Article,
The Narrative Construction of Reality
Critical Inquiry, (1991)
Abstract
Surely since the Enlightenment, if not before, the study of mind has
centered principally on how man achieves a "true" knowledge of the
world. Emphasis in this pursuit has varied, of course: empiricists have concentrated
on the mind's interplay with an external world of nature, hoping
to find the key in the association of sensations and ideas, while
rationalists have looked inward to the powers of mind itself for the principles
of right reason. The objective, in either case, has been to discover
how we achieve "reality," that is to say, how we get a reliable fix on the
world, a world that is, as it were, assumed to be immutable and, as it were,
"there to be observed."
This quest has, of course, had a profound effect on the development
of psychology, and the empiricist and rationalist traditions have dominated
our conceptions of how the mind grows and how it gets its grasp on
the "real world." Indeed, at midcentury Gestalt theory represented the
rationalist wing of this enterprise and American learning theory the
empiricist. Both gave accounts of mental development as proceeding in
some more or less linear and uniform fashion from an initial incompetence
in grasping reality to a final competence, in one case attributing it to
the working out of internal processes or mental organization, and in the
other to some unspecified principle of reflection by which—whether
through reinforcement, association, or conditioning—we came to
respond to the world äs it is." There have always been dissidents who
