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.
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Monday, February 13, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
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:
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.
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.
Wednesday, January 18, 2012
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.
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.
Thursday, November 3, 2011
Should the mind be extended?
A recent trend in cognitive science (as well as other areas of psychology) has been the call for an appreciation of the “extended mind.” This has been formulated in multiple ways, using different terms. For the present purposes I’m grouping all of these together because I want to discuss the basic idea....which is that our ordinary understanding of the mind as limited (or perhaps even more limited) by the boundaries of the skin. The term the extended mind has been used by Andy Clark and David Chalmers to describe this idea, and I cannot argue against the fact that they make a very convincing case.
Their argument is that to say that the cognitive processes of the individual person are contained by the skin (or in more extreme versions, by the brain) is to fail to appreciate the extent to which these processes continually extend beyond the skin. Clark and Chalmers give the example of a man with a memory disorder who has to use a notebook that he carries with him to remember basic facts. For example, when going to the MOMA, he uses this notebook to remember the address (53rd st). In contrast, the man’s wife has no memory disorder, needs no notebook, and can remember the address of the museum off the top of her head. Clark and Chalmers’ point is that while the processes of memory look different in the man and wife, these are actually superficial differences, and the basic processes are much the same. Even if we have no memory disorder, we can all think of situations in which we don’t remember knowledge internally, but keep it inscribed in the world in a way that allows for convenient, seamless retrieval. This applies to cases beyond those involving factual knowledge like the example above. Clark gives repeated examples of how people reorganize the environment to facilitate memory, e.g., when we are cleaning vegetable, we may put the already cleaned vegetables in a separate pile to aid our memory. Further examples of this kind of extended cognition can be found in the work of Sylvia Scribner and Jean Lave.
While there have been arguments that external and internal memory are actually importantly different processes, I want to address a separate aspect of these extended mind claims: the very idea of a boundary between mind and non-mind.
What is the nature of such a boundary? While it may actually be conceived in terms of a specific physical boundary (e.g., the skin), it’s actually the ascription of boundary-ness to a specific region of physical space. The idea of mental and non-mental is a product of our symbolic culture, rather than a preexisting thing in the world.
If we understand it in this way, the need to delineate it is understood differently. Rather than being an unavoidable distinction whose specific boundaries may be negotiated, the distinction becomes the result of the practical need for a boundary. It is therefore something in the world that has been constructed for a specific purpose, but need not be there for all purposes. If we want to discard it or disregard it, we may.
Seen like this, the idea of the extended mind may be called into question. Not because there has been solid evidence in favor of the mind stopping at the skin, but because making boundaries around the mind has no clear purpose when we are talking about cognitive processes. Rather than expanding the boundaries of the mind, a more practical option seems to disregard the idea of boundaries in the first place when talking about cognition. The availability of information in today’s world (at any given point in time) requires us to extend the boundaries of the mind in revolutionary and expansive new ways. If we are to take a historical approach, then the boundaries of the mind extend even further. Why should our mind not encompass other minds, even if these are the minds of people who have died long before we were born, but who somehow influenced us? For the sake of practicality, I would have to argue that the idea of a boundary for the mind is of little practical use for cognitive science.
With practicality in mind, it is useful to reexplore the traditional conception of the non-extended mind; the mind which stops at the skin. In spite of Clark and Chalmer’s convincing argument, this way of putting a boundary on the mind is, for practical purposes, almost essential. The value of this way of delineating the mind lies in the physical affordances of the body and the external world. Despite the fact that parts of the external world (like notebooks) can serve as extensions of our mind, they are inherently not connected to us physically. We may bring a notebook with us, or we may not. In contrast, we have no option of forgetting our arms or legs. By not including these things in our idea of a “person” or their “mind” we provide a built in way to remember that they must be talked about separately because they can be forgotten or misplaced. If we didn’t do this, our ability to conveniently coordinate interpersonal activity would be hindered because the “person” would never be a clear entity.
Their argument is that to say that the cognitive processes of the individual person are contained by the skin (or in more extreme versions, by the brain) is to fail to appreciate the extent to which these processes continually extend beyond the skin. Clark and Chalmers give the example of a man with a memory disorder who has to use a notebook that he carries with him to remember basic facts. For example, when going to the MOMA, he uses this notebook to remember the address (53rd st). In contrast, the man’s wife has no memory disorder, needs no notebook, and can remember the address of the museum off the top of her head. Clark and Chalmers’ point is that while the processes of memory look different in the man and wife, these are actually superficial differences, and the basic processes are much the same. Even if we have no memory disorder, we can all think of situations in which we don’t remember knowledge internally, but keep it inscribed in the world in a way that allows for convenient, seamless retrieval. This applies to cases beyond those involving factual knowledge like the example above. Clark gives repeated examples of how people reorganize the environment to facilitate memory, e.g., when we are cleaning vegetable, we may put the already cleaned vegetables in a separate pile to aid our memory. Further examples of this kind of extended cognition can be found in the work of Sylvia Scribner and Jean Lave.
While there have been arguments that external and internal memory are actually importantly different processes, I want to address a separate aspect of these extended mind claims: the very idea of a boundary between mind and non-mind.
What is the nature of such a boundary? While it may actually be conceived in terms of a specific physical boundary (e.g., the skin), it’s actually the ascription of boundary-ness to a specific region of physical space. The idea of mental and non-mental is a product of our symbolic culture, rather than a preexisting thing in the world.
If we understand it in this way, the need to delineate it is understood differently. Rather than being an unavoidable distinction whose specific boundaries may be negotiated, the distinction becomes the result of the practical need for a boundary. It is therefore something in the world that has been constructed for a specific purpose, but need not be there for all purposes. If we want to discard it or disregard it, we may.
Seen like this, the idea of the extended mind may be called into question. Not because there has been solid evidence in favor of the mind stopping at the skin, but because making boundaries around the mind has no clear purpose when we are talking about cognitive processes. Rather than expanding the boundaries of the mind, a more practical option seems to disregard the idea of boundaries in the first place when talking about cognition. The availability of information in today’s world (at any given point in time) requires us to extend the boundaries of the mind in revolutionary and expansive new ways. If we are to take a historical approach, then the boundaries of the mind extend even further. Why should our mind not encompass other minds, even if these are the minds of people who have died long before we were born, but who somehow influenced us? For the sake of practicality, I would have to argue that the idea of a boundary for the mind is of little practical use for cognitive science.
With practicality in mind, it is useful to reexplore the traditional conception of the non-extended mind; the mind which stops at the skin. In spite of Clark and Chalmer’s convincing argument, this way of putting a boundary on the mind is, for practical purposes, almost essential. The value of this way of delineating the mind lies in the physical affordances of the body and the external world. Despite the fact that parts of the external world (like notebooks) can serve as extensions of our mind, they are inherently not connected to us physically. We may bring a notebook with us, or we may not. In contrast, we have no option of forgetting our arms or legs. By not including these things in our idea of a “person” or their “mind” we provide a built in way to remember that they must be talked about separately because they can be forgotten or misplaced. If we didn’t do this, our ability to conveniently coordinate interpersonal activity would be hindered because the “person” would never be a clear entity.
Thursday, October 27, 2011
epistemology and cognitive development
Cognitive developmentalists (cog devs) have, since at least the time of Piaget, taken an epistemological approach to understanding children. By epistemological, I mean that their investigations have been concerned with determining things like what children of different ages know, and the progression of things kids know in a given area, and so forth. (obviously behaviorists are not really included in this). This approach has made substantial contributions to a large extent because of how different children are than adults in terms of their thinking. Familiar types of activities that seem simple and obvious to adults are approached in completely different ways by kids. Inabilities in a certain area have been attributed to children not understanding things about that particular area.
Despite the simple production of "results" using this approach, researchers have done little more than open up previously unknown areas of investigation. Empirical results of (e.g.) children's numerical thinking have made it very obvious that children think about numbers and counting differently than adults do. Yet, it has been virtually impossible to move from negative statements about knowledge taht can be easily backed up by research, to positive statements that can be backed up and conclusively agreed upon. Instead, what ends up happening is that researchers make assumptions about the epistemological implications of a given behavior (what a certain behavior indicates that a kid knows), and draws conclusions on the basis of these generally questionable assumptions.
The assumptions are questionable because it is really hard to come to any conclusion about whether or not a kid "knows" something, for several reasons. First, behaviors are not proof of a certain form of knowledge. I may be able to count because I have been taught counting by rote, or I may be able to do it and understand its function and how to do it correctly based on sound mathematical principles. The obvious reaction to this problem is to verify abilities seen in one area with abilities in another. E.g., to determine whether a child who can count a row of objects really understands counting, they could be asked tocount to comapre two sets of objects, or to pass a conservation task. Although these demonstrations may make certain conclusions increasingly plausible, the same objection that applied to the initial findings apply to these.
The second difficulty with attributing knowledge to kids is that it's not at all clear what knowledge is. I can say that I know how to drive a car, and this may be meaningful and effective for many social purposes such as whether or not I can take a shift on a long driving trip. But this just means that "my knowing something" has certain practical implications, specifically that it allows my behavior in a variety of situations to be predicted. This sense of knowledge is often useless for children whose ability to perform successfully on related tasks is often baffling and surprising. For example, researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that children who can count a set of objects are unable to give out a requested number of objects when asked. This combination of ability and inability is particularly baffling to adults who can hardly imagine doing one without doing the other. It's not at all clear what kind of "knowledge" these children would have to have to explain this constellation of abilities.
In my opinion, the concept of knowledge doesn't refer to a well defined state, but rather serves a functional purpose to make claims about the sorts of activity that might be expected from a certain person, based on past events. These predictions are grounded in the system of established regularities of human interaction, most of which are not understood.
Based on this closer look at the concept of "knowledge" (this applies to its close cousin understanding as well), what is its use in cognitive development?
I would argue that the use of epistemological terms such as "knowledge" in cognitive development results from prevailing cultural practices that are in place for dealing with thinking. We use these epistemological terms to make sense of other people's behavior and thinking because they are socially useful for these purposes. Because of the terms' usefulness in these contexts, they may have become reified, or treated as more real than they actually are. Continued use over time may have obscured the fact that epistemological terms like knowledge are representations of cognitive processes, not reflections of them. The result is that people continue to use them for purposes where they appear to have little use.
Cognitive development is the perfect example of this phenomenon of the reification of concepts leading to confusion within the field. Instead of serving to make sense of the subject matter, these concepts instead dominate the subject matter, to the extent that the actual subject of study is often ignored, and replaced with an alternate object that more closely fits the concept. This can be seen when researchers are trying to determine (e.g.) whether or not children know that numerosity is a property of all number words. The idea that children possess this "knowledge" is forefront in the investigation, which is concerned with detecting its presence in children of a certain age. Investigators assess different aspects of children's behavior, and draw conclusions about whether or not they possess the knowledge in question. All the while, it is never considered what the very idea of "having knowledge" even means for the child. It is simply assumed that the proper object of cog dev research should be to detect the supposed entities such as knowledge that exist beneath the surface, influencing (in certain contexts) children's activity.
This approach seems to be ridiculous when we reflect back on the earlier consideration of what it even means to have knowledge. Knowledge, it was concluded there, is a practical way of making sense of thinking for certain purposes. As the research example shows, however, this has become inverted. Rather than being the tool for generating understanding, knowledge has become the goal of the investigation. The incredibly ironic result is that the investigators have a thinking child in front of them during the experiment, and yet they ignore this thinking because of their preoccupation with the concept of knowledge, which social interaction has reified into an object of study, rather than a way of representing knowledge.
What has happened here can be humorously illustrated with an example. Imagine a detective who has been hired to track down a burglar, and has been given a picture of the burglar as a guide for who to look for. The detective then goes out with the picture and begins drawing other pictures of the faces he encounters, which he then compares to the original picture, in the hope of finding the thief.
This method of tracking down the criminal is analogous to the approach taken in cognitive development. Just as the detective placed too much importance on matching his subjects to the picture, so too do cognitive development researchers forget that culturally received ways of representing cognition are not reflections of cognition itself. All too often they, like the detective overlook the actual thought processes that are the real subject matter of cognitive development, preferring instead to look for something that perfectly matches a particular representation of cognition.
Despite the simple production of "results" using this approach, researchers have done little more than open up previously unknown areas of investigation. Empirical results of (e.g.) children's numerical thinking have made it very obvious that children think about numbers and counting differently than adults do. Yet, it has been virtually impossible to move from negative statements about knowledge taht can be easily backed up by research, to positive statements that can be backed up and conclusively agreed upon. Instead, what ends up happening is that researchers make assumptions about the epistemological implications of a given behavior (what a certain behavior indicates that a kid knows), and draws conclusions on the basis of these generally questionable assumptions.
The assumptions are questionable because it is really hard to come to any conclusion about whether or not a kid "knows" something, for several reasons. First, behaviors are not proof of a certain form of knowledge. I may be able to count because I have been taught counting by rote, or I may be able to do it and understand its function and how to do it correctly based on sound mathematical principles. The obvious reaction to this problem is to verify abilities seen in one area with abilities in another. E.g., to determine whether a child who can count a row of objects really understands counting, they could be asked tocount to comapre two sets of objects, or to pass a conservation task. Although these demonstrations may make certain conclusions increasingly plausible, the same objection that applied to the initial findings apply to these.
The second difficulty with attributing knowledge to kids is that it's not at all clear what knowledge is. I can say that I know how to drive a car, and this may be meaningful and effective for many social purposes such as whether or not I can take a shift on a long driving trip. But this just means that "my knowing something" has certain practical implications, specifically that it allows my behavior in a variety of situations to be predicted. This sense of knowledge is often useless for children whose ability to perform successfully on related tasks is often baffling and surprising. For example, researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that children who can count a set of objects are unable to give out a requested number of objects when asked. This combination of ability and inability is particularly baffling to adults who can hardly imagine doing one without doing the other. It's not at all clear what kind of "knowledge" these children would have to have to explain this constellation of abilities.
In my opinion, the concept of knowledge doesn't refer to a well defined state, but rather serves a functional purpose to make claims about the sorts of activity that might be expected from a certain person, based on past events. These predictions are grounded in the system of established regularities of human interaction, most of which are not understood.
Based on this closer look at the concept of "knowledge" (this applies to its close cousin understanding as well), what is its use in cognitive development?
I would argue that the use of epistemological terms such as "knowledge" in cognitive development results from prevailing cultural practices that are in place for dealing with thinking. We use these epistemological terms to make sense of other people's behavior and thinking because they are socially useful for these purposes. Because of the terms' usefulness in these contexts, they may have become reified, or treated as more real than they actually are. Continued use over time may have obscured the fact that epistemological terms like knowledge are representations of cognitive processes, not reflections of them. The result is that people continue to use them for purposes where they appear to have little use.
Cognitive development is the perfect example of this phenomenon of the reification of concepts leading to confusion within the field. Instead of serving to make sense of the subject matter, these concepts instead dominate the subject matter, to the extent that the actual subject of study is often ignored, and replaced with an alternate object that more closely fits the concept. This can be seen when researchers are trying to determine (e.g.) whether or not children know that numerosity is a property of all number words. The idea that children possess this "knowledge" is forefront in the investigation, which is concerned with detecting its presence in children of a certain age. Investigators assess different aspects of children's behavior, and draw conclusions about whether or not they possess the knowledge in question. All the while, it is never considered what the very idea of "having knowledge" even means for the child. It is simply assumed that the proper object of cog dev research should be to detect the supposed entities such as knowledge that exist beneath the surface, influencing (in certain contexts) children's activity.
This approach seems to be ridiculous when we reflect back on the earlier consideration of what it even means to have knowledge. Knowledge, it was concluded there, is a practical way of making sense of thinking for certain purposes. As the research example shows, however, this has become inverted. Rather than being the tool for generating understanding, knowledge has become the goal of the investigation. The incredibly ironic result is that the investigators have a thinking child in front of them during the experiment, and yet they ignore this thinking because of their preoccupation with the concept of knowledge, which social interaction has reified into an object of study, rather than a way of representing knowledge.
What has happened here can be humorously illustrated with an example. Imagine a detective who has been hired to track down a burglar, and has been given a picture of the burglar as a guide for who to look for. The detective then goes out with the picture and begins drawing other pictures of the faces he encounters, which he then compares to the original picture, in the hope of finding the thief.
This method of tracking down the criminal is analogous to the approach taken in cognitive development. Just as the detective placed too much importance on matching his subjects to the picture, so too do cognitive development researchers forget that culturally received ways of representing cognition are not reflections of cognition itself. All too often they, like the detective overlook the actual thought processes that are the real subject matter of cognitive development, preferring instead to look for something that perfectly matches a particular representation of cognition.
Thursday, October 13, 2011
Thinking about thinking: a phenomenological look
A distinction can be drawn between (1) linguistic descriptions of the mental events and processes that we use to refer to firsthand experience of our own thinking, or of others thinking inferred from their behavior.
(2) The actual events/processes as they occur as phenomenological or biological realities.
I should say from the outset that, especially in light of the title of this blog, I am not making a point about the "map and the territory" in a simplistic sense. That is, I am not pointing out that a linguistic description of an event is different from the phenomenological/biological reality of that event. I am looking at a deeper form of this distinction which is commonly unrecognized between (1) the mental events that we claim are occurring when we try to reflect on our thoughts (to ourselves or others) and (2) the mental events that are actually occurring.
This can be shown best with an example. As a student, I have a password for my computer account at school, and I have a separate password for the blackboard website (an online forum for class discussions, document postings, etc). These passwords are arbitrary strings of numbers/letters and are identical except that the last character of my computer password is 5, versus 3 for the blackboard password. Because I use the computer password significantly more than the BB password, I am used to typing in that password, and the BB password is more of an exception. This means that when I go to type that password in, I must remember that it is not the normal computer password, but something else (I frequently type in the computer pword by mistake).
Today, I was logging onto blackboard and the user/pword box came up, and I managed to remember to type in the correct (BB) password. When I reflected on this, I was struck to discover that my inner linguistic representation of the mental events that had transpired differed from my actual perception of these mental events. This is how I would describe the process of what happened:
The password box came up, and I remembered that the pword for BB is not my normal computer password, and that I should remember to type in the correct password.
In contrast to this, the actual sequence of experience was more like this:
Password box comes up>generic experience of caution connected with typing in password>correct typing in of password.
In other words, the mental event that I would have described as having occurred in a specific, explicit, meaningful form instead occurred as the enactment of an undefined and generic cautious attitude. This attitude was not self-directed towards the situation, but instead occurred within my consciousness of the situation, and by virtue of this could only have been directed towards the situation, that being the only relevant context to which its meaning could apply.
In addition to lacking an inherent reference towards the situation that it ended up aiding, the attitude also lacked the specific meaning that I attributed to it in my verbal reflection. What went through my head was not "you need to remember that your password is wdfg3 not wdfg5," but only a generic attitude of cautious meaningfulness. This attitude was sufficient to bring about the effect of writing the correct password, but that's only because of the way that my attention was focused. My attention gave a specific form to a generic attitude that could have taken other forms in other contexts.
If realizations have the generic form that I am claiming, why do people describe them as ungeneric and as having a meaning of their own? My answer would by people speak about the mind in a way that doesn't accurately reflect the underlying structures and processes. This has been shown in a variety of instances, particularly over the last 50 years. For example, people commonly make a sharp distinction between perception and action that doesn't reflect their actual deep interrelation. In a somewhat similar way, we apply a structure to our thoughts and actions that is not necessarily reflective of their actual nature. The fact that these practices exist is proof of their utility in the situations where they have been developed. Unfortunately, the practices may not work when they're applied to new situations which may demand that our characterizations of thought processes bear a closer resemblance to the underlying structure of biological/phenomenological events.
Any sophisticated study of cognition is a situation in which our "common sense" way of talking about thought processes is detrimental to our attempts of understanding. We may observe people's activity and describe their thought processes in commonsense terms, but these descriptions do not match what's actually going on. The commonsense characterization of thought processes does not reflect the systemic nature of the mind in which certain realizations (or as cog dev researchers like to say, "principles" may be embedded within contexts of activity, and don't necessarily exist as independent, linguistic principles. This may be the case, or it may become the case, later in life. But it does not have to be the case, and I am arguing that it often isn't.
To go beyond this, cognitive scientists must find a way to characterize cognition as something that contains both linguistic/propositional and non-propositional knowledge. The distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge is not sufficient because even there, implicit knowledge is conceptualized as "hidden propositions."
One could object to this by saying "Yes, but the linguistic representation is a convenient way of making sense of the knowledge. A representation cannot be the thing represented. A little corruption (or artistic license) is only the result of the inherently metaphorical nature of all representations." I agree with this in principle, but would argue that it doesn't apply here. If we fail to make the distinction between propositional/implict knowledge a truly important one, then we have no conception of what language is with regards to the mind. To cast implicit (non-propositional) knowledge in propositional terms is to ignore its defining characteristic, and to blur the distinction between cultural and non-cultural ways of thinking. Metaphorical, artistic license is likely to be a necessity, but it cannot be done in a way that prevents the most central aspect of a given concept from showing through.
To restate this in terms specific to the problem at hand: We tend to describe the component thought processes that comprise the cognitive portion of any activity as being individually coherent, propositional entities. To do so is to overlook the fact that human cognition is coherent and propositional in terms of its totality, not in terms of its component parts. The component parts each interact to generate activity that may be described in totality with propositional linguistic terms. This does not mean that the individual parts have these characteristics.
(2) The actual events/processes as they occur as phenomenological or biological realities.
I should say from the outset that, especially in light of the title of this blog, I am not making a point about the "map and the territory" in a simplistic sense. That is, I am not pointing out that a linguistic description of an event is different from the phenomenological/biological reality of that event. I am looking at a deeper form of this distinction which is commonly unrecognized between (1) the mental events that we claim are occurring when we try to reflect on our thoughts (to ourselves or others) and (2) the mental events that are actually occurring.
This can be shown best with an example. As a student, I have a password for my computer account at school, and I have a separate password for the blackboard website (an online forum for class discussions, document postings, etc). These passwords are arbitrary strings of numbers/letters and are identical except that the last character of my computer password is 5, versus 3 for the blackboard password. Because I use the computer password significantly more than the BB password, I am used to typing in that password, and the BB password is more of an exception. This means that when I go to type that password in, I must remember that it is not the normal computer password, but something else (I frequently type in the computer pword by mistake).
Today, I was logging onto blackboard and the user/pword box came up, and I managed to remember to type in the correct (BB) password. When I reflected on this, I was struck to discover that my inner linguistic representation of the mental events that had transpired differed from my actual perception of these mental events. This is how I would describe the process of what happened:
The password box came up, and I remembered that the pword for BB is not my normal computer password, and that I should remember to type in the correct password.
In contrast to this, the actual sequence of experience was more like this:
Password box comes up>generic experience of caution connected with typing in password>correct typing in of password.
In other words, the mental event that I would have described as having occurred in a specific, explicit, meaningful form instead occurred as the enactment of an undefined and generic cautious attitude. This attitude was not self-directed towards the situation, but instead occurred within my consciousness of the situation, and by virtue of this could only have been directed towards the situation, that being the only relevant context to which its meaning could apply.
In addition to lacking an inherent reference towards the situation that it ended up aiding, the attitude also lacked the specific meaning that I attributed to it in my verbal reflection. What went through my head was not "you need to remember that your password is wdfg3 not wdfg5," but only a generic attitude of cautious meaningfulness. This attitude was sufficient to bring about the effect of writing the correct password, but that's only because of the way that my attention was focused. My attention gave a specific form to a generic attitude that could have taken other forms in other contexts.
If realizations have the generic form that I am claiming, why do people describe them as ungeneric and as having a meaning of their own? My answer would by people speak about the mind in a way that doesn't accurately reflect the underlying structures and processes. This has been shown in a variety of instances, particularly over the last 50 years. For example, people commonly make a sharp distinction between perception and action that doesn't reflect their actual deep interrelation. In a somewhat similar way, we apply a structure to our thoughts and actions that is not necessarily reflective of their actual nature. The fact that these practices exist is proof of their utility in the situations where they have been developed. Unfortunately, the practices may not work when they're applied to new situations which may demand that our characterizations of thought processes bear a closer resemblance to the underlying structure of biological/phenomenological events.
Any sophisticated study of cognition is a situation in which our "common sense" way of talking about thought processes is detrimental to our attempts of understanding. We may observe people's activity and describe their thought processes in commonsense terms, but these descriptions do not match what's actually going on. The commonsense characterization of thought processes does not reflect the systemic nature of the mind in which certain realizations (or as cog dev researchers like to say, "principles" may be embedded within contexts of activity, and don't necessarily exist as independent, linguistic principles. This may be the case, or it may become the case, later in life. But it does not have to be the case, and I am arguing that it often isn't.
To go beyond this, cognitive scientists must find a way to characterize cognition as something that contains both linguistic/propositional and non-propositional knowledge. The distinction between explicit and implicit knowledge is not sufficient because even there, implicit knowledge is conceptualized as "hidden propositions."
One could object to this by saying "Yes, but the linguistic representation is a convenient way of making sense of the knowledge. A representation cannot be the thing represented. A little corruption (or artistic license) is only the result of the inherently metaphorical nature of all representations." I agree with this in principle, but would argue that it doesn't apply here. If we fail to make the distinction between propositional/implict knowledge a truly important one, then we have no conception of what language is with regards to the mind. To cast implicit (non-propositional) knowledge in propositional terms is to ignore its defining characteristic, and to blur the distinction between cultural and non-cultural ways of thinking. Metaphorical, artistic license is likely to be a necessity, but it cannot be done in a way that prevents the most central aspect of a given concept from showing through.
To restate this in terms specific to the problem at hand: We tend to describe the component thought processes that comprise the cognitive portion of any activity as being individually coherent, propositional entities. To do so is to overlook the fact that human cognition is coherent and propositional in terms of its totality, not in terms of its component parts. The component parts each interact to generate activity that may be described in totality with propositional linguistic terms. This does not mean that the individual parts have these characteristics.
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