p.5 The objective of computationalism is to devise a formal
redescription of any and all functioning systems that manage the flow of well-formed information.
It seeks to do so in a way that produces foreseeable, systematic outcomes. One such system is the human mind... thoughtful
computationalism... argues... that any and all systems that process information must be governed by specifiable "rules" or
procedures that govern what to do with inputs... This is the ideal of Artificial Intelligence, so-called.
p.17 If pedagogy is to empower human beings to go beyond their "native" predispositions, it must transmit
the "toolkit" the culture has developed for doing so.
p.19 The "reality" that we impute to the "worlds" we inhabit is a constructed one... "reality is made, not
found." Reality construction is the product of meaning making shaped by traditions and by a culture's toolkit of ways
of thought.
p.39 let me turn to narrative as a mode of thought and as a vehicle
of meaning making... There appear to be two broad ways in which human beings organize and manage their knowledge of
the world, indeed structure even their immediate experience: one seems more specialized for treating of physical
"things," the other for treating of people and their plights. These are conventionally known as logical-scientific
thinking and narrative thinking.
p.40 we frame the accounts of our cultural origins and our most cherished beliefs
in story form... Our immediate experience, what happened yesterday or the day before, is framed in the same storied
way.
p.40 It has always been tacitly assumed that narrative skill comes "naturally," that it does not have to
be taught. But a closer look shows this not to be true at all.
p.119 Now let me turn to the main topic of this chapter - narrative as a mode of thinking,
as a structure for organizing our knowledge, and as a vehicle in the process of education
p.121 what is a narrative? ...A narrative involves a sequence of events. The sequence carries the
meaning ...But not every sequence of events is worth recounting. Narrative is discourse, and the prime rule of discourse
is that there be a reason for it that distinguishes it from silence. Narrative is justified or warranted by ...[telling] about
something unexpected, or something that one's auditor has reason to doubt. The "point" of the narrative is to resolve
the unexpected, to settle the auditor's doubt, or in some manner to redress or explicate the "imbalance" that prompted
the telling of the story in the first place. A story, then, has two sides to it: a sequence of events, and an implied
evaluation of the events recounted.
p.125 let me propose that we characteristically convert our efforts at scientific understanding
into the form of narratives or, say, "narrative heuristics." "We" includes both scientists and the pupils who inhabit
the classrooms in which we teach. This would consist of turning the events we are exploring into narrative form,
better to highlight what is canonical and expected in our way of looking at them, so that we could more easily discern
what is "fishy" and off-base and what, therefore, needs to be explicated.
p.130 What, in fact, is gained and what lost when human beings make sense of the world by telling
stories about it - by using the narrative mode for construing reality? The usual answer to this question is a kind
of doxology delivered in the name of "the scientific method": Thou shalt not indulge self-delusion, nor utter unverifiable
propositions, not commit contradiction, nor treat mere history as cause, and so on. Story, according to such commandments,
is not the realistic stuff of science and is to be shunned or converted into testable propositions. If meaning making were
always dedicated to achieving "scientific" understanding, such cautions might be sensible. But neither the empiricist's
tested knowledge nor the rationalist's self-evident truths describe the ground on which ordinary people go about making sense
of their experiences... These are matters that need a story.
p.131 Although the scientific method is hardly irrelevant to all this, it is certainly
not the only route to understanding the world.
p.136 What people do in narratives is never by chance, nor is it strictly determined by
cause and effect, it is motivated by beliefs, desires, theories, values, or other "intentional states."
p.147 Narrativized realities, I suspect, are too ubiquitous, their
construction too habitual or automatic to be accessible to easy inspection. We live in a sea of stories,
and like the fish who (according to the proverb*) will be the last to discover water, we have our own difficulties
grasping what it is like to swim in stories. It is not that we lack competence in creating our narrative accounts
of reality -- far from it. We are, if anything, too expert. Our problem, rather, is achieving consciousness
of what we so easily do automatically, the ancient problem of prise de conscience. [JLJ - becoming aware]
p.149 we live most of our lives in a world constructed according to the rules and devices of narrative...
Is it so bizzare... to propose... that we turn our consciousness to what narrative construal imposes on the world of reality
that it creates?
p.161 Noam Chomsky remarked... we seem not to possess the natural mental categories for explicating our
own minds
*A Chinese proverb, "the fish will be the last to discover the water"
