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The Narrative Construction of Reality

Jerome Bruner

Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a "true" knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind's interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations andideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover how we achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, "there to be observed." This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on thedevelopment of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniformfashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the working out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world "as it is." There have always been dissidents who
Critical Inquiry 18(Autumn 1991) © 1991 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/91/1801-0002$01.00. All rights reserved.

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Jerome Bruner

The Narrative Construction of Reality

challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. In more recent times, Piaget became the spokesman forthe classic rationalist tradition by arguing the universality of a series of invariant developmental stages, each with its own set of inherent logical operations that successively and inexorably led the child to construct a mental representation of the real world akin to that of the detached, dispassionate scientist. While he did not quite drive the empiricist learning theorists from the field (theyhave begun to revive through their formulation of "connectionist" computer simulations of learning), his views dominated the three decades following the Second World War. Now there is mounting criticism of his views. The growth of knowledge of "reality" or of the mental powers that enable this growth to occur, the critics argue, is neither unilinear, strictly derivational in a logical sense, noris it, as it were, "across the board." Mastery of one task does not assure mastery of other tasks that, in a formal sense, are governed by the same principles. Knowledge and skill, rather, are domain specific and, consequently, uneven in their accretion. Principles and procedures learned in one domain do not automatically transfer to other domains. Such findings were not simply a "failure toconfirm" Piaget or the rational premise generally.1 Rather, if the acquisition of knowledge and of mental powers is indeed domain specific and not automatically transferable, this surely implies that a domain, so called, is a set of principles and procedures, rather like a prosthetic device, that permits intelligence to be used in certain ways, but not in others. Each particular way of usingintelligence develops an integrity of its own—a kind of knowledge-plus-skill-plus-tool integrity—that fits it to a particular range of applicability. It is a little "reality" of its own that is constituted by the principles and procedures that we use within it. These domains, looked at in another way, constitute something like a culture's treasury of tool kits. Few people ever master the whole range of...