deconstruction of the Self" with
Geertz's rejection almost as an epigraph: see Sampson in John
Shottcr and Kcnneth Gergen, cds., Texts of ldentity (London:
Sage, 1989).
33. A recent and excellent example is Sidonie Smith, A Poetics of
Women's Autobiography: Marginality 11nd the Fictions of Self
Representation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
34. See Elliot G. Mishler, "The Analysis of lnterview-Narratives,"
in Theodore R. Sarbin, ed., N11rrative Psychology: The Storied
Nature of Human Condua (New York: Praeger, 1986). For a
fuller account of some of the techniques used in analyzing such
interview-narratives, sce Mishler, Resea.rch Intemewing: Conttxt
tmd Narrative (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1986).
35. Donald Polk.inghome, Narrative Knowing tmd the Human Sci-
ences (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988), p. 150.
36. Psychologists, even quite philosophically sophisticated ones,
have always bcen extremely chary of "historical explanation." 1
think this chariness stems from a common misconception about
the difference between "explanation" in the causal sense dis-
cussed in the first two chapters, and "interpretation" in the
historical or cultural sense. An interesting contrast is provided
by two psychologists of the past generation-Kurt Lewin and
Lev Vygotsky. ln a celebrated essay entitled "Aristotelian and
Galilean Modes of Thought"-see his Dynamic Theory ofPerson-
aJity (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1935)-Lewin condemns his-
torical "causation" as necessarily "teleological" and as involving
"action at a distance." What determines behavior now is what
is present in the "bchavioral field" of the individual actor at the
time of action. This "Galilean" idea was, in his view, the source
168
of the great success of the physical sciences. Doubtless there is

a sense in which the same ideal would be relevant to the human
sciences-that we should not invoke "tradition" without some
specification of how the tradition in question is represmted in
the hearts and minds of thc participants in an act going on
here and now. But the manner in which an enduring tradition
operates to define and alter meanings in the here and now is
not the same as the way in which a fidd of forces rdlects the
resultants of physical events that created it.
Vygotsky, of course, followed a quite different route. He
proposed that the method of psychology, however experimen-
tal and empirical it might become, was necessarily "cultural-
historical" at its root. For the tools and instruments that human
beings employ in the "enablement of mind" are essentially cul-
tural tools that were transformcd historically by thc circum-
stances of social and economic life. Their history reflects itself,
therefore, in the nature of their use now. It is of no small
interest that Lewin, contemplating emigration from Germany
when fascism was on the rise, visited Vygotsky in Moscow with
an introduction from his Russian student Zeigamik; see Guil-
lermo Blanck, Vygotrky (Buenos Aires: in preparation; persona!
communication, October 1989). Unfortunately, there is no
record of their conversation, although it is reported that they
got on famously in spite of the enormous diffcrence in their
attitudes toward the role of history in psychological interpre-
tation.
37. ln an as yet unpublished study, 1 had morc than a dozen readers
interpret this story while in the process of reading it for the
first time, and 1 think 1 know most of the intcrpretations offcred
by critics as well. lnterpretations, for all their diversity, share
one overwhelmingly important characteristic: they are all. efforts
to invokc an intentional state (a motive or statc of mind) in the
captain/protagonist. The morc sophisticated among the readers
169
also tried to undcrstand how thc story was emblematic of our

culture, or of Conrad's plight in that culture.
38. See, for example, Ellen Langer, The Psychowgy of Control (New
York: Sage, 1983).
39. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1989), p. 132.
40. Dr. Weisser and 1 arc now completing a volumc on this work
to be published by Harvard Universiry Press, cntitled "Autobi-
ography and the Construction of Self." It goes without saying
that a different way of approaching the interview would havc
produced different ways of telling. If, for example, one asks
people to teli about "memories of the past," one is much morc
likcly to obtain lists of recalled events, with much less of an
accounting of what these events "mean" to the teller. For other
ways of going about the task of cliciting a rccord of thc past
from human subjects, see David C. Rubin, ed., Autobiographical
Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge Universiry Press, 1986).
41. Mishler, Research Interviewing. This issue is better left for fullcr
discussion in Bruner and Weisscr, "Autobiography and the
Construction of Self. „
42. Keith Thomas, review of Roger Chartier, ed., A History of Pri-
vate Lift, vol. 3, New York Review of Books, 9 November 1989,
p. 15. The volumes in this series are among the great accom-
plishments of the French Annal.es school of historians. Perhaps
the best known of these historians among psychologists was
Philippe Aries, whose Centuries ofChiJdhood: A Social History of
Family Lift (New York: Knopf, 1962) argued that the concept
of childhood was a "social invcntion" rathcr than a fact, and
that it was constantly being rcshapcd. The position taken by thc
Annales historians, beginning with onc of its founders, Lucicn
Febvre, has been that "privacy" is to be understood as a "spin-
off" from post-medieval sociopolitical arrangements rather than
as an expression of some basic psychological or biological need.
170
Subject Index
Acrion: in cultural psychology, Autobiography: presuppositions of,

19-20; situated, 19, 1.05 122; research in, 120-123; in
Actor, in Burkean pentad, 50 tracking thc: self, 119-120, 136-
ActUR/ Mim/s, Possible W orlds 13 7; use of narrative in, 121; use
(Bruner), 5J of tense in, 122. See a/so Good-
Affo„"t regulation, 56, 58-59 hcrtz family
Agency: concc:pt of, 9; and context, ""Autobiography and thc: Construc-
119; and intenrional states, 9-10; tion of Self" (Bruner and Weis-
in narrative, 77; self as, 41 ser), l 70n40
Altematives, capacity for envi-
sioning, 110 Beginnings of SociaJ Uruúrstanding,
Animal lc:aming, 103-104, 106- The (Dunn), &l-86
107; contexts of, l64nl5. See a/so Behaviorism, and the cognitive rev-
Leaming olution, 2, 3-4
Annales school, 107, 136, 170n42 Biology: and causes of human be-
Anthropology, 2, 3; concc:pt of self havior, 20-22; as constraint, 23,
in, 107; on distribured leaming, 34; and culture, 34, 138; of
163nl3; as interprc:tative, 118; meaning, 62-Zl
on problems of translation bc:- Bod_v in Pain, The (Scarry), 21
tween cultures, 3 7~ on the role of Bovary, Emma, 5Q
culture, 12, 27, 34; transaction-
alism ín, 105
Antimentalism, and computability, Canons: ín Emily's soliloquies, 91;
8-9 narrative and, 77, 81-83, 86, 87
Artificial intelligence (AI), 10 Causarion: methodology of, 137; in
Aspiration, mc:asurement of, 102 narrarive, 89-90
171
• Subject Index •
Center for Cognírive Studics (Har- 107, 164nl5; and meaning,

vard), 3 118-119
Chíldrcn: acquísition of languagc Conversation, narrative in, 8.4
by, 70-97; apprecíation of con- Cooperative princíple, 48, 6.3
text by, 77-80; communícation Culrural psychology, 19-20, 35;
predating languagc, 71; order of and cross-cultural variations, 20;
acquísition of grammatical forms, as folk. psychology, 35; on mcan-
77-78; push for narracivc by, ing, 117; and open-mindedncss,
77-80; social aspcct of lcarning 30; and rclativísm, 24-27; and
by, 70- 71 1 138; socíalization of thc self, 99, 116-120; on valucs,
later narrative by, 81-84; uses of 28-19
narratives by, 84-87 Culture, human: and bíology, 34;
Cognirive revolurion: and concept and the concepr of meaning,
of leaming, 105; and informacíon 11-12 1 23; democratic, 30; and
proccssíng, 7; original, 1, 2-41 folk psychology, 13-14, 13 7-
163nl2; rationalism ín, 110- 138; and intentional statcs, 33;
1111 165-166n23; rcncwcd, 2 1 narrativcs as means of peacckccp-
35_, 64, 137; subscquent history ing in, 95-96; recognition of de-
ot: 3.-11 viations in, 68; and thc self, 110,
Communicarion: discourse units vs. 116, 138; and the sharing of
sentences for, 76-77; narrative meaning, 12-13, 64; and values,
as, 77, M... See aJso Language; 22
Readiness for language
Computabílicy: and the Cogníríve Deceptin Distinctúms (Epsteín), 57
revolution, l Q; and meaníng, 4, 6 Doli's House, A (Ibsen), 60
Computation, and meaníng, 4, l.3Z Don Quixotc, 5Q
Computers, 6 Dramatism, Burke on, 5Q
Conceptual Self, 100-10 l Dual landscape, 5..1=5.2
Constituenc belíefs: and folk psy-
chology, 39-43; and memory, 59 Emily (Narratives from the Crib):
Constructívísm: and commítment, evaluarion, 91-92, 93; puzzle-
27-28; ín democratíc culture, 30; solving, 94; quantirative reliabíl-
example of, 26-27; and rclarív- icy, 91; recognicíon ofthe canoní-
ísm, 25 cal, 91; scquentialíty, 90;
Concext: ín acquísírion of language, solíloquies of, 87-94
71, 72; of animal learning, 106- Empathy, ín shapíng narracivcs, 87
172
Ethnomcthodology, 105 124-125; skctchcs of mcmbcrs,

Ethnonavigation, 36 127-131; srudy of, 123-126
Ethnosociology, 3.7-..38 Grammar, and casc, 155-156nl9
Ethology, on animal lcarning, Greeks "nd the lrmtilmaJ, The
164nl5 (Dodd), 107
Hedda Gtibler (Ibsen), 60

Family: knowlcdgc of canons in, 86;_ History: in autobiography, 133;
pmxis in grasp of drama of, 87; as and cultural psychology, 138; and
tool for aurobiography, 122- narrativc, 148nl6; and thc self,
123; usc of narrativcs in, 84-87i 116-117, 136-137, 168n36
as vicar of culrurc, 132. See al.so History of Privtite Lift, A, 136
Goodhcrt:z family Humanities, and thc cognitivc rcvo-
Felicity conditions, 63, 6 7 lurion, 2
Folk psychology: Churchland on, 9; Hypothcsis confirmarion, in lcarn-
and conccpt of culture, 13-15 ~ ing experimcnts, lM
constirucnts of, 35 1 39-43i do-
mains of "inncr" and "outcr" Information, shift from "meaning"
worlds, 40-41' history of idea, to, 4=5
35, 36-38; and narurc of narra- lntentional statcs: and agcncy, 9; as
tive, 35 1 43-551 138; organiza- central to human psychology, 33;
tion of cxpcricncc, 35-36, and computability, 8i and folk
55-59, 137i protolinguistic psychology, 14, 38
grasp of, 74-75; rolc in culrural lntcrprctant, Peircc on, 46, 149n20
psychology, 35, 137 Interpretation: importancc of, 137,
Framing,56 138; andmcaning, 118, 168n36
From Follt Psychology to Cognitive Sci- lnterpretivism, 114, 167n31
mce (Stich), 8 lntcrvicws: ofthc Goodhcrtz family,
"Function of Gcncral Laws in His- 123-126, l 70n40; and narrativc,
tory" (Hcmpcl), ~ 115
Jerusalem-Harvard Lecrurcs, 3
Geisteswissenschaft (Dilthcy), 23, 35
Goals, in Burkcan pcntad, 5.0 Kalidasa, 150n24
Goodhcrtz family, 122-123; can- Knowing: and contcxt, 106; and
ons of, 132-136; family scssion transactionalism, 1.0.5... See al.so
with, 125-126; intcrviews with, Leaming
173
Lafcadio's Adventure (Gide), 4.0 Memory: and affect, 58-59; ín au-

Language: and culture, 11; early ac- tobiography, l 70n40; and fram-
quisition of, 70-71, 138; and ing of experience, 56-58; and in-
folk psychology, 14i and func- trospection, 99; and self,
tion, Zb vs. forma! logic, ()1-62; 111-112, 166-167n26
innate gift for, 69; narrative use Mentalism, opposed by computabil-
ot~ ~ philosophy of, 3... See a/so ity, 8_-_9
Childrcn; Narrative; Readiness Mimesis (Aristotle), 46
for language Mimesis (Auerbach), 5l
Law, 3 Mind: and computation, 6-8;_ con-
Leaming: animal, 103-104, 106- cept of, l, 3; and intentional
107; as conditioning, 161- states, 8
162nl0; distribured, 106, Mind, Self, and Society (Mead),
163nl3, 164nl6; history of con- 167n31
cept, 102 Multiple personality, disorders of,
Leaming theory: based on animal il
experiments, 102-104, 106-
107; and personality, 105; in so- Narrative: in autobiography, 120-
cial conccxt, 106-107; super- 122; child's achievemenr of,
seded, 104-105, 164nl5; and 68-80, 155nl7; dramatic quality
transacrionalism, 105.-106. in, 50-52; exceptional and ordi-
Linguistics, :2;_ cognitive, 3 nary, 47-50 1 93; fictional and
Literary theory, 2 empirical, 52-55; in folk psychol-
ogy, 35; functions of, 43, 67; of
Meaning: Anglo-American philoso- Goodhenz family, 123-126; im-
phers on, 61-62, 65! biology of, portance of in communication,
69-72; child's search for, 89; 77;_ as instrument for social nego-
communicative context in, tiation, 55; in interviews, 115; as
62-63, 67; felicity conditions for, means of culrural peace-keeping,
63, 67; search for in narrative, 97; 95-96; perspective in, 93; re-
and self, 117 quiremencs of, 77 ~ rhetoric of, 85,
Meaning-making: and the concept 87; sense and reference in, 44; se-
of culrure, 12-13, 20; in original quenciality of, :43-44, 77, 79, 93;
cognitive revolucion, 2-3_; in a re- socialization of child's latcr use of,
newed cognitive revolution, 2, 81-84; as use of language,
33, 13 7; shift to information, 59-64; use of subjunctive in,
4- 7; in siruated speech, 6.3.-M 53-51, 59;_ uses by children,
174
84-87; and the theory of self, Puluwat AtoU, 36, i l

W-115
N arrative K nowing and the H uman Rational choice theory, 9, 2..8.=22
Sciences (Polkinghorne ), 115-116 Rationalism, in early cognitive revo-
Narratives from the Crib (Nelson, lution, 110-111, 165-166n23
cd.), 87-94 Rats, studies of learning in,
Narrator, perspective of, Ll 103-104
Nature, i l Readiness for language: and ap-
Neuroscience, on role of cuJture, 34 preciarion of context, 71_, 72;
Chomsky on, 69-70; and com-
Ontic <lumping, M munication skills, 71, 76~ impor-
tance of funcrion, 72; social as-
Pain, effcct of, 22 pect of, ZQ- ZL Stt also Languagc
Parallel Distributed Processing Readiness for meaning, Z2..-Z5
(POP), Z Rcalism, and the self, 100-101
Personality, studies of, 105 Reflexivity, in perception of self,
Philosophy, 2; on the self, 107-108 109
Place of Values in a W orúl of FRCts, "Relation of the Poet to Day-
The (Kohler), 3.1 dreaming" (Freud), ~
"Plea for Excuses, A" (Austin), 8.6 Relativism: and constructivism, 25,
Poetics (Aristotle), 46 27; and cuJrural psychology,
Praxis, 81 15-16_, 20; senscs of, l i
Predicament ofCulture, Tht (Clif- Remnnbtring (Bartlett), 58
ford), 27 Response reinforcement, in teaming
Prediction, as goal, 16 experiments, 103-104
Presuppositions, in autobiography, Rhetoric: in autobiography, 121;
122-123 convergence of verifiability and
Privacy, concept of, 136, 170n42 verisimilitude, 94; vs. explanation
Psychoanalysis, and the self, l 00, in narrative, 85, 8Z
lll-113, 166-167n26
Psychulogy: and thc conccpt of cul- Saltuntala, l 50n24
ture, 12-13_, 19; cultural, 19-20i Saying and doing: congruencc be-
and the Infonnation Revolution, cwcen, 19; discrust of, 16-19
5; meaning as central concept of, "Sccret Sharer, The" (Conrad), 118,
2; scientific vs. folk, 31-32. Ste 169-170n37
also Culrural psychology; Folk Self: in autobiography, 119; and thc
psychology conceprual self, 100, l60n5; and
175
contcxt, 118-119; in cultural Stimuli and rcsponscs, 6
psychology, 116-120, 138; as Subjcct-vcrb-objcct (SVO}, 79
"distributcd," 107-109, 114, Subjcctivc statcs, as cxplanatory
116; ín folk psychology, 41-43.; conccpts, 15, 16-18
Gcrgcn on, 108-110; history of Subjunctivc, in narrativc, 53-541 59
conccpt, 99-108; in history, 116; Syntax: in acquisition of languagc,
ín law, 117; and thc privatc do- 70; as instrwncnt, 72; ordcr of ac-
main, 136-137; in psychoanaly- quisition, 76, 77-78; and thc
sis, 111-113; and rcalism, 100- push for narrativc, Z7-80
101, 159n22; as storytcllcr, 111;
and transactional conccms, 10 l, Tcsts, as mcasurcmcnt of self,
107-108; Western vicw of, 101-102
lli-ill To the Lighthouse (Woolt), 51
Sclf-cstccm: "distributivc" vicw of, "Toward an Anthropology of Self
108-109; mcasurcmcnt of, 102 and Fccling" (Rosaldo), il-42
Scqucntialiry: in Emily's soliloquics, Transactionalism, l.05-11l7
90; in narrativc, 43-44 1 771 Z2 Tropcs: and mcaning, 64; and mcm-
Social intcraction: prcrcquisitc for ory, 59-60
languagc, 74-75.; and thcorics of
self, 105-líló U nivcrsal Turing Machinc, 6
"Social Psychology as History" Utility, dc.fincd, 28
(Gcrgcn), 110
Social scicncc: and thc cognitivc rcv- Vlúue of the I nllirNlUllJ, The (Wcin-
olution, 2; intcrprctivc, 114, traub ), 107
167n31 Valucs: and culrurc, 29; as prcfcr-
Sociology: in autobiography, 133; cnccs, 28; rationalists on, 28-22
transactionalism in, 105 Vcrifiability, and plausibility, 108
Sources ofthe Self (Taylor), 22
Spccch: communicativc contcxt of, Wiút Ducit, The (Ibsen), 60
62-63; and logical analysis of Womcn, and thc self, l.14-115
mcaning, 61-62; siruatcd,
63-M. See tU.so Languagc Zipf's Law, 10
176
Name Index
Note: Where an author is mentioned in the text with an aaompanying endnote,

only the appropriate text pRfie is referenced in the index, not the endnote. When
authors are mentioned only in the endnotes, the appropriate endnote wilJ be found
referenced in the index.
Abclson, R„ M Bloom, L., 89

Allport, G. W„ 71 149n21 Boring, E. G., 99
Amsterdam, A. G., 159n43 Breckler, S. J„ 160n4
Aries, P„ l 70n42 Bridgman, P„ 160n5
Aristotle, 46 Brown, Ann, 106
Auerbach, E„ 5.1 Brown, R. W„ 155nl8, 156n22
Austin, G. A„ 17, 166n23 Bruncr, J. S„ 17, 53, 144n33,
Austin, J. L„ 17, 19, 62, 70-71, 86l 153n6, 154n8, 154nl5, 156n20,
149n20 164nl6, 166n23
Bruss, E„ M
Bach, E„ 156nl9 Burke, K„ 50, 132, 150n24
Bakhtin, M., 16ln7 Buttcrworth, G., 142n7, 154nl5
Barker, R„ 4:.8 Byrne, R. W., 154nl0
Barthes, R„ 166n24, 166n25,
166n26
Bartlett, F. C., 56-57, 58, 59, 64. Campione, J „ 106
165n21 Case, R„ l 60n4
Bcach, F. A., 153n7 Castillo, M„ 154nl5
Berg, K. M„ 156n20 Chandlcr, M., 74, 81
Berg, W. K„ l 56n20 Chartier, R„ 165nl 7
Bickcrton, D„ 72-73, 153n5 Chomsky, N., 69-70, 72 1 89,
Blanck, G„ 169n36 142nl0
177
• Name Index •
Churchland, P., 8=..2 Fcrguson, C. A., 157n23
Clark, E., 153n6 Fcstínger, L., 16ln9
Clark, H. H. 1 153n6 Fillmorc, C., 155-156n19
Clifford, J., 27 Fitzgerald, Scott, SZ
Colc, M., 144n27, l63nl3, 164nl6 Flaubcn, G., 52
Colc, P., 156nl9 Fodor, J., 2
Collíns, A., l63nl3 Foncs, M., 36, 32
Cronbach, L., 108 Foucault, M., 166n24
Culicovcr, P. W., 153n5, 155nl7 Fra.kc, C. 0., 36
Frcgc, G., 61
Darwin, C., 14 Freud, S., 14.. 16, 23, ~
Davis, K. E., 14ln3 Freund, P., 3
Davis, P., 159n43 Fricdman, D., l 45n38
Dcmbo, T., l6ln9 Frye, N., 45
Dcnnctt, D., 6, 8 42, 147nl l
1
Dcwcy, J., 77, 88. Gallic, W. B., 44, 147nl6, 148nl6

Diderot, D., 136 Gard.ner, H., 26
Dilthcy, W., 23_. 3..5 Garfinkd, H., 37, 110
Dodd, E. R., 107
Garnica, O. K., 156n23
Dollard, J., 162nl 1
Gccrtz, C., ~ lQ, !.b 126, 14ln3,
Donaldson, M., 80
166n24, l67n32
Douglas, M., 56 Gcntncr, D., 146n4
Drcyfus, H.. L., 14ln2 Gcrgcn, K., 2, 108-110, 14ln3,
Drcyfus, S. E., 14ln2 168n32
Duby, G., 165nl7 Gidc, A.,~
Duguid, P., 163nl3 Gladwin, T., 146n4, 147nl2
Dunn, J., M Goffinan, E., 110
Durkhcim, E., 149n21 \.JOodman, N., ~ ~ 14ln3,
Dworkin, R., 97 155nl7
Goodnow, J. J., 17, 166n23
Eco, U., 152n38
Grccnbcrg, J. l:L 156n22
Edclman, G., 34 Grccn.fidd, P. M., 79, 153n6
Edwards, D., 15ln31 Grccnwald, A. G., 160n4
Epstein, C. F., 5Z Grcgory, R. L., 147nll
Evans-Pritchard, E., 3Z
Gricc, P ., 48, 63
Febvre, L., l 70n42
Fddman, Carol, 24_. 92, 154n8 Haith, M., 156n20
Ferenczi, S., 144n37 Halliday, M. A. K., 76, 153n6
178
• Name Index •
Harms, R. T., 156nl9 Kcsscn, W., 156n20

Harris, R., l 52n40 Kis, D., 96
Hastc, H., 144n33 Kluckhohn, e., u
Haugclund, J., 147nll Kohler, W ., 3.1
Hcath, S. B., 83 1 M Krcchcvsky, L lM.
Hcchtcr, M., 145n38 Kuhn, T., 160n5
Hcider, F., 31-.38 Kundera, M., 96
Helm, J., 157n28 Kurland, 0., 163nl3
Hempcl, C., 44_, 55, 148nl6
Hcrbart, J. F., Z Labov, W., 90, 121, 157n28
Hcrdt, G., 147n7
Lachman, J. L., 142n7
Hermstein, R., 2.8.-22 Lachman, R., 142n7
Higgins, T. E., 160n4 Lakoff, G., 14ln3
Hillary, E., 40
Langer, E., 170n38
Hinde, R. A., 153n7
Ltjeune, P., 64_, 120, 170n39
Holquist, M., 16ln7
Leveit, W. J. M., 156n22
Hughes, H. S., 3
Levi-Strauss, C., 68, 146n4
Hull, C. L., 103
Lcvinson, s. e., 152n42
Hwnc, D., ló
Lewin, Kurt, 102, l68-169n36
Humphrcy, N., 34, 42\ 73 Lewin, R., 34, 73
Hunt, J. McV., 162nl 1
Lord, Albert, 45, 147nl7
Hutchins, E., 146n4
Lucariello, J., 81-.82
Luria, A. R., 80
Ibsen, H., 60, 118
Iscr, W., 14ln3, 15ln36
Mach, E., 160n5
Mandlcr, J., 56
Jakobson, R., 3, Z2 Markus, H. 1 42 1 100
James, W., 25, 100, 149n21 Marx, K., 141 60
Johnson, M., 14ln3 McClclland, J. L., 142nl0
Johnson-Laird, P., 159n2 Mcad, G. ~ 16ln6, 167n31
Joyce, James, 53 Mcad, Margarct, 36, 39
Jung, C. G., 45 Middlcton, D., 1Sln31
Miller, G. A., 4, 21, 159n2
Kahler, E., 5.1 Miller, N. E., 162nl 1
Kahncmann, D., 17 Miller, Peggy, 8..3
Kalnins, 1., 156n20 Mishler, E., 115, 125, l70n4l
Kant, I~ 3, 45 Mitchell, W. J. T., 166n24
Kelly, George, l 63n 12 Moore, B. B., 157n28, 157n30
179
• Name Index •
Morse, S.]., 165nl9 Rorty, R., 16~ 25-27, 160n5,

Mowrer, 0. H. 1 162nl0, 162nl 1 l66n24
Myers, F., 107 Rosaldo, M., 41-42, 95, 107,
147nl5, 147nl6, 167n31
Nagel, T., lA RosaJdo, R., .4l
Napokon, 60 Ross, Gail, l 64n 16
Nehamas, A., 160n5 Ross, Lee, 17
Nelson, K., 87, 158n35, 158n39 Rousseau, J. J., 136
NietzSche, F., 160n5 Rubin, D., l 70n40
Ninio, Anat, l54nl5 Rumelhart, D., 142nl0
Nisben, R., 17
Nurius, P., 42, 100 Sacks, 0., 152n37
Sadock, J. M., 156nl9
Pavlov, L P., 161-162nl0 Salapatek, P., 156n20
Pea, R., 106 Sampson, E. E., 168n32
Peirce, C. S., 46, 62 Santambrogio, M., 152n38
Perkins, D., 106-107, 163nl3 Sapir, E., 2.2
Perrot, M., 165nl7 Sarbin, T. G., l67n31, 168n34
Piagct, J., 8Q Scaife, M., 154nl5
Picasso, P., 3.1 Scarry, E., 22
Pinker, S., 153n5, 155nl7 Schafcr, R., 111, 112-113, 119
Polkinghome, D., 115-116, 119, Schank, R., M
142n3 Schutz, A., 38, 110
Polonoff, D., 112 Schwartz, J., 163nl3
Popper, K., l60n5 Schweitzer, A., 60
Pratkanis, A. R., 160n4 Scribncr, S., 164nl6
Premack, D., 68 Searle, J., 9, 14ln3
Propp, V., 80~ 88 Sears, P., 16ln9
Seeley-Brown, J., 163nl3
Quine, W. V., 3 Shoner, J., 56, 168n32
Shulman, D., 150n24
Rabinow, P., 166n24, 167n32 Shweder, R., 146n7
Reynolds, V., 34 Simon, H. A., l 42n8
Rich, Adrienne, 32 Skinner, B. F., 38, 145n42, 16lnl0
Richards, D., 159n43 Slobin, D. 1., 153n5
Rickman, H. P., 144n30, 146n2 Slovik, P., 143n25
Ricoeur, P., 16, 44, 45, 46, 53, 60, Smith, Adam, 2&
147nl5, 147nl6 Smith, Joshua, 79, 153n6
180
• Name Index •
Smith, Sidonic, 168n33 Van Dijk, T„ 64
Snow, C. E., 157n23 Vamcdoe, J. K. T., 145n44
Spcncc, D., 111, 142n3, Veync, P., 164nl7
165nn25,26 Violi, P., 152n38, 152n39
Speny, L. L., 157n27 Vygotsky, L., 11, 88, 16ln7,
Stein, Gcrtrude, 31 164nl6, 169n36
Stern, D., 79
Stevcns, A. L., l 46n4 Waal, F. de, 95
Stich, S., 8, 36, 38, 146n3 Wagner, H. R., 146n7
Stigler, J. W., 146n7 Waletzky, J., 157n28, 158n38
Stock, B., 107 Wason, P. C., 155nl 7
Stone, L., 148nl6 Weigel, M., 53
Strawson, P., 159n2 Weintraub, K. J., 107
Sullivan, W., 166n24, l67n32 Weir, Ruth, 89
Weisscr, S., 124, 135, 170n40
Tallcyrand, C., 60 West, M., 163nl3
Taylor, C., 9, 22, 29, 39 Wexlcr, K., 153n5, 155nl7
Taylor, M. G., 16Snl 9 White, Hayden, 50
Thomas, K., 136 Whiten, A., 154nl0
Thucydides, 148nl6 Williams, B., 160n2
Tinbcrgcn, N., 164nl5, 169n36 Wittgenstein, L., 62, 152n41
Titchencr, E. B., 99 Wood, David, 164nl6
Tolman, E. C., 2, 103-104, Woodruff, G., 153nl
162nl0, 162nl l Woolf, Virginia, 51
Twing, A. M., 6 Wylie, R. C., 16ln8
Turner, V., 150n24
Tvcrsky, A., 17 Yeats, W. B., 54
Vailúngcr, H., 160n5 Zener, K., 162nl0
181
-„-
Jtronwt .,,._ •SI* Utlt U. ~ ~ •Ö IU arrtnl ftx>..
„_..,... .... „ •...,„,.,..,.,.
„ --„„„„,-....
..,., __ .._„....._o..,„_,,.._""
............ °"' oltt..•••••• 11 Pp1:11edt.,' aCllP•J •.....Smod.lcl......,
an .... rr"'P tht lf*Clll n.......uoi• ~ wf1Kh "*"' bolh ~
and • tonit-tllC.ed "' C\.llwre.
1 Btv.) •&\lel tha.t ~y thoold r•lum to hurran COl'ICMnl, ape--

caally tii• roi. of culture in shaplng our thouchu and tht: laniu;aae we UM
to llXfl"ll them (.....,) Mt:n'c$ to iu ..., r•ád ~ a.lli""l1tod c""1'yone
•IM"• ldoat on 1hit e.apa he ~ He al'l-·lrld d09t· allude to lhem
ln COtU•t. '° lhllt we Me cOl'ISUll'lliy rubblnc •lbow1 w1th the IQl'IU on
_\_...,...
W'hoM "'°"'*" N mndl.. En.dlc.e ~ l«Of..._ tti. tiext pu.. WICh
...,,.,.
-
- ....
O...Sabel.- - T.... - -
..,,..,.....""-'.,..., .......... „ ..„-...
~ f1l'C' ol irutd u
.,.~.....
„
-
p opcAb
1U rNnlfnc.o not at. thc behl..;onsu ~ht (.Ol1lidon dm. SUVUlc '°"C
1111Ce .....on- bul M thoM memben of hD o-n cocnil•.... P-'t1who1'1..-e
dd t"'-lr W>Yls to tl',e ton'lpUtef' , (Bnnlrl ddc:nMI how psychotogy an
redediut.e ltt.c:lf 10 the swdy of me1111111 and •U fotmat:ion H1111ng •pont 1n
Wl~tNKll c.ar•er aK~ncling ~ mount.Aln. he now ,._... i.n elder 1~·
m#I\ p11'1ot1m1t ~w ,. ~ lne.or-atcd ln úie c.urrcnl dcbata ln
Pfr<holocY w~I f'lftd (thai! book ~ ~fid 1timullu.na "
- Paul 8uaetl'Niac ~ Tirnn
)U'ome.,.,_,iil~yPt
...,.,,. ....... „_,

~. T1w .....
...-... by Hlrvanl).
<:
„ ................ ----°'
oro/PJ,.ctdooat,......Yoril~
fi( EdlK«JOn.. .,.. ......, •

~ 1987"" ..........
fl'r&ae tor NI „..... cotenbuuon to hwnwl p. '
„ ""-·-
nw., "'~ <•
,,
sm..
Hahard Unh9r11cy Prcss

C..mbnct,.. f"'b1aachu1.etu
~ondon, "'a't•d
www.hup..harvard.edu
c--.,....,o.-„ar' '

Bruner Acts of Meaning

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Bruner Acts of Meaning

Uploaded by

Document Information

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Bruner Acts of Meaning

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What is Bruner arguing psychology should focus on?

What is Bruner arguing psychology should focus on?

How does Bruner describe referencing other thinkers in his work?

How does Bruner describe referencing other thinkers in his work?

THE JERUSALEM-HARVARD LECTURES

Sponsored by che Hebrew University of Jerusalem

HARVARD UNIVERSIT PRESS

Bruner, Jcromc S. (Jcrome Scymour)

Dcsigned by Gwcn Frankfddt

The Proper Srudy of Man 1

Entry into Meaning 67

Subject Index 171

Name Index 177

B OOKS are like mountaintops jutting out of the sea.

the human condition-inquiries in the humanities or ín the

Locke. And had Freud's followers fought free of the model of

inunarure child and man at full marurity, man in full health

with meaning, how it inevitably becomes a cultural psychol-

I CANNOT begin to mention all the people and institu-

forces into concert. We had become convinced by then that

first draft of this book. 1 have rarely lectured to so intensely

The Proper Study of Man

I WANT TO BEGIN with the Cognitive Revolution as my

done, 1 then want to tum directly to a preliminary exploration

beneath the surface of the more computationally oriented cog-

This implies a code of established possible choices. The cate-

Soon, the battleground began looking increasingly traditional

plainly wrong mentalism, that was something to be explained

pologist Clifford Geertz, but their views were marginalized

return to the question of how to construct a mental science

11 Begin with the concept of culture itself.-particularly its

became the major factor in giving form to the minds of those

dered public and shared. Our culturally adapted way of life

ivc disciplines that are evenrually displaced by scientific knowl-

psychological categories that we experience ourselves and

theory of psychology for each culture we study. Let me con-

post-Freudian modem men and women to cock a snoot at

pcople act in an offensive fashion, our first step in coping is

has now been a quarter-century since John Austin's introduc-

to say that a cultural psychology necd dispensc forcvcrmorc

IV I have urged that psychology stop trying to be "mean-

action but, at most, a constraint upon it or a condition for it.

lim's commitment to Ramadan is not captured by a recital of

there been such a concerted effort to dehwnanize through

rcconstructing communal ways of life than to invoke thc fail-

V And this inevitably brings us to the issue of relativism.

Are the consequences of practicing such constructivism and

"why or whether our present view of the world is, roughly,

been rigged by choice of curriculum in such a way as to legiti-

matter of preference? Arc values only preferences? If not, how

these circumstances. But it is whimsical to suppose that, under

VJ Let me retum finally to the adversarial stance of posi-

from that kind of painter. 44 As Adrienne Rich puts it, "When

Falk Psychology as an Instrument

I N THE FIRST CHAPTER 1 recounted how the cognitive

make Other Minds seem so opaque and impenetrable. When

Those are the bare bones of the argument in favor of what

mcmory as our example. And finally, I shall want to explicate

11 Coined in derision by the new cognitive scientists for

Since, in the main, anthropologists had never been much