Actual Minds Possible Worlds

Author : Jerome S. BRUNER
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674029011
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.19/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds written by Jerome S. BRUNER and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on recent work in literary theory, linguistics, and symbolic anthropology, as well as cognitive and developmental psychology Professor Bruner examines the mental acts that enter into the imaginative creation of possible worlds, and he shows how the activity of imaginary world making undergirds human science, literature, and philosophy, as well as everyday thinking, and even our sense of self. - Publisher.

Author : Jerome Bruner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674253132
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.31/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds written by Jerome Bruner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1987-10-15 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this characteristically graceful and provocative book, Jerome Bruner, one of the principal architects of the cognitive revolution, sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of mind. According to Professor Bruner, cognitive science has set its sights too narrowly on the logical, systematic aspects of mental life—those thought processes we use to solve puzzles, test hypotheses, and advance explanations. There is obviously another side to the mind—a side devoted to the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful. This is the side of the mind that leads to good stories, gripping drama, primitive myths and rituals, and plausible historical accounts. Bruner calls it the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature. Drawing on recent work in literary theory, linguistics, and symbolic anthropology, as well as cognitive and developmental psychology, Professor Bruner examines the mental acts that enter into the imaginative creation of possible worlds, and he shows how the activity of imaginary world making undergirds human science, literature, and philosophy, as well as everyday thinking, and even our sense of self. Over twenty years ago, Jerome Bruner first sketched his ideas about the mind’s other side in his justly admired book, On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds can be read as a sequel to this earlier work, but it is a sequel that goes well beyond its predecessor by providing rich examples of just how the mind’s narrative mode can be successfully studied. The collective force of these examples points the way toward a more humane and subtle approach to the investigation of how the mind works.

Author : Jerome Bruner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674003668
Total Pages : 220 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Actual Minds, Possible Worlds written by Jerome Bruner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1986 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bruner sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of the mind. He examines the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful; he calls this side of mental activity the “narrative mode,” and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature.

Author : Jerome Bruner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674253051
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Acts of Meaning written by Jerome Bruner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1993-01-01 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jerome Bruner argues that the cognitive revolution, with its current fixation on mind as “information processor,” has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Only by breaking out of the limitations imposed by a computational model of mind can we grasp the special interaction through which mind both constitutes and is constituted by culture.

Author : Jerome Seymour Bruner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674635258
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.56/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book On Knowing written by Jerome Seymour Bruner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1979 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The left hand has traditionally represented the powers of intuition, feeling, and spontaneity. In this classic book, Jerome Bruner inquires into the part these qualities play in determining how we know what we do know; how we can help others to know--that is, to teach; and how our conception of reality affects our actions and is modified by them. The striking and subtle discussions contained in On Knowing take on the core issues concerning man's sense of self: creativity, the search for identity, the nature of aesthetic knowledge, myth, the learning process, and modern-day attitudes toward social controls, Freud, and fate. In this revised, expanded edition, Bruner comments on his personal efforts to maintain an intuitively and rationally balanced understanding of human nature, taking into account the odd historical circumstances which have hindered academic psychology's attempts in the past to know man. Writing with wit, imagination, and deep sympathy for the human condition, Jerome Bruner speaks here to the part of man's mind that can never be completely satisfied by the right-handed virtues of order, rationality, and discipline.

Author : Jerome Seymour Bruner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780674010994
Total Pages : 148 pages
Book Rating : 4.9X/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Making Stories written by Jerome Seymour Bruner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stories pervade our daily lives, from human interest news items, to a business strategy, to daydreams between chores. Stories are what we use to make sense of the world. But how does this work? This text examines this pervasive human habit and suggests ways to think about how we use stories.

Author : Jerome Bruner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674253086
Total Pages : 196 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Toward a Theory of Instruction written by Jerome Bruner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1974-01-01 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This country’s most challenging writer on education presents here a distillation, for the general reader, of half a decade’s research and reflection. His theme is dual: how children learn, and how they can best be helped to learn—how they can be brought to the fullest realization of their capacities. Jerome Bruner, Harper’s reports, has “stirred up more excitement than any educator since John Dewey.” His explorations into the nature of intellectual growth and its relation to theories of learning and methods of teaching have had a catalytic effect upon educational theory. In this new volume the subjects dealt with in The Process of Education are pursued further, probed more deeply, given concrete illustration and a broader context. “One is struck by the absence of a theory of instruction as a guide to pedagogy,” Mr. Bruner observes; “in its place there is principally a body of maxims.” The eight essays in this volume, as varied in topic as they are unified in theme, are contributions toward the construction of such a theory. What is needed in that enterprise is, inter alia, “the daring and freshness of hypotheses that do not take for granted as true what has merely become habitual,” and these are amply evidenced here. At the conceptual core of the book is an illuminating examination of how mental growth proceeds, and of the ways in which teaching can profitably adapt itself to that progression and can also help it along. Closely related to this is Mr. Bruner’s “evolutionary instrumentalism,” his conception of instruction as the means of transmitting the tools and skills of a culture, the acquired characteristics that express and amplify man’s powers—especially the crucial symbolic tools of language, number, and logic. Revealing insights are given into the manner in which language functions as an instrument of thought. The theories presented are anchored in practice, in the empirical research from which they derive and in the practical applications to which they can be put. The latter are exemplified incidentally throughout and extensively in detailed descriptions of two courses Mr. Bruner has helped to construct and to teach—an experimental mathematics course and a multifaceted course in social studies. In both, the students’ encounters with the material to be mastered are structured and sequenced in such a way as to work with, and to reinforce, the developmental process. Written with all the style and élan that readers have come to expect of Mr. Bruner, Toward a Theory of Instruction is charged with the provocative suggestions and inquiries of one of the great innovators in the field of education.

Author : Jerome Bruner
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674251067
Total Pages : 241 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Culture of Education written by Jerome Bruner and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1997-04-25 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What we don't know about learning could fill a book--and it might be a schoolbook. In a masterly commentary on the possibilities of education, the eminent psychologist Jerome Bruner reveals how education can usher children into their culture, though it often fails to do so. Applying the newly emerging "cultural psychology" to education, Bruner proposes that the mind reaches its full potential only through participation in the culture--not just its more formal arts and sciences, but its ways of perceiving, thinking, feeling, and carrying out discourse. By examining both educational practice and educational theory, Bruner explores new and rich ways of approaching many of the classical problems that perplex educators. Education, Bruner reminds us, cannot be reduced to mere information processing, sorting knowledge into categories. Its objective is to help learners construct meanings, not simply to manage information. Meaning making requires an understanding of the ways of one's culture--whether the subject in question is social studies, literature, or science. The Culture of Education makes a forceful case for the importance of narrative as an instrument of meaning making. An embodiment of culture, narrative permits us to understand the present, the past, and the humanly possible in a uniquely human way. Going well beyond his earlier acclaimed books on education, Bruner looks past the issue of achieving individual competence to the question of how education equips individuals to participate in the culture on which life and livelihood depend. Educators, psychologists, and students of mind and culture will find in this volume an unsettling criticism that challenges our current conventional practices--as well as a wise vision that charts a direction for the future.

Author : L. S. Vygotsky
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674076699
Total Pages : 180 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Mind in Society written by L. S. Vygotsky and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-01 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The great Russian psychologist L. S. Vygotsky has long been recognized as a pioneer in developmental psychology. But somewhat ironically, his theory of development has never been well understood in the West. Mind in Society should correct much of this misunderstanding. Carefully edited by a group of outstanding Vygotsky scholars, the book presents a unique selection of Vygotsky’s important essays, most of which have previously been unavailable in English. The Vygotsky who emerges from these pages can no longer be glibly included among the neobehaviorists. In these essays he outlines a dialectical-materialist theory of cognitive development that anticipates much recent work in American social science. The mind, Vygotsky argues, cannot be understood in isolation from the surrounding society. Man is the only animal who uses tools to alter his own inner world as well as the world around him. From the handkerchief knotted as a simple mnemonic device to the complexities of symbolic language, society provides the individual with technology that can be used to shape the private processes of mind. In Mind in Society Vygotsky applies this theoretical framework to the development of perception, attention, memory, language, and play, and he examines its implications for education. The result is a remarkably interesting book that is bound to renew Vygotsky’s relevance to modern psychological thought.

Author : Julian Jaynes
Publisher : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN 13 : 0547527543
Total Pages : 580 pages
Book Rating : 4.43/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind written by Julian Jaynes and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2000-08-15 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist: “This man’s ideas may be the most influential, not to say controversial, of the second half of the twentieth century.”—Columbus Dispatch At the heart of this classic, seminal book is Julian Jaynes's still-controversial thesis that human consciousness did not begin far back in animal evolution but instead is a learned process that came about only three thousand years ago and is still developing. The implications of this revolutionary scientific paradigm extend into virtually every aspect of our psychology, our history and culture, our religion—and indeed our future. “Don’t be put off by the academic title of Julian Jaynes’s The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. Its prose is always lucid and often lyrical…he unfolds his case with the utmost intellectual rigor.”—The New York Times “When Julian Jaynes . . . speculates that until late in the twentieth millennium BC men had no consciousness but were automatically obeying the voices of the gods, we are astounded but compelled to follow this remarkable thesis.”—John Updike, The New Yorker “He is as startling as Freud was in The Interpretation of Dreams, and Jaynes is equally as adept at forcing a new view of known human behavior.”—American Journal of Psychiatry