okay so today we're going to talk about p and p is a constructivist and a constructivist is someone who's attempting to answer the question where does your personality come from now for PJ it would be more something like where do your models of the world come from but his idea of model of the world is so broad that it's perfectly reasonable to use personality as a proxy so here's one of P's initial propositions the common postulate of various traditional epistemologies epistemologies are theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge is a fact and not a process and that if our various forms of knowledge are always incomplete and our various Sciences still imperfect that which is acquired is acquired and can therefore be studied statically hence the absolute position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types of knowledge possible under the converging influence of a series of factors we are tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempt to holds fast dissolves once again in the current of development it is the last analysis of this development and of it alone that we have the right to State it is a fact what we can and should then seek is the law of this process he par he puts in parenthesis we are well aware on the other hand of the fine book by Thomas on scientific revolutions the first aim of genetic epistemology because that's what he called his field is therefore if one can say so to take psychology seriously and to furnish verifications to any question which each epistemology necessarily raises yet replacing the generally unsatisfying speculative or implicit psychology with controllable analysis to know means to act human knowledge is essentially active to know is to transform reality in order to understand how a certain state is brought about knowing an object does not mean copying it it means acting upon it knowing reality means constructing systems of transformation that correspond more or less adequately to reality knowledge is a system of Transformations that becomes progressively adequate in fact if all knowledge is always in a state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete an efficient one evidently it is a question of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible accuracy so here are the sorts of questions that P addressed himself to they're very fundamental questions um upon what does an individual basis judgments what are his Norms how is it that these Norms are validated what's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general and how does the fact that children think differently affect our presumption of fact itself more problems how do children conceptualize number in space and time and speed how do they understand that objects hidden from view are actually still there how do they understand that entities that can transform from one place to another are the same entities how do we understand chants or moral concerns play patterns and dreams or and how do we how is it that we imitate others and what does it mean that we can now here's a definition of constructivism this is from p as well knowledge does not begin in the eye and it does not begin in the object it begins in the interactions there's a reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one hand and the object on the other there's no structure apart from construction either abstract or genetic now so let's take some of that apart the first thing that P is pointing out is that trying to understand what knowledge is by referring to a body of facts seems to be somewhat problematic because sh facts shift with time and people understand facts differently at different stages of development even though hypothetically we all live in the same world it it turns out that we can get by in some sense with structures of knowledge that differ from one another I think the easiest way to understand that is actually to take something like a pragmatic perspective and pragmatist and I think p is a pragmatist and pragmatic people basically say that because they're interested in what constitutes truth and of course we know that we don't have absolute truth about anything so the question is if you don't have absolute truth about anything how do you know when what you know is enough and the pragmatic answer to that is you set your own conditions for truth with each of your actions and the way you do that is by specifying an outcome so if you tell a joke and the outcome is that people should laugh you know even if 70% of the people laugh then that's probably good enough and so you could say that you've done a good enough job of matching your social knowledge to the circumstance to obtain your desired end and so PJ's P P's Notions of what constitute knowled valid knowledge structures seem to be very much pragmatic in origin and it's also partly because PJ is a thinker who's who's deeply considered the fact of human embodiment and and in fact I think PJ has done that more than any of the thinkers that we're going to we're going to talk about and so for psj truth is determined in action the next proposition is that when you're trying to understand knowledge you should understand the process by which it's generated rather than the outcome of the knowledge process itself because the outcomes transform across circumstances but the nature of the process that you engage in to produce knowledge seems to be constant across situations so and what is that process well that's the that's the next part of constructivism for p you can think of for p in some sense the reality is a field of latent information and in interacting with that information you code some of it both physically physically and abstractly and out of that coding not only do you generate yourself but you also generate well if not the object itself so to speak at least your perceptions of the object so when you're continually engaged from a pedian perspective in trying to trying to produce certain transformations in the world and as you produce them in an embodied sense because you're acting in the world you map the Transformations that occur onto the transformations of your body and that mapping constitutes your practical knowledge so for as I said for PJ the body of of knowledge that guides you is always action predicated now I want to provide you with another way of understanding P so that as we go through what he has to say we can not only understand what he has to say but we can link it to the other things that we're going to talk about now there's a man named Jerome Bruner who talked about narrative constructivism and Bruner said we seem to have no other way of describing live time save in the form of a narrative so I'm going to review a little bit for you what might constitute a basic narrative and then I want to talk to you about the way that narratives transform because one of the pedian propositions is that at a given time in development you might have a way of interacting with the world say a schema that is good enough for the aims that you want to pursue at that particular point in time but there may come a time when there are transformations of one sort or another that could be specific to you or that could actually happen in the world where if you continue to perceive and act in that manner you're not going to get what you want and so for example one here's an an example from a developmental perspective when you're 8 years old it's probably okay for your mother to arrange play dates for you but if that's still happening when you're 15 there's a problem and and so you you can see that the manner in which someone interacts with the world even if it's successful at one point isn't necessarily successful in the next and sometimes there are qualita transformations in the world that mean that the structure that you're looking at the world through has to reconstruct itself to take in more information and then you have to act out that new body of knowledge that would be accommodation from a pedan point of view PJ assumes that there's two things happening when you're interacting with the world one is that your current body of knowledge is sufficient and all you have to do is add to it in a ra rather normative way and if any of you know anything about Thomas that is roughly equivalent to Thomas Coon's theory of normal science so normal science occurs when the body of theory within a g given scientific domain is quite sketched out and what people are doing is basically um mopping up the details so you might say that uh right now in personality theory the psychometric big five models are paradigmatic and what people are doing is not so much arguing about whether or not that structure exists but are arguing about something smaller which is H what information can you derive from the world if you take as your set of assumptions that those five dimensions exist and you can see that that's a less comprehensive question than do the five Dimensions themselves exist so assimilation is when you have a notion of how to act in the world so that things happen the way you want them to and you can just add more to that an accommodation occurs when instead the the novelty and the Transformations that you've encountered are so large that you have to reconstitute the theory itself in order to progress so for example in the in the example I used where when you're eight or nine years old you can have play dates arranged but you can't when you're 15 the reason for that is that you're undergoing a series of maturational changes a lot of a lot and a large number of them are physiological and so you have to change the assumptions that you use to deal with the world and so one of the Prime assumptions might be when you're a child that it's okay okay for one of your parents to serve as a mediator of your social interactions but by the time you've hit puberty then all of a sudden that becomes inappropriate and if you continue to use the same schema then well then you're not well then you're stuck at a developmental stage that you shouldn't be stuck at that'd be roughly equivalent to Freud's idea of uh fixation it's a a similar idea so we're going to go back to this little schema here and I'm going to recapitulate the idea that when you're looking at the world this is a pragmatic frame of reference it's also a cybernetic frame of reference and I think it's one of the easiest ways to understand a pedian schema or and the beginnings of a schemata so a schemata is sort of like an arrangement of schemas and schemas are like tools to deal with the world and the tool that you're you're using to deal with the world is the tool that gets you what you want when you act it out so here's some propositions with regards to how those schemas might be formulated one is is that you're somewhere that's point a and the next is you want some transformation in the world to occur otherwise you wouldn't be acting right so you have some vision of the outcome that you wish to obtain and then you have a sequence of behaviors at the most fundamental level of analysis you have a sequence of embodied behaviors that you can apply to the world and hopefully that produces the transformation that you want now now you can take a page from biology and you can say well a lot of these schemas or or brief narratives are embedded in biological systems so for example if you're hungry then that's going to set up a particular schema and if you're thirsty that's going to set up a particular schema and so on but human beings are capable of high levels of abstraction so that instead of pursuing direct biological goals we can perform operations that are in some way conceptually linked to the Fulfillment of biological goals in a social environment across large spans of time which is a much more complicated question you know because I might say well why are you guys sitting here what does that have to do with biological necessity and the answer is well in some sense it's rather tenuous and that it's multiple stages removed from absolute necessity but your hypothesis is instead of foraging around in the frozen ground for nuts it might be better to adopt a career because that'll solve all of your bi logical problems simultaneously and so again I'm going to repeat that so the animal's problem is how to fulfill a motivational state will say your problem is how to fulfill multiple motivational States in a social environment that's composed of many other people doing the same thing in the short term the medium term and the long term and you want to come up with a solution that will satisfy all those constraints simultaneously now PJ would regard a a solution like that that is an equilibrated State an equilibrated state is a is a solution that um isn't producing anomalies or Novelties when it's enacted in the world and so it's important to understand this because it forms part of the pedian uh theory of morality now P he was a kind of a strange guy he was a childhood Prodigy um he was studying animals in depth when he was a small child he published his first scientific paper when he was 10 which was on the behavior of mollusks and the next year he was offered the curatorship of a museum in Switzerland but his parents given his developmental stage had to tell the people who wanted him to take over the curatorship that he was only 11 and that it probably wouldn't be appropriate now when P was an adolescent he went through what you might describe as a Messianic crisis he actually regarded messianism messianism as a developmental stage that often characteristic characterized late adolescence and so at that stage people are concerned with the relationship between their individual lives and the broader social community and when he was in that messis stage and very much concerned about morality he was also suffering from the tension between scientific and religious points of view and one of the things that he wanted to do as an adult was to reconcile values with science or broad more broadly speaking religion with science but we'll stick to values and morality with science and I think he got farther Along on that than anyone else has and the equilibrated state is one of his most intelligent proposition so an equilibrated state would be something like it could be two things it could be you in a happy family and it could be the happy family it depends on your level of analysis but you in a happy family are going to be equilibrated because assuming that you're as happy as the rest of the family what that means is that you found a mode of operation that simultaneously works for you and for your family and a higher order equilibrated state would be happy you in a happy family in a happy City let's say and so there are multiple levels of potential equilibration and PJ's one of PJ's fundamental claims was that an equilibrated state was preferable so there's a value judgment there to a dise equilibrated state and the reason for that was that it took less energy per unit of work to maintain an equilibrated state so think about it this way so there's family a and there's family B and they're competing in a in a local environment and family B is very disharmonious and so in order for the family to get anything done or any of the individuals within the family there has to be a tremendous amount of conflict and so the load is whatever they have to do plus the conflict they have to go through in order to to do it and in many cases if the situation is disequil enough then the conflict that you have to go through to do whatever it is that you want to do actually requires more energy than the thing itself and so P's point was then whereas in a happy family we'll say an equilibrated family both the individuals and the family as a unit can move forward without wasting a lot of time in conflict and so P's idea was that you know in a in a race for Success however you happen to define success the equilibrated system is going to outperform the dise equilibrated system because the dise equilibrated system has to waste time and energy on enforcement that's a lovely idea it's it's a profound idea because what it does is it set up it sets up the preconditions for starting to understand how value judgments so to speak and value judgments are outcroppings of theories of action because a theory of action has to do with what you should do and that's a value judgment P would say that the the patterns of action and the value judgments that lead towards a more thoroughly equilibrated state are better now you can take that a bit further and you can say that and this is sort of akin to PJ's ideas that children go through stages of development that are somewhat identifiable across cultures although there's a fair bit of debate about that it's it's a quasi pedian notion that there only might be a finite number of equilibrated solution solutions to a set of given problems so you can imagine well you pop up on the horizon you're born and you're a particular kind of entity now there are some things that you can do as an entity to continue your your existence as an entity and there's other things that you can't do so you're bounded by a set of limitations and possibilities one of the limitations seems to be is that your family has to be sufficiently well integrated so that you get a certain amount of attention so for example if babies don't get a certain amount of physical attention in the first year of their life so nobody literally touches them and plays with them then they'll often die because their gastrointestinal systems will shut down and even if they don't die they're so impaired afterwards as a consequence of that lack of initial stimulation that they never recover and so you can see right off the bat that one of the preconditions for even for existence as a human being is that you have to be born into a familial environment that that has certain structures in place now some of them are obvious like well you should be fed and you have to be fed what you need to be fed and you have to be protected and sheltered and and you know you have to be exposed to a certain amount of information flow and so on so your physical obvious physical needs have to be taken care of but then there are less obvious things that you need from your local environment like physical attention literally touch and play and social interaction and language because if any of those are lacking in the initial developmental stages depends on the stage then you're going to be so crippled that you won't be able to you won't be able to survive and thrive in the world so then you can think that you know imagine that there's a set of constraints that Define the system within which you can Thrive as an individual then you might say well there's a of constraints within which a family can survive as a family without blowing apart and then if you put multiple families together in some sort of community there's a set of constraints that have to be met for those families to live together in relative Harmony and so on all the way up the levels of complexity and a properly equilibrated State as I said would be one where you're thriving in a thriving family in a thriving community and so forth all the way up the all the way up the chain of complexity so it's a very very very smart idea and you can also imagine that one of the things that that means is that representations of moral systems might have some similarities across cultures now we know this is true already because there are a number of human universals but if you take individuals and you put them in geographical area a and you take different individuals and you put them in geographical area B because of the nature of the constraints and the fact that there's some relatively limited subset of solutions that will satisfy everyone at each of those levels of analysis you're going to expect relatively similar moral systems to develop in different cultures and so it's also a powerful argument against moral relativism now you know relativism is a tricky thing because you know you can ask yourself well are people the same or are they different and the answer to that is well it depends on what you mean when you ask the question you know and I'm not being uh sarcastic about that that question is not answerable without some additional information about what you're up to because it's like saying well are human languages the same or different and the answer is well they're the same and different there are levels of analysis at which they're the same and there are levels of analysis at which they're different and whether you consider the levels of analysis with the similarities more important than the levels of analysis with the differences is going to depend on what you want as a consequence of asking the question so we do know that there are Broad and identifiable similarities across people that don't seem to be merely biological they're also biological and cultural and you know you can see examples of that pretty quickly by the fact that you know I think there are going to be more smartphones in the world next year than there are people and so it's pretty obvious that there's a universal market for smartphones and that says something about you know that says something about the makeup of people themselves regardless of culture because people find tools that facilitate social communication desirable and they find tools that facilitate information gathering desirable and they don't have to be taught to desire that they are just like that so anyway so like I said PJ is a good antidote to moral relativism because the idea that it's like this think about it this way because this is another way to understand it um I'll give you two examples there were multiplayer online games in the early stages of multiplayer online games that collapsed into Anarchy and then they had to be shut down and the reason for that was that they weren't playable games there was there was some flaw in their underlying set of assumptions that made them unsustainable as a meeting place for multiple human beings across large periods of time others are more others are more equilibrated and people will play them and so you can also think about a game as an equilibrated state for example and psj is quite smart about this sort of thing so let's say a Monopoly game well is it an equilibrated State well the answer to that is yes in so far as all the players finish the game and then you might say well all the players finish the game and they're still friends you know because that would be another level of specification or constraint that you could put on it but it's also interesting if you consider something like an enjoyable game as an equilibrated state that you can have competition within an equilibrated State a social Community with no problem as long as everybody agrees on what the rules for the competition are you know and so PJ actually regarded competition as necessary element of games because he said that a game it's very so interesting he he actually thought of competition in some sense as a necessary as necessarily tied in with with cooperation so here's an example um take a hockey game so then we could say well are people in the playing hockey are they competing or are they cooperating and the answer to that is well it's pretty hard to distinguish because all the players within a given team are cooperating in so far as they're a given team and what that means is that each player is trying to climb the hierarchy of competence within the team but at the same time maximizing the probability that the team will be successful across multiple games and and so that means that there's a set of constraints around how that player has to interact with his teammates right he has to work in a manner that enables the development of his teammates because otherwise it's a it's like a psychopathic strategy it's a bad long-term strategy and then you might say okay fine fine people are cooperating within the team but what about between teams and then the answer to that is well they're cooperating in so far as they follow the rules you know and that they don't bring a basketball to the hockey game or a a set a chess set to the hockey game because obviously you can't play chess and hockey at the same time and so everybody's agreed to act out a certain set of Behavioral constraints and in so far as they're doing that that's a Cooperative that's a Cooperative maneuver so that's pretty that's pretty interesting too P actually believed that children couldn't become social until So at their earliest stages of development as far as P was concerned children in some sense were playing by themselves and the reason they're doing that is because they're not very organized yet their bodies are sort of not completely under their control so you could think of a child as a non-equilibrated set of Quasi functional and quasi unified knowledge subsystems so for example when a child is born and they're laying on their back their arms are kind of floating around like this and the reason for that is there arms aren't melinated yet the baby's kind of melinated from a nervous system perspective in the center of its body and its mouth is pretty wired up but the rest of it isn't very formed and so what the child has to do is integrate him or herself as an individual entity and bring all those subsystems online and into something that's sort of integrated across reasonable lengths of time and then the next goal is to do that with someone else and that's about 3 years old when social play starts so then if if you and I are playing and we're playing say pretend play we're going to say well we're going to do X you know we'll lay out the ground rules we're going to do X and we can compete to get to towards X but if we couldn't have unified our goals so unified these frames of reference we wouldn't be able to compete in the same space and so one of the things p is pointing out is that it's clearly the case that a competitive game can can facilitate cooperation and in fact the establishment of such games might actually be absolutely fundamental to socialization itself so you know because well you don't just want a game that everybody can play I don't think so I don't think that's sufficiently motivating for people you want a game that everyone can play that everyone has a chance at winning because playing is something that's for sure and if it's a good game just playing it is interesting but winning is also something and so that places another constraint on those games that people find that people are willing to voluntarily play you know and one of the things that you can think about with regards to the 20th century is that the 20th century was an experiment in producing games that were predicated on rational assumptions about the nature of mankind so for example the Communist said well from each according to his ability to each according to his need which sounds like a pretty reasonable proposition right so you should work as hard as you can and and give what you can to the community and if you need something something from the community then it should be given to you and you think well you know that seems like a pretty positive presumption you know and there were other presumptions that went along with the theory as well like the fact that private property was something that was um a Scourge and and and to be eliminated and so you know lots of societies set that game up as a experiment in some sense and we found out very very rapidly that it didn't work so all games are not equally playable and that's a that's a a proposition that you can use to orient yourself in a world where people talk about the relativism of different moral beliefs now obviously there's some relativism because in our society for example you can do perfectly well playing the plumber game or playing the lawyer game and the plumber game and the lawyer game are obviously different at all sorts of levels of analysis and you know those are modes of being you could think of them in some sense as moral systems and both of them can operate in the same environment so even in an equilibrated State there's room for a fair bit of variability but its variability within boundaries just like the play when you're playing a complex game is variable within boundaries you know in most games that are enjoyable to play multiple times set out some pretty serious constraints but within that system of constraints they enable a lot of freedom so all right so you know that's that's an overview of P pH jedan Theory I mean I'm particularly interested with regards to this course in PJ's theories of moral development and I outlined them in some sense right there so you know one of the things that would happen is that once an equilibrated state is set up at multiple levels of analysis the child's job is to interact with the environment in a manner that doesn't that this class can go ahead without interruption is that you're all playing an equilibrated game roughly speaking you don't have to be here but you are and there's a whole large number of Unwritten procedural rules for being here and you're all following them you know and you can think about that as a consequence of some degree of tyranny and people have made that comments about classrooms and sometimes it's true but you can also think about it as a pretty successful equiv cated State because universities have been around for Thousand Years you know and they've continued to cross time so it looks like a it looks like a pretty good game so yeah the trick is is that the value systems emerge as a consequence of multiple constraints laid down by the fact that there are multiple levels of reality that have to be harmoniously working simultaneously and you know you're biologically equilibrated system in so far as you're healthy right because well none of your none of your DNA has decided to make a go of it on its own which is basically what happens when you develop cancer and so it's a stacking of systems on top of one another so that each is nested in the other and they're all working together and it's a you can imagine that's a very very tight set of constraints and there's certainly lots of situations where none of those are going to be met so what's your motivation for learning this fits very well into cybernetic models of of learning as well well you're motivated to learn when what you do doesn't produce what you want it to to do so that's another um that's another description of pragmatism fundamentally so remember this is an action-oriented Theory you're specifying the outcome and then you're acting on the world in order to bring it about and if it doesn't work then you have to reexamine your assumptions and then or it's funny you have to reexamine your assumptions which would be part of accommodation because you'd be shifting around the assumptions of the theory within which you're operating but you're also going to be assimilating new information too so for example you know if you maybe you're 15 or 16 and you've tried to establish a relationship with someone that you have a romantic interest in and that's failed multiple times well the first thing is it's obvious that you're the set of assumptions that you're bringing to bear on the situ situation are are inaccurate and you might say well what's the evidence that they're inaccurate and the answer is well you aren't engaging in any romantic relationships and that's the whole point of the theories so they're inaccurate in so far as they're not producing the desired outcome okay so then you might say well what could you do about that and one would be well you could gather some more information so one of the things I do with my clients for example if they happen to be terrified of the opposite sex which is you know generally is a is a that's a very high probability um situation I often get them to go to speed dating games because they can interact with 20 people in the space of an hour or two and it expands their knowledge of interactions and also their knowledge of the variability of the people that they're dealing with and so it's it's a form of exposure so you could say if you're using the old kind of habituation Theory you could say Well they're just getting accustomed to the situation but that's rubbish that isn't what they're doing at all what they're doing is going in there and they're interacting and each time they interact they gather more information and then what do they do with that information well they build it into themselves and that means that they start behaving differently and they start conceptualizing themselves in the world differently and so some of it's built in at a procedural level which means maybe they become more fluid and less awkward in their non-verbal self-presentation but at the same time they're also incorporating abstract knowledge that's going to help them expand their domain of competence and so for PJ the motive is if it doesn't work well then you should be motivated to fix it now you know that doesn't work under all circumstances because sometimes if it doesn't work it crushes you you know and so well that's something else we'll talk about here so okay so this little diagram kind of points out a little more complicated version of that so you're going from point A which is the unbearable present to point B and there's more or less two things that can happen and one is what you want to have happen and the other is something other than you want happens now sometimes the thing that you that happens that you don't want to happen is minor in which case you can just modify you don't have to change your whole Theory you can just modify one tiny sub element of it and you'll get where you're going so for example if I wanted to walk towards that set of doors there and I was going to do it blindfolded and I wasn't aware of this environment I would walk forward until I encountered a desk say and then I could just feel my way around the desk and continue forward so I wouldn't have to disrupt the whole plan I would just have to alter microelements of it but if I'm going to med school hypothetically and I write the MCAT and I get 30th percentile which 30% of the people get or lower right then you're not going to medical school and so that requires a radical read vamping of the of the system that you're using to schematize your world and you know you might say well that would be motivating to that would motivate you to see what you did wrong and to change it so you could go to medical school but sometimes it's just hopeless what you do this is a radical Act of accommodation is you do something else you know and you might go through an intervening period of tremendous chaos well everything has fallen apart into its subsidiary elements and you have no idea how to unify that once again into equilibrated state so so the diagram here shows you point a and point B it says when you're going to point a then what you want can happen and that's great because you move forward plus you validate the whole Theory or you can move forward in something that you don't unexpect H don't expect happens and you don't understand it and that stops you and if it's bad enough it invalidates the whole Theory now you might ask well what's the difference between a small dis ruption and a large disruption and that's a very complicated thing to figure out but and it took me a long time to figure this out I would say it probably took 20 years is that you could imagine that each of your your schema your systems of adaptation work in a given area and across a variety of circumstances okay then you could say the most fundamental assumptions that you have are the ones that for you have worked across the broadest possible range of situations and time spans so they work when you're alone they work with when you're with other people they work in the short term and they work in the long term if you disrupt a schema that's a schema that has oriented you across wide swaths of time and space then that's really going to disregulated you emotionally whereas if you disrupt a schema that's only locally operating like the table example that I gave you well it doesn't spread much it's you can make a minor adjustment that's only relevant to this time and place it'll produce a little burst of emotion sometimes even positive emotion because you just get curious about it instead of frightened so and I I can I'll show you as we proceed a little more formal way of schematizing that because when you're reading P you might ask well at what point does assimilation become accommodation and the answer that I just provided which I hope is reasonably comprehensible is is the best I can provide here's a more concrete way of looking at it you're a Premed student or let's do pre-law because let's pick on the pre-law students instead you're a pre-law student so you can imagine that there's assumptions that go into that think about them all um you're reasonably intelligent you're reasonably verbally intelligent you're you're going to do well on the elsat uh there's going to be a career as a lawyer waiting for you if you do well um being a lawyer lawyer is a perfectly valid way of being in the world from a moral and practical perspective being a lawyer is better than any other way of being in the world because other for you anyways because otherwise why why wouldn't you pick that okay so those are pretty fundamental assumptions and then you can think well how much of your schema do they underly well your judgment about your intelligence and let's say also your relative ability cuz you know ability isn't only intelligence that's a big one right you bring that with you pretty much wherever you go there may be some domains where you think well I'm not as smart as I could be there but it's usually quite a general assumption and so let's say you write the elat and you just bomb out it's like looks like you're not as smart as you thought you were and so then what do you do about that well it's rough because you not only do you have to reconstitute your vision of the future but you have to reconstitute your vision of the present and the past all those times that you thought you were so smart turns out you weren't so you can see that that's because those those presuppositions are so fundamental that disrupting them is going to produce a a fair degree of negative emotion so and you can tell from from this diagram you imagine that when you're moving forward from point A to point B there are there are obstacles that you can encounter that you know of and you can just put a detour in place or there are obstacles that emerge that you have no idea how to conceptualize whatsoever that often happens to people if they develop the symptoms of a very serious disease disease or if someone they love develops the Ser the symptoms of a very serious disease because not only are you not going where you thought you were with the person that you thought you were going but you don't know what's going to happen the interim so it's very very difficult to accommodate to that and so one of the things I think that PJ missed at least to some degree is that there's often catastrophic discontinuities in the stage progression you know and he was looking at little kids and how they put their cognitive schema together and generally they're not completely distraught and destroyed by the necessity for transformation in the purely cognitive realm but uh well I told you I think I told you my nephew's dream about the dragon did I tell you that yeah okay so he was going through a stage transition at that point because well there were two things happening one was that he was going off to kindergarten that's a big deal and then there was some instability in family and so he had to figure out how to cope with both of those and one of the ways of coping was to become more of an individual and his dream first of all laid out for him the problem the problem was there were problems those are all the little bitey things that were jumping up on them they're problems but that's not the problem the problem is is that the problems keep coming so not only are there problems but there's an indefinite number of them and there's something that gener Ates them it's like the Hydra you remember the Hydra in ancient mythology it's got seven heads you cut off one head seven more heads grow it's like that's life so you know what do you do under those situations and he had the symbolic notion first in the dream although I triggered that with my questions which was well you go right for the source of the problems and you do something about that now part of the reason that P thought that the study of knowledge was best construed as the study of the acquisition of knowledge is because you could say well here's a situation do you know what to do and you say yes I say great no problem in that situation but then I could say here's a situation and you don't know what to do well that's a problem but that's also the problem of life and so what's the solution to the set of problems that you have no answer to and the answer to that is assimilation and accommodation exploration assimilation and accommodation now when the little guy in the dream went down the dragon's throat he went to where the fire came out and you can imagine that if a dragon is belching fire and smoke and that's turning into little you know beak demons that the fire box which is a place of transformation seems to be the core of the problem well he went to the core of the problem and he cut part of it out and then he used that as a shield now that it's a brilliant solution because basically what it proposes is that there's enough information in the world and you're a good enough information processor so that if you use all the information that's lying latent in the world against the set of all possible problems it will work and I would say you know we have lots of clinical evidence that that's the case because one of the things we do for people in Clinical Psychology all the time is well they have a problem we unpack it into the things that are stopping them that they don't think they can master and then we put them in a situation where they're asked to develop Mastery over just those situations and it works and if you do an analysis of why it works it's not exactly that they become less afraid so let's say somebody's agrh obic and they don't want to go in an elevator and you teach them to go into the elevator you might say Well they're less afraid of the elevator but it's not exactly right what they are is more confident in their ability to be the sort of creature that can overcome fears and Prevail and therefore go in the elevator so instead of the world getting less dangerous they get braver which is a much better solution because the world is just not going to get any less dangerous so so the knowledge acquisition process is explore in the face of novelty and the novelty is Technically when you lay out something that you think you know and something else happens instead so this is a set of ideas that's in keeping with with uh PJ's pragmatic Viewpoint because uh let's see sorry about that so you might say well if you're if you're if you're basing your theory of knowledge on action what are the elements of that theory of knowledge because they're not exactly objects because objects are something that sort of exist outside the realm of what you're going to do with them at least in principle one of the presuppositions of science is that the object exists independently of its value but if your cognitive scheme are more or less action predicated then that isn't exactly how the world manifests itself to you not as an objective reality and here's a way of looking at it you're going from point A to point B and what do you see well you can look at it in different ways uh these are ideas that are taking taken from uh an ecological approach to visual perception which was written by JJ Gibson who's who has constructivist elements in his thinking so he would say that when you when you look at the world what you see are things that will facilitate your movement forward roughly speaking those are tools although he would have called them affordances it's kind of a broader category but no one knows what affordances mean so I'm going to use tools and the later scientists like Jeffrey gray pointed out that if you see something that facilitates movement forward that produces positive emotion so for example if I want to go up to that exit sign and I see see that pathway clear as it is now that's going to produce a little approach activation in me and make me feel good whereas if people have put six or seven pack sacks in the way and I look at that that's going to produce a bit of negative emotion right away because the other thing that you see in the world are obstacles tools facilitators affordances depending on how you look at it and obstacles and you manifest positive emotion to the tools and negative emotion to the obstacles and then there's class which is things that you don't know things you don't things you aren't able to classify as tools or obstacles but that aren't irrelevant and that's the class of unexpected things now along with tools and obstacles there's another rule which is you ignore almost everything right you ignore almost everything so most things have no value at all and the value is actually dependent to some degree on the schema that you lay on the situation so all right so I might as well tell you about this too so here's a here's a more elaborated description of what happens to you when you run into something that you don't know what to do with because remember you have to deal with the things that you don't know how to deal with which is a very peculiar problem because obviously you don't know how well what happens is that your body has default responses and one of the default responses is that you freeze because you tend to respond to anything that's unexpected as if it has a predatory impulse you know so you're back on the velt you know six million years ago and you hear something rustling in the bushes it's probably a or in the grass it's probably a pretty good idea to freeze because perhaps it's a predator and you don't want to attract its attention so one of the things that your body does to things you don't expect is to treat them as if they're predatory and you as if you're prey so you freeze and then you ramp up your physiology so your heart rate will go up for example and you might say well your heart rate goes up because you're afraid it's like well no that isn't why your heart rate goes up your heart rate goes up so that your heart pumps blood to your muscles and when you're afraid you want to have blood pump to your muscles because you want to use the damn things for running away or fighting if you have to and so that's why for example if you do psychophysiological experiments you can't just assume that raised heart rate rate means fear because it might excitement or any number of other things what it really means is that you're preparing to act well and so how do you prepare to act if you don't know what to do and the answer is you're pretty much prepare to do anything and that's really hard on you and if you stay in the if you stay in the mode of preparing to do anything for a long period of time then you age and you're more likely to become diabetic and you're more likely to become obese and you're more likely to get cancer and infectious diseases and so on and so forth because well partly because your body suppresses your immune system while you're in the state of not knowing what to do next because you know if if you have to fight with a tiger the next five minutes doesn't really matter if you're going to die of small pox in a year so your body just shuts off everything that isn't useful so and you might think about that as stress and that's a pretty good way of thinking about stress and then you might assimilate that to dominance hierarchies and here's how you could do it at the top of the dominance hierarchy everything you do works that's why you're at the top of the dominance hierarchy at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy nothing you do works that's why you're at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy now that might be the fault of the dominance hierarchy but as far as you're concerned it's irrelevant because the point is what's it doing to you and the answer is if you're at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy you don't know what's going to happen next and so you're always in a state of chronic preparation for activity and that's why you die sooner and you're more likely to develop infectious diseases and all sorts of things and that's even true if you control for absolute income so all right so that's kind of what this diagram indicates so this is a this is similar to the initiation rituals that we talked about before if you're in a schema and something comes along and knocks out one of the Pres supposition so what you're doing doesn't work then you're going to fall into an intermediate period of chaos and the chaos is going to be proportionate to the importance of the proposition that that was disrupted and the importance is going to be proportionate to how much you use that Axiom across multiple situations so you know I can give you a scientific example you may remember perhaps not a couple of years ago there was a report from someone in Europe that they had managed faster than light communication now the right response to that was no way because that means the most fundamental physical Theory we have that's passed like 50,000 other tests is wrong so and they say well extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence but had it been true it would have been Earth shattering because it would mean that the physical theory that physicists used not only to ramp up their career but to actually deal with the world had a fundamental AC atic error you know it turned out that there was something wrong with their measurements which is you know one of the problems when something unexpected occurs right you don't know if it's some damn trivial thing because you haven't calibrated a machine properly or whether you've just discovered you know a new part of the secret to the universe so generally you should assume that you've calibrated your machine improperly and I should also tell you something about something that's akin to that from with regards to a self-protective mode of reconstructing your schema so one of the things that happens to depress people is something like this so maybe they go out and you know they try to have a conversation with someone in a coffee shop and you know maybe that person's having a horrible day or maybe you know they're very disagreeable and extroverted which makes them kind of narcissistic and so they're rude and the depressed person thinks um I can't talk to people it's bad people that can't bad useless people can't talk to people I'm a bad useless person I've always been a bad useless person and as far as I can tell I'm going to be a bad useless person as far as I can see into the future well you could say well what's wrong with that because it's TR maybe it's true maybe the reason the person won't talk to you is because like you're just wrong in a million different ways but let's not jump to conclusions so the rule there the mental hygiene rule is pick the simplest possible explanation and until you disprove that accept it and one of them would be well you that person's probably not having such a good day or maybe that person's not having such a good day you know or maybe if I smiled at them a little more brightly and somewhat less pathologically they would have talked to me you know so this it's important to remember when you make mistakes in your life don't start out with generic highlevel criticisms you know it's a pathway to self-destruction assume minor alterable changes until proven until it's proven otherwise so anyways it's a big problem because it's not that easy to figure out why where the mistake is when you make a mistake that stops you from getting what you want yes is that similar to the concept of a yes it is it's the aam's razor on the value on the value side of the equation assume a small error assume a small reparable error and then if that doesn't work out then assume a slightly large reparable error and I'll show you a schema for understanding that in a minute that's akin to PJ's construction of World from the bottom up so let me show you that here this is a very helpful diagram I think if I can find it all right we're going to go at this a couple of different ways so look at the top diagram it's a hierarchy all right so you might say what does it mean to be a good person and you might think well you know that's an empirical question but from the pedian or the pragmatic perspective that's not exactly right because what being a good person is is an abstract representation of an aggregation of action oriented behaviors and presuppositions that have a similarity across context now we're going to decompose it so this is for say an adult of about 35 what's one element of being a good person well you might say being a good parent it's not a necessary element but you know it's one of the ones that would fit there so what does it mean to be a good parent well you could say roughly speaking that you have a good job and that you take care of your family and then you might say well what did do it mean to take care of your family now one of the things I would like you to note is that these are abstractions right good person good parent take care of your family they're abstractions the question is what do they represent or what are those abstractions made up of now lots of the abstractions that are that we use are made up of descriptions of the world so scientific categories are like that but these aren't scientific categories they're pragmatic categories so they're actually made up of action not of object facts objective facts they're not made out of objective material at all they're a whole different thing good person good parent take care of your family okay what does it mean to take care of your family well there's a bunch of things it means but one of them might be you cook meals and you play with the baby okay so then well what is it mean to complete a meal well it looks like in this example you're cooking corn so what do you have to to do you have to cut it you have to set the table you have to do dishes now you can imagine you could decompose those too what do you have to do if you're doing the dishes well you have to grip a dish you have to move your hand in a twisting motion you have to push this arm forward and turn on the tap okay so what's cool about that is you can see where the mind which is the the part of us that's capable of abstract considerations meets the body right because people people are always wondering well how do you solve the Mind Body problem well this is one of the ways you solve it you assume that abstract categories are actually abstract representations of patterns of action and then you decompose them till you get to the action it's like how do you go underneath this what's next on the hierarchy well it doesn't matter because you're not conscious of it anyways it's muscle movements it's cell it's electrical information that you're cells are sharing it's completely irrelevant to you it's not part of your Consciousness this is you can do this you can't move a f you know you can't move an identifiable finger muscle because you don't know which ones they are so one of the things P would point out is that one of one of the characteristics of a baby when the baby's first born is that it has it can do these sorts of things it comes equipped to do these sorts of things those are basic reflexes now they're more basic than this but a child can do this it can stick out its tongue which is really helpful because that means that it can mouth everything in it vicinity which is exactly what a child does and the reason it does that is because this little exploratory apparatus here is quite wired up and so what the child assumes so to speak first is the world is a place to put in your mouth and that's why babies are always putting everything they can in their mouth now you know the tongue is absolutely covered with sensory and motor neres so it's unbelievably an unbelievably fasile exploratory tool and so the child starts to extract out information about the world by using its its oral reflexes to a large degree to begin with now it can also move its eyes although it's not really quite so good about that and you know because its eyes cross a fair bit it takes a while to get both of them coordinated you know it can hear things and so on it's got a sense of touch so but it's equipped to start operating on the world at the highest resolution level of analysis so we could say think about it this way as you move up a chain of abstractions your representations get lower and lower in resolution understand so for example being a good person is a much lower resolution description than picking up a fork prior to setting it on the table although picking up a fork is a microelement of being a good person so that's a high resolution description so another thing that you can know is that if you make a mistake try to decompose the problem into high resolution representations it's lazy not to not only that it's insulting so you know you come home and maybe your partner has agreed to make a meal and the thing is like scorched to death you know and so you say you are not a good person you've never been a good person and you're never going to be a good person it's like well they're not a good person in so far as they weren't able to you know make the meal but you could start with a microanalysis it's like why exactly did that burn since that's not the desired outcome you know and then you can help the person disentangle the sequence and you can find out where the error occurred now maybe they were distracted by something else or whatever but it's it's a very difficult analytic process but I can tell you if you're going to maintain an equilibrate state with yourself and with people around you stay away from the low resolution abstractions when you're discussing something important go down to the micro level you know so here's an example that you might consider with regards to children as they develop so the baby's laying on its crib on its back you know and it's trying to get its act together and it's got to organize its arms and it's got to organize its legs and it's got to figure out how to move them because it's just hitting them hitting itself in the AR head with its arms PJ would say child will be laying there and go like this and that'll sort of startle them and then one of the things he'll do is try to do it again so in that way the child uses imitation of itself to start building up the basis of predictability it's bloody brilliant idea you know so so that's part of the groundwork that the child lays to start understanding the world it's going to be putting things in its mouth and then it's going to notice similarities between the way something feels and how it it feels when it's in the mouth and it's going to notice that this motion is good for grabbing bottles but it's also good for grabbing like teddy bears so maybe teddy bears and bottles are in the same category to begin with and the category is things you can grab and bring close to you you know which is a perfectly reasonable category though it's not an objective category and the child is chaining all these things together and developing more and more sophisticated abilities with its body and at the same time because it becomes more fasile with its body it can analyze the world at a higher and higher level of resolution and so it's the circular process information in development of tools expansion of knowledge information in development of tools expansion of knowledge you sort of boot yourself up fundamentally and you do it from the bottom up now let's say you've got a three-year-old this is a good example of how children differ at different developmental stages so maybe you have a 15-year-old you say clean up your room now that is a low resolution representation now when you use that low resolution representation on the 15-year-old you assume that they know the following things so we're going to put that aside for a moment now you're talking to a three-year-old and you're in their room and the room is scattered with with junk because they've been playing and you say now it's time to clean up your room and then you leave and then you come back in 20 minutes and what's happened no the child's playing with some toy and you say you know didn't you hear what I said and the answer to that is well I heard it but I didn't have any idea what you meant and the reason that I didn't have any idea what you meant is because I don't have the microprocesses embodied in me so then you take the three-year-old and you say do you see your bear and the child goes yes because they've got seeing down you point they can see what you're pointing at great that's a little micro routine and then you say could you go pick up that bear and they know that one too so then they'll go pick up the bear and then you might point to a space on the Shelf that's empty and you could say well could you put that bear in that space and they've got that too so then you want to help them clean up the room but you don't want to do it for them well what do you do you build up all the micro routines it's painstaking hey if you're a parent you're just going to think well go play I'll clean up the room but then you'll be cleaning it up until the child is 15 because they won't develop the micro routines so you might as well just start right off the bat and go through the painstaking process of building up the procedural knowledge as the ground for the abstract conceptions because the next time the child you want the child to clean up the room you could start by saying pick up the toys on the floor and put them where there is space on the shelf and maybe they've gener ized across those you know more concrete instances of cleaning up so that they can use the abstract representation to govern themselves so this also helps you figure out what it means for something to mean something you might say well that's meaningful what what does that mean well it means that partly it means that you have the underlying structure so that you can take the abstract utterance and decompose it into actionable sequences in the world now now sometimes meaningful also means you could use the information to reconfigure the abstractions that you use to guide action in the world so that's a bit more complicated but you get the point now part of the reason we can communicate and this is quite interesting and this is sort of in keeping with PJ's ideas is I kind of know what you know now why do I know that well it's because I it's not cuz I know you cuz I don't but it's because you're like me a lot I mean physiologically we're you know not clones but the similarities are obviously there so I can assume that you have some relationship with your body that more or less parallels the relationship I have with my body and then I can also assume that since that the environment you grew up in was sufficiently similar to the environment that I grew up in so that the schema of actions and abstractions that constitutes your personal ity is similar enough to mine so that I can use abstractions and you'll know what they mean and so it's a very complex and sophisticated theory of communication right because it assumes that well where is the meaning in a word well the word is embedded in a phrase and the phrase is embedded in a sentence and so on so that's complicated but the meaning is is that I compress a whole sequence of action strategies and representational schemas into a phrase and I toss it to you and you decompose it and then you've got the meaning you know and some of some like you can't do something like well how do you play the piano well you sit in front of it move your hands up and down the keys right that's too low resolution to be useful but especially if I know that you don't know how to play the piano but if if I can assume sufficient shared experience and shared biological commonality then I can use high level abstractions and we can exchange information so all right so the petan notion at least in part is that you're interacting with the world constantly and you're doing that in order to extract out from the world what you need and to increase your competence at getting what you need right so that's a cool idea too so and here's a way of understanding that way of understanding equilibrated States at a high level of abstraction so think about this so your kids in a soccer game and uh let's say he trips someone and elbows them and the referee doesn't catch on and their team wins the game and maybe their team wins the game because he tripped them and elbowed him and the kid comes off the court the pitch yes and says we won and what do you say well if you're like 30% of the soccer parents I saw you say good job you should have kicked them again but that that isn't what you should say right you should say that's no way to win and then the question might be what in the world do you mean by that because as far as the child's concerned hypothetically They just won and that's the point of the game so when you say that's no way to win what do you mean well think about it this way what's the definition of winning at soccer well one question is well winning the game well yeah that's kind of that's a little too high resolution for the current purposes like how about um developing your skill as a physical being Ah that's a good one developing your skill in a physical being as a physical being in a manner that will translate into success in other domains of the world ha that's even better you get to be well-developed physically and it works more places how about developing your physical abilities in a manner that ensures that lots of people invite you to play games for the rest of your life that's a really good deal and so when you say well it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game what you're saying is the proper equilibrated state is not Victory within a game it's the ability to play many games and to extract out value from each instance of playing and then you went across huge swath of time instead of sacrificing that to some trivial local Victory and that's another example of how morality emerges from the bottom up from the games that people play so there's actions and then there's the integration of actions and schema within yourself as an individual then you kind of got your act together as a two to four year-old and you better have your act together by the time you're four enough so that other children will play with you because otherwise you're basically screwed for life you cannot be fixed after that and there's endless amounts of evidence showing that so you kind of got yourself together by the time you're 2 to four enough so that other people can tolerate you and then you start playing games with them and the games are cooperative and competitive and if you're good at playing which means you're Fair across multiple instances of the game then you'll have lots of friends and you'll be able to play with them and then you'll have a whole network of games which is all the games you play with all your friends in all the different circumstances and then you're going to learn how to be a good player across all those games and hopefully the environment that constitutes the shared elements of that set of games is similar to the adult environment that constitutes a whole set of things that you'll do when you're an adult and that'll mean that you're socialized enough to start to develop some autonomy and individuality and Independence and that's all emerging from the bottom up it's not a top down it's not instantiated from the top down it's a natural progression of moral systematizing in society as a whole and also a natural progression of your adaptation to that system as you mature and that in 90 minutes or thereabouts is the essence of pedian theory and there's some elements of a lot of what you learn if you take P generally speaking is stage Theory and compared to what PJ was really up to Stage theory is pretty much irrelevant because what I laid out for you today was really what he was up to and all the things that he was doing in the multiple Publications that he laid out were attempts to determine how does society organize itself from the bottom up and how does the individual do the same thing and it's an extremely useful way of thinking you know so and we'll close with this from a practical perspective because I try to only teach you things that I think have practical utility so that means if you know them you'll understand yourself and others better and you'll get along with with them better and that the net consequence of that will be that you're better placed in the social world and that'll make the social World somewhat better so what's the take-home message from this well one is the most important one I think is don't use highlevel negative abstractions to characterize your behavior or that of others what you have to do is the the the thing is is that if you have someone for example maybe you have a roommate who can't cook or maybe you are that roommate it's like in order to help someone like that you have to decompose the process until you hit the level at which they're competent and then you have to teach them how to integrate those things that they know into the next stage of development so it's a complex decomposition and then you're actually helpful and now you'll find when you have an intimate relationship with someone that you want to last over the long run I can give you a couple of hints one is do not use high level negative abstractions they'll hate you and for good reason because you're criticizing them in a generic and stupid manner what you want to do is first of all help them identify the problem at the highest level of resolution necessary and then Implement a solution that will actually solve the problem now that often takes a fair bit of conflict and a fair bit of immediate analysis it's difficult and so people will avoid it but if you do that every time you do that and it works that's a problem you'll never have again in your life that's a really good deal so it beats the hell out of ignoring it and hoping that it'll go away so all right so we'll see you Thursday [Applause]