Intangible territoriality

Leave a reply

L. (3 years and a half) has become very defensive of his territory, especially in his dealings with his older sister. He started by demanding her not to touch him or the toys he was using. Later he began to enforce a kind of “exclusion zone”: he doesn’t want his sister to get too close to him, especially when he’s playing by himself (with his toy cars, etc.). Of course, this doesn’t happen all the time; they often play together and get along well. But sometimes he does get very territorial and shouts or cries asking her to leave (in his jargon: “¡ite!”), and if she doesn’t obey he tries to recruit parental help.

Lately, in what I see as an increase in this kind of territoriality, he seems to be concerned about “intellectual property”: whenever he says something and is echoed by his older sister (or other people) saying something identical or very similar to what he just said, he tells her not to copy him (“¡No me copies!”). He’s enforcing intangible boundaries that protect his identity; he’s drawing an assertive circle around him and he’s self-confident enough to try to deter his older sister from crossing this limit.

 

The doctor will tell you to behave

Leave a reply

At about 3 years of age, I tell L. that he will be having a haircut later. I ask him, “Do you know where we’ll take you for the haircut?”. And he replies: “Yes, to the doctor”. This makes sense, I think: both the doctor and the barber do something intrusive with your body.

A month later he is scratching persistently a mosquito bite and I tell him to stop so that he doesn’t hurt himself. He says: “Take me to the doctor”. “Why?”, I ask. His response is: “He’ll ask me to behave” (“me va a decir portate bien“).

A couple of weeks after that he sees me trying to repair my car. He tells me: “call the doctor”. I ask him: “What for?” And his response is: “He’ll ask the car to behave” (Para que le diga portate bien).

So not only behavior problems (or disobedience) are assimilated to physical body problems. In a twist to child animism, the car body is like a human body, and a car can be taken to the doctor to get disciplined, or at least to be scolded and instructed on how to behave.

Foucault lives.

 

 

E. Watkins on therapy for depressive rumination

Leave a reply

I’ve just finished reading Watkins (2006). Some interesting points:

  • Even though the author says he’s discussing cognitive-behavioral approaches, his approach at times resembles systemic therapy. For instance, he asks himself about the meaning and function of depressive symptoms in specific contexts. Moreover, therapeutic efforts do not address thought content; rather, they aim at changing thinking styles and patterns.
  • Some other comments remind me of psychoanalysis. For example, the author treats rumination as an avoidance strategy. This would be the case of a patient that, in order to avoid getting into a fit of anger, uses rumination as a way to divert his attention and energy. The author even claims that “rumination is often tied up with avoidance of an unwanted or feared self.” This seems to me a good example of what psychoanalists would call a “defense mechanism”.

WATKINS E. 2006. Cognitive-Behaviour Therapy for Depressive Rumination. Mood
Disorders Centre, School of Psychology, University of Exeter.

Another interesting paper on this topic:

Abbott, M. J., & Rapee, R. M. (2004). Post-event rumination and negative self-appraisal in social phobia before and after treatment. Journal of abnormal psychology, 113(1), 136–144. doi:10.1037/0021-843X.113.1.136

Summary of my presentation at the fairness conference

Leave a reply

I like the summary Erin Robbins and Philippe Rochat wrote for my presentation at the Fairness Conference (Emory University, 2012). It really captures the spirit of what I was trying to convey. It goes as follows:

Gustavo Faigenbaum from the University Autonoma de Entre Rios in Argentina (“Three Dimensions of Fairness”), in contrast to the preceding two evolutionary perspectives, argues that in understanding fairness, individual morality has been overrated and institutions underrated. To this end, Faigenbaum advances several claims that draw from both psychological and philosophical theories. First, he argues that institutional experience shapes concepts of fairness. This is evident in children’s interactions in schoolyards, where they engage in associative reciprocity (sharing with others to build alliances and demonstrate social affinities) rather than strict reciprocity. At the level of adult behavior, this associative reciprocity is also evident in gift-giving rituals. Second, Faigenbaum argues that possession and ownership are the most important institutions in the development of fairness reasoning because they involve abstraction and are the first step in the development of a deontological perspective.

Concepts of morality do not need to be evoked; he argues that research on children’s protests of ownership violations reflect an emphasis on conventional rather than moral rules. Faigenbaum concludes by arguing that participation in rule-governed activities is sufficient to create mutual understandings about what constitutes fair exchange (per philosopher John Searle’s “X counts as Y” rule). Developmental research demonstrates that fairness is an autonomous domain of experience that is fundamentally tied to institutions and cannot be reduced to moral reasoning proper.

The complete presentation is available at youtube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZcLicg_Dw8) yet the sound is terrible and it’s practically impossible to listen to.

Three dimensions of institutional experience at 3 years of age

Leave a reply

At some point I will write extensively in this blog about one of my central tenets: children’s everyday social experience is best understood when analyzed into three institutional dimensions that I call: inclusion, hierarchy and reciprocity.

For the time being, here is a little example that shows how these three dimensions are present in my son’s everyday interactions.

  1. Inclusion: Starting at about 3 years of age, whenever I announce that I am going to do something (go shopping, eat some yogurt, cook, take a nap, etc.) he usually replies “me too” (“yo también”), “I’ll go with you” (“te acompaño”) or “Let me help you” (“te ayudo”). He is thereby including himself in a group (formed by two or more people); he is inserting himself, through speech, within an “us”, and assumes that the activity in question is not performed by me and by him at the same time but by a collective formed by both of us. By the way: Michael Tomasello talks a lot about this specifically human ability to do things together, that is, to cooperate (Tomasello, 2009). At about the same age he starts talking about his friends. For example he refers to his cousin F. by saying “mío amigo” (“my friend”); he also mentions frequently that “F. is my friend”. When he’s about to leave for kindergarten he mentions he wants to meet his friends to play (“voy a jugar con míos amigos”). To sum up: he acknowledges that there is a sub-group of friends within the larger group of human beings; he shares with his friends a type of experience (peer play) that is different from what he does with his older sister, adults, etc. He includes himself in this proto-community. At about 3 years and 4 months he says that his music teacher, Maxi, is my friend, because “we both have a beard”.
  2. Hierarchy: There is also a hierarchic dimension in children’s everyday experience. L. differentiates between grown-ups and kids (“grandes” and “chicos”) in his speech; he also knows that grown-ups are entitled to a number of things from which kids are excluded (manipulating dangerous objects such as pots with boiling water or oil, drinking wine, driving, giving orders to other kids, staying up late, etc.) And it is clear, in many situations, that he would like to be a grown up (he says he’s “big”; he engages in pretend play in which he’s a grown-up).
  3. Reciprocity: this dimension of institutional life is obviously present in many everyday episodes, both involving adults and other children. In this blog, we have discussed object trading and give-and-take games, and will continue to provide similar examples. We might also mention that reciprocity is strongly embedded in linguistic practices and language games such as mutual greeting, thanking and welcoming, etc., in which the participants’ roles are symmetrical and interchangeable.

Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. Human Resource Management (Vol. 49, p. 206). MIT Press.

Alison Gopnik and the mirror of nature

Leave a reply

Gopnik’s (1996) argues that scientific knowledge (as well as children’s theories) stems from a device-powered ability. In her candid account, a child (or a scientist) discovers truths by using a truth-discovering device we’re all equipped with. Individuals (children and scientists) have direct access to truths; and truths involve a two-way relationship: they are a mirror-like match between the individual’s representations and the world (as opposed to, for example, being the result of a social, normative, constructive process).

Gopnik acknowledges that epistemology has a normative component, but only in the sense that some epistemologists and philosophers of science prescribe the structure of the ideal scientific inquiry. Indeed, when most scholars talk about traditional epistemology schools (logical positivism, falsificationism, etc.) as being “normative” they mean exactly that kind of external, prescriptive attitude. Yet there is another way of understanding the normative side of epistemology (one that Piaget, for example, emphasizes frequently): epistemology is normative, in this second sense, because its object of study (science) is inherently normative; that is, because scientists try to conduct their research according to certain binding rules and, moreover, they try to formulate laws, rules and models that explain, not just how the world works, but also why the world must work in that way. Scientists use a deontological language when talking about their research; they believe some theories are bad and others are good; they require that scientific statements be justified; they demand other people to be fair in their evaluation of their theories. Epistemologists, in this second version of “the normative,” do not try to impose prescriptions from the outside, but to reveal what is inherently normative in actual science. Gopnik does not take into account this inherently normative nature of science, but she reduces normativity to the traditional epistemologist’s recommendation of certain rules of enquiry to the scientist.

Hand in hand with Gopnik’s neglect of the internal normativity of science, she sees science as stemming from an individual, internal ability to “find the truth,” that is, as something that “people do” (they eat, they sleep, they have sex, they find the truth). She consequently endorses a naïve realism according to which science “gets it right” and succeeds at “uncovering the truth” (Gopnik, 1996, p. 489), and this because “human beings are endowed by evolution with a wide variety of devices that enable us to arrive at a roughly veridical view of the world” (Gopnik, 1996, p. 487). She claims that human cognition is a system that “gets at the truth about the world” because “it is designed by evolution to get at the truth about the world” (Gopnik, 1996, p. 501).  I will not delve into the obvious circularity of such assertions (briefly: to assess whether our cognitive device works well and yields true representations we use that very device). But I believe that this very way of talking about cognition (“we have a device inside our head that operates with rules and representations and is ready-made to find the truth”) makes it impossible from the start to provide an adequate account of a) the normative and b) the social aspects of cognition, since social norms are in this view necessarily reduced to an external source of information, i.e., to the device’s input. Gopnik’s words: “They [mental representations and rules] may be deeply influenced by information that comes from other people, but they are not merely conventional and they could function outside of any social community” (Gopnik, 1996, p. 488). Furthermore, when Gopnik talks about the institutions of science or the division of labor in science, she sees social organization simply as a way of being more effective at achieving a certain goal (reaching truths). It’s a merely technical, means-end reasoning.

What concept of “truth” is Gopnik using when she asserts that the human cognitive system produces truths? She seems to rely on a naïve version of truth as correspondence: our cognitive system is like a mirror of the world; it produces representations that match up to the outside world (Gopnik, 1996, p. 502). Needless to say, this correspondence view of truth has been criticized and destroyed over and over again by philosophers and epistemologists from all schools; it is untenable for a number of reasons. The three main reasons: 1) knowledge processes do not imitate reality but to impose certain abstract, mathematical or relational models unto the world, 2) consequently, our mental representations are not copies of the world; rather, they contain abstract concepts (atom, mind, time, gravity, homeostasis) that radically redescribe the object we are trying to know; and 3) we only say that some things are true within a certain form of life or cultural context that provides the rules to evaluate what is true and what is not.

Gopnik treats truth as a natural fact and as a tangible property of representations, which are also pretty much treated as tangible things. Yet the concept of “truth” only exists within certain normative systems; and normative systems only exist in culture, not in nature; truths are not things; we say that certain propositions or theories are “true” always in the context of complex, relational systems such as science. Animals try to solve concrete problems, but they don’t search for the truth. Human interest in the truth cannot derive from having a natural device implanted in our brain only; something else needs to be added to the mix.

Most interesting theories about the social origins of scientific knowledge do not focus on “socially transmitted information” or “social input” but on social structure. Yet Gopnik finds it “hard to see how a particular social structure, by itself, could lead to veridicality” (Gopnik, 1996, p. 491).

It is in my opinion much easier to see how social structure could lead to veridicality than how a computer-like device could do so. Social structure creates institutions that formalize adversarial scenarios, so that one party is in charge of attacking a position and the opposite party is in charge of defending it. They enforce rules, in many contexts (from editorial boards to legislatures and courts) that specify what counts as a legitimate argument and as valid proof. Moreover, institutions create authorities that rule above the parties in the dispute and are in charge to adjudicate between them, to say who’s right, “who has the truth”. States have succeeded in creating the first institutions that were “impersonal” in the sense that they represented abstract principles or the common good (rather than the interest or the point of view or a specific individual); once people got used to think in terms of impersonal principles (the Greeks called them arches) they applied this form of thought to nature and started discovering principles and laws in the world around us. I’m collapsing into one paragraph thousands of pages written by very diverse authors (Hegel, Durkheim, Vernant) who recognized that social institutions created something absent in the natural world: truth.

If you accept at least provisionally that what is particular about science is not only that it gets things right (its efficacy) but also that produces legal-like knowledge (legitimate, verifiable knowledge that aims at universal validity), you can start to see what it is that social structure adds to the mix.

Says Gopnik: “An important point of the empirical developmental work, and a common observation about science, is that the search for better theories has a kind of internally-driven motivation, quite separate from the more superficial motivations provided by the sociology. From our point of view, we make theories in search of explanation or make love in search of orgasm” (Gopnik, 1996, p. 498). Her idea is that evolution built our internal device in such a way that would feel thrills of pleasure when finding the truth. Yet I believe that the passion of scientists has more to do with a social feeling, namely justice. They strive for truth with the passion that a rebel fights for justice. As when the equation works, the pleasant experience results from the recognition that the result is fair, that the right explanation is given its due value.

Summing up, my argument against Gopnik (1996) proceeds in three steps: 1) She doesn’t recognize the normative dimension of scientific knowledge, so she imagines we have a scientific-knowledge device that is effective, but not one that produces valid, legitimate knowledge; 2) The non-normative conception of truth (which is conceived as a match between the mind and the world) makes her embrace a naïve realism; 3) this narrows, or rather kills, the power of her theory to include the social aspects of knowledge. The main flaws in Gopnik’s theory, therefore, derive from her understanding of scientific activity as resulting from a mere ability to investigate and find truths rather than as a social, normative practice.

Gopnik, A. (1996). The scientist as child. Philosophy of Science, 63, 485–514. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/188064

Alison Gopnik as a child

Leave a reply

Shamelessly, Gopnik starts her seminal article on The Scientist as Child (Gopnik, 1996) by claiming that “recently, cognitive and developmental psychologists have invoked the analogy of science itself” (p. 485). Recently! That analogy is at the core of the Piagetian enterprise. Indeed, Piaget founded the field of cognitive development some 80 years ago by appealing to that very analogy, i.e., by claiming that the fields of epistemology (or philosophy of science) and developmental psychology can illuminate each other because there are functional similarities between the processes of knowledge acquisition in children and in scientists. The insight that the scientific investigation of children’s cognitive development sheds light on the history of science and vice versa is 100% Piagetian. Yet Gopnik discusses it as if it were a new idea.

Gopnik knows that Piaget already said this. In other writings she’s honest enough to admit she knows about Piaget’s systematic comparison between children and scientists, although she also claims that she means it in a different way; i.e., she affirms that the relationships she establishes between the fields of child psychology and epistemology are not the same as in Piaget’s. Yet in this particular paper (Gopnik, 1996) and in many other places (most notably, her lectures to undergraduates, of which I will speak some day) she pretends that it’s she and her theory-theory colleagues who have coined this famous analogy. In this particular article, Piaget’s name is not even mentioned.

There are many other ideas that are originally Piagetian and for which the Swiss researcher gets no credit at all. For example: that theory change is a process that goes through different stages: disregard or denial of uncomfortable evidence, compromise solutions, generalized crisis and substitution by a new theory. And, of course, the basic contention that children have theories in a sense comparable to scientists. She also claims: “Theory change proceeds more uniformly and quickly in children than in scientists, and so is considerably easier to observe, and we can even experimentally determine what kinds of evidence lead to change. In children, we may actually be able to see “the logic of discovery” in action” (Gopnik, 1996, p. 509). This is Piaget talking! Yet she presents these ideas as if they were completely her own.

This is not my main criticism of Gopnik’s work, of course. The central problem, in my opinion, is the way she understands science (as result of a mere ability to investigate and “find truths” rather than as a normative practice). I’ll talk about it in a different post.

Gopnik, A. (1996). The scientist as child. Philosophy of Science, 63, 485–514. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/188064

Kitchener on Piaget as a sociologist

Leave a reply

This post presupposes many others. Don’t start here.

I’ve just read Richard Kitchener’s excellent paper on Jean Piaget as a sociologist (Kitchener, 1991). He rightly emphasizes the normative aspect in Piaget’s approach to knowledge. Part of the unfair criticism that the Piagetian legacy endures these days comes from authors who neglect or just don’t understand such normative aspect (A. Gopnik’s publications are good examples of this intellectually shortsighted attitude). I’ve insisted on this topic in previous posts such as this one or this one or this one, and will be writing more about it in the future.

What do we mean when we say that epistemic knowledge and logic have an inescapable normative component? Our point is that individuals engaged in the construction of epistemic knowledge are different from animals in that they are not simply trying to solve problems posed by their environment (that is, they’re not just trying to be effectively adapted to the world) but they are trying to produce valid, legitimate knowledge that they can defend by means of reasons when questioned by interlocutors or adversaries. Ideally, these interlocutors challenge each other as equals, that is, they don’t use the argument from authority. “The need to justify one’s beliefs or actions emerges only under the particular social conditions of equality” (Kitchener, 1991, p. 433). Under conditions of equality people tend to cooperate with each other rather than to constrain or force each other to do certain things or to accept certain propositions. Rationality, in Piaget’s and Kitchener’s view, is a byproduct of peer interaction: cooperation generates reason (Kitchener, 1991, p. 430). Logic, to sum up, arises from interactions between individuals: “The Cartesian solitary knower, separate from social interaction with others, cannot construct an equilibrated logic” (Kitchener, 1991, p. 435).

Similarly, objectivity results from mutual exchanges of subjective perspectives between individuals: being objective “…requires an awareness that what one thinks may not coincide with what is true” (Kitchener, 1991, p. 429). This self-vigilance or, as Kitchener calls it, self-consciousness, is the psychological activity of an individual thinking and arguing with others, and subjecting herself to the normative rules of reasoning. “Rules of reasoning are thus normative obligations binding upon the individual (…) Reasoning in general requires normative principles of inference and the most adequate one is normative reciprocity” (Kitchener, 1991, pp. 425-426).

Kitchener illustrates this last point with a famous example from Piaget’s Études sociologiques: “two individuals, on opposite banks of a river, are each building a pillar of stones across which a plank will go as a bridge”. This creates a problem of action coordination between individuals that can be characterized in logical terms (correspondence, reciprocity, addition or subtraction of complementary actions). But the bridge example is an instance of what I call the technological approach to human action. That is, Piaget (and Kitchener) focus here not on the structure of social relations (the rules and institutions that organize life in common) but on the practical, effective coordination of actions that are a (more or less effective) means toward an end (building the bridge). The bridge example could have as well came out of the desk of a Vygotskian scholar, since it fits with the features of activity as defined by the socio-historical school: people organized in order to achieve a common goal and using tools available in their cultural context. The emphasis here, to say it again, is on technical action and not in the sense of justice inherent to social relations.

So I have two (external?) criticisms of Kitchener-Piaget: 1) to understand normativity (of social relations, and epistemic normativity as well) you need to pay attention to social institutions as they embody a sense of justice; a technical or technological view of human action won’t do; 2) institutions come with many flavors, reciprocity being a characteristic of one particular (albeit important) institution (contract). But there are other institutions (some of them based on authority) that are legitimate and can therefore be a source of valid statements. (There was rational argumentation before the emergence of Athenian democracy).

Kitchener, R. F. (1991). Jean Piaget: The Unknown Sociologist? The British Journal of Sociology, 42(3), 421–442. doi:10.2307/591188

 

Clarification on the purpose of my planned experiment on “practical math”

Leave a reply

What follows is the response to some questions my friends Philippe and Samar raised about the experiment I describe here (previous post).

1) How is the normative context you are proposing different from a school math context?

I try to embed math problems in narratives that remind children of everyday, familiar situations that involve observance or transgressions of exchange and distribution rules. Such narratives, I believe, will awaken children’s sense of justice and motivate them to balance a situation that they see as unbalanced or unfair (“A gave a present to B but B didn’t make a matching present to A”, “A stole something from B”, etc.) Such narrative contexts should remind children about the institutions and rules or reciprocity that govern exchange and distribution. So, this is very different from the formal, instructional school context.

I’m not primarily focused on the educational applications. My questions are theoretical. I’m interested in mapping the social aspects of human cognition. If my work gets the desired results, then the educational applications might follow… but that’s not a primary goal for me. The experiment aims at proving a theoretical point.

2)  Do you think that the social/normative context of math problems would boost children numerical competence?

Yes, my hypothesis is that the social-normative context of these math problems will probably improve children numerical competence. But I would not expect any deep or long term effects from just one session. My idea is as follows: if we can use this one session to show just a local effect of the narrative context on how children construe and solve these problems, this is relevant enough. This would prove that social meanings are transferred to the mathematical domain and have an impact on children’s performance. I think that proving such local effect is much simpler than doing a longitudinal study (which might be a second step in the research). I also proposed to “do some standardized numeracy tests (perhaps those used by Opfer & Siegler, Dehaene, Piagetian conservation tests, etc.) right after the main task in order to evaluate if each of these normative contexts has “sensitized” the child to quantities in a special way.” In other words, we would not be testing for any lasting effects, but we would test numerical competence and/or quantity conservation right after the main experiment, to see whether this “sensibility” to number gets transferred to different problems. So this would only test for immediate effects, but we are interested in the child’s performance in a second, apparently unrelated problem, in the domain of math, to see if there is a “spill-over” from one situation to the other.

3) Why should normative and social context as provided in the narrative improve children’s performance?

Math problems that involve some kind of “equalization” between different parties are social in nature. This type of math was created historically to deal with such social problems (barter and purchase, paying back, getting even, managing debt). The history of math seems to go hand in hand with the history of human exchange and distribution systems. For example, the popularization of coins and the establishment of a class of merchants seems to happen at the same time as (and probably facilitate) the emergence of formal arithmetic. Calculus (developed simultaneously by Newton and Leibniz) is invented at a time when the first stock exchanges are being created.

We are not merely providing children with a social metaphor in this experiment, we are re-embedding math problems in their original social context. It’s the meaningfulness of the situation that should impact on children’s performance. This is the idea I want to test.

4) Where’s the novelty of your approach? 

Most current researchers (Dehaene, Opher, Siegler, Spelke, Lourenco, among many others) are interested in the innate, Approximate Number System (ANS) that humans share with other animals. Although there are differences among authors in the details, there is consensus that such a system is a pre-condition for the development of symbolic number and arithmetic (which are unique to humans). These authors show that symbolic number builds upon such innate capacity but they don’t provide good explanations about how we go beyond the ANS and up to human math. They mention “culture” but they treat culture as a mere collection of arbitrary conventions, technologies and techniques. In the case of number, culture is seen as providing a more or less fast and effective set of arbitrary procedures to perform calculations.

So, again, my immediate aim is not so much to discover the best strategy for training kids or to improve academic performance in the long term, but to prove a theoretical point about the social nature of math.

Thinking about an experiment on “practical math” in normative contexts

1 Reply

I am trying to think about an experimental situation that would allow me to test how normative-institutional contexts impact on children quantitative reasoning. Ideally, it has to be an easy experimental task that can be tested quickly with children from different cultures. What follows is a half-baked draft. Your feedback and criticism is most welcome.

So this is the idea… Children (ages 4 to 7) are interviewed individually. During the interview, they are shown a series of very short puppet plays. After each play children are questioned about the best way to solve a problem that arose in the play. Children are required to offer quantitative answers to such problems; for example, “how much money does character A have to pay character B to get even?” or “How many blocks does character A need to add in order to complete the building?”, etc.  The narratives are different in nature. Some narratives provide a social and normative context to the problem, in the sense that they highlight certain social rules children need to take into account in order to respond appropriately to the situation. Other narratives, by way of contrast, highlight “technical” or “engineering” problems, and involve means-ends reasoning. They problems they involve are similar to the normative problems in their mathematical content, yet the narrative context is markedly different.

Examples:

A1: “Negative reciprocity and reparation”. Character A has a bag with three candy bars. Character A shows the bag to character B and tells her that she loves candy bars and that she plans to eat them with her friends the next day. Character A goes to sleep. Character B steals the bars and eats them. Character A wakes up and finds character B stole the candy, and asks character B to return them. Character B says she doesn’t have the candy anymore but that she can offer character A some money to make up for the stolen candy. She opens a purse and drops some coins and bills on the table. The child is asked to choose the coins and bills character B has to hand over to character A in order to get even. They child is questioned about how she made that decision; and how she calculated how many bills and coins that character B must give character A.

A2: “Destruction and reconstruction”. The child is shown a tower formed by six big blocks. The child is told that a powerful storm and strong winds hit the building during the night and broke the three upper stories of the building. She’s then given a number of smaller blocks of different sizes and is asked to rebuild the tower so that it is as high as it was before the storm. The child is questioned the criteria she used to select the blocks and to decide how many blocks to use.

B1. “Positive reciprocity”. Character A visits character B and shows up with a present: a stack of stickers or trading cards. Each character returns to her own home. Then character B says that character A was really nice and that she would also like to give her a present to “get even”. The child is asked to help character B prepare her present. She is shown a cup and a collection of marbles and is told to fill the cup up until there are enough for A’s present. The child is also asked about how she decided how many marbles to give; i.e. to justify her decision.

B2. “Bridging the gap”. The child is shown a model of a river. On the river there is half bridge built with legos. The bridge starts on one shore and goes only half-way over the river. The child is asked to pick the lego pieces that she would need to build the other half of the bridge. The set of lego pieces the child can choose from have a different size than the ones used to build the first half of the bridge.

All four situations involve some kind of addition and subtraction of different units; they also involve compensating different dimensions of problems (values of the goods exchanged, sizes of different objects, etc.) A1 and B1 are “social” and “normative”: they involve the concept of justice; A2 and B2 are “technical”: they involve a kind of means-ends reasoning.

One possibility is to give situations A1-B1 to one group and A2-B2 to a different group. One could then compare the reasoning and argumentation of children who are given a “normative” vis- à-vis a “technical” narrative. To this end, one might use the theory of argumentation and other tools of discourse analysis. One could also do some standardized numeracy tests (perhaps those used by Opfer & Siegler, Dehaene, Piagetian conservation tests, etc.) after the main tasks in order to evaluate if each of these normative contexts has “sensitized” the child to quantities in a special way; i.e. if the children who just completed the “technical” problem perform better or worse than the children who did the “social-normative” problem.

Another possibility is to give the same children all four situations so as to compare the features of quantitative thinking in technical vs. normative contexts in the same children.

Still thinking…

The normativity of human knowledge

2 Replies

I am now reading Prof. Castorina’s lectures on Genetic Epistemology. There he makes the case that human knowledge in general, and scientific knowledge in particular, involves a normative dimension that is often overlooked by naturalistic approaches to knowledge.

Let me explain this topic in my own words. Naturalized Epistemology is right in considering human knowledge as a fact of the world. Human beings are real, corporeal, natural entities. Human beings have (are) bodies; they have a physical existence. Any explanation of human knowledge must recognize that humans can know their world only insofar as they are equipped with wet computers (aka brains) that receive information from the world, process it, and respond to the world in a certain manner. There’s input, information processing and output. If your computer gets broken (in a serious car accident, for example), you might lose your ability to know the world.

Although I am already using a highly metaphorical language here (because the brain is different from a digital computer in many significant ways), I can buy the previous description up to this point. Human knowledge is a natural phenomenon and therefore it can be studied by using the methods of the natural sciences (for example, the neurosciences).

Yet when we look at actual human beings engaged in knowledge-related practices (human beings investigating, thinking, theorizing, teaching, learning and discussing about different issues) an important aspect of human knowledge comes to light. Not only do people know about certain things, they also know that what they know is true. For instance, they know that the sentence “dogs are mammals” is true; and they can defend the truth of such a claim through arguments. People can (and frequently do) justify most of their knowledge claims. They offer reasons why things are in a certain (and not in another) way. They argue for specific positions. They follow rules and shared criteria for adjudicating between rival hypotheses. They claim that some assertions are true and they also claim to know why they are true. In certain cases (two plus two equals four) most human beings would argue that the truth of this claim is universal and necessary. That is, they would say that they know not only that things are in a certain way, but also why they must be that way and couldn’t possibly be in any other way.

To put it differently: people care not only about the efficacy of their knowledge (whether what they know allows them to adapt effectively to the external reality) but also about the legitimacy of their knowledge. Any observation of actual human beings involved in knowledge-related practices makes this point self-evident. Any observation of naturalistic epistemologists giving talks in conferences or workshops or making arguments to convince others makes this point self-evident. They are not just blind mechanisms sputtering output; they try to be rational, sensible, persuasive.

There is a normative dimension to human knowledge. The problem with the naturalistic approach to human knowledge is that it cannot bridge the gap between the mechanistic – naturalistic level of explanation and the normative phenomena. What humans know is not just the result of some material mechanism (involving the interaction between the world and the wet computer) but is also the result of a complex socio-cultural normative process that requires to be addressed on a different level. The natural sciences by themselves cannot account for this normative component; norms and institutions must be included.

Epistemology, therefore (and this is Castorina’s point) should deal with the fundamental problem of how people and societies give themselves norms. Any relevant epistemology must start by recognizing the normativity of human knowledge.

 

“Let’s trade” and “my turn”

Leave a reply

My son L. is 3y 1m old. He’s started recently to use the expression “let’s trade” (“te cambio”). That is: he produces speech acts aimed at swapping objects with another person. For instance, he gives away his glass of milk in order to obtain a yoghurt cup I have. We exchange goods. He seems to understand that the proto- contract we thus celebrate involves the mutual surrender and handing over of possessions. The rules of reciprocity are no doubt regulating this interaction. Which doesn’t mean that the child can understand conceptually, let alone articulate, such rules.

In addition, when playing with other children, L. knows how to claim his turn to use a toy (shouts “¡Turno mío!”). He also uses this expression in other contexts; for instance, to demand his turn to drink mate (in a mate round shared with adults). Again: his understanding of the reciprocity rules involved is perhaps incipient. But L. is clearly starting to master the rhetorical forms that allow efficient access to the desired objects.

My hypothesis: the child first masters the rhetorical forms, and only later the conceptual content. Piaget’s prise de conscience (the conceptual, explicit insight) is the final product of a process that starts with immediate, un-reflected action. The process goes from the periphery of action to the center of explicit, conceptual thinking. Differently from Piaget, however, in the periphery I do not see the actions of an organism but the utterances of a retor.

Piaget and the logic of action

1 Reply

I’m reading Prof. Castorina’s lectures on Genetic Epistemology. They’re quite good.

One of the points he explains very clearly is that, for Jean Piaget, logic emerges out of the individual’s coordination of actions (or action schemata). Piaget considers that one of the basic features of all living forms is their tendency to self-organize. He thought that this principle or “functional invariant” applied to all levels of development, from basic organic forms to complex human behavior. It is an essential part of self-preservation that organisms produce complex and organized structures and that they maintain such organization actively throughout time in order to survive. Successful self-organization is thus the counter-part of successful adaptation; they are parallel processes, two sides of the same coin.

I buy it up to that point. But Piaget extends this biological framework further: intelligent life is manifestation of life as such; the same laws that apply to living forms also apply to intelligence and to cognitive development. Logic derives from action, and action is understood in biological terms. Logic reflects the inner organization of action. For example, the organized actions of babies that move, order and categorize objects are at the root of the (developmentally later) mental operations of classification, seriation, number, etc. The very logical principle of “conservation,” so central to Piaget’s theory, derives from the organism’s tendency to self-organize and self-preserve.

It is as if a logical instinct were inherent to human action. For Piaget, there’s a continuum that goes from biology, through action, up to logic and scientific knowledge.

In my opinion, Piaget underestimates the discontinuities between animal cognition and human knowledge. I consider the latter as an institutional phenomenon (I try to explain in other places). As I see it, the deontological nature of human knowledge is not reducible to biological action.

 

Ritualized exchanges at three years of age

Leave a reply

My son L. is taking a bath. He’s 3 years – 1 month. After playing around in the water for a while, he says “I’m a fish”. Then looks at me and says: “I am a penguin.” I reply: “Hello, penguin”. He: “Nice to meet you”. Then he adds: “I pay” (extends his hand as if giving me money). I extend my hand and say: “Here is your change.” Then he says: “Here’s a gift” (and again extends his hand). So I say, “Oh, what is it?” He answers: “A perfume”. He then gives me several more presents, sometimes saying that the gift is “a perfume”, and at other times saying it’s “a surprise”.

I find this sequence very interesting. Our interaction comprises a continuous series of conventional behaviors that are typically used to start social exchanges and to keep them alive. So we go from “greetings” to “payment,” and then to “gift-giving”. Children, of course, do not understand payments as a way to deliver a certain amount of monetary value in the context of a sale or some other economic contract. Rather, they ​see payment as a ritualized exchange, in that sense similar to gift-giving or greeting rituals (as we know from the research in the area of children’s economic notions, such as Berti and Bombi’s, Delval’s, Jahoda’s and Danziger’s among many others). All the actions performed by Leon are instances of ritual exchanges, realized with a purely associative purpose, that is: he interacts in order to keep me engaged in interaction.

Misunderstanding Piaget

1 Reply

Re-reading Piaget and García’s Psychogenesis and the History of Science (Piaget & Garcia, 1988). I like the way they explain the Piagetian project in the introduction.

It is clear to me that many of Piaget’s critics misunderstand the object of study of genetic psychology (either purposely or by ignorance).They criticize Piaget as if he was talking about the child as a concrete, integral individual (involving emotional, biological, socio-cultural and cognitive aspects); that is, as if Piaget were talking about the same child that is studied by developmental psychology.

Yet Piaget makes it very clear that it is not such a concrete child he’s studying but, rather, he’s concerned with an abstraction: the epistemic subject, i.e., the child as embarked on the construction of justifiable, i.e., normative knowledge; the “child as scientist.” Thus in section 2 of the Introduction Piaget and García make it clear that they are not concerned with the psychophysiology of human behavior (actions as material events, consciousness, memory, mental images, etc.) Rather they’re only interested in the child’s construction of cognitive instruments insofar as they are (or become) normative, that is, insofar as they come to be organized according to norms that the individual either gives herself or accepts from others during the processes of knowledge acquisition. If A. Gopnik (to give just one example, among many possible others, of an author that puts forward a distorted version of Piaget’s theory, and keeps defeating the strawman over and over again) understood this distinction, half of her criticisms of Piaget would instantly become pointless.

Piaget, J., & Garcia, R. (1988). Psychogenesis and the History of Science. New York: Columbia University Press.