I referred to Jerome Bruner’s “Routes to Reference” (1998) briefly in Chapter 1 of my book, but didn’t deal with it in the depth it deserves, with its drawing together of so many important threads, from infant pointing, to Peirce’s notion of “interpretant”, to “plot” as the connection between children’s narrative play and Aristotle’s concept of the “peripateia” (the turning points) in drama.
I especially like one of his concluding sentences: “Well before lexicogrammatical speech becomes the main game, the child (and the parent) have learned many routes into each other’s mind, and thereby have come to be reassured that they are jointly inhabiting the same world. These routes serve the child well in getting into the language games to follow, and it is in their honor that I have entitled my paper, “Routes to reference” (p. 224).
In my mind, this has new meaning as researchers today begin to engage in conversations with “Large Language Models” such as Google’s Bard, who can be denigrated as “stochastic parrots” precisely because they lack that training in an infrastucture of “sense” and “reference” that Bruner notes that human infants routinely receive from their caregivers as they learn to play those language games that reflect their shared reality.
Bruner was born blind due to congenital cataracts, underwent experimental surgery to restore partial vision in his childhood when such surgery was both uncommon and dangerous, lived to be 100, and made massive contribution to the emerging cognitive science revolution. Truly, Jerome Bruner can be said to have gone far Beyond the Information Given him!
Keywords In and Out of Context 