ABSTRACT
Jerome Brunner's Acts of Meaning is about how he would redirect his home field of psychology away from biological determinism, the human mind as an information processer, stimulus and response models with their "little studies" of overtly observable behavior, and toward the social construction of meaning. Put one way, as the formulation of hypotheses about how people make sense out of their world, Brunner's cultural psychology is no different from any other kind of theorizing. The distrust of subjectivism, Brunner thinks, may be due to people's erroneous impressions of the gap between what individuals say and what they do. But language is for everyone; it cannot explain the conflicts over meaning that Brunner keeps saying he wants to study. Essentially, Brunner asks how social stability is created in the midst of different constructions of reality. He answers that each society must have "interpretative procedures for adjudicating the different construels of reality that are inevitable in any diverse society.".
