One of the most interesting things about music is how the clearly psychological enjoyment of music correlates with certain types of acoustic phenomena. While is would be a mistake to say that good music correlates perfectly with harmonies that reflect simple mathematical relationships, there is a clear relation between simple mathematical relationships in the frequency of sound waves, and stereotypically enjoyable music. While dissonance is an increasing characteristic of music over the last few hundred years, this is not just any dissonance. Instead, it would be better to say that it's a very tangentially developed version of order. The blue notes heard in jazz or blues music (among others) are not dissonant for the sake of disorder. Rather, their dissonance creates a tension in the underlying order that, when developed and resolved skillfully by the musician, is a celebration of that order; a gesture that attempts to cleverly, passionately, triumphantly, ...---reaffirm that order.

The appreciation of more profound dissonance as it relates to order is a clearly more developmentally complex state than the appreciation of moderate, or minimal dissonance. For example, appreciation of elevator music is more simple than appreciation of modern jazz. Elevator music is so simple as to be boring. Modern jazz may be complex enough to sound completely disordered.

Learning a musical instrument is an interesting application of this type of thinking. What are the different ways that the development of the appreciation of music--in particular the harmonic aspects of music--can relate to the development of the ability to play an instrument. One possibility is that there are two alternative developmental relationships between harmonic appreciation and instrument ability. One is that the musician learns the instrument while still at a primitive level of harmonic appreciation, and the development of harmonic appreciation is scaffolded by the instrument as a psychological structure. The other is that advanced harmonic appreciation develops far in advance of musical talent. In this case, an awareness of how certain notes relate to the harmonic order of the song is embodied not by knowledge of the instrument, but instead by some internalized spatial schema that does not relate to the instrument. The latter type of musician would be able understand how complex harmonies relate to a song without being able to express this flexibly, or with any depth, with the instrument. The difference between these two possibilities is equivalent to the difference between a person who knows something in a way that is difficult for them to communicate (which doesn't mean that they don't know it), and a person who can easily communicate the same knowledge. In this example, language command functions the same way that command of the musical instrument does.

Science Teaching Controversy

Recently, the news in TN has involved the introduction, and today, passing of a controversial bill involving the teaching of science. The way I'm describing this is very vague, and this is intentional. While the bill itself is clear and concise (well, maybe not conceptually), the media reaction to it is anything but. In it's own words, the bill seeks to "[help] students to understand, analyze, critique and review in an objective manner the scientific strengths and scientific weaknesses of existing scientific theories." This doesn't or shouldn't sound controversial, but given the history of this country, and in particular Tennessee, and the fact that this bill is getting so much attention, it's almost impossible to not immediately make the connection to the creationism-evolution debate, of which the bill is most certainly a part.

The previous sentence captures in a nutshell what is so interesting about this issue. On one hand, the bill itself contains very little that any reasonable person would find objectionable: It simply states that in teaching science, critique of existing scientific theories, and discussion of alternatives (initiated only by students) should be allowed. The governor of TN, Bill Haslam, who has been under intense scrutiny, has made much the same point, saying that it wasn't clear to him what if anything the bill would change.

It's not just that the bill is unobjectionable. Far from being unobjectionable (which has neutral connotations), I would argue that the bill comes across as distinctly appealing. It stresses the value of unimpeded discussion, and the freedom to debate any topic that seems problematic. This embodies values that are central to both the United States of America AND to the practice of scientific inquiry.

Now, if the issues at stake in the bill were simply those that are explicitly stated, there would be no reason for new headlines like the following: "TN Governor Signs Law Protecting Creationist, Denialist Science Teachers and Their Theories" (From democratic underground)

While this title reflects a definite resistance to the bill, this resistance isn't to the bill's explicit meaning, but instead to the implications that it would have for the separation between church and state, and in particular, the teaching of creationism in school. The asymmettry between the bill and its opposition reflects the fact that they're two narratives that are being used to account for what's going on: the narrative of the separation between church and state, and another narrative about the need for free and open discussion in this country. Proponents of the bill are claiming that it provides a way to ensure the open exchange of ideas. Critics remain mute on that topic and instead claim that the bill will protect teachers or students who wish to bring religion into the classroom.

The simultaneous coexistence of multiple narratives that make sense of a situation is something that happens all the time. Different narratives stress different meanings, and skew situations in different ways. What is so interesting about the current case is the different values that are elicited by the narratives. The case against the Tennessee bill (and against other similar bills) is practically being strangled to death by its adherence to multiple, conflicting values.

Opposition to the bill, whether in official statements, public comments, or "digital comments" in online forums, tends to be based around one or both of the following: First, the claim that the bill would compromise the separation between church and state by providing a defense for those who introduce creationism into the classroom. Secondly, the related claims that evolution is practically universally accepted as a scientific fact, alternatives are only found outside the mainstream, and the evolution but not alternatives are based on empirical evidence.

These claims are relatively powerless against the bill. First of all, the need to maintain a separation between church and state is explicitly mentioned in the bill. This ensures that efforts to block the bill cannot be made on that basis. Consequently, the ACLU has stated that it will use confederates in the TN school system to monitor classroom activities, and build its case on evidence that these activities are compromising the separation b/t church and state.

The second claim (that evolution is a better theory and accepted scientific fact) connects to the most interesting part of this whole issue. Any reasonable person would not disagree with these claims about evolution. However, to use these claims as the basis of an argument against the bill, or its effects is unfortunately an exercise in futility. Arguing that evolution should be taught just because it's widely accepted contradicts innumerable statements of the fundamental tenets and values of scientific practice (e.g., as articulated in curriculum materials). These principles stress the value of questioning existing beliefs or theories, and drawing conclusions based on evidence. Ironically, some of the most high-visibility critics of religion (to say nothing of bringing religion into schools) base their arguments on these value. According to people like Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, the ideal person is completely rational, basing his or her decisions on empirically grounded facts.

As this illustrates, the argument that evolution is too well established to be questioned contradicts the basic spirit of science as outlined by many of its most public advocates. As if this weren't enough, this argument also contradicts basic values of freedom--freedom from having to accept a viewpoint one doesn't want to accept, or the freedom to call anything in to question. It's a safe bet to say that no value has been more frequently affirmed in the United States.

This situation is clearly a mess. If I had to sum it up neatly, I'd say that "creationists" (that's what they are after all) are taking advantage of the post-modern epistemological crisis in science. They're using the disputed territory that exists between naive claims about the epistemology of science (as made by Dawkins, Pinker, and others) and the reality of scientific practice and so called "rational thinking" (in which rational knowledge exists on a foundation of beliefs and assumptions about the world) to further their own ends of bringing religion into school. Preventing this from happening requires that those on the "science side" resolve the tension between the naive epistemology of many scientists, and the somewhat messier reality of actual scientific practice. Unfortunately, I think that this will have to involve some kind of very unscientific value judgment about the superiority of science as a way of understanding the world.

Children's understanding of pretense

My research work as an undergraduate, and now as a graduate student has been frequently concerned with children’s developing understanding of number, or phrased differently, with their developing ability to use numbers. This topic is one that I’ve come to as a result of chance, and have stuck with as a result of the comparative ease of doing work in an area that I’m familiar with, more than with any overarching interest.

A good deal of research in this area is done by researchers who ask young preschooler’s numerical questions that involve numbers, and can be answered by using counting, or basic logical reasoning. These situations involve an interesting juxtaposition of knowledge and ignorance on the behalf of the researchers. On one hand, the researchers put themselves in these situations (in preschools, daycare centers, home environments, etc.) because of their ignorance about children’s developing numerical thinking. On the other hand, once in these situations, the researchers ask children questions that in many cases they already know the answer to. Researcher’s do not go to children because they can’t count, or because they want to know the mathematical result of an addition or subtraction operation. They know the “objective” answers to these questions, and are instead interested in whether or not children know them.

The situation described above involves, depending on your interpretation, either dishonesty, or an asymettrical form of communication. What do the children involved think of this situation? The most ideal state of affairs, as far as the research is concerned, is for children to assume that the question asked of them is one that the researcher genuinely doesn’t know, and needs their help with. In such a situation, a child’s behavior is driven solely by the desire to get the “right” answer. Of course, this may not be how things actually are. Is it actually reasonable to think that children believe that the researcher really needs help answering the question they have been asked? This question can’t be answered without knowing what children think these questions are about in the first place, and there’s an abundance of evidence that 3-4 years olds don’t understand what type of answer a given numerical question is seeking, let alone how to reach that answer.

It may be that children’s understanding of the nature of social situations outstrips their understanding of numbers. This might lead them to grasp the pretense nature of research situations before they can correctly answer the questions asked therein. If so, then the issue is once again what children think that goal of the question is. In other words, if they understand the pretense nature of the situation, and they are compliant, their response will reflect their best ideas about how to answer the question.

Both of the above considerations indicate that there may be an interaction between (a), children’s understanding of the situation (pretense or serious), and (b), their interpretation of the problem. That is, children’s understanding of the situation may shape their developing understanding of the nature of the problem. Conversely, their developing understanding of the problem may shape their understanding of the situation. Just as a small number of possible answers may be found for algebraic equations with multiple variables, so too may a consideration of the possibilities above lead to a narrowing down of possible conclusions.

The question of whether children understand the element of pretense in research designs is contingent on how they understand the question. Certain types of questions make pretense a realistic interpretation, while in others, it makes no sense. If children see numerical questions as commands for them to perform a certain series of behaviors, then the realization that there is an element of pretense would never arise. Such children wouldn’t see the situation as involving the researcher’s desire for a question to be answered, but as involving their giving a performance. They would see the act itself as the object of the situation, rather than as a means to an end. Conversely, if it can be established that children understand the pretense nature of the research situation, then this would indicate a different understanding of the question, namely, one in which pretense makes sense.

The relationship between children’s understanding of numerical questions and their understanding of the situation in which these questions are asked is not just important to figure out at any given point in development. The relation between these two things determines the nature of the developmental process itself. The development of numerical thinking involves not only a developing understanding of counting and numerical logic, but also an understanding of the goals of the situations in which this is used. Children who are oblivious to a researcher’s/teacher’s/parent’s pretense will make sense of numerical situations in a very different way from those who grasp pretense.

The nature of mental illness

The APA (American Psychiatric Association) has recently announced a new diagnostic manual (the DSM 5) which, among other things, introduces new "mental illnesses" for psychiatrists to diagnose. The choice of words in the last sentence, which may sound awkward, was intended to demonstrate the strange practices that the psychiatric association partakes in. Although I may be wrong, I am relatively confident in saying that the role played by the DSM in Psychiatry is significantly larger than the role of similar texts in other areas of medicine. While other doctors do find new conditions and illnesses, only in psychiatry is the issue of what constitutes an illness a major concern. This uncertainty is what makes the announcement of a new version of the DSM, and the "new illnesses" therein such a significant moment.

Many others have commented and criticized the new DSM for the inclusion of a number of new conditions. For example, the manual treats the depression that follows a loss, shyness in children, oppositional/defiant and apathetic behavior in children as new forms of mental illness. These have changed from being ordinary characteristics of life into abnormal "sick" states. Most of the criticism levelled against these new conditions claims that they're based on inappropriate influences from drug companies, or reflect an inappropriate desire to eliminate the ordinary diversity of the human condition.

Here I want to make a different sort of criticism. Many of the conditions identified by the DSM reflect issues in the social realm. Being oppositional or defiant is necessarily social, as is shyness. Furthermore, depression and apathy, while possible individual feelings, often occur for people within social contexts (though they could occur for “desert island” people too). Because these occur in a social context, it is only within this context that they can be understood. In other words, the processes involving “oppositional-defiance disorder” run through entire social contexts; they are not limited to individuals. Yet, psychiatry attempts to deal with these things as if they were individual problems. THe individual is separated from society, taken to the psychiatrist. There, in isolation, the psychiatrist attempts to understand the problem in terms of the individual. Treating mental phenomena that occur on the interpersonal realm by looking at individuals who are presumed to be at the center of these phenomena is like trying to understand the audience experience at a concert by studying the band alone. Such an approach cannot work. To understand the experience of a concert, one must study both the music/band, and the audience.

The psychological processes that reflect generalized versions of “oppositional defiance disorder” or shyness disorder are certainly distinct things--this can be granted. However, for something to be distinct it doesn’t follow that all of its elements must be distinct form the elements of all other things. For example, two songs for the piano may be distinct, even if they involve all of the same notes. The differences emerge at a higher level in terms of the vertical and horizontal arrangement of the notes. The same principle is true for other generative phenomena--language, DNA, etc. To bring this example to the realm of psychiatry, mental phenomena that exist as qualitatively distinct on the social level are not necessarily made up of distinct component processes. The component processes may simply be ordinary ones that have combined in a certain way to yield a certain result. Therefore, when a “mental illness” has been identified which manifests itself on the social level, there is no reason to expect that the optimal way to return to a healthy mental state is to change something on the level of the “afflicted” individual. The problem may not be with any of the component parts of the situation (the individuals involved) but with the results of their combination. A new view of psychological problems becomes available when we think of them as possibly deriving from unfortunate combinations of otherwise healthy, ordinary mental processes.

What is collaboration?

A recent article in the New York Times documents the apparent rise of groupthink as a fashionable and desirable path to creative, success, and acheivement. The article claims that there is a prevailing trend towards collaboration that has been forced on an unsuspecting workforce. Despite this push for collaborative activity, the author argues that many of the best creative work occurs in solitude (or at least individually).

This article intrigued me. In the psycoology department where I study, the prevailing theoretical position is that humans are, by nature, essentially social creatures. Now, this is somewhat different from the claims made in the article. There, the emphasis was on collaboration as a more effective mode of work. The theoretical claims about humans essentially social nature instead argue that the higher thought processes characteristic of human beings are social, or communicative in nature. This view is derived primaril from Vygotskian theory which holds that thought is an inverted version of language. Children first learn to communicate with others, and then they turn these communicative skills inwardly on themselves, engaging with themselves as a subject. Vygotsky also claims that thought processes that occur within individuals are not essentially different from interpersonal communication (e.g., having a conversation).

Much of this can be related harmoniously to the (claimed) prevailing zeitgeist that stresses collaborative, social activity as the site of the most productive work. As revealed in the Times article, businesses are setting up their offices to maximize collaboration. This involves knocking down walls and creating areas for joint activity.

What the article (as well as its claimed zeitgeist) as well as Vygotskian social psychology are missing is the distinction between different types of social/collaborative activity. The result of people working together is not a single type of human activity, but can instead be broken down into two broad categories. The first is simple interpersonal dialogue, i.e., formal or informal interactions with others in which thought processes occur between two people. This is surely what Vygotsky had in mind when he talked about interpersonal psychological processes, and it seems to be what many businesses are trying to foster by redesigning their workspaces. Vygotsky is very accurate in claiming that this type of interaction is very similar to individual thought processes. When we bounce ideas off of others and get their reactions, we are doing much the same thing we do when we consider ideas alone in solitude. In both cases, there is a dialogical structure.

This type of social interaction is not the only result of collaborative activity. There is another way in which humans collaborate which, while considered in many fields (particularly sociology), is often grouped in or ignored in the individual-group debate. This second form of interaction is that which occurs when groups of collaborating individuals work together to form a group that is an agent with properties not found in its individual members. Individual people carry out the actions that comprise the activity of the grounp, but a logic emerges from the whole with a purpose that is not necessarily held by any individual member. These "higher purposes" should be distinguished from the unintentional side effects of action which are a feature of any type of action (In doing things for a purpose, there are bound to be side effects that we did not anticipate and which may or may not conform to our motives in performing the action in the first place).

The emergent actions that I'm talking about don't represent the goals of any individual members of a collaborative group. They are the product of the combined actions of the members. Furthermore, the group may be structured in such a way as to ensure the continued carrying out of the component actions which comprise the whole, meaning that the whole becomes something of an adaptive, "living" system. This type of activity is beautifully illustrated by the bank in The Grapes of Wrath, which Steinbeck describes as a monster that eats money:

“Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's what makes it ours—being born on it, working it, dying on it. That makes ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.

We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.

Yes, but the bank is only made of men.

No, you're wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it, but they can't control it.”

The bank in this instance is in many ways the outcome of collaboration, but it is so qualitatively different from other forms of interpersonal activity that it makes no sense to group it in with them. Collaboration between two people does not necessarily result in a level of organization that has demands and interests that are separate from the individual people. With an organization such as a corporation, we begin to see such a level of organization.

The Demand-less nature of the occupy movement

Perhaps the most defining feature of the occupy movement in relation to other social movements is its lack of formal demands. This is something that has been both attacked and lauded. Critics say that formal demands provide a unified goal for action, and a way to measure the progress of the movement. Others claim that the lack of demands is a strength of the movement. They say that whatever demands would have to be made by the Occupy movement cannot be formulated given the current discourse. Therefore, the discourse must be changed (which they imply can be done with the demand-less movement). Some of the most articulate support for the lack of formal demands ironically came from The Onion, which, in a satirical piece, issued a call for demands to give the rest of the country a basis for rationalizing reasons to ignore the movement.

Yet, to really assess the lack of demands it is important to go beyond questions of what demands in general can or cannot do. These questions treat the movement as a scientific experiment by exploring the unique role that formal demands might play if they were present in the movement and everything else were precisely the same. The problem with this approach is that it treats the movement and its potential as somehow independent of the lack of formal demands. A more useful approach is to explore how the lack of demands has contributed to making the movement what it is.

I would like to consider the possibility that the lack of demands is uniquely well suited to the current state of the world, specifically the highly interconnected world of Occupy protesters who have virtually unlimited access to vast amounts of information. Just a generation ago, access to information was comparatively limited (to say the least). Information was available through televisions, radios, as well as books and information centers like libraries, but this availability was drawn out over time. Information was not "at our fingertips" but rather available to those who were willing to go out of their way, using a good deal of time to get it.

When we first consider the difference between now and then (a generation ago), the state of affairs concerning information then seems vastly inferior to now. The limited availability of information seems prison-like, preventing full awareness of the collective knowledge of human society. Yet, things are never this simple. The availability of information in a "print" society provided a context in which human action developed. By this I don't just mean learning how to use books or learn about the world from other people. I mean ways of consolidating one's thinking and turning knowledge into social action. There are norms for doing this. The process of learning about something and then reacting to what has been learned occurs in certain ways. We decide to act at a certain point in the learning process.

These norms are adapted to contexts with a certain availability of information. When that context changes, the norms must change with it. At this point in time, those of us who regularly use the internet are at the intersection of habits designed for a very different "information landscape" than the one that we live in. Information is ubiquituously available, yet we continue to act in ways that reflect a world of limited information.

The connection to the Occupy movement is not at all obvious from this, so I will spell it out. The lack of demands in the Occupy movement is the first indicator of the emergence of a new standard for social action. The lack of demands allows for participants in various discourses to join the movement and develop its meaning on their own terms, while simultaneously (through their participation) negotiating a collective meaning for the movement on a scale previously never seen.

This is not all. The ubiquity of information makes it more difficult to form a definite opinion on a particular topic. Previously, this had been facilitated by the difficulty of obtaining information, and the resulting tendency to make do with what one had and to synthesize it into a coherent body of thought. Now, with more information available than ever before, such a synthesis is continuously put off by the emergence of new information that challenges (often completely) one's previous assumptions. This makes a single, unified position difficult to reach, especially in matters of economics and politics which are massively complicated. The beauty of the lack of demands in the occupy movement is that it is impervious to these threats because of its vagueness. Members of the movement are not unified by specific principles that may have questionable lasting power. Instead, they are unified by an ever-shifting, malleable sense of purpose which allows for adaptation and development.