"Mind could not exist save for culture" (p. 3).

"It is culture that provides the tools for organizing and understanding our worlds in communicable ways" (p. 3).

"Culture and the quest for meaning within culture are the proper causes of human action" (Acts of Meaning, p. 20).

"The rules common to all information systems do not cover the messy, ambiguous, and context-sensitive processes of meaning making, a form of activity in which the construction of highly 'fuzzy' and metaphoric category systems is just as notable as the use of specifiable categories for sorting inputs in a way to yield comprehensible outputs" (p. 5).

"The meaning making of the culturalist, unlike the information processing of the computationalist, is in principle interpretive, fraught with ambiguity, sensitive to the occasion, and often after the fact" (p. 6).

"While there are a finite number of words, there are an infinite number of contexts in which particular words might appear" (p. 7).

"Once meanings are established, it is their formalization into a well-formed category system that can be managed by computational rules. Obviously one loses the subtlety of context dependency and metaphor in doing so: clouds would have to pass tests of truth functionality to get into the play. But then again, 'formalization' in science consists of just such maneuvers: treating an array of formalized and operationalized meanings 'as if' they were fit for computation" (p. 7).

"'External' or 'objective' reality can only be known by the properties of mind and the symbol systems on which mind relies"(p. 12).

The meaning of any fact, proposition, or encounter is relative to the perspective or frame of reference in terms of which it is construed" (p. 13).

"Constructivism's basic claim is simply that knowledge is 'right' or 'wrong' in light of the perspective we have chosen to assume. Rights and wrongs of this kind—however well we can test them—do not sum to absolute truths and falsities. The best we can hope for is that we be aware of our own perspective and those of others when we make our claims of 'rightness' and 'wrongness.' Put this way, constructivism hardly seems exotic at all. It is what legal scholars refer to as 'the interpretive turn,' or as one of them put it, a turning away from 'authoritative meaning'" (Acts of Meaning, p. 25).

"Understanding something in one way does not preclude understanding it in other ways" (p. 13).

"The 'rightness' of particular interpretations, while dependent on perspective, also reflects rules of evidence, consistency, and coherence" (p. 14). [Note: Pragmatism?]

"Life in culture rarely conforms to anything resembling a cookbook of recipes or formulas" (p. 14).

"When education narrows its scope of interpretive inquiry, it reduces a culture's power to adapt to change" (p. 15).

"I take openmindedness to be a willingness to construe knowledge and values from multiple perspectives without loss of commitment to one's own values" (Acts of Meaning, p. 30).

"If pedagogy is to empower human beings to go beyond their 'native' predispositions, it must transmit the 'toolkit' the culture has developed for doing so" (p. 17).

"'Thinking about thinking' has to be a principal ingredient of any empowering practice of education" (p. 19).

"The 'reality' that we impute to the 'worlds' we inhabit is a constructed one. To paraphrase Nelson Goodman, 'reality is made, not found.' Reality construction is the product of meaning making shaped by traditions and by a culture's toolkit of ways of thought" (p. 19).

" . . . habits of thought and taste . . . " (p. 24).

"Perhaps the single most universal thing about human experience is the phenomenon of 'Self,' and we know that education is crucial to its formation" (p. 35).

"Ideally, school is supposed to provide a setting where our performance has fewer esteem-threatening consequences than in the 'real world,' presumably in the interest of encouraging the learner to 'try things out'" (p. 37).

"Any system of education, any theory of pedagogy, any 'grand national policy' that diminishes the school's role in nurturing a pupils' self-esteem fails at one of its primary functions" (p. 38).

"If agency and esteem are central to the construction of a concept of Self, then the ordinary practices of school need to be examined with a view to what contribution they make to these two crucial ingredients of personhood" (p. 38).

"If school is an entry into the culture and not just a preparation for it, then we must constantly reassess what school does to the young student's conception of his own powers (his sense of agency) and his sensed chances of being able to cope with the world both in school and after (his self-esteem). In many democratic cultures, I think, we have become so preoccupied with the more formal criteria of 'performance' and with the bureaucratic demands of education as an institution that we have neglected this personal side of education" (p. 39).

"Thoughtful people have been forever troubled by the enigma of applying theoretical knowledge to practical problems" (p. 44).

"Keep before you a busy classroom of nine-year-olds, say, with a hard-working teacher, and ask what kind of theoretical knowledge would help them" (p. 45).

"All cultures have as one of their most powerful constitutive instruments a folk psychology, a set of more or less connected, more or less normative descriptions about how human beings 'tick,' what our own and other minds are like, what one can expect situated action to be like, what are possible modes of life, how one commits oneself to them, and so on" (Acts of Meaning, p. 35).

"Our interactions with others are deeply affected by our everyday intuitive theories about how other minds work" (p. 45).

"The folk psychology of ordinary people is not just a set of self-assuaging illusions, but the culture's beliefs and working hypotheses about what makes it possible and fulfilling for people to live together, even with great personal sacrifice. It is where psychology starts and wherein it is inseparable from anthropology and the other cultural sciences. Folk psychology needs explaining, not explaining away" (Acts of Meaning, p. 32). "Beliefs and assumptions about teaching, whether in a school or in any other context, are a direct reflection of the beliefs and assumptions the teacher holds about the learner" (pp. 46-47).

"We need to provide teachers with some insight about their own folk theories that guide their teaching" (p. 49).

"A culturally oriented cognitive psychology does not dismiss folk psychology as mere superstition" (p. 49).

"A folk psychology must be at the base of any cultural psychology" (Acts of Meaning, p. 39).

"What higher primates lack and humans continue to evolve is a set of beliefs about the mind" (p. 50).

"We psychologists were born in positivism and do not like such intentional-state notions as belief, desire, and intention as explanations" (Acts of Meaning, p. 15).

"Becoming a scientist or a poet requires more than 'knowing the theory' or knowing the rules of iambic pentameter" (p. 54).

"How are beliefs turned into hypotheses that hold not because of the faith we place in them but because they stand up in the public marketplace of evidence, interpretation, and agreement with extant knowledge" (p. 60).

"All knowledge has a history" (p. 61).

"We have known for years that if you treat people, young kids included, as responsible, contributing parties to the group, as having a job to do, they will grow into it - some better than others, obviously but all benefit" (p. 77).

"Understanding is the outcome of organizing and contextualizing essentially contestable, incompletely verifiable propositions in a disciplined way. One of our principal means for doing so is through narrative: by telling a story of what something is 'about.' But as Kierkegaard had made clear many years before, telling stories in order to understand is no mere enrichment of the mind: without them we are, to use his phrase, reduced to fear and trembling" (p. 90).

"Since no one narrative construal rules out all alternatives, narratives pose a very special issue of criteria" (p. 90).

"Scientific theories or logical proofs are judged by means of verification or test—or more accurately, by their verifiability or testability—whereas stories are judged on the basis of their verisimilitude or 'lifelikeness'' (p. 122).

"Stories can make sense but have no reference" (p. 122).

"History never simply happens: it is constructed by historians" (p. 91).

"The objective of skilled agency and collaboration in the study of the human condition is to achieve not unanimity, but more consciousness. And more consciousness always implies more diversity" (p. 97).

"Readiness is not only born but made" (p. 119).

"Nowadays we quite properly ask how it is that we can ever know what the world is actually like, save by the odd process of constructing theories and making observations once in a while to check how our theories are hanging together—not how the world is handing together, but our theories" (p. 123).

"Physics is 95 percent speculation and 5 percent observation" (p. 124).

"What seems most obvious psychologically may obscure some of life's most important secrets" (p. 151).

"The oar and oarlock invent the rower" (p. 152) [Note: "The ear commands the story." ~ Italo Calvino]

"Knowledge helps only when it descends into habits" (p. 152).

"'Habitual' . . . a word that reeks of familiarity but really deserves to glow with mystery" (p. 152).

"The 'next chapter' in psychology is about 'intersubjectivity'—how people come to know what others have in mind and how they adjust accordingly" (p. 161).

"Just as you cannot fully understand human action without taking account of its biological evolutionary roots and, at the same time, understanding how it is construed in the meaning making of the actors involved in it, so you cannot understand it fully without knowing how and where it is situated" (p. 167).

"Knowledge and action are always local, always situated in a network of particulars" (p. 167).

"It is practically impossible to understand a thought, an act, a move of any sort from the situation in which it occurs" (p. 167).

"A cultural psychology, almost by definition, will not be preoccupied with 'behavior' but with 'action,' its intentionally based counterpart, and more specifically, with situated action—action situated in a cultural setting, and in the mutually interacting intentional states of the participants" (Acts of Meaning, p. 19).

"Biology and culture both operate locally; however grand the sweep of their principles, they find a final common path in the here and now: in the immediate 'definition of the situation,' in the immediate discourse setting, in the immanent state of the nervous system. local and situated" (p. 167).

"Do not be consoled by the false claim that psychologists already [keep an eye on both the biological and the cultural, and do so with proper regard for how these shaping forces interact in the local situation], and have always done so. It is simply not so: sociotropes and biotropes still think they are involved in a zero-sum game; most mind-modelers would sooner be caught without their computers than be caught with historical interpretations; and all of them seem to delight in establishing separate divisions of the American Psychological Association where they can have the comfort of speaking only to their like-minded constituency. Psychology, alas, seems to have lost its center and its great integrating questions" (p. 167).

"It is no surprise, then, that a reaction has set in against the narrowing and 'sealing in' that are afflicting psychology. The wider intellectual community comes increasingly to ignore our journals, which seem to outsiders principally to contain intellectually unsituated little studies, each a response to a handful of like little studies" (Acts of Meaning, p. xi).

"What characterizes a good laboratory is that it is trying to elucidate something particular about a phenomenon, something related to other phenomena that also have to do with particulars" (p. 169).

"All of which is not to say that there are no universals in mental functioning, no 'psychic unity of mankind.' It is surely a misbegotten claim, even an ideological agenda, that leads one from the premise that since each culture is unique, therefore psychic universals must be bogus" (p. 170).

"Complex processes have an integrity in their own right and must be understood as reflecting evolutionary, cultural, and situational interactions" (p. 170).

"The study of situated learning in pursuit of particular goals in a particular cultural setting constrained by biological limits is the stuff not only of good policy research but good psychological science" (p. 173).

"The humanoid mind/brain complex does not simply 'grow up' biologically according to a genetically predestined timetable but, rather, is opportunistic to nurturing in a human-like environment" (p. 183).

"Language permits the construction and elaboration of that 'network of mutual expectations' that is the matrix on which culture is constructed' (p. 184).

"To those who want to concentrate upon whether what people say predicts what they will do, the only proper answer is that to separate the two in that way is to do bad philosophy, bad anthropology, bad psychology, and impossible law" (Acts of Meaning, p. 19).