CONCEPT
Meaning-Making
Bruner's term for the active cognitive process by which a consciousness embedded in a culture, a life, and a history constructs interpretations of experience — the operation computational systems structurally cannot perform because they lack stakes in the experiences they process.
Meaning-making is not 'understanding' in the colloquial sense. It is the specific cognitive operation Bruner devoted his career to describing: the active construction of interpretations by a consciousness that has stakes in the experience being interpreted. The child who constructs meaning from a story is not decoding sentences; she is integrating the story with her existing understanding of the world, her knowledge of herself, her sense of what matters. Meaning-making requires a meaner — a consciousness for whom the experience counts. A large language model that produces coherent narrative has performed sophisticated pattern-matching; it has not performed an act of meaning in Bruner's sense, because it has no stakes in the narrative it generates. The distinction is not about the quality of the output. It is about the nature of the operation that produced it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Bruner's concept of meaning-making connects his constructivism to his late-career turn toward narrative