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• CHAPTER ONE

The Proper Study of Man

I WANT TO BEGIN with the Cognitive Revolution as mypoint of departure. That revolution was intended to bring

"Inind l) back into the hwnan sciences after a long cold winter

of objectivism. But mine wiU not be the usual account ofprogress marching ever forward. 1 For, at least in my view, thatrevolution has now been diverted into issues that are marginal

to the impulse that brought it into being. Indeed, it has beenrechnicalized in a Inanner that even undermines that originalimpulse. This is not to say that it has failed: far from it, for

cognitive science must surely be among the leading growthshares on the acadenuc boutse. It may rather be that it hasbecome diverted by success, a success whose technologicalvirtuosity has cost dear. Some critics, perhaps unkincUy, evenargue that the new cognitive science, the child of d1C revolu·non, has gained its technical successes at the price of dehu­

manizing the very concept of mind it had sought to reestablishin psychology, and that it has thereby estranged much of psy­chology from the other hWll,m sciences and the hunlanities. 2

I shaU have more to sayan these matters shordy. But beforegoing on, let I11C give you the plan of this chapter and the onesthat follow. Once our retrospective glance at me revolution is

1

Acts of Meaning

done, I then want to turn direedy to a preliminary explorationof a renewed cognitive revolurion-a more interpretive ap­proach to cognition concerned with «meaning-making)) onethat has been proliferating these last several years in anthro­pology, linguistics, philosophy, literary theory, psychology,and, it would almost seem, wherever one looks these days 3 Iradler suspect that mis vigorous growth is an effort to recap­ture the originalmomenrum of the first cognitive revolution.In later chapters, 1 shall try to fill in mis preliminary sketchwith some concrete illustration of research on me bowldariesbetween psychology and its neighbors in me hwnanities andme social sciences, research dlat recaptures what I have calleddle originanng impulse of me cognitive revolution.

Now let me tell you first what 1 and my friends thought therevolution was about back mere in th~ late I950s. It was, wethought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as the centralconcept of psychology-not stimuli and responses, not overtly

_ observable behavior, not biological drives and their transfor­,j:>, mation, bur meaning. It was not a revolution against behavior­---.l ism witll me aim of transforming behaviorism into a better

way of pursuing psychology by adding a little mentalism toit. Edward Tolman had done tllat, to little avail.' It was analtogemer more profound revolution tilan mat. Its aim wasto discover and to describe formally dle meanings dlat humanbeings created Out of tlleir encounters with the world, andtllen to propose hypotlleses about what meaning-making pro­cesses were implicated. It focused upon me symbolic activitiestllat human beings employed in constructing and in makingsense not only of tile world, but of themsclves. Its aim was toprompt psychology to join forces with its sister interpretivedisciplines in the hwnanities and in the social sciences. Indeed,

2

The Proper Sntdy of Man

beneatll tile surface of the more computationally oriented cog­nitive science, this is precisely what has been happening-firstslowly and now with increasing momenrum. And so todayone finds flourishing centers of cultural psychology, cognitiveand interpretive anthropology, cognitive linguistics, andabove all, a tllriving worldwide enterprise that occupies itselfas never before since Kant with the philosophy of mind andof language. It is probably a sign of me times tllat me twOJerusalem-Harvard Lecrurers in the academic year 1989-90represent, each in his own way, tllis very tradition-ProfessorGeerrz in antllropology and myself in psychology.

The cognitive revolution as originally conceived virtuallyrequired that psychology join forces with anthropology andlinguistics, philosophy and history, even witll the discipline oflaw. It is no surprise and certainly not an accident mat intll0Se early years tile advisOlY board of tile Cemer for Cogni­tive SUldies at Harvatd included a philosopher, W. V. Quine,an intellectual historian, H. Stuart Hughes, and a linguist,Roman Jakobson. Or tllat among the Center's Fellows couldbe l1lullbered almost as many philosophers, amhropologists,and linguists as tllere were proper psychologists-amongtllem such exponents of the new constructivism as NelsonGoodman. As for tile law, I must report that several distin­guished members of that faculty canlC occasionally to our col­loquia. One of them, Paul freund, admitted he came becausewe :1t the Ccnrcr, it seemed to him, were. intereste.d in howrules (like rules of grammar, rather than scientific laws) af­fected humon action and tllot, after oIl, is what jurisprudenceis about. s

I think it should be clear to you by now that we were norout to "reform" behaviorism, but to replace it. As my col-

3

I

--"'"J:J

Acts of Meaning

league George Miller put it some years later, "We nailed ournew credo to the door, and waited to see what would happen.All went very well, so well, in fact, that in the end we mayhave been the victims of our success.,,6

It would make an absorbing essay in the intellectual historyof the last quarter-century ro trace what happened to the origi­nating impulse or" the cognitive revolution, how it becamefractionated and technicalized. The full story had best be leftro the intellectual hisrotians. All we need note now are a fewsignposts along the way, just enough of them ro give a senseof the intellectual terrain on which we were all marching.Very early on, fOt example, emphasis began shifting from"n1eaning)) [0 uinforn1ation," from the construction of meaningro the processing of information. These are profoundly differentmaners. The key facror in the shift was the introduction ofcomputation as the ruling metaphor and of computability asa necessary criterion of a good theoretical model. Infonnationis indifferenr with respect to meaning. In computationalterms, information comprises an already precoded message inthe system. Meaning is preassigned to messages. lr is nOt anoutcome of computation nor is it relevant ro computationsave in the arbitrary sense of assignmenr.

Information processing inscribes messages at or fetCheSthem from an address in memory on instructions from a Cen­tral control unit, or it holds them temporarily in a buffer store,and then manipulates them in prescribed ways: it lists, orders,combines, compares precoded information. The system thatdoes all of these things is blind with respect to whether what isstored is words from Shakespeare's sonnets or nwnbers from arandom number table. According to classic information the­ory, a message is informative if it reduces alternative choices.

4

The Proper Study of Man

This implies a code of established possible choices. The Cate­gories of possibility and the instances they comprise arc pro­cessed according to the "synrax" of the system, its possiblemoves. Insofar as information in this dispensation can dealwith meaning it is in the dictionary sense only: accessingstored lexical information according to a coded address.There are other "meaning-like" operations such as permutinga set ofentries in order to test the resultants against a criterion,as in anagrams or Scrabble. But information processing can­nOt deal with anything beyond well-defined and arbitrary en­tries that can enter into specific relationships that arc strictlygoverned by a progran1 of elementary operations. Such a sys­tem c:umot cope with vagueness, with polysemy, with meta­phoric or connotative corU1ections. When it seems to be doingso, it is a monkey in tl1e British Musewn, beating out theproblem by a bone-crushing algorirlU11 or taking a flyer on arisky heuristic. Information processing needs advance pl:U1­ning and precise rules? It precludes such ill-formed questionsas "How is the world organized in tlle mind of a Muslimfundamentalist'" or "How docs the concept of Self differ inBomeric Greece and in tlle postindustrial world?" And it fa­vors questions like "What is the optimwn strategy for provid­ing control information to an operator to ensure that a vehiclewill be kept in a predetermined orbit?" We shall have muchmore to say later about me:U1ing :Uld the processes that createit. They are surprisingly remote from what is convenrionallycalled "informJtion processing,»)

It is not surprising, given that an Information Revolutionwas occurring throughout the postindustrial world, that such:U1 emphasis should have developed. Psychology and tl1e socialsciences generally have always been sensitive, often oversensi-

5

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Acts of Meaning

rive, to the needs of the society that gives them shelter. Andit has always been rather an intellecrual reflex of academicpsychology to redefine man and his mind in the light of newsocial requirements. Nor is it surprising that under such con­ditions interest should have shifted away, accordingly, frommind and meaning to computers and information. For com­puters and computational theory had by the early 1950s be­come the root metaphor for information processing. Givenpreestablished meaning categories weU-formed enough withina domain to provide a basis for an operating code, a properlyprogrammed computer could perform prodigies of informa­tion processing with a minimum set of operations, and thatis technological heaven. Very soon, computing became themodel of the mind, and in place of the concept of meaningthere emerged the concept of computability. Cognitive pro­cesses were equated with the programs that could be run ona computarional device, and the success of one1ti effort to "un­dt:rstand," say, memory or concept attainnlent, \Vas one's abil­ity realisticaUy to simulate such hlUnan conceptualizing or hu­man memorizing with a computer program.H This line ofthinking was enormously aided by Turing's revolutionary in­sight that any computational program, no matter how com­plex, could be "imirated" by a much simpler Universal TuringMachine computing with a finite set of quite primitive opera­tions. If one falls into the habit of thinking of those complexprograms as "virtuaJ 1l1inds" (to borrow Daniel Dcnn<:tt'sphrase), then it takes only a small bllt crucial step to go thewhole way to believing that Hrc:l1 minds» and tht:ir proc~sscs}

like Hvirtual" ones and theirs, could be "explained)' in dIe SJmeway9

This new reductionism provided an astonishingly Iibertar-

6

The Proper Srudy of Man

Ian program for the new cognitive science that was beingborn. It was so permissive, indeed, that even the old S-H.learning theorist and associationist student of memory couldcome right back into the fold of the cognitive revolution solong as they wrapped their old concepts in the new terms ofinformation processing. One did nOt have to truck with "men­tal" processes or with meaning at all. In place of stimuli andresponses, there \Vas input and output, wid1 reinforcementlaundered of its affective taint by being converted into a con­trol element that fed information about the outcome of anoperation back into the system. So long as there was a com­putable program, there was "mind."

At first this pun version of mind did not seem to provokethe traditional antimentalist panic among the seemingly con­vened behaviorists. In good time, though) new v~rsions ofold classically familiar controversies began ra reemerge, partic­ularly in connection with debates about the so-called architec­ture of cognition: whether it was to be conceived as a set ofgranunar-like hierarchically nesting mle structures for accept­ing, rejecting, or combining input, or whether, rather, it couldbe conceived of as a botrom-up connectionist network withcomplerely distributed connol as in the PDP (Parallel Distrib­uted Processing) models, a model much like the old associa­tionist doctrine, minus Herbart's creative synthesis. The firstsimulated the rap-dowo, rationalist-mentalist tradition in psy­chology and moved easily back and forth berween "real"111inds Jnd "virtual») ones; the second was a nt;W version ofwhat Gordon Allport used to mock in his Iecrures as "dust­bowl empiricism." East Coast compmationalism dealt withsuch mindlike terms as mles, granullars, and the like. TheWest Coasters wanted no part of such simulated mentalism.

7

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Acts of Meaning

Soon, the battleground began looking increasingly traditionaland familiar, though the vehicles that were racing over it hadmuch more speed and much more formalistic horsepowcr. Butwhether their maneuvers had to do with the mind or onlywith the theory ofcomputation remained a question that bOtllsides regarded as infinitely postpon~ble. Time would tell, thequestioners were assured) whether a sow's ear could be turnedinto a silk purse. 10

It was inevitable tI,at with computation as the metaphorof the new cognitive science and witll compurability as thenecessary if not sufficient criterion of a workable theory withinthe new science, the old malaise about mentalism would re­emerge. With mind equated to program, what should ti,estams of mental states be--<lld-fashioned mental states identi­fiable nor by their progranunatic characteristics in a computa­tional system but by their subjective marking1 There could beno place for "mind" in such a system-"mind" in the sense ofintentional stares like believing, desiring, intending, graspinga meaning. The cry soon rose to ban such intentional Statesfrom the new science. And surely no book published even inthe heyday of early behaviorism could march rhe anti mentalistzeal of Srephen Srich's From Folk Psychology to Cognitive Sci­ence. 11 There were, to be sure, statesmanlike efforts to makepeace between the fuddy-duddy, mentalistic cognitivists andthe brave new antimentalists. But tlley all tOok ti,e form ofeither humoring or cajoling the mentalists. Dennett proposed,for example, tI,at we should simply act as i{people had inten­tional States that caused them to behave in certain ways; laterwe'd find our we didn't need such fuzzy notions. ll PaulChurchland grudgingly admitted that, while it was interest­ingly problematic why people hung on so tenaciously to tlleir

8

I"

The Proper Study of Man

plainly wrong mentalism, tl13t was something to be explainedrather than taken for granted. Perhaps, as Churchland put ir,folk psychology seems to describe how things actually go, burhow could a belief, desire, or attitude be a cause of anythingin ti,e physical world-that is, in the world of computation' 13

Mind in ti,e subjective sense was either an epiphenomenontI,at ti,e computational system outputted under certain condi­tions, in which case it could not be a cause of anything, or itwas JUSt a way that people talked about behavior after it hadoccurred (also an output), in which case it was just morebehavior and simply needed further linguistic analysis. Andyes, I must include Jerry Fodor's nativism: it could also be aspinoff of innate processes built into the system, in which caseit was an effect rather than a cause. l'

With ti,e new attack on mental states and intentionalitycame a related attack on the concept of agency. Cognitivescientists, in the main, have no quarrel with the idea thatbehavior is directed, even directed toward goals. If direction isgoverned by the results of computing the utility of alrernariveoutcomes, this is perfectly bearable and, indeed, it is the cen­terpiece of "rational choice theoty." But cognitive science inits new mood, despite all its hospitality tOward goal-directedbehavior, is still chary of a concept of agency. For "agency"inlplies ti,e conduct of action under the sway of intentionalstates. So action based on belief, desire, and moral commit­ment-unless it is purely sfipulative in Dennett's sense-isnow regarded as something to be eschewed by right-mindedcognitive scientists. It is like free will anlong the deter­minists'!s There were brave holdouts against the new anti­intentionalism, like the philosophers Jolm Searle and CharlesTaylor, or ti,e psychologist Kenneth Gergen, or me anthro-

9

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iI

I

Acts of Meaning

pologist Clifford Geertz, but their views were marginalizedby the majoritarians of mainsrrc;lJTI compurationalism. 16

I am null' aware that I may be giving an exaggerated picll,reof what happened to the cognitive revolution once it becamesubordinated to the ideal of computability in the edifice ofcognitive science. I note that whenever a proper cognitivescientist uses the expression "artificial intelligence" (even if itis only once), it is almost invariably followed by the capitalizedinitials "AI" in parentheses: "(AI)." I take this act ofabbrevia­tion to indicate one of two things. The abbreviated form sug­gests the shortening required by Zipf's Law: the length of aword or expression is inverse to its frequcncy-"telcvision '1

eventually reduced ro "TV"-with the abbreviation "(AI)"celebrating its comparable ubiquitousness and marker penetra­tion. The boast of AI is that it is about all mincllike artifacts,even about mind itself, if mind only be considered as yet an­odler artifact, one d,at conforms to principles of computation.Or the abbreviation, on the other hand, may be a sign of

_ embarrassment: either because there is an aura of obscenityCJl abour the artificialization of somedling so natural as intdli­- gence (in Irdand, by the way, AI is the embarrassed abbrevia-

tion for artificial insemination), or because AI is an abbrevia­tion of what, in its full form, might seem an oxymoron (theliveliness of intelligence coupled with dle flatness of artificial­ity). The implied boast of Zipf's Law and the embarrassmentof cover-up are both merited. There is no question d,at cogni­tive science has made a contriblltion to our lU1derstanding ofhow information is moved about a.nd processed. Nor can therebe much doubt on reAection dut it has left largely wlexplainedand even somewhat obscured the vety large issues d,at in­spired dle cognitive revolution in the first place. So let us

10

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The Proper Study of Man

return [0 the question of hov./ [0 construct a mental sciencearound the concept of meaning 'U1d dle processes by whichmcanings are crcated and negotiated within a community.

II Begin with the concept of culrure itsdf-parricularly itswnstirutive role. What was obvious from the start was per­haps toO obvious to be fulJy appreciated, at least by us psy­chOlogists who by habit and by tradition think in radler indi­vidualistic terms. The symbolic systems that individua.ls usedin consrntcting meaning were systems that were already inplace, already "there," deeply entrenched in culture and lan­guage. They constituted a very special kind of communal roolkit whose rools, once used, made the user a reAection of thecommunity. We psychologists concentrated on how il1luvidu­:ds (~acquircdl) these systems, ho,"" the)' made them their own,much as we would ask how organisms in general acquiredskilled adaptations to dle natural environment. We even be­GU11e interested (:lgain in an inJividualistic way) in man's spe~

cific innate readiness for language. But with a few exceptions,notably Vygotsky, we did nOt pursue the impact of languageusc on the nanlre of nUll as a species,I7 We we;,:rc slow [0

grasp fully what d1e emergence of culture meant for hW1"nadaptation and for Imman functioning. It was nOt just theincreased size and power of l'he hlU11an brain, not just bipedal­ism and its freeing of dle hands. These were merely morpho­logical steps in evolution d,at would not have mattered savefor tlle concurrent emergence of shared symbolic systems, oftradi tionalized ways of living and working rogedler-in short,of hum;U1 culmre.

The divide in human evolution was crossed when culrure

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CJ1N

Acts of Meaning

beeame the major faeror in giving form ro the minds of thoseliving ,mder its sway. A product of history rather than ofnarure, culrure now became the world to which we had toadapr and rhe tool kit for doing so. Once the divide wascrossed, it was no Ionget a question of a "natural" mind sim­ply acquiring language as an additive. Nor was it a questionof a culrure runing or modulating biological needs. As CliffordGeertz puts it, wid10ut the constituting rok of culture we arc"unworkabk monstrosities ... incomplete or wlfinished ani­mals who cOlnplcre or finish ourselves through culture,,,18

These are all by now rad1er banal conclusions in and1ropol­ogy, bur not in psychology. There are three good reasons tonlcnrion them here at the very Start of our disclission. The first

is a deep methodological point: the constitutive argument. Itis mm's participation in culture and the realization of his men·tal powers through culture that make it impossible to constructa hwnan psychology on the basis of the individual alone. Asmy colleague of many years ago Clyde KILlckhohn llsed toinsist, human beings do not tenninare at dleir own skins; d1eyarc exprcssions of a culture. To treat d1e world as an indiffer­ent flow of information to be processed by individuals eachon his or her own terms is to lose sight of how individualsarc formed and how d1ey function. Or to quote Geertz again,"there is no such thing as huma..I1 nature independent ofculture.,,19

The second reason follows from this and is no less compel­Jing. Given that psychology is so inllllcrscd in culture, it mustbe organized around those meaning-making and meaning­using processes that connect man to culrure. This docs notcommit us to morc subjectivity in psychology; it is just the

reverse. By virrue of participation in culn1l'e, meaning is ren-

12

The Proper Study of Man

dered public :tnd shared. Ollt' culnltalJy adapted way of lifedepends upon shared meanings and shared concepts and de­pends as well upon shared modes of discourse for negotiatingdifferences in meaning oaKl interptetation. As I shall try to

relate in the third chapter, d1e child does not enter the life ofhis or her group as a private and autistic SpOrt of prima,yprocesses, but rather as a participoa1t in a larget public processin which public meanings arc negotiated. And in this process,meanings are nOt to his own advantage unless he can get thenlshated by others. Even such seemingly private phenomena as"secrers" (itself a culturally defined category) rum Out oncerevealed to be publicly interpretable oa1d even banal-just aspatterned as matters openly admitted. There ate even stan­dardized me:tns for "making excuses" for our exceptionalirywhen the intended nlcallings ofour acts become wlclcar, s[an~dard ways of making meaning public and thereby rclegitimiz­ing what we are up to. 20 However ambiguous or polysemousour discourse may be, we arc still able to bring our meaningsinto the public domain and negotiate them there. That is tosay, we live publicly by public meanings and by shared proce­dures of interpretation and negotiation. Interpretation, how­evcr "thick" it may become, must be publicly accessible or d1eculrure falls into disarray and its individual members widl it.

The third reason why culture must be a central conceptfor psychology lies in the power of what I shall call "folkpsychology." Folk psychology, to which I shall devore dlesecond chapter, is a culrurc's account of what makes hUJnanbeings tick. It includes a d1eory of mind, one's own :tnd oth­ers', a theory of motivation, and d1e rest. I should call it "eth­nopsycllOlogy" to make the term parallel to such expressionsas "ethnobotany," "edmopharmacology," and tbose od1er na-

I 3

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Acts of Meaning

ive disciplines that are evenrually displaced by scientific knowl­edge. But folk psychology, though it changes, does not getdisplaced by scientific paradigms. For it deals with the nature,causes, and consequences of those intentional states-beliefs,desires) intentions, cormnitments-that most scientific PSYRchology dismisses in its effort to explain hlU1lan action froma point of view that is outside human subjectivity, formulatedin Thomas Nagel's deft phrase as a "view from nowhere.,,21So folk psychology continues to dominate the transactions ofeveryday life. And though it changes, it resists being tamedinto objectivity. For it is rooted in a language and a sharedconceprual strucrure that arc steeped in intentional states-inbeliefs, desires, and commiU1lents. And because it is a reflec­tion of culrure, it partakes in the culrure's way of valuing aswell as its way of knowing, In fact, it must do so, for theculture's normatively oriented institutions-its laws, its educa­tional institutions, its family structures-serve to enforce folkpsycl,1010gy. Indeed, folk psychology in its turn serves to jus­

tify such enforcement. But dlat is a story for later.Folk psychology is not once for all. It alters with the cul­

ture's changing responses to the world and to dle people init, It is worth asking how the views of such intellectual heroesas Darwin, Marx, and Freud gradually become transformedand absorbed into folk psychology, and I say this to make

, plain that (as we shall sec in the final chaptet) cultutal psychol­ogy is often indistinguishable from cultural histolY·

Antimentalistic fury about folk psychology simply missesthe point, The idea of jettisoning it in the interest of gettingrid of menta] States in our everyday explanations of human

behavior is tantamount to throwing away the very phenom­ena d1:tt psychology needs to explain. It is in terms of folk-

14

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The Proper Snldy of Man

psychological categories d1:tt we experience oLltseives andothers, It is dlrough folk psychology d1:tt people anticipateand judge one another, draw conclusions about the worth·whileness of their lives, and so on. Its power over humanll1cntal functioning and hlUl1an life is that it provides the verymeJl1S by which culture shapes hlunan beings to its require­ments, Scientific psychology, after all, is part of that samecultural process, and its stance toward folk psychology hasconsequences for dle culture in which It eXists-a matter towhich we shall come presendy.

III But I am going toO far toO fast, and riding roughshodover dle cautions that most often make behaviorJI scientistsshy away from a meaning-centered, culrurally oriented psy­cholob,),. These were the very cautions, I suspect, that Inadeit easy for the Cognitive Revolution to shy away from someof its original aims. They are principally about two issues,both of d,em "fowlding issues" of scientific psychology, Oneconcerns dle restriction and sanitization of subjective statesnot so much as dle data of psychology, for operationalismpermits us to accept these as "discrilninatory responses,)' forexample, but as explarlarory concepts, And certainly what I justproposed about the mediating role of meaning and cultureand their embodiment in folk psychology seems to committhe "sin" of elevating subjectivity ro an explanatory stams. Wepsychologists were born in positivism and do not like suchintentional-state notions as bclid~ desire, and intention as cx­!)lanations, The orher caution relates to relativism and the roleof universals, A culmraJJy based psychology s<?unds as if itmust surely mire down into a relativism requiring a different

15

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Acts of Meaning

theory of psycholob'Y for each culture we study. Let me con­sider each of these cautions in mm.

Iv! uch of the distrust ofsubjectivism in our explanatory con­cepts has to do, I think, with the alleged discrepancy betweenwhat people say and what they acmally M. A culmrally sensi­tive psychology (especially one that gives a central role to folkpsychology as a mediating factor) is and must be based notonly upon what people acmaUy M, but what they ray they doand what they say caused them to do what they did. It is alsoconcerned with what people say others did and why. Andabove all, it is concerned with what people say their worldsare like. Since the rejection of introspection as a core methodof psychology, we have been taught to treat such "said" ac­countS as untrustworthy, even in some odd philosophical wayas wltrue. Our preoccupation with verificationist criteria ofmeaning, as Richatd Rorry has pointed out, has made us dev­orees of prediction as the criterion of "good" science, includ­ing "good psychology."n Therefore, we judge what peoplesay about themselves and their worlds or about others andtheirs almost exclusively in terms of whether it predicts orprovides ·a vetifiable desctiption of what they M, did, or willM. If it fails to do so, then with a Humean ferocity, we treatwhat was said as "naught but etror and illusion." Or, perhaps,as merely "symptoms" that, when properly interpteted, will1e3d us to the true "cause" of the behaviot whose predictionwas our proper target.

Even Fteud, with his sometime devotion to the idca ofupsychic 'reality,)l fostered this cast of mind-since, as PaulRicoeur so trenchantly puts it, Freud adhered at timcs toa nineteenth-cenmry physicalist model that frowned onintentional-state explanations. 23 So it is part of our heritage as

16

The Proper Study of Man

post-Freudian modern men and women to cock a snoot atwhat people ray. It is "merely" manifest content. Real causesmay not even be accessible to ordinary consciousness. Weknow all abollt ego defense and rationalization. As for knowl­edge of Self, it is a compromise symptom hatdened in theinterplay between inhibition and anxiery, a formation that, ifit is to be known at all, must be archaeologically excavatedwitll the tools of psychoanalysis.

Or in more contemporary terms, as in tlle careful smdiesreported by Lee Ross and Richard Nisbett, it is plain thatpeople can describe correctly neither the basis of tlleir choicesnor the,biases that skew tlle distribution of those choicesH

And if even more powerful proof of this generalization wereneeded, it could be found in the work of An,0S Tversky andDaniel. Kahnemann who, indeed, cite as a precursor a well­known volunle by Bruner, Goodnow, and Austin.25

There is a curious twist to the charge that "what peopk sayis not necessarily what they do." It implies that what peopkdo is more important, more "real,») than what they say) or thatdle latter is important only for what it can reveal about theformer. It is as if the psychologist wanted to wash his handsaltogether of mental states and their organization, as if toassert d,at "saying," after all, is only about what one dlinks,feels, believes, experiences. How cutious dut tbere arc so fewstudies dut go in the other direction: how docs what one Me5reveal what one dlinks or feels or believes? This in spite ofdle fact that OUt folk psychology is suggestively ricb in sucbcategories as "hypocrisy/' Hinsincerity," and the like.

This one-sided emphasis of scientific psychology is indeedcurious in light of our evelyd:lY ways of dealing with dlerelationship between saying and doing. To begin with, when

17

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Acts of Meaning

peopk act in an offensive fashion, our first step in coping isto find our whethcr what dley seem to have done is whatdley really intended to do--to get some line on whcdler dleirmental state (as revealed by saying) and their deed (as revealedby doing) were in concordance or nOt. And if they say theycLdn't intend to do it, we exonerate them. If dley intendedtheir otTensive act, we may d,en try to "reason withthem"-that is, to "talk them out of behaving in that way."Or dley may try to talk us out of our cLstaste for their actionby "giving an excuse," which is a verbal way of explicatingand dlcreby legitimizing their behavior as exempt fi'om blame.When people go on being offensive to a sufficiendy large nWll­ber of others, somebody may even try to convince them to goto a psychiatrist who, d1rough a talking cure, will ny to gettheir behavior straightened out.

Indeed, d,e meaning placed on most acts by d,e participantsin any everyday encounter depends upon what dley say to oneanodler in advance, concurrendy, or after dley have acted. Orwhat dley are able to presuppose about what the odler lVouldsay, given a particular context. All of dlis is sdf-evidem, nOtonly at d,e informal level of dialogue, but at the formal levelof privileged dialogue as cocLfied, for exampk, in d,e legalsystem. The law of contracts is entirely abour the relationshipben"een performance and what was said. And so toO, in a lessformal way, is the conduct of marriage, kinship, friendship,and colleagueship.

It works in bodl directions. The meaning of talk is power­fully determined by the train of action in which it occurs­"Smile when you say tharJ"-just as d,e meaning of action isinterpretable only by reference to what the actors say they areup to--"So sorry" for an inadvertcm bumping. After all, it

18

The Proper Smdy of Man

has now been a quarter-century since John Austin's introduc­tion of speech aCt d1eory26 To dlOSe who want to concentrateupon whedler what peopk say predicts what they will do, d,eonly proper answer is that to separate the two in dlat way isto do bad philosophy, bad anthropology, bad psychology,and impossible law. Saying and doing represent a fi.mctionallyinseparable W1it in a culturally oriented psychology. When, ind1e next chapter, we come to discuss some of the "workingmaxims" of folk psychology, this will be a cnlcial consider­ation.

A culturally oriemed psychology neither dismisses whatpeople say about dleir memal statcs, nor treats dleir state­ments only as if they were predictive indices ofovert behavior.What it takes as central, radler, is that the relationship benveenaction and saying (or experiencing) is, in the ordinary conductoflifc, interpretabk. Ir takes the position that d,ere is a publiclyinterpretable congruence between saying, doing, and d,e cir­CWllStances in which d,e saying and doing occur. That is tosay, there are agreed-upon canonical relationships between d,emeaning of what we say and what we do in given circum­stances, and such relationships govern how we conduct ourlives with one another, There arc procedures of negotiation,moreover, for getting back on d,e track when these canonicalrelations arc violated. This is what makes interpretation andmeaning central to a cultural psychology-or to any psychol­ogy or mental science, for dut matter.

A cultural psychology, almost by definition, will not bepreoccupied with "behavior" but with Haction,'} its intention­

ally based cow1tcrpart, and more specifically, widl situated ac­tion-action situated in a culnlral setting} and in the mutuallyintcracting intentional states of the participants. Which is nOt

19

..-_...._...._...._._--~-_._- --

­CJl::J)

Acts of Meaning

to say that a cultural psychology need dispense forevermorewith laboratory experiments or with the search for humanuniversals, a matter to which we rum now,

IV I have urged that psychology Stop trying to be "mean­ing free" in its system of explanation, The very people andculmres that are its subject ate governed by shated meaningsand values, People commit their lives to their pursuit andfulfillment, die for them, It has been argued that psychologymust be cultute-free if it is some day to discover a set oftranscendent human universals--cven if d,ese wliversals arehedged by specifications about "cross-cultural" variations 27

Let me propose a way of conceiving of human universals dutis consistent with cultural psychology, yet escapes bodl theindeterminacies of relativism and the trivialities of cross­cultutal psychology, Culrural psychology is "ot just a cross­culnlral psychology that provides a few parameters to aCCOlmtfor local variations in universal laws of behavior. Nor, as weshall see presendy, does it condemn one to a mbbery rela­tlVISJ11,

The solution to the issue of universals lies in exposing awidely held and radler old-fashioned fallacy that d,e hwnansciences inherited from the nineteendl century, a view aboutd,e rclarion between biology and culture, In that version, cul­ture was conceived as an "overlay" on biologically determinedhuman nature, The causes of hunlall behavior were assumedto lie in that biological substrate, What I Wallt to argue insteadis d,at culture alld the quest for mealling within culmre ared,e proper causes of hwnan action, The biological substrate,d,e so-called universals of human namre, is nor a cause of

20

The Proper Srudy of Mm

action but, at most, a constraint upon it or a co"ditio" for it,The engine in the car does not "cause» us to drive to thesupermarket for the week's shopping, any more d,an our bio­logical reproductive system "causes" us with very high oddsto marry somebody from our own social class, ethnic group,and so on, Granted that without engine-powered cars wewould not drive to supermatkets, nor perhaps would d,ere bemarriage in the absence of a reprOductive system,

But "constraint" putS the matter too negatively, For biolog­ically imposed limits on hunlan nmctioning are also challengesto cultural invention, The tool kit of any culture can be de­scribed as a set of prosthetic devices by which hUmall beingscan exceed 01' even redefine the "narural limits" of hUmallfunctioning, Html;m tools arc precisely of this order-softones and hard ones alike. There is, for example, a constrainingbiological limit on immediate memory-George Miller's fa­mOlls "seven plus or minus t\\lO.»28 But we have constructedsymbolic devices for exceeding dlis limit: coding systems likeoctal digits, rrulemonic devices, language tricks, Recall thatMiller's main point in that lalldmark paper was that by conver­sion of input dlrough such coding systems we, as enculruratedhuman beings, arc enabled to cope with seven chlmks of infor­mation radler than with seven bits, Our knowledge, dlen, be­comes encuJturated knowledge, indefinable save in a culturallybased system of notation, In d,e process, we have brokendlroUgh d,e original bounds set by d,e so-called biology ofmemory, Biology constrains, but not forevermore,

Or take d,e so-called natural hwnan motives, It would besilly to deny that people get hungry or sexy or that thete isa biological substrate for such states, But the devout Jew'scommitment to fasting on Yom Kippur or the devout Mus-

21

Acts of Meaning

lim's commitment to Ramadan is not captured by a recital ofthe physiology of hWlger. And the incest taboo is powerfuland ditective in a way that gonadotrophins arc nor. Nor iscultural commitment to certain foods or certain eating occa­sions simply a "conversion" of biological drives into psycho­logical preferences. Our desites and our actions in theit behalfare mediated by symbolic means. As Charles Taylor putS it inhis brilliant new book, So"rccs of the Self, commitment is notjust a preference. It is a belief, an "ontolog/' as he calls it,that :l certain mode of life merits or deserves suPPOrt) eventhough we find it difficult to live up to ir. Our lives, as weshall sec in the fourth chapter, ate given over to finding suchfulfillment as we can in terms of these ways of life-sufferingto do so if necessary.

Obviously, there arc also constraints on commitment tomodes of life that are more biological than cultural. Physicalexhaustion, hWlger, sickness, and pain can bteak our connec­tions or stem their growth. Elaine Scarry points our in hermoving book The Body in Pain that the power of pain (as intorture) is that it obliterates our connection with the personal-

- cultural world and wipes out the meaningful context that gives::; direction to our hopes and strivings29 It narrows human con­

sciousness to the point where, as torturers know, man literallybecomes a beast. And even at that, pain does not alwayssucceed, so powerful are the links to those meanings that givesense to life. The ghastly bestialization of tlle Holocaust andits deatll camps was designed as much to dehw11anize as tokill, and it was this that made it the darkest moment in humanhistory. Men have killed one another before, though never onsuch a scale or with such bureaucratization. But never has

22

__ , __r ... _

The Proper Study of Man

there been such a concerted effort to dehumanize throughsutfering, pain, and unbearable humiliation.

It was to the credit of Wilhelm Diltl1ey and his GcisteslVissm­

schaft, his culturally based human science, that he recognizedthe power of culnlrc to IlUrnlrC and guide a new and ever­changing species. 30 I want to ally myself witl1 his aspirations.What I want to argue in this book is that it is culture and thescarch for meaning that is the shaping hand, biology that isthe (onstrJint, and that, as we have seen, culUlre even has irin its power ro loosen thar constraint.

But lest this seem like a preface to a new optimism abouthumankind and its future, let me make one point before I1lt11­ing, as promised, to the issue of reiativislTI. For all its genera­tive inventiveness) human culnlf(;~ is not necessarily benignnor is it notably 1l1,tIlcable in response to ttoubles. It is stiUcustomary, as in the fashion of ancient traditions, to lay thebLune for tl1e failings of human culture on "human na­ture"-whcther as instinct.s, as original sin, or whatever. EvenFreud, with his shrewd eye for human folly, often fell intothis trap, notably in his doctrine of instinct. But this is surelya convenient and self-assuaging form of apologetics. Can wereally invoke our biological heritage to accoWlt, say, for theinvasive bureaucratization of life in our times, with its rcsu]·tant erosion ofselfhood and compassion? To invoke biologicaldevils or the "Old Ned" is to dodge responsibiliry for whatwe ourselves have created. For all our power to constructsymbolic cultures and to set in place tl1e institutional forcesneeded tor their t~xecution, we do not seem vcry adept atsteering our creations toward tl1e ends we profess to desire.We do better to question our ingenuiry in constructing and

23

­(J1

00

Acts of Meaning

reconstructing communal ways of life th".n to invoke the fail­ure of the human genome. Which is not to say that communalways of life arc easily changed, even in the absence of biologi­cJ...1 constraints, but only to focus J.ttenrion where it belongs,not upon our biological limitations, but upon our culturali.nventiveness.

V And this inevitably brings us to the issue of relativism.For what can we Olean when we say that we are not very"adepf' or ((ingenious" in constructing our sociaJ worlds?Who judges so, and by what standards? If culnlre forms mind,and if minds make such value judgments, arc we nOt lockedinto an inescapable relativism? We had better examine whatthis might mea.n. It is the epistemological side of relativism,rather than the evaluative, that musr concern us first. Is whatwe k.now "absolute," or is it always relative to some perspec­tive, some point of view? Is there an "aboriginal realitYl" oras Nelson Goodman would put it, is reality a construction,31Most thinking people today would Opt for some mild perspec­tival position. But very few are prepared to aba.ndon the no­tion of a singular aboriginal reality altogether. Indeed, CarolFeJdma.n has even proposed a would-be hwman wliversalwhose principal rhesis is that we endow the conclusions ofour cognitive reckonings with a special, "external" ontologicalstatus. 32 Our thoughts, so to speak, arc "in here." Our conclu­sions are "out there." She calls rhis altogether human failing"ontic dumping," and she has never had to look far for insran­tiations of her universal. Yet, in most huma.n interaction, "real­ities" are the results of prolonged and intricate processes ofconstruction and negotiation deeply imbedded in the culture.

24

The Proper Smdy of Man

Arc the consequences of practicing such constructivism andof recognizing that we do so as dire as they are made toseem' Docs such a practice really lead to an "anything goes"reloti"ism' Constructivism's basic claim is simply that knowl·edge is "right" or "wrong" in light of the perspective we havechosen to assume. Rights and wrongs of this kind-howeverwell we can test them--do nOt Slun to absolute truths andfalsities. The best we can hope for is that we be aware of ourown perspcctive and those of others when we make our cIJimsof '\rightncss» and "wrongness." Put this way, constructivismharcUy seems exotic at all. It is what legal scholars refer to as"the interpretive ulrn/) or as one of dleOl put it, a turningaway from (\authoritative meaning."

Richard Rorty, in his exploration of the consequences ofpragmatism, argues that interpretivism is part of a deep, slowmovement to strip philosophy of its "fowldational" status B

He characterizes pragmatism-and the view that I have beenexpressing falls into that caregory-as "simply anti-essential­ism applied to notions like 'truth,' 'knOWledge,' 'language,''morality' and other similar objects of philosophical theoriz­ing," and he illustl'ates it by reference to William James's defi­nition of the "true" as "what is good in the way of belief." InsuPPOrt of James, Rorty remarks, "his point is that it is of nouse being told that truth is 'correspondence with reality' ...One can, to be sure, pair off bits of what one takes the worldto be in such a way that tbe sentences one believes have inter­nal structures isomorphic to relations between things in theworld." But once one goes beyond such simple statements as"the cat is on the mat" and begins dealing with universals orhypotheticals Or theories, sllch pairings become "messy a.ndad hoc." Such pairing exercises help very little in determining

25

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to

Acts of Meaning

"why or whether our present view of the world is, roughly,the one we should hold," To push such an exercise to the limit,

Rorty rightly insists, is "to wam tnIth to have an essence," tobe true in some absolute sense. But to say something usefulabout truth, he goes on, is to "explore practice rather thantheory ... action rather than contemplation." Abstract state­ments like "History is the story of the class stnIggle" ore notto be judged by limiting oneself to questions like "Does thatassertion get it right?" Pragmatic, pcrspectival questionswould be more in order: "What would it be like to believethat?" or "What would I be conU11itr.ing myself to if I believedthat'" And tl1is is very far from the kind of Kamian essential­ism that searches for principles that establish the defining es­senCe of "knowledge" or "representation" or "rauonaJiry.1l34

Let me illustrate with a lime case srudy. We want to knowmore about intellectual prowess. So we decide, unthinkingly,to use school performance as our measure for assessing "it"and predicting "irs" developmem. After ali, where intellectualprowess is concerned, school performance is of the csscnct,;.

Then, in the light ofour chosen perspective, Blacks in Americahave kss Hprowessn than Whites, who in d1cir turn haveslightly less than Asians. What kind of finding is that, asks thepragmaric critic? If goodwill prevails in the ensuing debate, aprocess of what can only be called deconstnIcting and recon­stnIcting will occur. Whar does school performance mean, andhow does it relate to othcr forms of performance? And aboutintcUectual prowess) what does '<it" mean? Is it singular orplural, and may nOt its very definition depend upon somesubtle process by which a culUlre selects certain traits to

honor) rcward~ 3..nd cultivate-as Howard Gardner has pro~

posed?35 Or, viewed politically, has school performance itself

26

The Proper Study of Man

been rigged by choice of curriculum in such a way as to legiti­mize the offspring of tl1e "haves" while marginalizing tl10seof tl1e "have nots"? Very soon, tlle issue of what "inteUectualprowess" is will be replaced by questions of how we wish to

tise the concept in the light of a variety of circumstances-po­litical , social, econonlic, even scientific.

That is a typical constructivist debate and a typical prag­matic procedure for resolving it. Is it relativism? Is it thedreaded form of relativism where every belief is as good asevery otl,er' Does :mybody really hold such a view, or is rela­tivism, rather, someming conjured up by essentialist philoso­phers to shore up their faith in the. "lU1varnished trtlth»-an

imaginary playmate forever assigned tlle role of spoiler in thegame of pure reason' ] think Rorty is right when he says thatrelativism is not the snlInbling block for consrn.lcr,ivism andpragmarism. Asking rhe !)ragmatist's questions-How doesthis view affect m)' view of tl1e world or m)' conunitments to

it~-sllrdy docs not lead to ('anything goes,» It may lead toan unpacking of presuppositions, tl1e better to explore one'sCOlllJllltmcnts .

[n his thoughtful book The Predicament of Culture, JamesClinard notes that culnlres, if they ever were homogeneous,arc no longer so, and tl,at me srudy of anmropology perforcebecomes an instll.lJl1cnt in the l1unagcmcnr of diversity.36 Itmay even be the case tl1Jt arguments from essences and from"aboriginal reality," by cloaking tradition wim the mantle of"reality," art': mc:ans for creating cultural stagnation and alien·

ation. But what of the charge thar constnIctivism weakens orundermines COlnn1itn1cnr~

If knowledge is relariv<: to perspective, what now of the

vallie issue, of one's choite of perspective? Is mat "merely" a

27

Acts of Meaning

matter of preference? Are values only preferences? If not, howM we choose between values? There arc two seductively mis­leading psychological views on this question-<:>ne of themsccmingly rationalist in apparatus, the other romantically irra­tionalist. The latter holds that values are a function of gutreactions, displaced psychic conflicts, temperament, and thelike. Insofar as the irrationalists take culture into account, itis as a source of supply, a cafeteria of values from which onechooses as a function of one's individual drives or conflicts.Values are not seen in terms of how they relate the individualto the culture, and their stability is accounted for by suchfixatives as reinforcement schedules, neurOtic rigidity, andso 011,37

The rationalists take a quire different view, one derivedprincipally from economic theory, best exemplified, perhaps,by rational cboice theory.38 According to rational choice tbe­ory, we express our values in our cllOices, situation by situa­tion, guided by sucb rarionalmodels as utility theory, optimi­zation rules, minimization of chagrin, or wbatever. Tbesechoices (wlder appropriate condirions) reveal notable regular­iries, ones very reminiscent of the kinds of functions one ob-

~ serves in operant conditioning experiments with pigeons. Buto for a psycbologisr, the literature on "rational choice" is princi­

pally interesting for its vivid anomalies, its violations of therules of utility. (Utility is the multiplicative resultant of thevalue of a particular cboice and its subjecrive probability ofbeing successfully executed, and it bas been the cornerstoneof formal economic tbeory since Adam Smith.) Consider theanomalies. Richard Herrnstein, for exanlple, describes oneamusingly called "dearcr by the dozen" in wbicb it can besbown dut people prefer to buy season sympbony tickets even

28

The Proper Study of Man

when dley know tbey will probably go to only balf tbe con­certs. 39 The way to bandle the anomaly is to assign "snob­bery" or "comnutmcnt» or "laziness" J value in the choicesituation. The value assigned is one that makes dle result con­form to utility theory. And this, of course, gives the gameaway. If you accept utility theOt)' (or one of its variants) yousimply assign values to cboices in a malUler d,at makes cboicebehavior conform to irs teners. Rational eboice theory baslittle or nothing to say about bow values arise-wbedler theyarc gur reactions, wbedler historically derermined, or wbar.

Borh tlle irrarionalist and rbe rarionalist approaches to val­

ues miss one crucial point: values inhere in commitment to

"ways of life," and ways of life in dleir complex interactionconstiture a culture. We neitller shoot our values from thebip, choice-situarion by cboice-situation, nor are dley dleproducr of isolated individuals with srrong drives and compel­ling neuroses. Rarher, rhey are COIlUllWlal and consequentialin terms of our relarions to a cultural community. Tbey fi.dfillhmctions for us in dlar COIlUllunity. The values underlying away of life, as Charles Taylor points Out, arc only lightly openro "radical reflection.";o They become incorporated in one'sself identity and, ar tlle same time, they locate one in a culture.To the degree that a culture, in Sapir's sense, is not "spurious,"tllC vaJue commitments of its members provide either the basisfor tlle sarisfacrory conduct of a way of life or, ar least, a basisfor negotiatioll.;'

But dle pluralism of modern life and dle rapid ebanges iriJnposes, one can argue, create conflicts in comn1itmcnt, con­fliers in values, and tllereforc conflicrs about the "rightness"of various claims ro knowledge about values. We simply donot know how to predict dlC "fururc of commitment» under

29

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Acts of Meaning

these circumstances. But it is whimsical to suppose that, underpresent world conditions, a dogged insistence upon the notionof "absOlute value" will make the uncertainties go away. Allone can hope for is a viable pluralism backed by a willingnessto negotiate differences in world-view.

Which leads directly to one last general point I mustmake--<>ne furrher reason why I believe that a culrural psy­chology such as I am proposing need not fret abour the specterof relativism. It concerns open-mindedness-whether in poli­tics, science, literature, philosophy, or the arrs. I take open­mindedness to be a willingness to construe knowledge andvalues from multiple perspectives without loss of conunitmentto one's own values. Open-mindedness is the keystone of whatwe call a democratic culrure. We have learned, with muchpain, tllat democratic culture is neither divinely ordained noris ir to be taken for granted as perennially durable. Like allcultures, it is premised upon values that generate distinctiveways of life and corresponding conceptions of reality. Thoughit values the refreshments of surprise, it is nOt always proofagainst dle shocks that open-mindedness sometimes inflicts.Its very open-mindedness generates its Own enemies, for thereis surely a biological constraint on appetites for novelty. I takedle constructivism of culrural psychology to be a profoundexpression of democratic culture.'l It demands that we beconsciolls of how we come to Our knowledge and as consciousas we can be about the values that lead us to our perspectives.It asks that we be accountable for how and what we know.But it docs not insist that there is only one way of constructingmeaning, or one right way. It is based upon values that, Ibelieve, fit it best to deal widl dle changes and disruptionsthat have become so much a feature of modern life.

30

The Proper Study of Man

VI Let me return finally to the adversarial stance of posi­tivist "scientific psychology" toward "folk psychology." Scien­tific psychology insists quite properly upon its right to attack,debate, and even replace the tenets of folk psychology. It in­sists upon its right to deny the causal efficacy of mental statesand of culture itself. Ar its furthest reach, indeed, it even as­signs such concepts as "freedom" and "dignity" to the realmof illusion, though they arc central to the belief system of ademocratic culture. At this far reach, it is sometimes said ofpsychology that it is anticultural, antihistorical, and that itsreductionism is anti-intellectual. Perhaps. But it is also truethat the "village atheist" zeal of many extreme positivists hasenlivened debates about dle narure of man, and that theirinsistence on "objective" or "operational" research procedureshas had a healthily astringent effect on our speculations. Yetthere remains a niggling worry.

I recall the first of Wolfgang Kohler's William James Lec­tures at Harvard, The Place of Values in " World of Faces."Kohler reports an imaginary conversation with a friend whocomplains of the "Nothing But" quality of psychology: thathLUnan nature is portrayed there as nothing but the concatena­tion of conditioned reflexes, associative bonds, transformedanimal drives. And he worries, this imaginary friend, whathappens when the postman and the prime minister also cometo think this way. My worry toO is what happens when thesittcr comes to think he looks like his porrrait. RememberPicasso's reply to Gerrrude Stein's friends when d1ey told himthat she thought his porrrait of her was not a good resem­blance. "Tell her to wait," he said. "It will be." Bur the otherpossibility, of course, is that the sitter will become alienated

31

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Acts of Meaning

from that kind of painter.44 As Adrienne Rich puts it, "Whensomeone with the authority of a teacher, say, describes theworld a.nd you are not in it, there is a moment of psychicdisequilibrium, as if you looked into a mirror and sawnothing.)) 45

Intellectuals in a democratic society constitute a communityof cultural critics. Psychologists, alas, have rarely seen them­selves that way, largely because they are so caught up in theself-image generated by positivist science. Psychology, on thisview, deals only in objective truths and eschews cultural criti­cism. But even scientific psychology will fare better when itrecognizes that its truths, like all truths about the humancondition, are relative to the point of view that it takes towardthat condition. And it will achieve a more effective stancetoward tlle culture at large when ir comes to recognize thatthe folk psychology of ordinaty people is not just a set of self­assuaging illusions, but the culture's beliefs and workinghyporheses about what makes it possible and fulfilling for peo­ple to live together, even with great personal sacrifice. It iswhere psychology starts and wherein it is inseparable fromanthropology and the other cultural sciences. Folk psychologyneeds explaining, not explaining away.

32

• CHAPTER TWO'

Folk Psychology as an Instrument

of Culture

I N THE FIRST CHAPTER I recowlted how the cognitiverevolution had been diverted from its originating impulse

by the complltational metaphor, and I argued in favor of arenewal and refreshment of the original revolution, a revolu­tion inspired by the conviction that the central concept of ahlU11an psychology is meaning and the processes and transac­tions involved in the construction of mea.nings.

This conviction is based upon twO connected argun1cnrs.The first is that to understand man you must understand howhis experiences and his acts are shaped by his intentional states,and the second is that the form of these intentional states isrealized only through participation in the symbolic systems ofthe culrure. Indeed, the vety shape of our lives-the roughand perpetually changing draft of our autobiography that wecarty in our minds-is wlderstandable to ourselves and toothers only by virtue of those cultural systems of interpreta­tion. But culture is also constitutive of mind. By virtue ofthisactualization in culture, meaning achieves a form that is publicand communal rather than private and autistic. Only by replac­ing this transactional model of mind with an isolating individ­ualistJC one have Anglo-American philosophers been able to

33