Even our direct experiences, so called, are assigned for interpretation to ideas about cause and consequence, and the world that emerges for us is a conceptual world. When we are puzzled about what we encounter, we renegotiate its meaning in a manner that is concordant with what those around us believe.
If this is the basis for our understanding of the physical and biological worlds, how much truer it is of the social world in which we live.
. . . Meaning is what we can agree upon or at least accept as a working basis for seeking agreement about the concept at hand.
. . . a culture is constantly in the process of being recreated as it is interpreted and renegotiated by its members.
. . . “equilibrium” accounts of cultures are useful principally . . . as political instruments for use by those in power to subjugate psychologically whose who must be ruled.
Jerome Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds ; Cambridge and London : Harvard University Press, 1986, p. 122~123 (excerpt La Litera información) [there is an early version of this chapter at JSTOR]
