Transcript The Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Meanings

EDM6402
Qualitative Methods of Educational Research
Lecture 2
The Phenomenology and
Hermeneutics of Meanings:
Approaches to Qualitative Research
1
In Search of the Meaning of Meanings in
Educational Research
• Phenomenology of meaning
• Hermeneutics of meaning
2
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• What is phenomenology?
– “The term ‘phenomenology’ is partly derived from the
Greek word phainomenon (plural: phainomena).
Phainmenon literally means ‘appearance’, that is, ‘that
which shows itself’. Philosophers generally define
‘phenomena’ to mean ‘the appearances of things, as
contrast with the things themselves.” (Spinelli, 2005, p. 6)
– Immanuel Kant’s distinction between the ‘noumenon’ (i.e.
the thing itself) and the phenomenon (i.e. the thing appears
in our consciousness)
3
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• What is phenomenology?
– Edmund Husserl, the founding figure of phenomenology,
specifies that phenomenology is to study how we
“conscious of” them, how they “appear”, and, in short, how
things become “phenomena”. (Spinelli, 2005, 6; Smith,
Flowers & Larkin, 2009, p. 12-13)
1859-1938
4
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• What is phenomenology?
– In Husserl’s own words,
“Every experience can be subject to …reflection, as can indeed every
manner in which we occupy ourselves with any real or ideal objects — for
instance, thinking, or in the modes of feeling and will, valuing and striving.
So when we are fully engaged in conscious activity, we focus exclusively
on the specific things, thoughts, values, goals or means involved, but not
on the psychical experience as such, in which these things are known as
such. Only reflection reveals this to us. Through reflection, instead of
grasping simply the matter straight-out — the values, goals, and
instrumentalities — we grasp the corresponding subjective experience in
which we become ‘conscious’ of them, in which (in the broadest sense)
they ‘appear’. For this reason, they are called ‘phenomena’, and their most
general essential character is to exist as the “consciousness-of’ of
‘appearance-of’ the specific things, thoughts, … plans, decisions, hopes,
and so forth.” (Husserl, 1927; quoted from Smith, Flowers & Larkin, 2009,
p. 12)
5
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• What is phenomenology?
– In contrast to mode of inquiry in natural science, which
emphasizes observations of and experimentation with
things in the external world, phenomenology turns inwards
to investigate human reflection, consciousness, and
subjectivity; and poses the question of how a particular
experience stands out (i.e. appears) to become so
significant that we would grant them attention, intention
and consciousness. In short, phenomenology is to study
the meaning-construction process of human kind and
therefore, it is one of the theoretical foundations of the
human and cultural sciences, as well as of methodology of
qualitative research.
6
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Constituent concepts of phenomenology
– Stream of consciousness and the concept of
intentionality
• Hernri Bergson, another the founding figures of
phenomenology, stipulates that we humans are not only
living within the world of discrete and concrete space
and time, but also in the stream of consciousness. It is
within this stream of consciousness that a man would
grant his attention and intention to an object in reality
(or ‘the world’) and elevate it to become a “phenomenon”
within one’s subjectivity. And Husserl has labelled this
fundamental inter-connection between consciousness
and objects in reality the ‘intentioanlity’.
7
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Constituent concepts of phenomenology
• The concept of intentionality: “The term ‘intentionality’
is taken from the Latin intendere, which translates as ‘to
stretch forth’.” It indicates the process of how the mind
“stretching forth” into the world and “grasping” and
“translating” an object into a phenomenon. (Spinelli,
2005, p.15)
• The process of intentionality has been differentiated by
Husserl into two components, namely noema and
noesis.
– The concept of noema (intentional-object) indicates the
objects being intended to, conscious of and grasped, i.e.
the what;
– The concept of noesis (intentional-Act) refers to the act of
intending, stretching forth and bringing to consciousness,
8
i.e. the how.
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Constituent concepts of phenomenology
– Internal time consciousness (Durée)
• Henri Bergson has coined the concept ‘durée’ to specify
the inner stream of duration constituted within human
consciousness. It refers to, as Husserl characterized,
the types of experiences, that human minds would
“transverse” (translate or transform) into “intentional
unities”, within which “immanent time is
constituted, …an authentic time in which there is
duration, and alteration of that which endures.” (Husserl,
1964; quoted in Schutz, 1967, p. 46)
9
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
– Concepts of perception, retention and reproduction
Husserl has given a precise description of the constituting
process of this intentional unity of duration by
differentiating it into (Schutz, 1967, p.47-49)
• Perception: It refers to the “now-apprehension” granted to an
experience by human minds during the immediate encounter.
• Retention: It refers to the “primary remembrance” or “primary
impression” of an experience formed within the “afterconsciousness” of the encounter.
• Reproduction: It refers to the “secondary remembrance or
recollection” that emerges after primary remembrance is past.
“We accomplish it either by simply laying hold of what is
recollected … or we accomplish it in a real, re-productive,
recapitulative memory in which the temporal object is again
completely built up in a continuum of presentifications, so that
we seem to perceive it again, but only seemingly, as-if.”
10
(Husserl, 1964, quoted in Schutz, 1967, p. 48)
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Constituent concepts of phenomenology
– The concept of behavior: Meaning-endowing
experiences
Husserl makes a distinction between two types of
experiences “Experience of the first type are merely
‘undergone’ or ‘suffer’.’ They are characterized by a
basic passivity. Experiences of the second type
consist of attitudes taken toward experiences of the
first type.” Husserl characterized those experiences
endowed with ‘attitude-taking Act’ as ‘behavior’.
Accordingly, “Behavior is a meaning-endowing
experience of consciousness.” (Schutz, 1967, p. 56)
11
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Constituent concepts of phenomenology
– The concept of Action: Project
According to Schutz and Husserl, we can further
distinguish behavior from action. The former are
experiences endowed with attitudes, while the latter are
experiences oriented towards the future. Most specifically,
actions are experiences endowed with anticipation, which
Husserl has characterized as “the meaning of what will be
perceived.” (Husserl, 1931, quoted in Schutz, 1967, p. 58)
– Furthermore, apart from anticipation of the future, actions
are also experiences endowed with another form of
intentionality, namely intention of fulfillment. More
specifically, actions are not only made up of anticipated
goals or “empty protention” to the future. They also consist
of the parts of intentions to attaining those goals in the 12
future.
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Constituent concepts of phenomenology
– The concept of Action: Project
– In conclusion, according to Schutz formulation, an action is
experiences endowed with meanings in the form of “a
project”, which consists of anticipated goals and intentions
and efforts to fulfill them.
13
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Alfred Schutz phenomenology of meaning
– Alfred Schutz’c concept of meaning
(1899-1959)
14
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Alfred Schutz phenomenology of meaning
– Alfred Schutz’c concept of meaning
Built upon his understanding of Husserl’s phenomenology,
Schutz begins his own construction of The Phenomenology
of Social World with the following definition of meaning
“Meaning is a certain way of directing one’s gaze at an item
of one’s experience. This item is thus ‘selected out’ and
rendered discrete by a reflexive Act. Meaning indicates,
therefore, a peculiar attitude on the part of Ego toward the
flow of its own duration.” (Schutz, 1967, p. 42)
15
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Alfred Schutz phenomenology of meaning
– Schutz concept of action
By relating the conceptual apparatus derived from
phenomenological philosophy and Max Weber’s
conception of interpretive sociology, Schutz defines the
concept of action as follows
“Now we are in a position to state that what distinguishes
action from behavior is that action is the execution of a
projected act. And we can immediately proceed to our next
step: the meaning of any action is its corresponding
projected act. In saying this we are giving clarity to Max
Weber’s vague concept of the ‘orientation of an action’. An
action, we submit, is oriented toward its corresponding
projected act.” (Schutz, 1967, p. 61)
16
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Alfred Schutz phenomenology of meaning
– Schutz’c concept of meaning-context
• By applying the constituent concepts of
phenomenology, Schutz suggests that meanings
derived within one’s Ego are “configurated” into a
whole, which Schutz called “meaning-context”. By
meaning-context, Schutz characterized it as follows
“Let us define meaning-context formally: We say that
our lived experience E1, E2, …, En, stand in a meaningcontext if and only if, once they have been lived through
in separate steps, they are then constituted into a
synthesis of a high order, becoming thereby unified
objects of monothetic attention.” (Schutz, 1967, p.75)
17
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Alfred Schutz phenomenology of meaning
– Schutz’c concept of meaning-context
• Schutz indicates that meaning-context derived within
one’s inner time consciousness bears numbers of
structural features. (Schutz, 1967, p. 74-78)
– Unity: Though intentional acts and/or fulfillment-act
various meaning-endowing experiences are unified and
integrated into coherent whole within the Ego. Hence,
meaning-context generated from meaning-endowing
experiences also bears the internal structure of unity and
coherence.
– Continuity: As lived experiences are set within the stream
of consciousness of duration (i.e. Durée), therefore, the
meaning-context thereby derived is internally structured
into a continuity of temporal ordering.
18
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Alfred Schutz phenomenology of meaning
– Schutz’c concept of meaning-context
• Schutz indicates that meaning-context derived within
one’s inner time consciousness bears numbers of
structural features. (Schutz, 1967, p. 74-78)
– Hierarchy: Through her lived experiences in different
spheres of the life-world, individual will congifurated
various meaning-contexts for lived experiences in various
spheres of life. And these complex meaning-contexts are
structured in hierarchical order according to their degree
of meaningfulness and significance.
19
Internal time consciousness
Durée
Action
Anticipation & fulfillment
Behavior
Attitude-taking Act
Reproduction, Retention, Perception
Meaning-context
of unity and continuity
Hierarchy
Meaning-context
of unity and continuity
Stream of consciousness
Intentionality
The
subject
Intentional-Act
Intentional
object
20
Phenomenological conceptual framework of meaning
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– As a practicing sociologist, Alfred Schutz’s major
contribution to phenomenological studies is to extend
the study of human consciousness and experiences
from individual level to social level. Built on
phenomenological investigations of meaningconfigurations and meaning-contexts of individuals,
Schutz poses the questions: How meaningconfigurations among individuals are possible? More
specifically, how meanings among different inner
consciousnesses of durations are able to be
corresponded, shared or even come to consensus?
And how individual thinking and acting beings come
to act harmoniously, concertedly and cooperatively
21
into a social entity?
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Schutz’s concepts of meaning-context of the social
world
• Schutz suggests that constructions of social meanings
within a human aggregate are possible simply because
members of a “society” shared common “lived”
experiences generated from common temporal and
spatial situations.
• These common lived experiences have then been
accumulated geographically, historically, verbally and
textually into a “totality” of meaning-configuration and
meaning-contexts, which we now called the culture or
what Berger and Luckmann called symbolic universe.
22
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Schutz’s concepts of meaning-context of the social
world
• Based on commonly-share culture, Schutz has
differentiated the process of meaning-construction into
three types
– In Face-to-face relationship
– In relationship with contemporaries
– In relationship with predecessors
23
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Social meaning construction in face-to-face
relationship
• The primary base of mutual understanding between two
humans in face-to-face situation is that there are two
inner consciousnesses of durations who share similar if
not the same temporal-spatial flows, that is, each is
conscious of the other’s presence. In short, each takes
the other as intentional-object (noema) of her
intentional-Act (noesis) and vice versa.
24
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
– Social meaning construction in face-to-face
relationship
• Expressive movement and expressive act: They refer to
non-verbal gestures (body movements) which indicate
the “attitudinal-Act” of an individual implicates to an
subjective experience which she undergoes. Schutz has
further differentiates them into
– Expressive movement: It refers to gestures which bears
no communicative intention from the part of the initiator.
As Schutz states “expressive movements … have
meaning only for the observer, not for the person
observed.” (Schutz, 1967, p. 117)
– Expressive act: It refers to body movements “in which the
actor seeks to project outward the content of his
consciousness, whether to retain the latter for his own
use later on (as in the case of an entry in a dairy) or to
25
communicate them to others.” (Schutz, 1967, p. 116)
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
– Social meaning construction in face-to-face
relationship
• Sign and sign system:
– “Signs are artifacts or act-objects which are interpreted
not according to those interpretive schemes which are
adequate to them as objects of the external world but
according to schemes not adequate to them and belong
rather to other object.” (Schutz, 1967, p. 120)
In constructing a sign, the actor undertakes the act of
signification, that is, to assign a sign to an object in the
external world.
As on the part of the reader of the sign, she has to
undertake an act of interpretation, which has been defined
as the core activities that qualitative researchers have to
undertake.
Spoken and written signs in a language are the exemplary
26
representations of sign used by human kind.
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
– Social meaning construction in face-to-face
relationship
• Sign and sign system:
– “Accordingly, sign system refers to well established,
widely used, and universally interpreted signs
disseminating and communicating among members of a
defined human aggregate; for instance, language systems
of Chinese, English, etc.
(To be explicated in details in Lecture 5)
27
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
– Social meaning construction in face-to-face
relationship
• Concept of externalization and objectification:
– The concept of externalization of subjectivity: It is within a
sign system, i.e. a culture and/or a cultural system, that
subjective experiences and consciousnesses of
individuals can be externalized and communicate to other
members of the corresponding language and/or cultural
system.
– The concept of objectification of subjectivity: By
externalizing one’s subjectivity onto concrete artifacts,
subjectivity of mortal individual has then obtained
endeavoring existence of its own, which may out-live the
originating person.
• The debate on objectivity between positive and
interpretative sociologists (Adorno et al., 1976/1969;
Giddens, 1974)
28
Cultural system
Durée
Durée
Sign systems
Signs
Objectifications
Externalizations
Express
Acts
Intentionality
Express
Movements
Intentionality
29
Phenomenological conceptual framework of social meaning
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Social-meaning construction with the contemporaries
• As individuals move farther and farther apart, such as
residents in a metropolitan such as Hong Kong, fellow
citizens of a nation such as PRC, members of a “nation”
such as the Chinese, dwellers of the same continent
such as the Asians, fellow residents of the global village,
how can they come to shared meanings?
30
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Social-meaning construction with the contemporaries
• Concepts of ideal type and typification:
– As contemporaries, who are located in physically long
distance which does not enable them to have face-to-face
confirmation of their meanings to their counterparts, they
have to then presume and rely on the ideal-typical
interpretive schema generated and established in socalled “institutional contexts”.
– For examples, the ideal-typical role-performances
prescribed to teachers and students in modern
educational institutions; ideal-typical role-performances
presumed by both the husband and the wife in the
marriage institution; or sellers and buyers in international
trade or cyber-transactions.
31
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Social-meaning construction with the contemporaries
• Concepts of ideal type and typification:
– The act of prescribing ideal-typical roles and their
corresponding role-performances to partners in
interaction has been characterized by Schutz and
his followers as “typification”.
(To be explicated in details in Lecture 4)
32
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Social-meaning construction with the contemporaries
• Accordingly, the concepts of institution and
institutionalization have been reformulated and used by
followers of Alfred Schuts, such as Berger and
Luckmann, and advocates of New-institutionalism in
qualitative researches in social sciences in recent
decades.
(To be explicated in Lecture 6)
33
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Social-meaning construction with the predecessors
• To come to agreement with the deaths: When the
meaning configurations are constructed in remotely
temporal distance and the text and relics, it poses
insurmountable difficulties to researchers who are
supposed to retrieve the “authentic” meanings because
the interpretive findings can no longer be confirmed
with their “authors”. The situation has been
characterized by Ricoeur (1984) as the most acute
example of Kant’s demarcation between noumenon and
phenomenon, that historians can never the past in itself
from the historical texts and relics.
34
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Phenomenology of social meaning
– Social-meaning construction with the predecessors
• Schutz suggests that historians, who are to
“reconstruct” the meaning configurations of the deaths,
have to presume the notion of the stream of history in
parallel to the streams of consciousness, social
institutions and cultural system and to strive to
constitute the “fusion of horizons” across times. Most
specifically, as Paul Ricoeur underlines, historians are
expected to be able to muster kinds of “sympathetic
efforts” and “temporal imagination”, that is, to project
“not merely an imaginative projection into another
present but a real projection into another human life.”
(ibid, p. 28)
(To be explicate in Lecture 6)
35
Institutional context
of the predecessors
Fusion of horizons
Typiifcation
Institutionalization
Typiifcation
Institutionalization
Institutional context of the contemporaries
Phenomenological conceptual framework of social-meaning
construction with contemporaries and predecessors
36
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Recent development in the phenomenology of being
Scholars of the theoretical traditions of the critical
theory and phenomenological psychology have
made references to on the philosophy of Heidegger
and Merleau-Ponty and have further refined the
conceptual components of the phenomenology of
social meanings.
37
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Recent development in the phenomenology of being
– The concept of the situated-subject: By applying Heidegger
concept of “Being-there” (Dasein) and his critique on Husserl’s
transcendental approach to human experience and
consciousness, contemporary critical interpretative social
scientists have allocated the concept of the inner consciousness
of time, the Ego or more generally the subject back into
Heidegger’s concept of “worldiness”. They contend that the
subjects do not exist in some transcendental stream of
consciousness, but have been “thrown into”, in Heidegger’s
terms, some pre-existing world of people, languages, cultures, or
even social-class situations. Hence, in the approach to critical
qualitative research, it is advocated that the meaning-context of
the social-situations, in which the subjects existentially find
themselves, must be put back into the meaning-construction
process and critical analyzed.
38
Phenomenological Investigation of
Meanings
• Recent development in the phenomenology of being
– The concept of the body-subject: French philosopher MerleauPonty also wages his critique on Husserl’s transcendental
phenomenology by point to another aspect of the situatedness of
the subject. He underlines that human beings are first and
foremost biological organisms, that is, their streams of
consciousness of duration are ineluctably embodied in some
forms of body and flesh. In connection to this approach to
subjectivity, contemporary critical social scientists, especially
feminists, contend that special references to concepts such as
body-subject, embodiment, sexuality and so on, must be brought
back into the core concerns in studies of human subjectivity and
their meaning-construction process, i.e. qualitative researches.
(To be explicated in Lecture 7)
39
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• What is hermeneutics?
– Paul Ricoeur specifies that “hermeneutics is the theory of the
operations of understanding in the relation to the
interpretation of texts.” (Ricoeur, 1981, p.43) More specifically,
we may construe hermeneutics as research efforts in
retrieving the meanings that have been endowed,
externalized and even objectified on some apprehensible
formats by some known or unknown, and accessible or
inaccessible human subjects.
– We may further construe hermeneutics in a way that it is in
opposite direction to phenomenology. That is
phenomenology strive to reveal how human subjects endow
their subjective meaning onto their worldly environment,
while hermeneutics takes up what phenomenology has finish,
that is to retrieve from the “textual objects” the subjective
meaning that human subjects have encoded onto.
40
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Charles Taylor’s Meaning and Interpretation:
– Concept of interpretation:
“Interpretation … is an attempt to make clear, to
make sense of an object of study. This object must,
therefore, be a text, or a text-analogue, which in
some way is confused, incomplete, cloudy,
seemingly contradictory  in one way or another
unclear. The interpretation aims to bring to light an
underlying coherence or sense. …The object of a
science of interpretation must thus have (a) sense
(coherence and meaning) , distinguishable from its
(b) expression, which is for or by (c) a subject.”
(Taylor, 1994, p.181-182)
41
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Charles Taylor’s Meaning and Interpretation:
– Concept of meaning
“When we speak of the ‘meaning’ of a given
predicament, we are using a concept which has the
following articulation:
• Meaning is for a subject…
• Meaning is of something…
• Things only have meaning in a field, that is, in
relation to the meanings of other things.” (Taylor,
1994, p. 185-186)
42
Dimensions of Interpretation
Meaning
In relation to
for
Subject
of
Field
something
43
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Charles Taylor’s Meaning and Interpretation:
– Dimension of meaning: “Meanings …. is for a
subject, of something, in a field. This distinguishes
it from linguistic meaning which has a four- and
not three-dimensional structure. Linguistic
meaning is for subjects and in a field, but it is the
meaning of signifiers and it is about a world of
referent.” (Taylor, 1994, p.186)
44
Dimensions of Linguistic Meaning
Linguistic Meaning
In relation to
for
Subject
of
Field
signifier
about
referent
45
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Charles Taylor’s Meaning and Interpretation:
– Levels of interpretation: “There is … utter
heterogeneity of interpretation to what it is about;
rather there is a slide (level) in the notion of
interpretation. Already to be a living agent is to
experience one’s situation in terms of certain
meaning, and this is in a sense can be thought of
as a sort of proto-‘interpretation.’. This is in turn
interpreted and shaped by the language (or any
other forms of expression) in which the agent lives
these meanings. This whole is then at a third level
interpreted by the explanation we proffer of his
action.” (Taylor, 1994, p. p. 189)
46
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Jerome Bruner's tenets of the paradigm of
culturalism in cognition
– The perspective tenet: "The meaning of any fact,
proposition, or encounter is relative to the
perspective or frame of reference in terms of which
it is construed." (Bruner, 1996, p. 13) This tenet
basically resonates with Charles Taylor 's
conception of meaning, which specifies that
meanings are meaningful for someone, of
something, and in a specific field and/or context, in
short in perspective. Accordingly, any meaning
making and inquiring begins with locating the
perspective at work.
47
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Jerome Bruner's tenets of the paradigm of
culturalism in cognition
– The constraint tenet: "The forms of meaning
making accessible to human beings in any culture
are constrained in two crucial way" (Pp.15-19)
• The constraint "inheres in the nature of human
mental functioning itself."
• The constraint "imposed by the symbolic system
accessible to human minds generally …but more
particularly ….by the languages and notational
systems accessible to different cultures."
48
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Jerome Bruner's tenets of the paradigm of
culturalism in cognition
– The constructiveism tenet: "The 'reality' that we
impute to the 'worlds' we inhabits is a constructed
one." The tenet implies that human beings are
meaning-making specie and they attribute
meanings to the environment in which they reside.
As a result they constructed the "reality" out of the
environment. The tenet resonates Immanuel Kant
distinction between noumenonal world (the world
as it is) and the phenomenal world (the world as we
see it).
49
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Jerome Bruner's tenets of the paradigm of
culturalism in cognition
– The externalization tenet: All meaning making are "work",
i.e. deliberate efforts of an individual or a group of
individuals. That is they have to be externalized from the
'authors' themselves and "achieve an existence of their
own." At societal level, they may be expressed in the
form of "the arts and sciences of a culture, institutional
structure such as its laws and its markets, even its
'history' conceived as a canonical version of the past."
(p.22) At group level, they may manifest in group
solidarity, social identity and group behaviors. At
individual level, its "expressions" may take the forms of
self identity, self presentation, life style and in general
50
what Erving Goffman called "the presentation of the self".
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Jerome Bruner's tenets of the paradigm of
culturalism in cognition
– The instrumentalism tenet: Acts of meanings
imputation by individuals or groups to objects in
their surroundings are not random or arbitrary. They
are functional or instrumental to the very existence
of the person or the society that attributes the
meaning. In other words, meanings are "situated"
or "embedded" with the very existence of the
meaning makers. Hence, it echoes Weber’s advice
to qualitative researchers about imaginatively and/
or empathetically participating and/or immersing
into the situations of the subjects under study in
51
order to reveal the embedded meanings.
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Jerome Bruner's tenets of the paradigm of
culturalism in cognition
– The institutional tenet: "Cultures are not simply
collections of people sharing a common language and
historical tradition. They are composed of institutions
that specify more concretely what role people play and
what status and respect these are accorded― though the
culture at large expresses its way of life through
institutions as well." (p. 29)
As systems of meanings of a society have been
routinized into patterned and regular ways of doing
things and ways of life, social institutions emerge. In
other words, social institutions are one of the essential
parts of the socially constructed reality of human kind.
They are the embodiments and expressions of the 52
fundamental meanings and values of a given society.
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Jerome Bruner's tenets of the paradigm of
culturalism in cognition
– The tenet of identity and self-esteem: Apart from social
institutions, another salient product of the meaning-making
project of human kind is their own identity and self-esteem. As
George Herbert Mead contented, self is a self-interacting
process, through which human beings designate meanings to
themselves.
– “What characterizes human selfhood is the construction of a
conceptual system that organizes …a ‘record’ of agentive
encounter with the world, a record that is related to the past…
but that is also extrapolated into the future —self with history
and with possibility.” (p. 36)
– “Not only do we experience self as agentive, we evaluate our
efficacy in bringing off what we hoped for or were asked to do.
Self increasingly takes on the flavor of these valuations. I call
this mix of agentive efficacy and self evaluation ‘self-esteem’.”
53
(p.37)
Hermeneutics of Meanings
• Jerome Bruner's tenets of the paradigm of
culturalism in cognition
– The narrative tenet: Bruner takes “narrative as a mode
of thought and as a vehicle of meaning making” of
human kind. “It seems evident …that skill in narrative
construction and narrative understanding is crucial to
constructing our lives and a ‘place’ for ourselves in the
possible world we will encounter.” (p. 40) “We frame the
accounts of our cultural origins and our most cherished
beliefs in story form, and it is not just the ‘content ‘ of
these stories that grips us, but their narrative artifice.
Our immediate experience, what happened yesterday or
the day before, is framed in the same stories way. Even
more striking, we represent our lives (to ourselves as to
other) in the form of narrative.” (p. 40)
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EDM 6402
Qualitative Method in Educational Research
END
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