Contemporary Dialogues between Rorty's Pragmatism and Cultural Psychology: a Reading of Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100.

Abstract

The book Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100: Cultivating Possibilities immerses the reader in an epistemic, historical, and affective portrait delivered by authors from various fields and distinct perspectives on Bruner's work, in celebration of his hundredth birthday. If, on the one hand, it is possible to say that Bruner's life story intertwines with the history of Psychology itself, on the other hand, it is possible to recognise the author as a great ironist, according to Rorty's perspective, in his way of approaching the transformation process in psychological science. The present paper constructs a pragmatics dialogue with Bruner's Cultural Psychology discussing contemporary Western society in its way of understanding cultural diversity and communality citizenship. In times of media customisation and the fluid and agile environment of virtual communities, bubbles have become arenas for the reification of beliefs and meanings based on validation by peers and not by the dialectical, transformative tension towards their possible opposites. The present discussion builds up a reflection concerning possible affective-semiotics process in contemporary culture, highlighting Bruner's grammar on intersubjectivity and narrative interpretation of reality on the basis of Rorty's pragmatics-ethical philosophy.