Book Review on Act of Meaning Chapter Folk Psychology as an Instrument of Culture

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Book review of Act of Meaning, Jerome Bruner For the people who are not quite clear about what philosophy is about, philosophy may just be some theory or hypothesis that is very mysterious, and hard to get resonated with. However, this book, Act of Meaning by Jerome Bruner, may give those people a different understanding. The author, Jerome Bruner, an outstanding contributor to human psychology, illustrates the cultural nature and structure of meaning and the crucial role it plays in human action in great detail. For the eighth chapter of the book, the author elaborates the two factors, which are schematizing and affect regulation, in narrativized folk psychology. For the schematizing part, the interpretation is mainly based on the view of Bartlett. The author agrees on Bartlett’s words in cultural schematizing that each social group is organized by some psychological tendency, which gives the group a bias in its dealings with external circumstances. The author also adds a point that experience and memory are powerfully structured by internalized conceptions of folk psychology and culturally characterized historic institutions. That is to say, the people from the same culture are cultured with similar psychological and historic views, so that they tend to behave alike, which is in accordance with our daily perception. After interpreting the factor schematizing, the article subsequently talks about the affect regulation factor. The author consistently refers a lot to Bartlett. He borrows the following two points here. The first is that, remembering is under the control of affective attitudes, and unify of affect is a condition for memory. The other one is that, after charging an attitude when remembering, recalling is some kind of justification, where the confident subjects are justified by more details than that was actually present, and the hesitating
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