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Acts of Meaning
Bruner's 1990 manifesto against the computational turn in cognitive science — the slim, fierce book that argued the cognitive revolution he helped launch had been 'diverted' into information processing and had lost sight of its founding question: how do human beings make meaning?
Acts of Meaning emerged from Bruner's 1989–90 Jerusalem–Harvard Lectures. Published by Harvard University Press in 1990, it is among the sharpest turns in a long intellectual career. The original cognitive revolution, Bruner argued, had been about how human beings make meaning — how they construct the interpretive frameworks through which experience becomes intelligible. The computational model that came to dominate cognitive science had reduced this to information processing, stripping away the cultural, narrative, and intentional dimensions of cognition that make meaning-making possible. A New York Times reviewer captured the thrust: Bruner aimed 'his manifesto not at the behaviorists — he considers that struggle long since won — but at those members of his own cognitive party who have sold their souls to the computer.' The book's distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of thought became one of the most influential ideas in late-twentieth-century psychology.
