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Actual Minds, Possible Worlds
Bruner's 1986 turn to narrative — the book that first articulated the distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of thought, and prepared the critical ground that Acts of Meaning four years later would occupy.
Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Harvard University Press, 1986) marked the turn that surprised many of Bruner's colleagues. After decades of work on perception, concept formation, and educational theory, he turned to narrative — not as a literary form but as a fundamental mode of human cognition, as basic and irreducible as the logical-scientific thinking that had dominated cognitive psychology since its founding. The book argued that human beings operate in two distinct cognitive modes, each with its own logic, criteria for well-formedness, and relationship to truth. Paradigmatic thought seeks general truths through formal logic. Narrative thought constructs particular meanings through stories. The book prepared the ground for Acts of Meaning (1990) and established narrative psychology as a legitimate field of inquiry.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Until this book, Bruner's reputation rested on work that fit comfortably within mainstream cognitive science — concept formation, perception, educational theory. The turn to narrative was not