In this characteristically graceful and provocative book, Jerome Bruner, one of the principal architects of the cognitive revolution, sets forth nothing less than a new agenda for the study of mind. According to Professor Bruner, cognitive science has set its sights too narrowly on the logical, systematic aspects of mental life--those thought processes we use to solve puzzles, test hypotheses, and advance explanations. There is obviously another side to the mind--a side devoted to the irrepressibly human acts of imagination that allow us to make experience meaningful. This is the side of the mind that leads to good stories, gripping drama, primitive myths and rituals, and plausible historical accounts. Bruner calls it the "narrative mode," and his book makes important advances in the effort to unravel its nature. Drawing on recent work in literary theory, linguistics, and symbolic anthropology, as well as cognitive and developmental psychology Professor Bruner examines the mental acts that enter into the imaginative creation of possible worlds, and he shows how the activity of imaginary world making undergirds human science, literature, and philosophy, as well as everyday thinking, and even our sense of self. Over twenty years ago, Jerome Bruner first sketched his ideas about the mind's other side in his justly admired book On Knowing: Essays for the Left Hand. Actual Minds, Possible Worlds can be read as a sequel to this earlier work, but it is a sequel that goes well beyond its predecessor by providing rich examples of just how the mind's narrative mode can be successfully studied. The collective force of these examples points the way toward a more humane and subtle approach to the investigation of how the mind works.

Does thought depend crucially on language, as some philosophers maintain, or can abstract reasoning and other faculties exist in the absence of language? This voume, based on a Fyssen Foundation symposium held in Versailles in April 1987, addresses this crucial question in a new way, bringing together experts on non-verbal thinking in adults, in pre-linguistic infants, and in animals. The nineteen chapters, discussion and editorial comment represent an impressive body of material, shedding new light on many aspects of the problem. Topics covered include the role of the non-verbal right cerebral hemisphere in humans; the investigation of non-verbal aspects of various categories of cognition (such as abstract reasoning, spatial awareness, and pattern recognition); evidence for cognition without concious awareness; and neurological and developmental evidence. The concluding chapter is a personal account by a gifted but dyslexic mathematician of the nature of his handicap and the non-vebal reasoning that he has developed to cope with this. various