Acts of Meaning

1. The Cognitive Revolution's Misdirection: From Meaning to Information

For, at least in my view, that revolution has now been diverted into issues that are marginal to the impulse that brought it into being. Indeed, it has been technicalized in a manner that even undermines that original impulse.

Original impulse. The Cognitive Revolution, in its inception during the late 1950s, aimed to re-center psychology on the concept of "mind" and, crucially, "meaning." It sought to understand how human beings construct meaning from their encounters with the world and themselves, focusing on symbolic activities and fostering collaboration with the humanities and other social sciences. This was a profound shift, intended to replace behaviorism, not merely reform it.

The diversion. However, the revolution was soon sidetracked by the introduction of computation as the dominant metaphor and computability as the criterion for theoretical models. This led to a critical shift from "meaning" to "information processing." Information, in computational terms, is a pre-coded message, indifferent to the nuances of meaning, vagueness, or metaphor. It operates on pre-assigned categories and strict rules, making it ill-suited for the complexities of human interpretation.

Consequences of technicalization. This technicalization resulted in a new form of reductionism, where cognitive processes were equated with computer programs. It led to an antimentalist stance, dismissing intentional states like beliefs, desires, and intentions as irrelevant or epiphenomenal. The concept of human agency, which implies action driven by intentional states, also became suspect, alienating psychology from its original humanistic goals and much of the broader human sciences.

2. Culture, Not Biology, Shapes the Human Mind

As Clifford Geertz puts it, without the constituting role of culture we are "unworkable monstrosities . . . incomplete or unfinished animals who complete or finish ourselves through culture."

Culture's constitutive role. A central tenet of cultural psychology is that culture is not merely an "overlay" on a biologically determined human nature, but rather a constitutive force that gives form to human minds. Our symbolic systems, traditional ways of living, and shared practices are products of history that become the very world to which we adapt and the tools for doing so. This makes it impossible to construct a human psychology based on the individual alone.

Biology as constraint. In this reversed view, biology primarily acts as a constraint on human action and experience, rather than a universal cause. These biological limits, however, often serve as challenges for cultural invention. Cultures devise "prosthetic devices"—both soft (like language tricks) and hard (like tools)—to exceed or redefine these natural boundaries, as seen in memory aids or social norms around basic drives.

Shared meanings and adaptation. Human adaptation and functioning are deeply intertwined with shared meanings and cultural practices. Our culturally adapted way of life depends on these shared understandings and the modes of discourse for negotiating differences. To ignore culture's role is to lose sight of how individuals are formed and how they truly function within their social worlds.

3. Folk Psychology: Culture's Narrative Operating System

All cultures have as one of their most powerful constitutive instruments a folk psychology, a set of more or less connected, more or less normative descriptions about how human beings 'tick,' what our own and other minds are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how one commits oneself to them, and so on.

Defining folk psychology. Folk psychology is a culture's inherent, often implicit, theory of mind, motivation, and human action. It comprises a set of shared beliefs and normative descriptions about how people think, feel, desire, and behave. This "common sense" understanding is learned early in life, alongside language, and profoundly shapes our interactions and interpretations of the social world.

Resistance to displacement. Unlike naive disciplines that are eventually superseded by scientific knowledge, folk psychology, though it evolves, is not displaced by scientific paradigms. It continues to dominate everyday transactions because it deals with intentional states—beliefs, desires, intentions, and commitments—that scientific psychology often dismisses. These categories are fundamental to how we experience ourselves and others, anticipate behavior, and judge the worth of lives.

Institutional enforcement. Folk psychology is deeply rooted in language and shared conceptual structures, and it reflects a culture's values as much as its ways of knowing. Crucially, a culture's normatively oriented institutions—such as laws, educational systems, and family structures—serve to enforce and justify these folk psychological tenets. Ignoring these institutionalized meanings is to miss a fundamental aspect of how society guides and controls individual acts.

4. Narrative: The Core Structure for Making Sense of Human Action

Folk psychology is about human agents doing things on the basis of their beliefs and desires, striving for goals, meeting obstacles which they best or which best them, all of this extended over time.

Narrative as organizing principle. The fundamental organizing principle of folk psychology is narrative, not formal logic or categorical classification. It frames human experience as stories involving agents, actions, goals, scenes, and instruments, unfolding over time. This narrative structure allows us to understand human behavior in terms of intentional states, making sense of why people do what they do.

Sequentiality and meaning. A primary property of narrative is its inherent sequentiality. Events, mental states, and happenings gain their meaning from their place within the overall configuration of the sequence, or plot. Grasping a narrative involves a dual process: understanding the plot to make sense of its constituents, and extracting the plot from the succession of events. This unique sequentiality is indispensable to a story's significance.

Indifference to reality. Narratives can be "real" or "imaginary" without losing their power as stories, highlighting that their significance derives from an internal discourse structure rather than strict correspondence to external reality. This "indifference to extralinguistic reality" underscores that the sequence of sentences, rather than their individual truth or falsity, determines the overall plot and meaning.

5. Narrative's Dual Landscape: Bridging the Canonical and the Exceptional

The function of the story is to find an intentional state that mitigates or at least makes comprehensible a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern.

Explicating the exceptional. A crucial feature of narrative is its ability to forge links between the exceptional and the ordinary. While folk psychology is invested in canonicality—the expectable and usual—it possesses powerful mechanisms for rendering the unusual comprehensible. When an exception to ordinary behavior occurs, people invariably construct a story that provides reasons, implicating both an intentional state in the protagonist and some canonical cultural element.

Dramatism and moral consequences. Kenneth Burke's concept of "dramatism" highlights that well-formed stories involve a pentad of Actor, Action, Goal, Scene, and Instrument, along with "Trouble"—an imbalance between these elements. This trouble often has moral consequences, as stories explore the limits of legitimacy and come out "lifelike," with the trouble morally explicated. To tell a story is inherently to take a moral stance.

Inner and outer worlds. Narrative also features a "dual landscape," where external events occur concurrently with mental events in the protagonists' consciousness. Discordant linkages between these two landscapes provide motive force for stories, as protagonists interpret events and assign meaning to them. This gives stories not only a moral but also an epistemic status, reflecting how different cultures deal with the relationship between these inner and outer worlds.

6. Entering Meaning: Innate Narrative Readiness Meets Cultural Tools

I want now to make the more radical claim that it is a 'push' to construct narrative that determines the order of priority in which grammatical forms are mastered by the young child.

Prelinguistic meaning readiness. Human beings possess an innate, primitive predisposition to organize experience narratively, a "protolinguistic readiness for meaning." This readiness is triggered by social interactions and the expressions of others, suggesting we are equipped with a primitive form of folk psychology even before language. This capacity allows children to grasp the significance of situations, aiding in language acquisition.

Critique of autonomous language acquisition. Contrary to views like Chomsky's "language acquisition device," language is not acquired autonomously or merely through exposure to syntax. It requires extensive interaction with caregivers and is deeply context-sensitive. Children learn language through use, motivated by a prior grasp of communicative functions and the significance of the situations in which talk occurs.

Narrative's influence on grammar. The "push" to construct narrative profoundly influences the order of grammatical acquisition in young children. Narrative requires:

• Agentivity: Emphasis on human action and goals (e.g., agent-and-action, action-and-object relations).
• Sequentiality: Mastery of forms for linearizing events (e.g., "then," "later," "because").
• Canonicality: Readiness to mark the unusual and leave the usual unmarked.
• Perspective: Early expression of voice and affective stance (e.g., crying, prosodic features).
  These features appear early, enabling children to produce and comprehend stories long before mastering complex logical propositions.

7. The Rhetorical Nature of Narrative: Shaping Self and Social Reality

To narrate in a way that puts your case convincingly requires not only language but a mastery of the canonical forms, for one must make one’s actions seem an extension of the canonical, transformed by mitigating circumstances.

Narrative as rhetoric. Children learn early that narratives are not just about recounting events but also about rhetoric. In family conflicts, for instance, children discover that telling the "right story"—one that legitimizes their actions or goals—is crucial for balancing their desires against family expectations. This involves mastering canonical forms and presenting actions as extensions of these norms, mitigated by specific circumstances.

Social negotiation and empathy. This rhetorical function of narrative is a powerful instrument for social negotiation. By learning to construct convincing narratives, children develop skills to cajole, deceive, flatter, and justify, navigating social interactions without provoking confrontation. This process also fosters a more discerning empathy, as they learn to interpret the meanings and intentions of others, especially when no conflict of interest is involved.

Cultural cohesion and peacekeeping. The human capacity to render experience in narrative form is vital for cultural cohesion. It provides interpretive procedures for adjudicating divergent construals of reality, which are inevitable in any diverse society. By presenting, dramatizing, and explicating mitigating circumstances around conflicts, narratives serve a peacekeeping function, making happenings comprehensible against the background of ordinary life, even if not always forgiving.

8. The Self as a Culturally Constructed and Distributed Narrative

We achieve our personal identities and self-concept through the use of the narrative configuration, and make our existence into a whole by understanding it as an expression of a single unfolding and developing story.

From essential to conceptual Self. The concept of "Self" has evolved from an essentialist view—a pre-existing substance to be discovered—to a conceptual one, constructed through reflection and experience. This shift, influenced by antirealism in philosophy and constructivism in social sciences, recognizes Self not as a fixed entity but as a dynamic construction, shaped by both internal processes and external cultural forces.

The distributed Self. A cultural psychology views the Self as "distributed," not solely residing within an individual's head. Just as knowledge is distributed across external resources (notes, books, friends), the Self is distributed in social interactions, relationships, and cultural practices. It is a transactional relationship between a speaker and a "Generalized Other," framed by one's consciousness, position, and commitments within a cultural context.

Autobiography as Self-construction. Autobiography serves as a primary means by which individuals construct and revise their Selves. These life stories are not mere records but narrative constructions, constrained by life events yet powerfully shaped by the demands of the story being told. The Self as narrator recounts and justifies, while the Self as protagonist points to the future, constantly revising the plot as new events unfold and meanings are negotiated within a cultural-historical situation.

9. The Primacy of Interpretation: Understanding Human Action Beyond Causation

For there are no causes to be grasped with certainty where the act of creating meaning is concerned, only acts, expressions, and contexts to be interpreted.

Interpretation over causation. Cultural psychology is fundamentally an interpretive discipline, akin to history, anthropology, and linguistics. It moves beyond the positivist ideal of reductionism, causal explanation, and prediction, which often artificializes human life. Instead, it seeks to understand how human beings interpret their worlds and how we, in turn, interpret their acts of interpretation, recognizing that plausible interpretations are often preferable to rigid causal explanations.

Meaning from use. Understanding human action requires focusing on the meanings individuals and cultures bring to bear, and the practices through which these meanings are achieved and utilized. Meaning grows out of use, and concepts like "Self" are invoked in specific forms and contexts to particular ends. To grasp a "Self" in practice, one must sample its uses across culturally specifiable contexts, recognizing that these contexts are always contexts of practice.

Beyond reductionism. A cultural psychology does not deny biological limits or economic necessities but insists that the "methodology of causation" cannot capture the richness of lives in a culture or their historical depth. It recognizes that human minds and lives are reflections of culture and history, as well as biology and physical resources. Ultimately, even strong causal explanations of the human condition require interpretation within the symbolic world that constitutes human culture to make plausible sense.