Bruner, J. Acts of Meaning, chapters 3 & 4

I'm going to start off on the idea of positivism again. I realize that Bruner's work is about meaning-making, not research methods per se, but I might argue that these are the same thing. What is research if not a way to make meaning out of the world we see? I keep arguing that we live in a culture that is so positivistic, it becomes unconscious and we just believe it to be the way to know things. The classic example may be medical treatments. Would you take a medicine without knowing that there had be reliable research about its effects and side-effects? Most people wouldn't. They way to be sure that only .5% of people suffered from _____. But the other side of this idea is actually important. I do in fact want to talk to some people who have tried the medicine first hand. I want to talk to a friend I trust. How bad was the dizziness? Did it go away? You know me, will I mind it? Things like that. Those are not positivistic questions; they don't rely upon certainty. They rely more upon experience, or really what Bruner might call narrative. I wonder how much more we might actually be inclined toward this more phenomenological research. How much is my claim about positivism actually untrue? Toward the end of the book, Bruner says that cultural psychology “insists that the 'methodology' of causation (read, positivism) can neither capture nor begin to plum [a culture's] historical depth. It is only through the application of interpretation that we... can do justice to the world of culture” (p. 137, my emphasis). Here we see Bruner weighing in on what positivism misses: culture. You can't test for it, weigh it, measure it. You can control for it. You can put one group in one room and give them culture, another group in another room without culture... you know, unless you're testing yogurt. This is where the Skinnerians fall short, where they paved the way for the cognitive revolution.

But I now have a different understand of that revolution and more questions as well. Yesterday I think I claimed that Bruner and Chomsky were allies in this revolution; but I now believe they are not. Yes, they both reject behaviorism strict empiricist tenets, Chomsky being much more of a rationalist. Yet, I think that Chomsky, forgive me if I'm wrong, is as much of a positivist as the behaviorists. This extends from a realization I recently had that rationalists were indeed positivist, but just got their raw material from a different place than the empiricists. I came to believe that R and E were not the major counterparts of epistemology, but that what really divided the major ways of knowing was positivism—including both R and E—and constructivism, a belief that knowledge is not a fixed commodity that exists out there but rather that it is created through the human mind and its interaction with the world and with society. This is where Bruner clearly fits in—I believe he says it himself. And this is where—again, unless I'm just wrong—Chomsky and Bruner are split. For Bruner is after meaning and Skinner and Chomsky have pretty much the same use for the concept of meaningfulness, none. Meaning, it would seem, has no place in a purely positivistic world; meaning is constructed.

I think it gets more interesting from that split. Is there a difference between truth and meaning? Because truth is the golden calf of positivism. Bruner, I think, argues that the two are the same. Narrative is a form of meaning, it reflects meaning, sure; but it creates meaning as it goes too. In this way, narrative truth is a concept that can be seen as just as valuable for understanding the world—made up of cultures, as it is—as the idea of proof. The positivists would scoff at this. If you want to understand something, you need the facts; you don't want fiction. Those are lies. But if you think about it, about stories—they don't need to be true on the level of detail to reflect great truths on the larger level. That is the whole point of fiction. We all find ourselves in situations just like this or that character in this or that story—the human element is true.

But to side with Bruner and his elevation of narrative, a constructionist would need to come back at the positivists with the idea that positivism in itself, as a way of knowing the world for sure, is a narrative. The doctor in the white coat performing CRT on two groups of subjects, looking to objectively find out which treatment works better. That is a narrative. If we want subplots, how about his funding? How about the pen in his hand which reads Welbutrin? The myth of objectivity seems almost funny when you view it as a narrative. From this perspective, from what I am calling a constructivist perspective, the most fantastic vision in the world of truth-seeking might have to be this pure positivist, for he alone is fantasizing that he is unbiased, objective, in pure contact with what is real in the world.