3: Minding Challenge: Stances towards New Information and Openness to Change

So far I have examined in some detail three key Brunerian ideas: his distinction between paradigmatic and narrative modes of knowing, his ideas concerning the narrative construction of reality and the antinomies he identifies between an individual and their social environment. This chapter brings these ideas into dialogue and in doing so explores an individual's stance towards challenge in paradigmatic and narrative representations and how meaning-making within and between the two modes of knowing might be open to change over time in response to new information and challenge from the social environment.

For Bruner, an individual adapts both their paradigmatic and narrative modes of knowing in response to experience. These adaptations then in turn become new prior knowledge, and arrangement of that knowledge affects future motivation and choices in the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of reasoning involved in what Bruner terms ‘going beyond the information given’ (Holyoak & Morrison, 2005, p. 209). As such, he argues, ‘… stimuli do not just cause responses but alter existing cognitive states’ (Olson, 2007, p. 14). The modes he identifies therefore do not produce or consist of discrete and unchanging forms of representation. Rather, they continue to be intimately related to the thinker's environment and continue to be changed through dynamic interaction with it.