Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has centered principally on how man achieves a “true” knowledge of the world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated on the mind’s interplay with an external world of nature, hoping to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been (...) to discover how we achieve “reality,” that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were, “there to be observed.”This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on the “real world.” Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to the work out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to respond to the world “as it is.” There have always been dissidents who challenged these views, but conjectures about human mental development have been influenced far more by majoritarian rationalism and empiricism than by these dissident voices. Jerome Bruner is research professor of psychology at New York University, where he is also serving as Meyer Visiting Professor of Law. His most recent book, Acts of Meaning, appeared in 1990. In 1987 he received the Balzan Prize for “a lifetime contribution to the study of human psychology.”. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

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.

This is the first volume to systematically explore the range of contemporary thought concerning the body and draw out its crucial implications for medicine.

In an age where previous frames of reference lose their certainty nurses are finding themselves rethinking their relations to the ‘real’. In this paper I interrogate an empirical ‘text’ of a local nursing cultural practice through a poststructural critique of the ways in which language, discourses, representation and experience intersect to construct ‘reality’ for us with specific consequences. I do this in an attempt to disclose the micro‐politics at work in the processes of signifying and thus representing nursing to a (...) world of potential students. The discourses of science and caring find themselves exposed in particular representational technologies and practices that mark nursing's collusion with the ‘truths’ of science at the expense of those we loosely name ‘caring’. This cultural theoretical work constitutes a provisional and historical fragment of analysis designed to trouble the relations we often unwittingly sustain with dominant ‘regimes of truth’. (shrink)