1991_bruner_The Narrative Construction of Reality - Énergies, Temps & Cosmotechniques

The Narrative Construction of Reality === > [!tldr] Tags > #type/journalArticle > [!info] Meta Data >**FirstAuthor**:: [[Bruner, Jerome]] > **Title**:: The Narrative Construction of Reality > **Year**:: 1991 > **Citekey**:: [[1991_bruner]] > **itemType**:: journalArticle > **Journal**:: *Critical Inquiry* > **Volume**:: 18 > **Issue**:: 1 > **ISSN**:: > > [!Cite] > Bruner Jerome, « The Narrative Construction of Reality », _Critical Inquiry_, 1991, vol. 18, no 1. > > %%[@1991_bruner]%% > **URL**:: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1343711 . > > **Related**:: . > > **Attachment**::[PDF](zotero://open-pdf/library/items/QXDGK4CU). --- > [!important] Synthesis > **Contribution**:: > > [!Abstract] >> --- # Note. --- # Annotations%% begin annotations %% ### Imported: 2026-09-24 11:39 am Quote > Piaget became the spokesman for the 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 repre- sentation of the real world akin to that of the detached, dispassionate sci- entist Quote > The growth of knowl- edge 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, nor is it, as it were, "across the board. Quote > Knowledge and skill, rather, are domain specific and, consequently, uneven in their accretion Quote > It is a little "reality" of its own that is constituted by the principles and procedures that we use within it Quote > The attraction of this view is, of course, that it links man and his knowledge-gaining and knowledge-using capabilities to the culture of which he and his ancestors were active mem Quote > ers. But it brings pro- foundly into question not only the universality of knowledge from one domain to another, but the universal translatability of knowledge from one culture to anoth Quote > at cultural products, like language and other symbolic sys- tems, mediate thought and place their stamp on our representations of reality Quote > name, afterJohn Seely Brown and Allan Collins, of "distributed intelligen Quote > most of our knowledge about human knowledge-getting and reality-constructing is drawn from studies of how people come to know the natural or physical world rather than the human or symbolic world. Quote > So while we have learned a great deal indeed about how we come eventually to construct and "explain" a world of nature in terms of causes, probabilities, space-time manifolds, and so on, we know altogether too lit- tle about how we go about constructing and representing the rich and messy domain of human interaction Quote > we organize our experience and our memory of human hap penings mainly in the form of narrative-stories, excuses, myths, rea- sons for doing and not doing, and so on. Quote > Unlike the constructions generated by logical and scientific procedures that can be weeded out by falsification, narrative construc- tions can only achieve "verisimilitude." Quote > Narratives, then, are a version of reality whose acceptability is governed by convention and "narrative necessity" rather than by empirical verification and logical requiredness Quote > Eventually it becomes a vain enterprise to say which is the more basic-the mental process or the discourse form that expresses it-for, just as our experience of the natural world tends to imitate the categories of familiar science, so our experience of human affairs comes to take the form of the narratives we use in telling about them. Quote > con- 7. For a fuller, more discursive account of the nature and products of narrative thought, see my Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), and Acts of Mean ing. See also Theodore R. Sarbin, Narrative Psychology: The Storied Nature of Human Conduct (New York, 198 Quote > See On Narrative, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago, Quote > the ten features of narrative. Quote > 1. Narrative diachronicity. A n Quote > narrative is an account of events occur- ring over time. It is irreducibly durative. It may b Quote > The time involved, moreover, as Paul Ricoeur has noted, is "human time" rather than abstract or "clock" time.' It is time Quote > 2. Particularity. Na Quote > 3. Intentional state entail Quote > ent. Narratives are about people acting in a setting, and the happenings that befall them must be relevant to their intentional states while so engaged-to their beliefs, desires, theories, val- ues, and so o Quote > hing. For some measure of agency is always present in narrative, and agency presuppose Quote > e situation. The loose link between intentional states and subsequent action is the reason why narrative accounts cannot provide causal expla Quote > for inter Quote > d. Interpretation is concerned with "reasons" for things happening, rather than strictly with their "causes," a matter to which we Quote > 4. Hermeneutic composa Quote > The word hermeneutic implies that there is a text or a text analogue through which somebody has been trying to express a meaning and from which somebody is trying to extract a Quote > at there is a difference between what is expressed in the text and what the text might mean, and furthermore that there is no unique solu tion to the task of determining the meaning for this e Quote > ility." The telling of a story and its comprehension as a story depend on the human capacity to process knowledge in this interpretive Quote > . This is the more surprising since there is compelling evidence to indicate that narrative comprehension is among the earliest powers of mind to appear in the young child and among the most widely used forms of organizing human experien Quote > 15. See, for example, Narratives from the Crib, ed. Katherine Nelson (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), and Bruner, Acts of Meaning. Quote > Interpretation has a long history in biblical exegesis and in jurispru- dence Quote > f intention: "why" the story is told how and when it is, and interpreted as it is by inter- locutors caught in different intentional stances themse Quote > of background knowledge-of both the storyteller and the listener, and how each interprets the back- ground knowledge of the oth Quote > er Hilary Put Quote > t, proposes two principles: the first is a "Principle of Benefit of Doubt," the second a "Principle of Reasonable Ignoran Quote > e": the first "forbids us to assume that ... experts are factually omniscient," the second that "any speakers are philosophically omniscient (even uncon sciously)."2 Quote > 5. Canonicity and bre Quote > 24. See Donald P. Spence, Narrative Truth and Historical Truth: Meaning and Interpreta- tion in Psychoanalysis (New York, 19 Quote > often highly conventional and are strongly influenced by narrative traditions. Quote > narrative structure in terms of two components-what hap- pened and why it is worth telling. Quote > notion of irreducible clausal sequences Quote > 6. Referential Quote > 7. Genericness Quote > en- res seem to provide both writer and reader with commodious and conven tional "models" for limiting the hermeneutic task of making sense of human happenings-ones we narrate to ourselves as well as ones we hear others tell. Quote > . But genre is also a form of telling, its sju Quote > et. Even if genres specialize in conventionalized human plights, they achieve their effects by using language in a particula Quote > n a word, while they may be representations of social ontology, they are also invitations to a particular style of epistem Quote > logy. As such, they may have quite as powerful an influence in shaping our modes of thought as they have in creating the realities that their plots de Quote > 8. Normativeness Quote > Because its "tellability" as a form of discourse rests on a breach of conventional expectation, narrative is necessarily nor- mative Quote > A breach presupposes a norm. T Quote > Hayden White and Victor Turner to Paul Ricoeur, to propose that narrative is centrally concerned with cultural legitimacy.35 A Quote > The normativeness of narrative, in a word, is not historically or cultur ally terminal. Its form changes with the preoccupations of the age and the circumstances surrounding its produ Quote > 9. Context sensitivity and negoti Quote > it is this very context sensitivity that makes narrative discourse in everyday life such a viable instrument for cultural negotiation. Quote > You tell your ver- sion, I tell mine, and we rarely need legal confrontation to settle the dif- ference. Principles of charity and presumptions of relevance are balanced against principles of sufficient ignorance and sufficient doubt to a degree one would not expect where criteria of consistency and verification pre- vailed. We seem to be able to take competing versions of a story with a per- spectival grain of salt, much more so than in the case of arguments or proofs Quote > I think it is precisely this interplay of perspectives in arriving at "narrative truth" that has led philosophers like Richard Rorty to abandon univocally verificationist views of truth in favor of pragmatic ones.43 Nor is it surpris- ing that anthropologists have increasingly turned away from positivist descriptions of cultures toward an interpretive one in which not objective categories but "meanings" are sought for, not meanings imposed ex hypo- thesi by an outsider, the anthropologist, but ones arrived at by indigenous participants immersed in the culture's own processes for negotiating meaning.44 Quote > 10. Narrative accrua Quote > Sciences achieve their accrual by deriva- tion from general principles, by relating particular findings to central par- adigms, by couching empirical findings in a form that makes them subsumable under altering paradigms, and by countless other procedures for making science, as the saying goes, "cumulative. Quote > insist, the accruals eventually create something variously called a "culture" or a "history" or, more loosely, a "traditio Quote > ed.46 Institutions, too, as we know from the innovative work of Eric Hobsbawm, "invent" traditions out of previously ordinary happenings and then endow them with privileged sta- tus. Quote > 7 And there are principles of jurisprudence, like stare decisis, that guarantee a tradition by assuring that once a "case" has been interpreted in one way, future cases that are "similar" shall be interpreted and decided equivalently. Insofar as the law insists on such accrual of cases as "prece dents," and insofar as "cases" are narratives, the legal system imposes an orderly process of narrative accr Quote > Michel Foucault's ground-breaking Archeology ofKn Quote > be through the imposition of bogus historical-causal entailm Quote > coherence by contemporaneity: the belief that things happening at the same time must be connecte Quote > What creates a culture, surely, must be a "local" capacity for accruing stories of happenings of the past into some sort of diachronic struc Quote > that permits a continuity into the present-in short, to construct a history, a tradition, a legal system, instruments assuring historical continuity if not legitimac Quote > It is a sense of belonging to this canonical past that permits us to form our own narratives of deviation while maintaining complicity with the canon Quote > ic domains of human knowledge and skill and that they are supported and organized by cultural tool kits. If we accept Quote > understanding the nature and growth of mind in any set- ting, we cannot take as our unit of analysis the isolated individual opera ting "inside his or her own skin" in a cultural vacuum. Rather, we must Quote > human mind cannot express its nascent powers without the enablement of the symbolic systems of culture. While many of Quote > other domain that must be widely (though roughly) shared for a culture to operate with requisite effectiveness is the domain of social beliefs and Quote > procedures %% end annotations %% %% Import Date: 2026-09-24T11:39:09.418+02:00 %%