2014 Personality Lecture 05: Jean Piaget (Constructivism)

talk about constructivism and I'm going to primarily discuss Jean P although the readings extend to some some degree out past his thought um p is generally regarded as a developmental psychologist which is not what he thought of himself he thought that he was a genetic epistemologist which is a term that I think has over ever only been applied to him an epistemologist is someone who studies the manner in which knowledge um who studies knowledge itself and that's what P thought that he was doing and he wanted to understand how it was that knowledge unfolded across

time and um more importantly than that he wanted to understand how the cognitive structures that made up an individual developed across time so that's generally why he's regarded as a developmental psychologist because of course he also studied children now I'm going to read you something that P wrote to begin this um he wrote an awful lot of books and a lot of them haven't yet been translated and some of the ones that are translated are translated pretty badly and I think this is probably an example of a fairly bad translation but it regardless of that

the point that's being made is both valid and interesting so the common postulate of various traditional epistemologies which are theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge is a fact say or a set of facts so that you would go to class and learn a set of facts and that is what would give you knowledge instead of a process and if our various forms of knowledge are always incomplete as we know they are because they're replaced sequentially I mean for example recently in the domain of physics physicists revealed to us that they really didn't understand what

some massive percentage of the universe was made of I think I can't remember it's 75% or 95% made out of dark matter which is never been detected and we know nothing about it so that's a good example of how our fundamental assumptions can be challenged at any moment and how a fact can turn from a fact into a clear fallacy if our various forms of knowledge are always complete and our various Sciences still imperfect that which is acquired is acquired and can therefore be studied statically so the proposition there is that you come and you

learn the facts and the facts themselves are solid bits of information and they don't change across time and so that once you have them you have them now of course PJ obviously doubts that hence the absolute position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types of knowledge possible as an alternative under the converging influence of a series of factors we are tending more and more today to regarded knowledge as a process more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempt to hold 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 he means by that is the fact that human beings learn facts is in fact a fact right so you are capable of learning things and he thinks that's sort of the fundamental fact people assimilate information and they transform as a consequence of it and so studying that as he says what we can and should then seek is a law of this process we are well aware on the other hand of the

fine book by on scientific revolutions now the reason P throws that in at the end um how many of you know about Thomas Coon's book on scientific revolutions no one one just three people okay well that's probably not good um was one of the 20th centuries foremost philosophers of Science and he made a distinction between two different mod of scientific process one he called normal science and the other he called revolutionary science and normal science was the kind of science that you'll do as undergraduates unless you're un incredibly lucky or unbelievably brilliant um or probably

unbelievably brilliant and Incredibly lucky and so normal science occurs when you generate Knowledge incrementally from within the confines of an already developed scientific theory so a normal science would be uh say the of big five models of personality to the prediction of some other variable like say relationship success you're going to uncover something new but it's not going to shape the foundations of knowledge itself now observed that from time to time there were discoveries that were made that shook the foundation of knowledge itself there's some well-known Revolutions in science so the Newtonian Revolution was a

revolution in science uh Einstein's work produced another revolution in science dar work mle's work um those are the Revolutionary transformations of thought that people often consider did I say Darwin I certainly should have said Darwin because his was probably the most revolutionary of all um now the reason that I wanted to tell you that and the reason I kept it in here even though it seems like a funny little additional statement Pinn to the end of P's quotation is that observed that scienti science seemed to progress in accordance with the same mechanisms that PJ observed

that the knowledge of children appeared to progress now one of the things that you'll learn about P which is generally all you learn if you learn about p is his idea that children go through sequential stages of development and usually people have you memorize those stages I should let you know that P really didn't care that much about those stages and when they occurred and how they could be sped up and exactly what they were he was much more interested in deep philosophical questions and that element of his work generally goes unrecognized by the the

North American psychologist who purport to understand what he had to say now because he wrote dozens of books some of which are not yet translated it's not surprising that people Come Away with a partial view of T when you're that prolific he was so damn smart he was offered the curatorship of a museum when he was 10 because he had published a scientific paper on I think it was on snails and but his parents requested that he turn it down so you know PHA was a major genius and if someone puts their mind like that

puts their mind to work for an entire lifetime and he lived to be an old man they can produce an awful lot of intellectual material and it's not necess especially if it can't be summarized easily as a single you know coherent theory that you could memorize in one page it's pretty hard for people to keep up so it's not surprising that his thought gets reduced to you know a set of axioms in a sense but um the devil's often in the detail with great thinkers and what that means is that to really understand what they

had to say you actually have to read them because a lot of the information is at the sentence level of analysis and not at the summary level of analysis you know if you're really smart it's not that easy to summarize what you have to say because most of what you have to say is in fact informative so you can't just throw it away it's hard to compress it so anyways this initial par paragraph opens up the world of constructivism to you now the constructivists are interesting people because you know you often hear people ask is

it genetic or environmental which is it's not a good question because it's a false dichotomy the the genes formulate structures in accordance with environmental Demand right from the beginning of the organism's emergence and so there's a constant interplay between the environment and genetics but the environment isn't also just a thing that's out there that's like made out of lions and tigers and moose and buildings and you know the sky it's it's an information field and the constructivist point out rightly that partly what you're doing when you're operating in the world is interacting with this field

of information and incorporating its structure into the structure of your mind and body which is how you adapt so you could say in some sense that you're built out of information and matter that's a good way of thinking about it and the constructivists are very interesting interested in how you go about acquiring information and how you then transform that information into the sort of knowledge that you can apply to the world so they're also very pragmatic especially P because pH regards knowledge as um like the prequisite for adaptive action so again again he's less concerned

about the facts that you know about the structure of the world then he is about how it is that you modify and adapt your behavior so that you can survive in the world work so so that's the first postulate that's constructivism and then the next postulate is that there are revolutions in the internal structures that you construct that emerge as a consequence of you acquiring new information sometimes that information can already be fit into a knowledge structure that you possess but sometimes the information is so anomalous or novel that it blows out fundamental presuppositions that

you've already established and forces you to not only add some information to your repertoire of information but to reconfigure the structure you use to represent the information you don't like that people don't like it when that happens it's too dramatic and upsetting so which is often why Revolutions in science or in any other field are first resisted I mean it's very complicated the reasons people are opposed to new ideas are very complicated there's lots of theories about why that occurs precisely but briefly outline a good theory there's a bunch of them but I'll outline one

so let's say there's already a scientific theory and it's instantiated in the world so people accept it and let's say that you are a proponent of that theory so you might say well that theory therefore governs your worldview and if I threaten it then your worldview is going to fall apart and that's going to make you fall apart and that's not a bad Theory but here's a here's a variant of that which is similar but which I think is better so I'm a Professor let's say I have a theory now what I'm doing with my

theory is buying my right to be a professor so I would come to the University of Toronto as a job candidate and I would say here's my theory and here's why I think the facts support it here's what it's good for and they'll say okay it looks like you know enough about what you're doing so that you can occupy this position in this dominance hierarchy okay and I'm pretty happy about that because that position in that dominance hierarchy is pretty permanent that's one of the advantages to an ademic job it's like once you have it

as long as you're relatively competent and relatively ethical then you can you can maintain it across time so so it's a big deal to be granted that slot and then being in that dominance hierarchy is not only a matter of what you believe obviously the fact that I'm in that dominar means I get a certain salary and that's not hypothetical that allows me to eat so I'm happy about that it's not only psychological and I can pay my housing payments with it and so on so it protects me from the cold and offers me something

to eat and it gives me a certain public status and so if some other Joker comes along say they're young and they say well I have a different Theory and it makes your theory look stupid then I'm not going to be very happy about that hardly because it upsets the way that I configure my understanding of the world and that's a drag but I might recover from that but it also undermines my claim it undermines the validity of my claim to that position in the high Archy and so it sort of makes me an impostor

say say the guy turns out to be right it's like poof I'm an impostor and I no no longer really have the right to occupy that position and someone might even point that out although it doesn't happen very often in the case of professors you know it happens fairly frequently in other sorts of occupations you know all of a sudden your position is made useless because somebody figured out how to automate you and poof you're gone and like that's hard on your worldview but it's a lot harder on your celery so a lot of the

reasons that people cling to the validity of their Theory is because it gives them a claim to a certain kind of uh what would you call skill set and utility that then gives them a claim to occupy a certain position in the dominance hierarchy and that protects them from from you know all the horrors of reality not completely but you know I mean I have health insurance for example sometimes that's really really helpful so I don't want some Joker coming along and pointing out that my theory isn't isn't right anyway so far that hasn't happened

so that's a good thing as far as I'm concerned so pH concludes and says if all knowledge is always in a state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete and efficient one evidently it is a question of knowing this development and analyzing it with the greatest possible accuracy okay so PSA figures you're a information foraging machine so to speak and the process that you engage in while you're forging from information for information and then figuring out know what to do with it is typical to human beings and there's some

constancy of structure across human beings okay so that's that's the first idea it isn't that we all do it in a different way even though there's individual variation obviously um the other sort of fundamental postulate of constructivism especially the pedian version of constructivism is that you sort of build yourself from the bottom up starting with your body so P this is one of the things about P's Theory that's unbelievably sophisticated I think so when people were first developing models of artificial intelligence they thought they'd be able to develop machines that sort of modeled the world

and then figured out how to act in the world sort of abstractly and then would after they figured out how to act in the world would then act in the world but that proved to be impossible as you can tell because we don't have you know ambulatory robots that can like bus tables at a at a restaurant which turns out to be by the way a very complex job fast mathematical operations computer can handle that easily or easily but busing a table it's like no computer's smart enough to do that so that's pretty peculiar but

it turned out after like 40 years of investigation that you couldn't build computers that would operate as independent robots by teaching them to model the world and then by having them model the potential action that they were going to undertake and then by implementing it that did not work partly because modeling the world is way more complicated than anybody ever suspected it's like infinitely more complicated and so some robotics engineers such as Rodney Brooks who worked at MIT started building robots from the bottom up he made these little Mindless robots that really didn't even have

a s a central processor that were action oriented so like the first things he built were these little insect likee things that could skitter away from light that's all they could do it turn on light poof they' go find some dark and it's as if so imagine the world to that robot was a binary place it was either a light place or a dark place and then you might say well what did light or dark mean to this little robot then you have to ask yourself well what does meaning mean and that that's a very

good question it's one that PJ answers meaning means to that little robot move to a different place so light to that robot meant mooved to a different place so what the what the robot in a sense was doing was transforming one form of information like verus start into another form which was skin away and so I love that because it's not easy to understand what meaning means until you relate it to the body and so P's fundamental proposition is that the the elements of your understanding are not perceptual abstractions in fact there's even elements of

understanding that underly your perceptual abstractions that are more fundamental and what those are essentially are sensory motor skills they things you do with your body it's a lovely idea it's extremely profound and I I think it's absolutely correct it it does recre havoc with the idea of disembodied intelligence however because for p and also for Rodney Brooks who um is responsible by the way just so you know some of you have seen big dog you seen big dog look up DARPA DPA how many of you have seen big dog how many of you are terrified

by Big Dog yes big dog is this robot that's being developed by the US Army that is about this big and it's four-legged it's got a head and it can run like faster than you and it can run in snow and it can run on ice and it can run up hills and if you kick it it balances and stands back up and hypothetically it's going to be used to transport like the heavy things that soldiers have to carry but you know don't believe that that's a stupid idea once these things can ambulate by themselves

and they can already follow each other CU now they have visual systems um arming them is going to be a very simple matter and so the probability that we'll have unbelievably super fast robots that can shoot you in 10 years is like to me as far as I can tell from the development is absolutely certain I have a friend who's a computer engineer and he's a really good one and he said you know how in science fiction movies sometimes when those robots shoot at you they miss he said when the robots shoot at you not

only will they shoot at where you are but they'll shoot at the sixth place that they calculate you're most likely to Dart to and they will never miss so that's a lovely thing to think about so hopefully that won't come to pass but it probably will so here's the sort of thing that PJ was interested in these are very fundamental questions and he was a very deep intellect so he tried to go right to the bottom of the structures of knowledge to find out what was down there upon what does an individual basis judgments that's

a good one how do you know whether you do a or b or what the difference is between right and wrong how is that instantiated in your in your being what are your Norms how is it that those Norms are validated what's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general which which is a question like well there's a consensual reality that we all share to some degree which is why we can communicate but there's not a onetoone relationship between that consensual reality and the categories of science so PJ was interested in

the similarities between our consensual Viewpoint and the scientific Viewpoint and the differences so for example people used to hypothetically assume that the world was flat um and you could say well the reason they assumed that was because it looks flat when you look at it so it was an empirical observation but obviously there were other observations that we managed to produce that indicated that the world wasn't flat and then our scientific conceptions and our interpersonal uh consensual Norms became divorced from one another and that's become a really serious problem say with branches of science like

quantum mechanics which you know they're absolutely completely incomprehensible from a pragmatic perspective even to those who formulate them mathematically a p would say the reason for that is that well when we interact with objects at the phenomenal phenomenological level which is the level that we can most easily perceive they act Newtonian you know so can I take your pen so you know you can sort of predict what this pen will do because it acts like other objects of about its size and shape with mass and so your understanding of this is actually based upon your

knowledge of what will happen if you manipulate this thing with your body you know it's it's solid you'd be very surprised if you could like put your fingers through this pen you'd be surprised if it broke cuz you expect a certain hardness you do expect it to write although pens often don't you expect it to be pointy you know that you can take it apart into many objects even though like you could ask how many objects is this well it's one pen right but you could take it apart you know and now it's two objects

and then you can see that there's other objects in here and sometimes you can put it back together and it'll still work and so so P's point is that what we regard as understanding to say that you understand something is to indicate that you can predict what is going to occur if you interact with that object with your body okay and that's that gives you your intuitive understanding of things and so because this is material other you you already know something about other things that are material right and you can transfer it from place to

place and that's again an embodied knowledge because material things are those things through which you cannot put your hand right you get some weird things like smoke or clouds and like well are they what are they are they objects is a cloud an object well no not really because an object is one of these things that you could sort of manipulate as a unit now the categories of quantum mechanics of course which deal with these incredibly tiny things that are really not particles and are really not waves they're incomprehensible to us because we never manipulate

anything at that scale and so because we can't play with it we have no real way of understanding it because our understanding is based on the mapping of objects onto our body so any object we can't map onto our body is therefore fundamentally incomprehensible it's a very cool Theory you know and a very body Centric Theory so how does the fact that children think differently than we do affect our presumption of fact itself that's a very interesting question question too is like so you've got three-year-olds and of course they're pretty clueless about the world but

and and you know more but there's the threey old is alive in everything and functioning and so then you have to ask yourself well if their conception of the world is qualitatively different than your conception how is it that you can both survive in the same world and what does that mean about about what knowledge means and about the limits of knowledge I mean you know I could say the same thing about you that you might say about a three-year-old which is well if I took you from this place and dropped you in the jungle

you know soon you'd be dead first you'd be miserable then you'd be dead and so that sort of like the three-year-old's state of being if you you know if you were supposed to take care of them and you disappeared so obviously even your knowledge of the world is limited by what it's limited in its necessary generality by the context but that also has something interesting to say about the validity of your knowledge itself very context dependent so okay so that's the sort of thing that PJ was interested in here's some other ones what do you

mean by number so that's an interesting one so you know how they say you can't compare apples and oranges well you can so if I said well what's two oranges plus two apples four fruits who said that s very good so the way you solved that was by generalizing up a level right so if I said uh um what's two desks plus two rocks what would you say Yes Man you're very good at this particular that's an IQ that those are IQ questions by the way so if you didn't get them now you could feel

disappointed and depressed so if you got them well then you can p yourself on the back so that's good yeah so number is a funny thing because well as I pointed out with the pen well one can become many very rapidly and many can become one and well the whole idea of number is extremely difficult to understand you know like what is it in common between singular entities that allows you to represent all of them with one well animals don't do that they can in a sense they can sort of int it three or four

which is about all we can int it too but once we get the nomenclature done properly man we can use numbers like crazy and then they enable us to manipulate reality like mad so whatever it is we're abstracting from the commonality between objects seems to be something that gives us incredible power so that's a problem what do you mean by space since we know for example from Einstein's work that you know space space is is not an absolute in any sense it is at the speeds we move so what do you mean by time and

speed when is an object permanent and when isn't it and when do you learn that what does it mean that an object is the same across time that's a good one so you know I don't know if there's a single molecule in your body that was there you know 5 months ago 6 months ago there's some I don't remember what the turnover duration is but it's fairly it's fairly quick so it's weird e because there you are and you were there two years ago but none of your constituent elements are the same so how is

it that you can be the same now the physicist Shing schinger of of the Schrodinger's cat Fame solved that by claiming that you were a dissipative structure it's very interesting way that's what he thought life was dissipative structures a dissipative structure is the same as a you know when you when you pull up the the uh you call that at the bottom of the sink stopper you I think so stopper if your sink is full of water and you pull up the stopper you know you get a Whirlpool right and it all the water spins

as it as it goes down the the drain hole and you'll notice that that Whirlpool looks sort of the same across time even though obviously the water molecules that make it up are different he called that a dissipative structure it was a pattern that maintained itself in spite of the movement of matter through it and that's what you are by the way so it requires energy to keep a dissipative structure um intact but uh you take in energy so thanks to the Sun what do you mean by chance um why do you have moral concerns

and what does it mean that you have moral concerns that you have ideas about how people should behave and how they shouldn't behave and and you have a very deep understanding of that and it's characteristic of all human beings and many many animals so where does that come from and is a developed form of knowledge what are children doing when they're playing what are people doing when they're dreaming and uh what's the significance of the fact that you can imitate other people now I I'll start with the last one briefly um you know you might

think that one of the things that really distinguishes us from other creatures animals is the fact that we have a thumb and that's a big one we''ve got very good functional thumbs and hoay for that and we stand up on two feet so we get a chance to use our thumbs and hands to carry things around and to break things and to take them apart and to swing sticks and so on but there are other animals who can do that to a limited degree and then there's our ability to talk that's a major one but

one of the other things that really differentiates people from other animals is you know you hear monkey see monkey do right well that's wrong monkey see that's the end of that um monkeys really can't imitate one and they certainly can't imitate any even randomly generated novel behavior that another monkey produces think about it this way you know you hear these claims that chimpanzees have culture it's like well no they don't not really and the reason for that it's easy to figure out that they don't have culture I mean let's say chimps have been around roughly

speaking for 15 million years which is not a bad estimate because we diverged from them about 7 million years ago and evidence is pretty clear that the thing that we diverged from looked a lot more like a chimp than it looked like us so like we've been booting it ahead madly developing like mad and The Chimps of be laying back and eating leaves you know so so do they have a culture well they've had 15 million years you know they haven't even built a Hut yet and the reason I'm telling you that is because if

you're a culture generated creature and you only imagine M you only manage say one Discovery every 100 years years between all of you if you have 15 million years to get your act together that's a lot of 100e segments and so even if the chimpanzee was building culture at the rate of 0.001% a year if you compound that over 15 million years you have the Empire State Building and there aren't empire state buildings that chimpanzees are living in and so therefore they don't have culture now they might be able to recognize their the their peers

in the dominance hierarchy they can do that and they can use maybe they can use Simple tools but the tools they use seem to be dependent on the environment that they inhabit you know cuz some people say well some chimps use one tool and some chimps use another but you know if you're going to live in a rocky place then you might use rocks and if you're going to live in a place that has sticks you might use sticks but that's not because you're different it's because the environment's different so anyways chimps can't imitate one

another very much um but humans man we're ridiculous like we're we're so imitated it's absolutely crazy you know and that's so cool because what it means is that once you get a pattern of behavior you you know you whip up a new pattern of behavior I can watch you and I can just instantiate it in my own body you know maybe a bit awkwardly to begin with although maybe sometimes better than you can and bang I've got that and so we're always looking around at each other seeing what we're up to and as soon as

we see someone who's up to something interesting then we can do the same thing children do that cuz they imitate right but there even better at it man they generalize across instances of imitation so for example remember when you're a kid and you're playing maybe you're playing house and you're the mom or maybe you're I don't know maybe you're the house cat cuz children will certainly do that and so let's say the child is being the house cat so he or she is down on you know all fource zooming around like a cat maybe meowing

and you know rubbing up against their mother's leg and looking for a melt milk in the bowl and they're not exactly imitating their cat because if they were exactly imitating their cat they would be moving exactly the same way the cat moved but no they're not what they're doing is they've observed the cat across a wide variety of of environments they've abstracted what constitutes generalized cat behavior from all of those instances and then they can instantiate the spirit of the cat which is sort of the movements that make up catness and then you because you're

so smart you can watch them zooming around on the ground and despite the fact that they don't have a tail or ear ear or fur you're going to figure out pretty quick that that is now a cat and children do the same thing with their parents like if they're playing house and they imitate their father you know they may to to some degree try to imitate the sound of his voice and maybe even use a couple of his favorite phrases but basically what they're doing is trying to act like a father rather than imitating their

father so it's like IM it's meta imitation right it's I watch you I watch you I watch you I watch you there's alties across all those instances I extract the commonalities I embody it and then when I play that's what I'm doing I'm figuring out how to embody the commonalities across multiple exposures and that's that's you're doing that when you're like three you're so smart and then even if you're asleep you're doing it because you're doing it in your dreams and so human beings do that no other animals do so when you're thinking about the

ways that we're weird you want to put imitation way up there on the list because you can you know think about deaf people like congenitally deaf people don't have much access to language you know say they don't learn sign language because that used to happen in the past it's like they can still wander around in the world and fit in well why well because they're so good at imitating you know they get all the non-verbal stuff and that's a lot so language is you know great and all that language actually enables you to imitate across

space and time that's what it's for because you know maybe whip up a new action and then you write it down in words and then you send it to someone and they those are instructions by the way because that's what instructions are you send that to someone and then they read your code for behavior and then they act it out and so language enables you to move imitation across space and time and that's a really good way of conceptualizing language because it's a pedian way because sometimes we might think that language is there to describe

the world you know in a scientific sense George Kelly kind of thinks that that thought that that human beings are sort of like natural scientists but natural scientists are much more concerned with what is than with how to act so Kelly's wrong what human beings are more like is natural Engineers because we're always you know zooming around trying to figure out how to fiddle with things much more than what they are and as I mentioned to you earlier a pragmatist would say well it's an artificial distinction because things are what they are when you fiddle

with them that's in fact what they are so so that's pretty smart a also says this is part of the constructivist notion because constructivism is a philosophical school he says 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 is no structure apart from construction either abstract or genetic I really like that I showed you some of the symbolic categories in a couple of you know previous

lectures and I I mentioned for example that one of the symbolic categories is the great father and the greata kind of stands for cultural structure whereas the great mother stands for novelty and and and and sometimes the terrifying anyways back to the great father there's a precondition in constructivism that there has to be three things that exist and they map right onto that symbolic structure one is culture so when you look at something or really when any creature looks at something there's an inbuilt structure that characterizes the creature some of which would be biological built

in and some of which would be acquired that they must have in order to structure their perceptions of what they're looking at so you don't come to the situation blank you know for for example you have two eyes so you're going to have stereo Vision most of the time you know and you have five senses and they're the same sense and there's more than that you have snake detection circuits for example so you're sort of primed to respond to a certain class of predators and you like sweet tastes and sour tastes but you don't really

like bitter tastes and so on and so forth like right from the beginning you bring a landscape of interpretive structures in order to uh frame and simplify the world that you are exposed to now the World itself is this sort of amorphous thing it's a morphous because it's so multi-dimensional and complex there's so much of it it's like a fog that contains everything and so unless you can frame that and simplify it and narrow it it's very difficult for you to understand and interact with it at all I mean you you know you just can't

deal with everything at once it's hard enough to deal with one little thing at a time and you know this internal structure is partly what enables you to deal with one little thing at a time and then so there's you and there's the the source of all information there's the structure of you and the source of all information and then there's the the process that's you and the process that's you is you using your appendages fundamentally and your senses to interact with things and to make them manifest new properties right and so those are properties

that they might not manifest without you there and it's very difficult for you to tell when you're interacting with the world even at a perceptual level how much What You observe wouldn't be there if you weren't there now so because one of the big philosophical questions is well what's there when you're not there and and that is a much more complicated question than you might imagine um the the doist would say well what's there is so much an amalgam of everything at once that it might as well be nothing at all and it's sort of

a and give you a way of understanding that so let's say you took every Symphony that was ever written recorded he and then you took all those recordings together and you laid one on top of the other and you'd say well now I've got like every Symphony at once on a tape and then you played the tape what would it sound like would sound like white noise it would sound like and so you could say white noise is functionally equivalent to every single Symphony that's ever been written every piece of music that's ever been written

all being played at once well so what you know so and the DS would also say you have to remember that what something is is just as dependent on what it isn't as it is dependent on what it is so that's a tough one but it's very very smart so the constructivist would certainly agree with that now Bruner who is a constructivist of sorts put a little twist on P's idea which I'm going to borrow because I think it makes explaining PJ easier at least it makes it easier for me and since I'm explaining it

that's that's what we're going to have to go for Bruner said we seem to have no other way of describing lived time save in the form of a narrative now the reason I think this is a pedian constructivist claim is because p is concerned with knowledge as it emerges from action and action is clearly represented in narratives right because a narrative is about what the characters are doing so narrative is the way that we represent information about doing so and knowledge for PSA is about doing so I just put the two together and that and

that there's other reasons for it too and that makes it simpler to explain so here's here's a way of thinking about how we put a structure on the world so and I've mentioned I kind of introduced you to this idea before so you're headed somewhere wherever that happens to be because you're an active organism and so you're you know even if you're don't have any immediate needs you're going to poke about at things just because you're curious turns out that your dopaminergic system which is the system that drives curiosity Fires at a certain constant rate

even if you're not hungry or tired or thirsty or you know even if no primary needs are clamoring for your attention so your your default comfortable state is mildly curious about everything and so that's part of what makes you an information forager because when you have nothing better to do so to speak you'll just poke around and see what happens because you never know that knowledge might come in useful in the future so anyways you're always going from point A to point B because you're and the way you get from point A to point B

even if point B is an abstraction because it often is you know I'm going towards a better future well that's kind of a weird abstraction how are you going to get there well you can be sure that at the base it's going to involve movement right because to get to that future there's there's movements you're going to have to make so see see how I structured this I'm going to go ahead to something give a sec here how should I do this got the example yeah have to go forward a bit here and then back

okay so we're going to look at this we're going to look at this diam then we're going to go back so um start with an abstract philosophical concept I want to be a good person well you might debate forever about what the good means right it's the sort of philosophical conundrum that you can fall into because you can think in abstractions and then you might think of it as a property of the world and as something that's subject to internal debate which is exactly what's happened in the history of mankind but there's another way of

looking at it that's actually probably more accurate and I would say also more useful and this is the way it's like so you're going to try to be a good person well the pan view would be being a good person it's not a state of mind what it is is an abstraction that represents well first other Associated abstractions because the we could say well being a good person is a multi-dimensional problem that's right you can't you can't just be good and then it's done it's like being a good person might mean being good at well

what well good at being a friend good at being a lover good at being a a parent good at being a child good at being an employee you know you could say good is what's the same across all those things and P would call that a scheme just so you know because a scheme is what's the same across multiple different things so and the scheme is the basis of abstraction for PHA so good person is the sum total or the or the commonalities between being a good teacher student employee Etc okay so then we'll say

okay so now we can move the problem of analysis one level down and we can say okay well what does it mean to be a good parent and then you'd say well maybe you have to have a good job because you know otherwise you and your child starve but we'll forget about that one for a moment and then you might say well you have to do a good job of taking care of your family okay so you notice we're zeroing in on an element of the good here and it's still an abstraction care for your

family that's an abstraction so then you might say well one of the things you would do if you cared for your family is play with the baby and another might be complete a meal so we'll take the play with the baby example and then there's three things you can do with your baby you can peek at it they like that that's object permanence say there's nothing more thrilling to a baby than discovering that you're still there when you disappear like a baby you can amuse a baby for hours with that Discovery because it's by no

means self-evident to the baby that's a petan notion they lack object permanence so as far as they're concerned it's a hell of a shock when you disappear because they were just appreciating you being there and then they're just as shocked when you reappear and you can it's so interesting to watch them because when a baby gets startled like when you get startled you know you might go like that if you're really startled a baby it's like its whole body is startled right it like it makes a weird face and it moves its arms and its

legs and then takes it like 5 Seconds to recover you know they really have a startle reflex so and they'll often laugh I'm sure you've seen the laughing babies on YouTube because of course there's like two billion views of laughing babies which is a good thing it shows that we like babies I think there's one that's very famous where a baby is reacting to his mother either sneezing or coughing you know you know the one God it's absolutely hilarious this baby just has a fit and what's basically happening is its mother coughs I think it's

coughs or maybe sneezes blows her nose oh okay oh yeah she blows her nose so she makes this weird elephant likee noise and the baby is like shocked that mother could do this and then it gets surprised at its own startle and that makes it laugh so that's a really interesting phenomena from a pedian perspective because one of the things that P noticed the children did because they could imitate was imitate themselves that's how they got to know who they were so for example if a child would say a child would accidentally knock that off

when they're eating well that's a hell of a thing to discover you know if you move your arm just a little bit that will fall off that's cool so then maybe you can do that 60 70 times well you're supposed to be eating and the other thing that's really cool about doing that is that Mom will immediately rush over and pick that up and put it back and this is an excellent game you can entertain yourself with that for like a month and basically what you're discovering is the relationship between your movements and gravity right

it's like this is a major league Discovery it's no wonder you're obsessed with it so so anyways the point with regards to imitation is maybe the baby does this accidentally to begin with that startles them and then it's put up again and then they think well that was cool wonder if we can do that again then they're pretty happy about that and then they'll keep practicing that until they get like expert at doing that so instead of using like gross body movements to do it which is how they'd start they get develop finer and finer

and finer body movements until they've got the whole knock a light thing off a table down and it's it could even be fascinating as an adult some of you probably played table hockey you know with the the quarter you know how to do that put a quarter on a table it's not very complicated you make little gold your your job is to flick the thing so that it just sits that far over the table end so that the opponent can flip it up that's a that's like your opportunity to score a goal my point is

playing with how things move in relationship to friction and gravity is so engrossing to human beings that you can even make a game out of it if you're you know a relatively bored and stupid adult I played that game all the time with my son by the way so I put myself in that category as well now what the child is doing is it'll Accidentally In some ways Bumble into something interesting and then it recognizes that it's interesting in sense because that's a reflex action on its part and then once it recognizes that it's had

that reflex action which is kind of it's pleasurable as long as it's not too intense it's at least interesting then they'll try to imitate what they just did so part of the way you Master yourself is by imitating yourself after you've accidentally do done something interesting it's so smart so that's a petan notion so anyways you're playing with the baby and you can play Peak with the baby that's a good one you're teaching it that you're still there even though you went away and you can tickle the baby which is best done in moderation because

it's not exactly clear that babies enjoy that they just laugh when you do that so that you like them and don't throw them out the window when they're being annoying and then you can clean the baby too say those those are elements of the care of a baby I know that's not very sophisticated but you know those are some of the basics now the thing that's different about play with baby and tickle baby is that play with baby is an abstraction whereas tickle baby is an action right and so when you're trying to solve the

Mind Body problem this is how you solve it the mind is those abstractions the body is the actions that those abstractions ground themselves in so it's not like the mind is attached to the body it's the mind is a sequence of high hierarchically arranged abstractions the bottom level of which are not abstractions they're actions there's a qualitative transformation at the bottom of the hierarchy at the highest resolution level of the hierarchy it's action now you can understand P very very easily if you understand that the way a baby develops as far as PHA is concerned

is from the bottom up so the baby starts with it's lying in its crib it's a useless thing it's laying there it can't even focus its eyes you know it's just barely getting going so it's sort of floating in space trying to figure out what's going on you know and it doesn't even know that it has arms really it just sort of detects these things off to the side it'll of to Bonk itself in the face with their its arms or scratch itself because you have to cut baby's nails really short because otherwise they scratch

themselves because their arms are just you know wandering around randomly and the baby sorts from a petan perspective the baby starts to learn learn that learn what its body is capable of doing and some of that it just discovers by accident now there's no doubt some natural neurological progression that's going on so the baby is learning along the paths that babies can learn but still from a pedian perspective the baby is doing quite a bit of exploring to facilitate its neurological development and more complex animals may be doing that in the womb you know trying

out their legs and so on so so that they can run as soon as they you know as soon as they get out so it's not even obvious that all that sort of thing is reflexive and automatic in an animal that is more active when it's born so the baby is Begins by basically it sort of develops from the middle outward so what's the baby got when it first pops into the world Well it can't see very well although it can focus at about 12 in which conveniently is about the distance that its head is

from its mother's eyes if it's breastfeeding so that's good for social communication so the mother gaze at the baby and the baby can gaze at the mother and for some reason they both find that fascinating so baby's also very wired up around the mouth so it can use its mouth quite a lot and it can use its tongue those those come pre-wired so and this is kind of a Freudian observation so at the beginning the baby really is oral because that's all that works like it can smell too you know but but it's it's it's

it's voluntary capacity for Action is really centered around its mouth and you'll notice that babies infant are toddlers even love to put things in their mouth my son when he was a kid he used to go in the backyard we did feed him so that is wasn't the reason he'd go in the backyard and pick up acorns and stuff his cheeks with him just like a chipmunk and so you know then we' take him up to the bath and we'd have to like dig all the acorns out of his cheeks and he did that for

oh God way longer than you'd expect any sane child to do it so but the reason that he would put things in his mouth and you think about this is there's nothing that's a better exploratory organ than your tongue I mean check out one of your teeth bloody thing feels like it's about this big to your tongue as you'll notice if you know you ever get a tooth removed it's like the Grand Canyon was just instantiated inside your mouth then of course your tongue will work like mad of its own accord to investigate every tiny

little crevice in that new hole because your brain wants to know what's your mouth and what isn't so that if there's something in your mouth that either should or shouldn't be a it can tell it from you and B it can tell whether or not it's supposed to be there turns out to be very important right because well there's tooth decay that's a problem but you know there's also insects and poison and all sorts of other things that you shouldn't put in your mouth so don't underestimate the degree to which you can zoom around the

world like a you know Hoover vacuum cleaner and pick up a god- awful amount of information and of course you also feed that way obviously and so you know you're checking out your mother with your mouth and your tongue in a very meaningful way too and while you're feeding at the breast you're establishing the basis of social relationships now this puts a bit of a warp into the pedian hypothesis because P sort of assumed that the baby buil builds himself from the bottom up right but one of the things you have to understand is that

the baby is always picking up how to behave and see in a very very very social context even when it's so young that PJ would regard it as primarily egocentric CU what the hell does a baby know about you you know but the mother is teaching the child how to act right from the time it's a little tiny thing like if it's going to breastfeed it has to do it in a relatively civilized manner because if it bites his mother or her mother which a baby can do they can really Chomp you a good one

if their minds are made up to do that it's like unpleasant consequences are going to ensue at minimum the mother is going to startle and you know stop feeding the baby and you know maybe she'll put the baby down or or God only knows one time when my son was very young I guess he was about 13 months he just learned to walk and he walked up to my wife who was wearing shorts and he bit her right here and a good Chomp he was just teething and she reflexed her shot out as a reflex

and he like he must have flown 6 feet it's like that's how you socialize children against sudden bites you know so it's even the even the smallest alterations of their behavior take place within an intensely social context so even at this level the society is is helping guide and restrict the development of of the child's motor activities now children tend to develop as I said they develop gross body movements first so they kind of learn to fling their arms so maybe you put a mobile in the crib for your baby to look at by the

way most mobiles you'll notice maybe they're fish so you're a parent you're standing here and this is the side of the fish and this is the bottom of the fish and that's what the baby is looking at it's like the baby is looking at lines cuz the fish are there for the adults it's like that's a stupid mobile you get the fish turned over so that baby can see the fish and then you make them out of like black and white because babies are very good at picking up high contrast and that's a baby mobile

rather than a mother mobile so you got to decide whether the mobile is for you or for your baby so anyways you put the mobile above the baby and you kind of want to put it within limb length and then the baby will watch this thing who knows maybe it's annoyed to death by this thing we don't know it's like you know and then it'll it'll sort of flail about like it does in a not very well controlled Manner and maybe it'll flail an arm or a leg and now and then it'll get lucky and

it will nail one of those fish and that'll startled it and so usually it'll that it might cry then because that might have just if it's a neurotic baby it'll cry it's like that's too much for today take the whole bottle away but if it's a kind of a outgoing exploratory baby then the next thing it's really going to want to do is to figure out how to make that fish move again and then it'll sit there and practice flailing its leg it's like it's throwing its leg at the fish and if it gets lucky

it'll nail it a good one and then that'll make it laugh and then you know it'll practice doing that over a sequence of babies are persistent man so when my daughter was little she was about 18 months old we bought her this little cardboard box that had little cardboard Disney books in it you know and she didn't care what the Disney books were what she was really interested in is getting those three books out of the Disney box and then trying to get them back in because it turned out that was quite difficult cuz they

fit tightly so this was a great puzzle for her cuz you know she was still getting the whole cord thing going and she'd sit for like 3 hours getting those those books in that box and that was like a toy for for a week till she figured it out then she was on to bigger and better things but that's a big deal right you can imagine what you're doing neurologically when you're doing that it's like first of all you got to grip that book properly second you got to orient it precisely third as you add

the additional books to the Box the shape changes cuz the books flop over you know cuz they'll flop over diagonally so the shape changes you got to figure out how to adjust that and then the book itself will open and that'll get in the way so you got to keep the book closed and you know the tolerances are like an 18th of an inch so so you want to master that and like some people don't I had a client once who had a very low fluid intelligence probably 75 80 you wouldn't have known it by

looking at them but uh he he couldn't find employment surprise surprise there's there's no jobs in our society for people who are at that end of the cognitive distribution I got him a volunteer job at one point and his job was to put paper in envelopes had to fold it up in three because that's how you fold up a piece of paper and then you have to put it in envelope but that actually turns out to be hyper complex I probably trained him for 28 to 30 hours to do that and because when you do

it next time or you could do it now you just think about what you're doing it's first of all merely by observing the piece of paper you have to figure out how to make the first fold and it better be damn close to 1/3 because if it isn't when you make the second fold you're going to compound your error and then you're going to find to your Chagrin that the piece of paper does not fit in the envelopes because the envelope is exactly the same size as the piece of paper so if you're out by

your estimate say a quarter of an inch in your first fold you're out by a half inch in your second fold it's like it's not going in there or if if you don't fold it completely at 90° you know so the edges line up say you're out by a 16th of an inch and then you do that again so now you're out by an eight it won't fit in sideways so then you have to mangle the envelope to to get the paper in there and then by the time you're done mangling the envelope not only

does it look ugly but it will not go through an automatic sorting machine so and then added to that was the problem that on these pieces of paper there were often photographed Staples because he was working for a charity so then and but the photographs weren't always stapled at exactly the same place on the piece of paper so then he'd have to look at the piece of paper and he'd have to figure out where the photograph is and then he'd have to figure out how to fold the piece of paper so that he didn't bend

the photograph so that it would still fit in the envelope and that just used to he just sweat himself to death trying to solve that problem because there was time pressure too so and then there's an added level of complexity on top of that and the reason I'm telling you this is because it'll give you some sense of how you know simple actions are aggregated into increasingly complex operations some of the envelopes were French and some of them were English because it was Canada and so you couldn't put a French letter in an English envelope

the French ones had to go in a separate pile and then there was a huge stack say of English letters and a huge stack of English envelopes all of which hypothetically had been stacked so that each one corresponded to the other but now and then one of them would be out of alignment so then you had to figure out out whether it was the letters that were out of the alignment or the envelopes well that's a that's a high complexity working memory problem and that just bring him to a standstill so anyways you know during

typical development you develop those incredibly fine motor skills e early which is part of the reason why it's kind of nice to have your baby toddler infant do something by itself you know like sit there with a box till it gets a little bored and then it'll start to figure out what to do with the box and that's part of play and that's part of the development of its embodied conceptual structure so okay so so you basically chain these things together now the way that PJ he thought well what's the motivation for doing this so

the motivation is essentially is that well sometimes it can be sort of random you accidentally do something interesting and then try to repeat it but as you sort of develop the number of times that you do something accidentally that results in something interesting starts to decline now what part of what happens to you as you mature is that the opportunities that are provided for you by your body as you exercise and develop it start you know start to really ramp up and develop so that you can do a lot more interesting things with your body

by the time you're two than you can when you're 9 months old for example you can zoom around which just opens up a whole universe of things to pull over and dump over and pull off tables and you know and there's things lying around that you can write on walls with and you can pull out cupboards and it's like it's it's it's you know Paradise for an exploratory B baby so but what happens is that as the child puts himself or herself together physically and develops additional skills then they can elic additional manifestations of novelty

from the world so for example well here's a good example so the child finally manages to get itself upright which is like a colossal colossal amazing accomplishment you know I mean first of all that's hard to do you know like no there aren't two-legged creatures in the world except for us you know and we're so good at this you can even isn't that wonderful I learned that when I was two so you know you can do these amazing things with your body but the child is like trying to put itself together neurologically and it's a

hell of an operation to get this column of bone it's like jellyfish on a bone you know on or on stock bones and you got to get the thing to stand up upright God ridiculously difficult so the child manages that there's a lot of pain and anguish associated with that right because those little creatures they just fall down you know they got these little short arms so they're not much good at protecting themselves from Impact they're just bouncing off the walls like mad in the floor when they're trying to learn to walk then they finally

get themselves upright and totter along and fall and so on but then you know then the world turns into a different place because all of a sudden now you can stand up underneath a table that's the F that's a fun thing to do for the first time it's like whack so now your new body has taught you something about the world that you did not know so what P would say is well you've got this scheme worked out which is the standing up scheme and it turns out that that works pretty well if you're in

an empty space but if you're in an enclosed space with a low ceiling the whole standing up thing is just not going to produ produce the results intended so you stand up and whack yourself and that's a sign that it's time to update your representational structures and so you can think of that technically as the emergence of anomaly into what would have otherwise been a conceptually protected space now P has this idea of equilibration so let's say your baby crawls and let's say it's an equilibrated crawler which means it's kind of an expert and babies

get pretty expert crawlers by about say 12 13 months they can zoom around and they know how not to bump into things and you know how to crawl around without hurting themselves so when they crawl around only the things that they want to have happen happen most of the time and they're equilibrated at that point because their actions and their conceptions of the consequence of those actions match they've got no problem what they expect or want to have happen when they crawl is what happens that baby's at has mastered a developmental stage so that's the

stage idea and that's the equilibrated stage idea equilibration is a brilliant idea and I'll tell you why in a minute but then all of a sudden the baby learns to stand up it's like uhoh an advance but it's like a revolutionary Advance right it's equivalent to a revolution in science which is why P mentioned it's like well now I'm a standing creature the whole crawling expertise is hardly worth it at all you know there's some transfer of knowledge but the you new universe that's made accessible to the baby by its now Dawning ability to stand

forces it to revolutionize its entire cognitive structure now I I'll give you I want to tell you a very quick story because it's a very good one so this is a good indication of the function of dream in play so when my daughter was three she couldn't talk very well she she learned to speak late and we lived in Boston and when she learned to speak she developed a Boston accent which we were completely flabbergasted by because we didn't have a Boston accent and neither did any of our neighbors turns out there's a speech impediment

that sounds just like a Boston accent but anyway she was it usually goes away except in Boston so anyway she she was she was three and when her brother was born there's always the possibility of sibling rivalry right because and for good reason it's like H time to get rid of that thing all it's doing is taking up all of Mom's attention you know like that's a hard reality for a child who's under three to manage CU they're still pretty dependent and it's like well what why should they be liking this horrible noisy attention grabbing

interloper so we tried to we tried to teach her right from the time he came home her her her brother that the idea was she was going to lose something which was some parental attention especially from her mother but she was potentially going to gain something which was maturity Independence and the possibility of a new relationship now we could tell her that some parents will tell their three-year-olds that it's like and your three-year-old has learned to look at you when you talk but they're actually hearing you know how dogs in cartoons hear people talk it's

like wah wah wah w w w that's how children hear you talk when you're talking about something like Independence like what the hell do they know about that that's way up there on the hierarchy but we tried to teach her to interact with the baby in such a way that she would elicit positive feedback from him and so that they could be friends and then we also taught her that she should take care of the baby and that gave her something to do so that worked we also didn't let them tease each other not much

you know they're going to tease each other a bit because siblings often bloody well hate each other when they're when they're young and sometimes that just destroys the relationship for their whole life it's like you don't want that cuz you're stuck with your damn brother till he dies hopefully or until you do so anyway so my daughter was taking care of this little guy and you know she used to watch him on the steps and sort of Shepherd him around and she she was pretty good at it and then um one day he started to

walk and she kept talking about her baby and we told her that well he wasn't really a baby anymore and we didn't realize that this was setting off a cognitive revolution of the petan sort because of course she'd kind of grown attached to this baby just like mothers do and mothers sometimes get so attached to their babies that they really don't want them to stop being babies and so they end up living in their house till they're 55 you know plotting the destruction of the world so you don't want to have that happened so but

it was happening in in a microw way with her it's like well there's this baby and I spent a lot of time getting used to it and figuring out what to do with it now it's not a baby anymore what what the hell is it so she had this amazing dream and it ties back to the shamanic stuff that I taught you guys about earlier so this is the dream she dreamt that the baby crawled into a hole in the backyard now the way the hole got there was that a tree from the park beside

us had moved into our backyard and then it had burned down and left this hole and then the hole was full of water and so the baby crawled into the water and it reduced him to a skeleton and then there was a bug in the water and the bug pulled him out and when he came out he was a new creature so it was it was perfect like she came and told me that I don't know like two in the morning in her little three-year-old voice saying I got it all tiped down but was absolutely

spectacular because it was a straight shamanic dream like the tree burned down and so that's a transformation Motif and then water is the place of rebirth and you know the kid was dissolved into a skon and the little bug that pulled him out is like a representation of the underlying process that guides transformation her little brain was like weing like M trying to figure out continuity over change that's a tough one right because it's almost like a butterfly emerging from a cocoon it's a big deal baby to toddler that's a big difference you know she's

supposed to figure out well that's the same thing well no it's not so underneath her unconscious mind you know three-year-olds are not stupid even though they can't talk they've got this brain that's like 3.5 billion years old it's not stupid so so anyways um now why was I telling you that a specific reason oh well it's another indication of how so the transformations of cognitive structure are forced Upon a Child at least in part by the development of increasing physical ability right because as you increase in physical ability and capacity then the world transforms and

then your cognitive processes have to transform to keep up with that and sometimes that's a radical transformation so P's fundamental hypothesis is that part of the reason that people are motivated to undergo cognitive Transformations and learning per se is because as they mature they re they automatically come into contact with anomalous information information that they cannot process from within the confines of their current world model and because they can't process it it interferes with them getting what they want and so they're motivated to keep their cognitive structures updated so and sometimes the revolutions occur at

a micro level and that might be like when you're learning the difference between this and this you know it's like it's a major difference but it doesn't you know disrupt the whole fabric of your conceptual Universe whereas a divorce might the baby transforming into a toddler might puberty does it's cuz like you just finally got used to your body you're 12 years old he so you're sort of at the Pinnacle of childhood you're like an adult child you know what you're doing and 11 and 12y olds are often lovely creatures because they're pretty mature and

they've got their act together and then all of a sudden bang sex hormones kick in it's like you are no longer the same thing and neither is anyone you interact with and so it's like turbulence for three four five 20 30 years until you sort of sort that out which you never really do and so you can see how the physiological Transformations that are attended on development some biologically predicated and some an emergent consequence of learning disrupt the cognitive structures that people use to orient themselves in the world and that some of those disruptions are

sort of low-key equivalent to normal science that would be assimilation and some of them much broader and that's equivalent to accommodation assimilation means you something new that you can already handle using the constructs and schemas that you have at hand you know so maybe you have to pick the thing up like this instead of like this but you already know this and you know that so who cares it's like a little minor alteration and sometimes well know you have to readapt your whole body in order to handle the next level of complex problem solving learning

to drive is like that learning to ride a bicycle is like that and you can see that there's sort of a there's not normal versus revolutionary Transformations there's sort of a Continuum that that map themselves onto that hierarchy I showed you you know so if at the very highest levels of resolution it's minor Transformations and up the higher levels of abstraction you can blow out whole huge chunks of yourself so it's a Continuum but PJ and sort of conceptualized it as a dichotomy all right let's see that's a map of that which you can look

up um oh yes this is the this this this is the thing I really want to get at too this is it's so brilliant and so PJ was concerned about morality and he's one of the few psychologists I think who like he nailed it it's this is like the most important thing PJ discovered and maybe it's one of the most important things that a psychologist has ever discovered it's like how do you become moral well we already mentioned that when you acquire a behavior you inevitably acquire it in a social context so what that means

is that right from the time you're little and learning things the demands of society are encoded in the behaviors that you're allowed to manifest and so sence to some degree by the time you behave the way you do behave when you're three if you've been properly socialized you already act out the embodied moral structure of your entire community so you know when you talk about laws you say there's a body of laws and the body of laws used to be the king so you had to do what the king said but now the body of

laws is an abstract conceptual representation but those representations are actually semantic representations of allowable and not allowable behavior and so by the time you're three and you're a law-abiding three-year-old which means you're well socialized you're already acting in accordance with the law the patterns that characterize your being the behavioral patterns that characterize your being have already been molded into the patterns that you manifest and so what that means in some sense is you're already as n would say an unconscious advocate of your culture because you're acting it out now here's an examp here's an example

of how that can be transformed into actual moral knowledge so he as goes and studies kids playing a game so here's an example so there's a bunch of kids they're standing around on the playground and they're all playing helicopter maybe they've just got sticks and they're all going you know and they're flying their helicopters around and they're all doing this maybe they're diving in each other so what's happened is each kid wants to have a helicopter and each kid wants to be a good helicopter pilot but each kid wants to be a good helicopter pilot

in the way that other kids appreciate well they're being good helicopter Pilots that's tough a so not only do you have to figure out how to coordinate your behavior you have to figure out how to coordinate your behavior with other people coord coordinating their behavior in such a way that the shared activity not only does not come to a stop but proceeds an enjoyable way Jesus that's tough now if your kid can play well with other kids that's what they've managed okay so you got four kids doing this and there's rules actually there's not there's

rituals that the children are EMB boing that they've agreed upon while they set up the game they've just sort of bashed the ideas against each other and they came up with a solution and you can tell that because the game is continuing and everyone is having fun it's like is everyone playing nice yes that's an equilibrated play State and it's a moral organization because all the children are participating voluntarily towards a shared end and pH for pH that was the model of a functional Society that's so smart so now imagine that a kid comes along

and maybe he's a popular kid so he has a reasonable chance of getting into this play group he'll still be rebuffed like 50% of the time whereas if he's an unpopular kid it's like forget they're just not going to let him into the little helicopter Circle and it's probably because he's developmentally delayed or in in some other way he doesn't understand how he has to configure his behavior so that he can enter this complex dramatic scene without disrupting it or maybe he's one of those kids who says I don't want to play helicopter we should

play something else it's like no unless you're unless you're like a creative genius that's a really bad idea so what the popular kids do is they sort of side off to the group maybe they find a stick because they watch what they're doing and maybe they find a stick and they sort of start going with the stick and they're sort of looking to see if that stick helicopter behavior is acceptable to the peers and maybe you know one of their friends sort of notices that they're playing helicopters and they open up the circle and that

kid gets to come in and play helicopters but he might fail at that even if he's popular because once the little play thing is going it's like a play right it's got a dramatic structure you can't just come in there and you know start playing basketball or something so now what P noticed was that when children were playing a game maybe they were playing Marbles and that's a rough game May because you you can win and lose at Marbles and you might say well children shouldn't play competitive games but if you say that that's a

sure sign that you don't know what the hell you're talking about because all games are competitive and Cooperative at the same time if they share a single goal and it's really not a game unless there's a goal because go games have goals and so what the children do is they they organize themselves so they all decide what constitutes an acceptable goal and the goal with marbles is win some marbles and lose some marbles without whining about it that's that's another goal and that's an important thing to learn so the children say well here's the foundation

of our local moral Universe here's the rules that we're going to abide by and a lot of those are ritualistic they might have learned them from other kids so they play marbles you extract out a kid and you say what are the rules for marbles and if the kids's like seven they don't know they can't tell you but if you put them in with a bunch of other seveny olds they can play marbles perfectly well so what that means is the morality is coded in their behavior or in the behavior of the group like a

bunch of bees you know because there's knowledge in a hive of bees or maybe a school of fish so it's embedded in the child's behavior and in their patterns of action across time and then if you pull them out they can only give like a partial account of it they're not conscious of the morality it's like you pull a wolf out of a wolf pack and say well you know what's up with the wolf pack and the Wolf you know bites you because that's that's how it answers questions it's not going to tell you about

the rules it's only later in development that the children become conscious of the rules and then they become very irritated if people break them and then only much later do they start to understand that the rules can be adjusted by mutual agreement and that is associated with the pedian development of higher order morality it's brilliant you learn your actions the actions are conditioned by other people the actions are integrated into a voluntary game then the actions are integrated into a series of voluntary games that's social interaction then you learn the descriptions then you learn how

to manipulate the descriptions brilliant movement up to hierarchy so that's pedian Theory and nutshell constructivism in nutshell we'll see you on Thursday