Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Jerome Bruner, fully Jerome Seymour Bruner

American Psychologist known for Cognitive and Educational Psychology

"To create consists precisely in not making unclear combinations and in making those which are useful and which are only a small minority. Invention is discernment, choice. If not a brute algorithm, then it must be a heuristic that guides us to a fruitful combination. What is the heuristic?"

"The shrewd guess, the fertile hypothesis, the courageous leap to a tentative conclusion - these are the most valuable coins of the thinker at work. But in most schools guessing is heavily penalized and is associated somehow with laziness. "

"Learning and thinking are always situated in a cultural setting and always dependent upon the utilization of cultural resources."

"In the perception of the incongruous stimuli, the recognition process is temporarily thwarted and exhibits characteristics which are generally not observable in the recognition of more conventional stimuli. "

"Education is a major embodiment of a culture’s way of life, not just a preparation for it."

"“Thinking about thinking” has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education."

"Nothing is “culture free,” but neither are individuals simply mirrors of their culture. It is the interaction between them that both gives a communal cast to individual thought and imposes a certain unpredictable richness on any culture’s way life, thought, or feeling."

"Education is too consequential to too many constituencies to leave to professional educators."

"Education is risky, for it fuels the sense of possibility."

"You cannot teacher-proof a curriculum any more that you can parent-proof a family."

"Knowledge, after all, is justified belief."

"For a choice of pedagogy inevitably communicates a conception of the learning process and the learner. Pedagogy is never innocent. It is a medium that carries its own message."

"We need a surer sense of what to teach to whom and how to go about teaching it in such a way that it will make those taught more effective, less alienated, and better human beings."

"Learning to be a scientist is not the same as “learning science.”"

"Bad narrative interpretation in high places is poison."

"Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits."

"Mind is an extension of the hands and tools that you use and of the jobs to which you apply them."

"The objective of skilled agency and collaboration in the study of the human condition is to achieve not unanimity, but more consciousness. And more consciousness always implies more diversity."

"To sneer at the power of culture to shape man’s mind and to abandon our efforts to bring this power under human control is to commit moral suicide."

"We teach a subject not to produce little living librarians on teh subject, but rather to get a student to think... for himself, to consider matters... to take part in the process of knowledge-getting. Knowing is a process, not a product."

"Manipulation and representation... in continuing cycles are necessary conditions for discovery. They are the antithesis of passive, listener-like learning."

"I can think of only two good criteria [for whether an item is worth knowing]: Whether the knowledge gives a sense of delight and whether it bestows the gift of intellectual travel beyond the information given. "

"The good teacher is one who can construct exercises (or, better, provide experiences) that cry for representation in the manner that the one shoe dropped on the floor above cries to have the second one drop."

"A story (allegedly true or allegedly fictional) is judged for its goodness as a story by criteria that are of a different kind from those used to judge a logical argument as adequate or correct."

"As our readers read, as they begin to construct a virtual text of their own, it is as if they were embarking on a journey without maps ? and yet, they possess a stock of maps that might give hints, and besides, they know a lot about journeys and about mapmaking. First impressions of the new terrain are, of course, based on older journeys already taken. In time, the new journey becomes a thing in itself, however much its initial shape was borrowed from the past. The virtual text becomes a story of its own, its very strangeness only a contrast with the reader?s sense of the ordinary. The fictional landscape, finally, must be given a ?reality? of its own ? the ontological step. It is then that the reader asks that crucial interpretive question, ?What?s it all about?? But what ?it? is, of course, is not the actual text ? however great its literary power ? but the text that the reader has constructed under its sway. And that is why the actual text needs the subjunctivity that makes it possible for a reader to create a world of his own."

"Each of the ways of knowing, moreover, has operating principles of its own and its own criteria of well-formedness. They differ radically in their procedures for verification. A good story and a well-formed argument are different natural kinds. Both can be used as means for convincing another. Yet what they convince of is fundamentally different: arguments convince one of their truth, stories of their lifelikeness. The one verifies by eventual appeal to procedures for establishing formal and empirical proof. The other establishes not truth but verisimilitude."

"But still, it is not quite the arch. It is, rather, what arches are for in all the senses in which an arch is for something ? for their beautiful form, for the chasms they safely bridge, for coming out on the other side of crossings, for a chance to see oneself reflected upside down yet right side up. So a reader goes from stones to arches to the significance of arches is some broader reality ? goes back and forth between them in attempting finally to construct a sense of the story, its form, its meaning."

"It will always be a moot question whether and how well a reader?s interpretation ?maps? on an actual story, does justice to the writer?s intention in telling the story, or conforms to the repertory of a culture. But in any case, the author?s act of creating a narrative of a particular kind and in a particular form is not to evoke a standard reaction but to recruit whatever is most appropriate and emotionally lively in the reader?s repertory. So ?great? storytelling, inevitably, is about compelling human plights that are ?accessible? to readers. But at the same time, the plights must be set forth with sufficient subjunctivity to allow them to be rewritten by the reader, rewritten so as to allow play for the reader?s imagination. One cannot hope to ?explain? the processes involved in such rewriting in any but an interpretive way, surely no more precisely, say, than an anthropologist ?explains? what the Balinese cockfight means to those who bet on it? All that one can hope for is to interpret a reader?s interpretation in as detailed and rich a way as psychologically possible."

"In contrast to our vast knowledge of how science and logical reasoning proceed, we know precious little in any formal sense about how to make good stories."

"The imaginative application of the narrative mode leads instead to good stories, gripping drama, believable (though not necessarily ?true?) historical accounts. It deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course. It strives to put its timeless miracles into the particulars of experience, and to locate the experience in time and place."

"The great writer?s gift to a reader is to make him a better writer."

"Perhaps one of the reasons for this is that story must construct two landscapes simultaneously. One is the landscape of action, where the constituents are the arguments of action: agent, intention or goal, situation, instrument, something corresponding to a ?story grammar.? The other landscape is the landscape of consciousness: what those involved in the action know, think, or feel, or do not know, think, or feel."

"There are two modes of cognitive functioning, two modes of thought, each providing distinctive ways of ordering experience, of constructing reality. The two (though complementary) are irreducible to one another. Efforts to reduce one mode to the other or to ignore one at the expense of the other inevitably fail to capture the rich diversity of thought."

"The imaginative application of the paradigmatic mode leads to good theory, tight analysis, logical proof, sound argument, and empirical discovery guided by reasoned hypothesis. But paradigmatic ?imagination? (or intuition) is not the same as the imagination of the novelist or poet. Rather, it is the ability to see possible formal connections before one is able to prove them in any formal way."

"We would do well with as loose fitting a constraint as we can manage concerning what a story must ?be? to be a story. And the one that strikes me as most serviceable is the one with which we began: narrative deals with the vicissitudes of intention."

"Narrative deals with the vicissitudes of human intentions. And since there are myriad intentions and endless ways for them to run into trouble ? or so it would seem ? there should be endless kinds of stories. But, surprisingly, this seems not to be the case."

"All of the forms of effective surprise grow out of a combinatorial activity ? a placing of things in new perspectives."

"Detachment and commitment. A willingness to divorce oneself from the obvious is surely a prerequisite for the fresh combinatorial act that produces effective surprise. there must be as a necessary, if not a sufficient, condition a detachment from the forms as they exist? But it is a detachment of commitment. For there is about it a caring, a deep need to understand something, to master a technique, to render a meaning. So while the poet, the mathematician, the scientist must each achieve detachment, they do it in the interest of commitment. And at one stroke they, the creative ones, are disengaged from that which exists conventionally and are engaged deeply in what they construct to replace it."

"Freedom to be dominated by the object. You begin to write a poem. Before long it, the poem, begins to develop metrical, stanzaic, symbolical requirements. You, as the writer of the poem, are serving it ? it seems. or you may be pursuing the task of building a formal model to represent the known properties of single nerve fibers and their synapses: soon the model takes over? There is something odd about the phenomenon. We externalize an object, a product of our thoughts, treat it as ?out there.? Freud remarked, commenting on projection, that human beings seem better able to deal with stimuli from the outside than from within. So it is with the externalizing of a creative work, permitting it to develop its own being, its own autonomy coming to serve it. It is as if it were easier to cope with there, as if this arrangement permitted the emergence of more unconscious impulse, more material not readily accessible? To be dominated by an object of one?s own creation ? perhaps its extreme is Pygmalion dominated by Galatea ? is to be free of the defenses that keep us hidden from ourselves. As the object takes over and demands to be completed ?in its own terms,? there is a new opportunity to express a style and an individuality. Likely as not, it is so partly because we are rid of the internal juggling of possibilities, because we have represented them ?out there? where we can look at them, consider them."

"An act that produces effective surprise [is] the hallmark of the creative enterprise."

"As in the drama, so too a life can be described as a script, constantly rewritten, guiding the unfolding internal drama. It surely does not do to limit the drama to the stiff characters of the Freudian morality play ? the undaunted ego, the brutish id, the censorious and punitive superego. Is the internal cast a reflection of the identifications to which we have been committed? I do not think it is as simple as that. It is a way of grouping our internal demands and there are idealized models over and beyond those with whom we have special identification ? figures in myth, in life, in the comics, in history, creations of fantasy."

"Deferral and immediacy. There is an immediacy to creating anything, a sense of direction, an objective, a general idea, a feeling. Yet the immediacy is anything but a quick orgasm of completion. Completion is deferred?"

"I end with the same perplexity in attempting to find some way of thinking reasonably about the creative process. At the outset I proposed that we define the creative act as effective surprise ? the production of novelty. It is reasonable to suppose that we will someday devise a proper scientific theory capable of understanding and predicting such acts. Perhaps we will understand the energies that produce the creative act much as we have come to understand how the dynamo produces its energy. It may be, however, that there is another mode of approach to knowing how the process generates itself, and this will be the way in which we understand how symbols and ideas ? capture [our] thoughts. Often it is the poet who grasps these matters most firmly and communicates them most concisely. Perhaps it is our conceit that there is only one way of understanding a phenomenon. I have argued that just as there is predictive effectiveness, so is there metaphoric effectiveness. For the while, at least, we can do worse than to live with a metaphoric understanding of creativity."

"Having read a good many journals and diaries by writers I have come to the tentative conclusion that the principal guard against precocious completion, in writing at least, is boredom. I have little doubt that the same protection avails the scientist. It is the boredom of conflict, knowing deep down what one wishes to say and knowing that one has not said it. one acts on the impulse to exploit an idea, to begin. One also acts on the impulse of boredom, to defer. Thus Virginia Woolf, trying to finish Orlando in February 1928: ?Always, always, the last chapter slips out of my hands. One gets bored. One whips oneself up. I still hope for a fresh wind and don?t very much bother, except that I miss the fun that was so tremendously lively all October, November, and December."

"Jerome Bruner writes:"

"Make no mistake about it: it is not simply as technicians that we are being called, but as adjutants to the moralist. My antic sense rises in self-defense. My advice, in the midst of the seriousness, is to keep an eye for the tinker shuffle, the flying of kites, and kindred sources of surprised amusement."

"The artist, the writer, and to a new degree the scientist seek an answer in the nature of their acts. They create or they seek to create, and this in itself endows the process with dignity. there is ?creative? writing and ?pure? science, each justifying the work of its producer in its own right."

"Passion and decorum. By passion I understand a willingness and ability to let one?s impulses express themselves in one?s life through one?s work? Passion, like discriminating taste, grows on its use. You more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action? But again a paradox: it is not all urgent vitality. There is decorum in creative activity: a love of form, an etiquette toward the object of our efforts, a respect for materials? So both are necessary and there must surely be a subtle matter of timing involved ? when the impulse, when the taming."

"The internal drama. There is within each person his own cast of characters* ? an ascetic, and perhaps a glutton, a prig, a frightened child, a little man, even an onlooker, sometimes a Renaissance man. The great works of the theater are decompositions of such a cast, the rendering into external drama of the internal one, the conversion of the internal cast into dramatis personae."

"The dilemma of abilities. What shall we say of energy, of combinatorial zest, of intelligence, of alertness, of perseverance? I shall say nothing about them. They are obviously important but, from a deeper point of view, they are also trivial. For at any level of energy or intelligence there can be more or less of creating in our sense. Stupid people create for each other as well as benefiting from what comes from afar. So too do slothful and torpid people. I have been speaking of creativity, not of genius."