During my years in Baltimore, I worked with several Chinese and Japanese colleagues, and we frequently went to eat together at Chinese restaurants – the greater Baltimore area has several excellent ones. We always shared dishes, whether whole entrées, or dim-sum, small plates with 3-4 pieces of delicacies – dumplings of all sorts and shapes, steamed or fried, sweet and savory cakes, stuffed buns, rice wrapped in lotus leaves, and so much more. To properly eat Chinese food one has to use chopsticks, which I had never really used before. With communally shared food, to manage to feed oneself requires efficient use of eating utensils, and my friends found this a great motivation for me to learn how to use chopsticks.
When I began my tries at holding a pair of chopsticks, my fingers did not know what to feel for, what was relevant for the hold and what not. When trying to imitate how my friends were holding their chopsticks, my eyes did not know what to look for, to see the important part of the hold and ignore the unimportant. I tried to copy the way my friends held their chopsticks, my eyes looking at their fingers, then at mine, adjusting, registering what my fingers felt, then try to use. Reach to grab a dumpling with the chopstick tips, use the tips to tear a piece of cake, try to bring the piece over to my mouth, registering what my eyes saw, what fingers felt. Sometimes I held the chopsticks too close to their tips, sometimes they were not stable enough and the morsel of food would fall off, sometimes too stable and could not open to grab. Amidst my friends’ mirth and guidance, there was a clear criterion for whether I had learned how to use chopsticks: could I feed myself? could I grab a piece of food and bring it from the plate to my mouth? For the first few outings I did go a bit hungry, but eventually I began to get a feel for holding the chopsticks, one always held stable, the other mobile, controlled by the thumb and index finger. My fingers learned to recognize the chopsticks, adjust them, coordinate with my eyes. And with practice I got better and better, and now can comfortably hold and use different kind and size chopsticks, long, short, thick, thin, very thin, wooden or plastic or even metal ones.
It is through such trial and error processes that we develop abilities, learn, acquire knowledge. Sensations – from the eyes and fingers in the case of the chopsticks – come together with muscle movements (hand and fingers). Muscle movements and their effects on the world result in a change in sensations, adjustment of muscle movements, and this back and forth continues, until a goal is reached – in the case of the chopsticks, get to grab a piece of food, get the food into the mouth. This trial and error process brings together our body and the world, and as the back and forth of sensory input and muscle output goes on, our sensations are organized into perception of objects and our movements into discernible actions directed toward these objects. The objects we perceive in the world emerge through the feedback provided by the results of our actions. An important feature of this trial and error process is that the more we do, the better we become at doing, at integrating perception and action. Practice makes perfect.
This is also how we begin to learn a language, through a trial and error process, under someone’s guidance, pointing at the world, hearing a sound, vocalizing (moving lips, jaws, tongue, vocal cords), hearing our own sound and receiving feedback from our guide as well. And in this way we organize our perception of the world into objects, objects we associate with specific sounds, and it is an organization compatible with that of our guides and teachers.
With trial and error, we learn and develop abilities on our own, by engaging with the world on our own, but also by copying others (sometimes even animals). We also learn through socialization, under the guidance of others. We learn because we may be driven to satisfy a need (eat or drink), be praised by a tutor, feel good about mastering something, or we could be just playing, getting our senses and muscles to work together.
We are all of course intimately familiar with what I have written above, with how we develop abilities, how we acquire knowledge, how we link our perceptions and actions. We do it all the time, but usually we do not spend much time reflecting and thinking about it. But our knowledge, our abilities, provide the basis for our experience of the world, how we perceive and act.
“…We are all of course intimately familiar with what I have written above… but usually we do not spend much time reflecting and thinking about it…”
Learning is based on trial and error. It may sound trivial to say that learning is an ACTIVE process. However, we tend to forget it in our communication with others.
From a cognitive load perspective, this happens due to the fact that our cognitive resources are limited. When we communicate our ideas to others, we have to impose extra cognitive load to ourselves if we try to think of the mental or emotional states of the others.
Consider, for example, lecturing to many students, which is the the primary experience of formal education. It is easy to offload our information using PowerPoint. But we should not wonder why 60% of students find lectures boring. Even so, if we take into account that learning of students should be active, then we have to manage a very serious supply and demand problem. That is why listening skills of teachers are not so easy to acquire.
This supply and demand problem also exists in developing and applying our personal metacognitive skills. Self observation has benefits but also it has its costs. Trial and error implies that there exists something “correct” among many other possible options. Our working memory can process only three things at the same time. Combinatorial explosions are always lurking and ,in a way, we have to become cognitive misers in order to survive.
Of course, this cognitive load perspective deals with learning in a narrow time scale. I think what you write here has very important implications for our personal and collective decisions about learning.
I am unsure what to make of the limitations of our cognitive resources. For example, think of the “cognitive load” of a tennis player: monitors the opponent’s movements, position, speed, the way the racket hits the ball, the sound it makes, the speed and spin of the ball, and at the same time moving legs, taking position, moving hand and racket to hit the ball, deciding where to place the ball, and at the same time thinking and planning ahead. But the player appears unfazed by the “load”, even returns serves of 100+ miles per hour that require reaction times of less than half a second. This kind of performance has taken a lot of training, a lot of practice. And so it goes for thinking about the mental and emotional state of the ones we are trying to communicate with: it takes training and practice. I don’t see what cognitive resource limitations and loads have to do with it.
I am also not sure why “Trial and error implies that there exists something “correct” among many other possible options”. Trial and error might very well fail, no option emerges as possible, no ability crystallizes. And if there are many possible options, many different abilities that could crystallize as outcomes of a particular trial and error process, what does “correctness” have to do with it? “Correct” with regard to what standard? Either an ability emerges or it does not. If an ability emerges, this does not preclude that someone else, in the same situation, might not come up with something different. And even if an ability does not emerge, this does not mean that someone might not succeed later. This open-endedness of learning in the world is manifested by the multitude of possible ways of living in the world. Reality can accommodate them all – and it would seem it can accommodate many more as well.
Part I
I liked the chopsticks example because it conveys with clarity one of the ways we acquire new skills in our adult life. But let me frame this discussion, as I understand it, at the outset: I hold that we, as evolved species, have a certain predisposition (wiring, modules, whatever) for all our learning, which is unfolded in constant interaction with the environment natural and social / cultural. If we agree in this then we can go one step further and examine particulars of the learning tropes, individual differences in learning, explicit and tacit knowledge etc. that will (should) also shape our teaching methods. This post could have ended here, the below are just a few further comments.
I occasionally give professional training courses and a constant theme recurring there, as the psychologists undoubtedly know, is that adults are only interested in hearing something akin to their practical everyday problems. If one asks an eight years old child, “do you want me to teach you a Norwegian Christmas song?” the answer will most of the times be yes – this example is to be of more value if we assume that the participants are not Norwegian and the scene is not unfolded in Norway. That wouldn’t be the typical reaction of an adult. You can make your own stories of the reaction depending on the relationship; some wouldn’t be that polite.
One could analyze the chopsticks example with the “spiral of learning” theory (of sorts) used always for adults. There were times where Yiannis successively didn’t know he didn’t know, knew he didn’t, didn’t he did and knew that he knew to use the Chinese kind of cutlery for picking his morsels. This typical cliché, the spiral learning, is used in the type of “train the trainer” courses with a warning. When adults don’t know they don’t know, unless there is a motivation for them to want to know, any attempt to train them will give them the shudders so the response to trainer will be as if he attempted flogging. The only motivation is the connection of the training topic with some real problems of their professional (or personal) life else the trainer had better find another job. There are some tricks to attract their attention of course and avoid their mental fooling around during the course but the reality does not change. With the kids is different.
But do we really learn everything the same way? Is trial and error really depicting what it happens in obtaining knowledge, particularly tacitly, or it is simply a convenient metaphor? Even the children, who, let us agree on this, have an immense appetite for learning all Christmas songs and other strange things alike, are really keen of learning everything? And can all things for that matter be taught the same way, some kind of the spiral theory perhaps? I think not. Even the adults learn things in different ways albeit the word “learn” for such situations may not be approved by the staunch supporters of the spiral, or trial and error theory. Is the word “I learn” equally suitable for trigonometry, boiling eggs, a poem by heart, shooting 3-pointers, acquiring language or controlling one’s anal sphincter at the age of 30 months?
Let us concentrate on kids and rephrase the question. Do kids learn everything by experience? This absolute collective includes, what else, everything; the sensation of space, time, self, body control and even learning of language. I know, this is maybe an undue extension of Yiannis’s scope, but even for the sake of the discussion, it may be worth reinstating some very old controversies over the learning tropes.
The recursive theme is the question whether we acquire all knowledge by sheer experience or we come to this life armed with certain weaponry of sensations, ideas or perceptions. At this point it is not important to state some; it is enough to ask the question. It may be stated cum grano salis that philosophy can be read through the history of this core question.The first who introduced the subject, as a by-product of his theory of ideas, was Plato. The need to answer the basic question of what really allows us to classify all trees (as an example) under the notion (or word) “tree” despite the entourage of manifestations surrounding it, marked the history of ideas ever since. The war of the titans (figuratively…) over the substance goes on until our days in different frames but equally fierce and deadly. This is not our subject though; what is interesting for us is Plato’s delicate attempt (in his dialogue Meno) to produce from it, and through the immortality of soul, the theory of anamnesis (recollection) which basically states that certain knowledge is innate and recollected by the soul through proper inquiry. One of Meno’s slaves appears to prove this by discovering a geometric truth without ever having heard of geometry in his entire life.
Aristotle, more earthly as always, emphasized the mind-body interaction over the primacy of the soul and the inborn nature of knowledge; a position shared by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. For a change, he was rather right. The controversy went on in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but was given the characteristics of a real battle after Descartes, between the rationalists (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz) and empiricists (typically Brits, Hobbs, Locke, Hume and Mill to name but a few in both groups) the latter holding, to one or the other degree, the view that all knowledge is empirical and the man is born with a tabula rasa soul, a blank slate. Kant compromised somehow between the two, much like Aristotle in the practical consequences of the problem, that is in education; other than that he clearly accepted a form of innate knowledge through the a priori categories. Empiricism, in general, thrived in the 19th century; the most influential philosopher (but not necessarily the deepest) Karl Marx, was clearly an empiricist and disavower of human nature, a position lucidly stated in his famous 6th thesis on Feuerbach (…but the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual in its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations). Marx definitely was not on the limb, yet another influential philosophy of the 19th century, Peirce’s pragmatism, howsoever empirical it might sound, did not reject rationalists’ ideas outright.
Nowadays, and after the logical positivism of the early 20th century (which, although empirical in nature, received pronged attacks, occasionally dastardly) we have the same discussion between (the vast majority of) evolutionary psychologists and anti-realist thinkers that mostly belong in the analytic school. Not too many such thinkers I reckon, for the controversy between the defenders and attackers of innate ideas seems to be of parochial interest now. After the prevalence of the Darwinian thinking, the advent of genetics and many related fields of research, it is untenable for anyone to refuse that we are born with certain pre-wired (use any term you may like here) concepts, skills, ideas or whatever, or, better, with the neural network and the innate structure to acquire certain, though not all, skills through experience. Pure empiricism seems to have gone bust.
In any case we are not blank slates and, if one accepts this, the big step forward has been taken despite of the nuances, exaggerations or dogmatism that are abundant in either side. For example, whatever the new manifestations of this core idea may be, humanity should never return to the, starkly wrong, 6th thesis on Feuerbach looking forward to living in the world of angels once the means of production, the current ownership of which bends out and warps our behavior, pass to the working classes and become common. Nor it will strive again to nurture children in the kibbutzim away from their parents, allegedly for the better. You see, theoretical views, ideas, beliefs, you name it, have distinct, ineluctable and usually bitter consequences on this planet’s very conducive evolved animals, called humans, and their lives. Unfortunately, humans look for their tethers where they are not and the denouncement of human nature only cedes vast swathes of territory to futile and irrational hopes.
Nancy approached the same issue, of whether there is knowledge we are born with, from a different direction under Experience and Knowledge. I agree that we are born with dispositions, with needs that call to be satisfied, along with a tremendous potential to learn. We are also born with pre-wired reflex arcs; for example, our eyes will blink if something touches our cornea, our leg will raise itself if we step on a pin, while the other leg will adjust to accommodate the shift in load. As Michael says, it is through the unfolding of this potential in interaction with our social and physical milieu that we learn, we acquire abilities, we become who we are.
We are definitely not born as blank slates, and there is actually a certain commonality in what we are born with, if we judge from our ability to not only be socialized into our own particular culture, but even in adult life to learn to live as part of another. At any rate, it is from this common potential that all of us, from early infancy onward, learn through trial-and-error, through this “learning spiral”, through a back-and-forth with the material world.
This back-and-forth with the material world shapes the substrate we are born with, channels the unfolding of our potential. Our abilities are not simply the result of the unfolding of our potential – the unfolding takes place in continuous engagement with the material world, within our particular physical, social, cultural milieu. The learning process that takes place through this back-and-forth selects, enhances certain potentialities, while rejecting, suppressing others – it is through such selection and rejection that abilities form. Without this interaction with the material world, without the “learning spiral”, our potential would remain too rudimentary, too amorphous, and would not develop into the abilities we refer to as knowledge.
From this perspective, what I find striking in the account of western philosophy that Michael presented is the continuous neglect of the active engagement with the material world and its role in the acquisition of abilities and knowledge. The emphasis on the nature/nurture distinction instead appears rather puzzling. What’s the fuss?
For societies with complex and intensive division of labor (which include our own, as well as those from before the times of Plato), our lives depend on the maintenance and reproduction of the social order. Our socialization and acquisition of abilities is therefore of paramount importance. Moreover, individuals with different paths to socialization and different abilities end up occupying different positions in production and have different access to resources. In trying to understand what one becomes and where one ends up in the social order, the roles of nature and nurture serve to legitimize or de-legitimize one’s position in that social order. So, there is definitely something very important to fuss about. But, in my view, the emphasis on nature and nurture misses the point.
Yianni thanks for the reply. I don’t disagree with the above but, frankly, I feel that still there is a somehow different approach. I am not sure what it is so let me simply call it for now “a matter of degree” continuing my typical western quantification where it may not be applicable, granted. Anyway, I have a 2nd part in my original reply, which concludes my approach and without which the 1st part looks limp. It is of the same length but, as Pascal wrote to his sister in a long letter, I had no time to make it shorter. Apologies.
This tackles language and learning and may shed some light in our points of view. It is clearly stated therein that the nature-nurture debate is a fuss, a very good point to start exploring further, probably over a glass of wine (or two!). The scrappy account of the Wester philosophy was given exactly to depict (as I see it) the long story of this debate and its inglorious bashing in today’s evolutionary perspective; however the debate is still hot in political, artistic, religious and philosophical views which forebodes grim results.
Part II
Language is a good example. One may be with or against Chomsky, who, I have to concede, is not the political philosopher of my taste. First, Chomsky is not (when he is something) the only supporter of the idea of a language wiring and, second, his theory is just a theory of linguistics whose X and X’, sooner or later, will follow Wittgenstein’s, Saussure’s, Sapir-Whorf’s, Derrida’s and other theories into the museums of ideas or into litterbins. Empiricists of today seem to use Chomsky’s maverick idiosyncrasy and his often frivolous personality as a talisman against the ogre of rationalism wafting invitingly over the sacred tabula rasa convictions. Yet, the basic idea (his as well and this has to be credited to him) of a common human evolved wiring (I insist, the wording here is irrelevant) to accommodate language cannot be abandoned; at least, not in favor of any tabula rasa theory that attributes language learning to pure empirical efforts. A toddler cannot learn by trial and error the endless syntactical and lexical combinations as it would take ages to go through them all. Our ability to understand pure forms, or universals, from the individual members of a certain class, that is to grasp easily and without any effort the essence of “treeness” from a very tender age and regardless of the manifest differences between a tall bush, a lemon tree and a whopping oak, is mind-boggling. I guess the problem of substance is the origin of all pertinent philosophical questions too. I have seen no mother teaching her precious sprout the collective meaning of “treeness” enumerating all sorts of trees, or trees of sorts; certainly mine didn’t.
The great platonic question, one of a genius indeed, separated from its feeble platonic answer, would have been still open had the neuroscientists not seen this today as a property not of the individual trees but of our brain. Greek language has maintained this connection by referring to the noun –grammatical category and a collective entity comprising members sharing an essence – with a word akin to essence / substance (ousia): the “ousiastikon”. As we speak, significant progress seems to have been been made in the location of the brain area that hosts this ability, mainly through latest technical advances as well as observations on impaired persons who lacked the ability to understand the universals.
In addition, and in a different context, trial and error theories cannot be an ultimate cause for the evolvement of the pidgin languages, formed by adults coming from vastly different linguistic environments, into grammatically complete languages (creole) when adopted and used by kids without any teaching (Derek Bickerton). This language-making is analogous with the sign languages spontaneously developed between impaired people (deaf-mute) in Nicaragua without any involvement of the relatives, schools etc. whose attempted techniques like lips reading had miserable and often negative results (plus that the users hate it). These pidgin-like proto-languages evolved later in grammatically and syntactically full languages when adopted as such by other kids (Judy Shepard- Kegl, Nicaraguan Sign Language). A sort of trial and error during the formation of these languages cannot be argued against but is this really an explanation? It is impressive that deaf-mute children not exposed at the suitable age into any sign language (usually, because their non-impaired parents trusted the old and overbearing tradition of lips reading and speaking with the lips) when later submerged in sign linguistic communities acquired the sign language but with the problems of the adults who try to learn a foreign language (Jenny Singleton).
Definitely, we do not learn the language like we learn to tell time.
Now, if we accept that rationalism has tilted the balance in its favor, we ought to follow certain methods of education, or, at least, reject others irrespective of how entrenched by the centuries they are notwithstanding their ineffectiveness. Kids and pupils alike are neither noble savages nor infinitely malleable minds given the right teacher and method. I may me preaching to the converted here and all these may sound trivial and superfluous – hopefully not Greek. But not all learning is a product of pure trial and error. (My personal opinion is that no learning is realized by pure trial and error as we know it from numerical analysis for instance, in the sense that the error, most of the times, is as tacit as the knowledge itself; we only recognize the failure to achieve the goal, which is the same no matter the distance from the goal, and often, but not always, the distance from the goal. Nevertheless, I understand the process behind and I agree; what I am saying is that another term would probably lend itself more aptly). We perform a lot better, and therefore we may learn quickly, in some contexts (see for example the Wason experiment) or we have a natural difficulty to grasp and manipulate certain concepts (e.g. probabilities) no matter the trials.
All modern theories of learning from Pavlov and Piaget to behaviorists and the lauded Vygotsky illuminated perhaps (the “perhaps” is not cosmetic here) parts of this untamed animal in an ocean of words, but have left out of the picture the fundamental element of our nature; first what we can or cannot do, second how our making interferes with the facts of the outside world, or the repository knowledge of our era which we want to learn, and third how we will overcome these barriers as deftly as possible in the social and natural environment we are in. Learning may not be the same, but is, definitely, not entirely different, for a scientist combatting the unknown and a pupil in the elementary school. We have always to overcome the stumbling blocks of our nature (sticking to convictions, seeking for verification, disregarding experience, overwhelmed by inborn as well as acquired heuristics, dominated by an insatiable appetite for causality hence neglecting randomness- to name but a few).
Yet, we have three (usually) faithful and powerful allies: 1) the logical part of our brain when and to whatever extent can get separated from the emotions that is our bounded rationality. It is bounded, but, nevertheless, it is rationality too 2) the comparison with the outside world (that is the empiricism although not the pure one) and 3) the fact that many of us will examine the same issue and will disagree, contest or attack each other hopefully bringing into the open errors, defects, emotions, hidden purposes, motivations or self-interest. It is here where the human nature does miracles against itself. I would add a fourth: our improvement in the understanding of ourselves as humans; mainly the deeply rooted and severe restrictions of our mind which was evolved to cope with an environment vastly different than the one we live. All these will facilitate teaching and learning from the kindergarten to Nobel laureates. Our theories on learning should be put to work and be tested in practice if we want to be pragmatic.
I apologize for holding the floor and being, perhaps, out of topic, but I would like to stress that it pays to refer to this basic thesis, namely that the evolved brain structure matters a lot. This, very well grounded, view combines the two worlds, the rational and the empirical and has, or should have, huge impact on the way we see education. It is also the end of the either/or dipole of dilemmas such as nurture or nature, genes or environment and the like. Trial and error may be part of learning, albeit often an insufficient explanation as a lot of learning involves neither trial nor error. When it appears to play a role may have no practical consequences, cannot bring about guidance to the others.
For the sake of fairness though I must note that the way the debate has been framed in the course of the centuries proclaims rationalism as clear winner for the simple reason that rationalists, with the exception of Plato perhaps, never rejected altogether the empirical tropes of knowledge. With a fate’s ironic blow, the rationalists refused to close their eyes to the empirical world, something the pure empiricists did all the way through only to have their clocks cleaned as an aftermath.
Commonplace, but try to fall from the balcony like a cat through trial and error or, on the other hand, try to teach a gorilla to eat using chopsticks no matter how many hours of training and affection you might spend with him (or her). If he (she – Koko maybe) can learn, tell me so that I concoct a better example – Popperian falsification at its best!
I very much appreciate Michael taking the time to provide his perspective on learning. He brings up several instructive points. He states, for example, that “A toddler cannot learn by trial and error the endless syntactical and lexical combinations as it would take ages to go through them all.” By the same token, one would also say that a driver cannot learn by trial and error the endless combinations of road conditions, cars, and driving actions required, as it would take ages to go through them all. But we do manage to drive, though it is rather unlikely that we are pre-wired to do so — we do not possess a driving organ as far as I am aware. The same point can be made for virtually all of our actions and activities (with the exception of reflexes, and those only in certain instances), with linguistic communication being just another example. Regarding the learning of a language, I have a couple of comments. One is that our potential to learn a language, and more generally to communicate, varies widely, with autism for example being associated with severe difficulties. Another is the case of Alex, the African Grey parrot, who learned a fair amount of words and phrases, talked and listened, and was able to use language creatively, that is, in novel situations.
But I would agree that we are pre-wired for communication, we want to, we strive to communicate, and this provides the drive and goal for the trial and error learning process that allows for language acquisition.
Michael provides another example, about trees and the notion of “treeness”, saying that he has “seen no mother teaching her precious sprout the collective meaning of “treeness” enumerating all sorts of trees, or trees of sorts”. Of course he has not! We learn what trees are through individual instances of what our mother tells us they are “trees” and “not trees”, complimenting us when we agree and correcting us (trial and error) when we disagree with her. But, to state the obvious, if someone had never encountered trees before, they would not know what to make of such features of the world were they to come across them, they might simply ignore them and relegate them to background. We do not learn by being taught any “collective meaning” but rather by trial and error through specific instances.
It is the persistent disregard of our interaction with the material world that leads Michael (and not only) to being mystified with how we can possibly develop abilities from just a few experiences, from a few instances of interaction with the material world. Every one of our encounters with the material world is novel, and in every such encounter we grasp only certain features of the world, the ones we have been attuned to from our previous experiences, from our previous learning. In every encounter, there is a host of the material world we relegate to background, we edit out, as we have not learned to discern features out of it. Our knowledge, our abilities, are not absolute, they have grades, and the more we practice the better we become. Our performance is error-prone (to different degrees of course), in linguistic communication, in driving, or in figuring out whether something is a tree or not, reflecting the patchiness and open-endedness of our knowledge about the material world. And we are all very familiar with this feature of knowing and being able to, it is part of our daily experience.
In the linguistic examples that Michael gives, as well as in every instance of linguistic communication, there is always a back-and-forth between the speakers and listeners, a back-and-forth taking place in a particular context, there will be requests for clarification, disagreements, errors, mis-hearings, re-phrasings, cross-checks, and so on. And the more people communicate with each other, the more they get used to each other and the better they get at it. Of course, with repeated trials and interactions, patterns develop in communication, regularities that are necessary for smooth, reliable communication that sustains coordinated activities. It is from these patterns that linguists extract what they refer to as syntax and grammar rules. But these patterns have developed through common (among the speakers/listeners) trial and error processes.
Michael also brought up the notion of “rationality”. The persistent disagreements about what is “rational” or not should give us pause. We have many ways of analyzing, measuring, comparing (rationalizing that is, putting things in ratio to compare them). These ways are always embedded in the particular practices through which we engage with the world, and may well amount to different rationalities, which cannot always be brought to agreement. Along the same lines, “universals” arise within certain ways of engaging with the world, through specific practices, they are always a local kind of “universals”.