The left hand has traditionally represented the powers of intuition, feeling, and spontaneity. In this classic book, Jerome Bruner inquires into the part these qualities play in determining how we know what we do know; how we can help others to know-that is, to teach; and how our conception of reality affects our actions and is modified by them.
The striking and subtle discussions contained in On Knowing take on the core issues concerning man's sense of self: creativity, the search for identity, the nature of aesthetic knowledge, myth, the learning process, and modem-day attitudes toward social controls, Freud, and fate. In this revised, expanded edition, Bruner comments on his personal efforts to maintain an intuitively and rationally balanced understanding of human nature, taking into account the odd historical circumstances which have hindered academic psychology's attempts in the past to know man.
Writing with wit, imagination, and deep sympathy for the human condition, Jerome Bruner speaks here to the part of man's mind that can never be completely satisfied by the right-handed virtues of order, rationality, and discipline.
Introduction
PART 1: THE SHAPE OF EXPERIENCE
1. The Conditions of Creativity
2. Myth and Identity
3. Identity and the Modern Novel
4. Art as a Mode of Knowing
PART 2: THE QUEST FOR CLARITY
5. The Act of Discovery
6. On Learning Mathematics
7. After John Dewey, What?
PART 3 THE IDEA OF ACTION
8. The Control of Human Behavior
9. Freud and the Image of Man
10. Fate and the Possible
11. Psychology and the Image of Man
Overview
The left hand has traditionally represented the powers of intuition, feeling, and spontaneity. In this classic book, Jerome Bruner inquires into the part these qualities play in determining how we know what we do know; how we can help others to know-that is, to teach; and how our conception of reality affects our actions and is modified by them.
The striking and subtle discussions contained in On Knowing take on the core issues concerning man's sense of self: creativity, the ...