1. Narrative diachronicity: The notion that narratives take place over some sense of time.
2. Particularity: The idea that narratives deal with particular events, although some events may be left vague and general.
3. Intentional state entailment: The concept that characters within a narrative have "beliefs, desires, theories, values, and so on" (7).
4. Hermeneutic composability: The theory that narratives are that which can be interpreted in terms of their role as a selected series of events that constitute a "story." See also Hermeneutics
5. Canonicity and breach: The claim that stories are about something unusual happening that "breaches" the canonical (i.e. normal) state.
6. Referentiality: The principle that a story in some way references reality, although not in a direct way; narrative truth can offer verisimilitude but not verifiability.
7. Genericness: The flip side to particularity, this is the characteristic of narrative whereby the story can be classified as a genre.
8. Normativeness: The observation that narrative in some way supposes a claim about how one ought to act. This follows from canonicity and breach.
9. Context sensitivity and negotiability: Related to hermeneutic composability, this is the characteristic whereby narrative requires a negotiated role between author or text and reader, including the assigning of a context to the narrative, and ideas like suspension of disbelief.
10. Narrative accrual: Finally, the idea that stories are cumulative, that is, that new stories follow from older ones.

• Acts of Meaning (The Jerusalem-Harvard Lectures, 1990)
• It was, we thought, an all-out effort to establish meaning as the central concept of psychology - not stimuli and responses, not overtly observable behavior, not biological drives and their transformation, but meaning. It was not a revolution against behaviorism with the aim of transforming behaviorism into a better way of pursuing psychology by adding a little mentalism to it. Edward Tolman had done that, to little avail. It was an altogether more profound revolution than that. Its aim was to discover and to describe formally the meanings that human beings created out of their encounters with the world, and then to propose hypotheses about what meaning-making processes were implicated. It focused on the symbolic activities that human beings employed in constructing and making sense not only of the world, but of themselves. (p. 2)
• Very early on, ... emphasis began shifting from 'meaning' to 'information', from the construction of meaning to the processing of information. These are profoundly different matters. The key factor in the shift was the introduction of computation as the ruling metaphor and of computability as a necessary criterion of a good theoretical model. Information is indifferent with respect to meaning... (p. 4)
• Given pre-established meaning categories well-formed enough within a domain to provide a basis for an operating code, a properly programmed computer could perform prodigies of information processing with a minimum set of operations, and that is technological heaven. Very soon, computing became the model of the mind, and in place of the concept of meaning there emerged the concept of computability. Cognitive processes were equated with the programs that could be run on a computational device, and the success of one's efforts to 'understand', say, memory or concept attainment, was one's ability realistically to simulate such human conceptualizing or human memorizing with a computer program. (p. 6)
• If the cognitive revolution erupted in 1956, the contextual revolution (at least in psychology) is occurring today. (pp. 105—6)
• Jerome Bruner argues that the cognitive revolution, with its current fixation on mind as "information processor," has led psychology away from the deeper objective of understanding mind as a creator of meanings. Only by breaking out of the limitations imposed by a computational model of mind can we grasp the special interaction through which mind both constitutes and is constituted by culture. ( Review of Harvard University Press)

Books

• A Study of Thinking (1956)
• The Process of Education, Harvard University Press (1960)
• Toward a Theory of Instruction, Harvard University Press (1966)
• Studies in Cognitive Growth (1966)
• Infancy (1968)
• Beyond the Information Given (1973)
• Essays for the Left Hand, Harvard University Press (1979)
• Learning to Use Language (1983)
• Essays in Autobiography (1983)
• Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Harvard University Press (1985)
• The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book about a Vast Memory, [Foreword only] Harvard University Press (1987)
• Acts of Meaning, Harvard University Press (1990)
• The Culture of Education, Harvard University Press (1996)
• Minding the Law, Harvard University Press (2000)
• Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life, Harvard University Press (2003)

Articles

• Bruner, J. S. & Goodman, C. C. (1947). Value and need as organizing factors in perception. Journal of Abnormal Social Psychology, 42, 33-44. Available online at the Classics in the History of Psychology archive.

• Bruner, J. S. & Postman, L. (1947). Tension and tension-release as organizing factors in perception. Journal of Personality, 15, 300-308.

• Bruner, J. S. & Postman, L. (1949). On the perception of incongruity: A paradigm. Journal of Personality, 18, 206-223. Available online at the Classics in the History of Psychology archive.
• Wood, D., Bruner, J., & Ross, G. (1976). The role of tutoring in problem solving. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, 17, 89-100. (Addresses the concept of instructional scaffolding.)
• "The Narrative Construction of Reality" (1991). Critical Inquiry, 18:1, 1-21.
• "The Autobiographical Process" (1995). Current Sociology. 43.2, 161-177.
• Shore, Bradd. (1997). Keeping the Conversation Going. Ethos, 25:1, 7-62. Available online at JSTOR.
• Mattingly, C., Lutkehaus, N. C. & Throop, C. J. (2008). Bruner's Search for Meaning: A Conversation between Psychology and Anthropology. Ethos, 36, 1-28. Available online at Blackwell Synergy.