https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ED_TfmwjsEw
Okay, so today we’re going to talk about Piaget. And Piaget is a constructivist. And a constructivist is someone who’s attempting to answer the question, where does your personality come from? Now, for Piaget, 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 Piaget’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 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 we can and should then seek is the law of this process. He puts in parentheses. We are well aware on the other hand of the fine book by Thomas Kuhn 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 and 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 Piaget addressed himself to. They’re very fundamental questions. Upon what does an individual base his 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 and 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 chance or moral concerns, play patterns and dreams, and 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 Piaget 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 Piaget is pointing out is that trying to understand what knowledge is by referring to a body of facts seems to be somewhat problematic because facts shift and people understand facts differently at different stages of development. Even though hypothetically we all live in the same world, 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. A pragmatist, and I think Piaget is a pragmatist, and pragmatic people basically say that because they’re interested in what constitutes truth. 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 Piaget’s notions of what constitutes valid knowledge structures seem to be very much pragmatic in origin. It’s also partly because Piaget is a thinker who’s deeply considered the fact of human embodiment. And in fact I think Piaget has done that more than any of the thinkers that we’re going to talk about. For Piaget, 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. And what is that process? Well that’s the next part of constructivism. For Piaget, you can think of, for Piaget 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 Piagetian perspective in 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 as I said, for Piaget, the body of knowledge that guides you is always action predicated. Now I want to provide you with another way of understanding Piaget 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 lived 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 Piagetian 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, here’s an example from a developmental perspective. When you’re eight 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 so 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 qualitative 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 Piagetian point of view. Piaget 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 rather normative way. And if any of you know anything about Thomas Kuhn that is roughly equivalent to Thomas Kuhn’s theory of normal science. So normal science occurs when the body of theory within a given scientific domain is quite sketched out and what people are doing is basically mopping up the details. So you might say that 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 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. And accommodation occurs when instead 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 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 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 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 would be roughly equivalent to Freud’s idea of fixation. It’s 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 Piagetian schema 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 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. 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 you can take a page from biology and you can say well a lot of these schemas are 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 in 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 biological problems simultaneously. And so again I’m going to repeat that. So the animal’s problem is how to fulfill a motivational state we’ll 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 Piaget would regard a solution like that as an equilibrated state. An equilibrated state is a solution that 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 Piagetian theory of morality. Now Piaget, he was a kind of a strange guy. He was a childhood prodigy. He was studying animals in depth when he was a small child. He published his first scientific paper when he was ten, which was on the behavior of mollusks. In 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 Piaget was an adolescent he went through what you might describe as a messianic crisis. He actually regarded messianism as a developmental stage that often characterized late adolescence. 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 messianistic 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 more broadly speaking, religion with science, but will stick to values and morality with science. I think he got farther along on that than anyone else has. And the equilibrated state is one of his most intelligent propositions. 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 one of Piaget’s fundamental claims was that an equilibrated state was preferable, so there’s a value judgment there, to a disequilibrated 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 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 do it. And in many cases, if the situation is disequilibrated 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. So Piaget’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 Piaget’s idea was that in a race for success, however you happen to define success, the equilibrated system is going to outperform the disequilibrated system because the disequilibrated system has to waste time and energy on enforcement. That’s a lovely idea. That’s a profound idea because what it does is 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. Piaget would say that 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 Piaget’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 a quasi-Piagetian notion that there only might be a finite number of equilibrated 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 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 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 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 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 set 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 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 relativism is a tricky thing, because 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 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. But 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. You can see examples of that pretty quickly by the fact that 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 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, Piaget 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. 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 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 equilibrated, and people will play them. So you can also think about a game as an equilibrated state, for example. And Piaget 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, insofar 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. And so Piaget actually regarded competition as a necessary element of games because he said that a game is so interesting. He actually thought of competition in some sense as a necessary, as necessarily tied in with cooperation. So here’s an example. Take a hockey game. So then we could say, well, are people in the playing hockey? Are they competing? 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 insofar 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 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 like a psychopathic strategy. It’s a bad long-term strategy. And then you might say, OK, fine, fine. People are cooperating within the team, but what about between teams? And then the answer to that is, well, they’re cooperating insofar as they follow the rules and that they don’t bring a basketball to the hockey game or 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 insofar as they’re doing that, that’s a cooperative maneuver. So that’s pretty interesting, too. Piaget actually believed that children couldn’t become social until… so at their earliest stages of development, as far as Piaget 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 their arms aren’t myelinated yet. The baby’s kind of myelinated 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 three years old when social play starts. So then 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. We’ll lay out the ground rules. We’re going to do X. And we can compete to get 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 Piaget is pointing out is that it’s clearly the case that a competitive game 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 communists 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 give what you can to the community. And if you need 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 a scourge and to be eliminated. And so, you know, lots of societies set that game up as an 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 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 it’s 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 an overview of Piagetian theory. I mean, I’m particularly interested with regards to this course in Piaget’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 disequilibrate the systems that the child is part of. And you could think about that as socialization. You know, and so for in this situation, for example, the only reason 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 comment about classrooms, and sometimes it’s true. But you can also think about it as a pretty successful equilibrated state, because universities have been around for a thousand years, you know, and they’ve continued across time. So it looks like a pretty good game. So yeah, the trick 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 in your biologically equilibrated system insofar as you’re healthy, right? Because, well, 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 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? Well, you’re motivated to learn when what you do doesn’t produce what you want it to do. So 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 re-examine your assumptions. And then, or, it’s funny, you have to re-examine 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 the set of assumptions that you’re bringing to bear on the situation 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 insofar 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 sex, which is, you know, generally is a, that’s a very high probability 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 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 nonverbal 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 Piaget, 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 OK, 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, then you’re not going to medical school. And so that requires a radical revamping of the system that you’re using to schematize your world. And you might say, well, that would motivate you to see what you did wrong and to change 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. 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 an equilibrated state. So the diagram here shows you point A and point B. It says when you’re going to point 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 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 disruption and a large disruption? And that’s a very complicated thing to figure out. And it took me a long time to figure this out. I would say it probably took 20 years. You could imagine that each of your schema, your systems of adaptation, work in a given area and across a variety of circumstances. 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 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 dysregulate 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. 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. And I’ll show you as we proceed a little more formal way of schematizing that. Because when you’re reading Piaget 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 the best I can provide. Here’s a more concrete way of looking at it. You’re a pre-med 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. You’re reasonably intelligent, you’re reasonably verbally intelligent, you’re going to do well on the LSAT, there’s going to be a career as a lawyer waiting for you if you do well. Being a 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, for you anyways, because otherwise 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 underlie? Well, your judgment about your intelligence, and let’s say also your relative ability, because 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 LSAT and you just bomb out. It 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 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 presuppositions are so fundamental that disrupting them is going to produce a fair degree of negative emotion. And you can tell from this diagram, you imagine that when you’re moving forward from point A to point B, 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, or if someone they love develops 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 in the interim. So it’s very, very difficult to accommodate to that. And so one of the things I think that Piaget missed, at least to some degree, is that there’s often catastrophic discontinuities in the stage progression. 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 well, I think I told you my nephew’s dream about the dragon. Did I tell you that? Yeah, OK. 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, and that’s a big deal. And then there was some instability in his 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 him. They’re problems. But that’s not the problem. The problem 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 generates 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 what do you do under those situations? And he had this 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 Piaget 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, big 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 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. Because 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 agoraphobic, 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 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 Piaget’s pragmatic viewpoint, because So you might say, well, 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 exists outside the realm of what you’re going to do with them, at least in principle. of science is that the object exists independently of its value. But if your cognitive schema 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. These are ideas that are taken from an ecological approach to visual perception, which is the was written by J.J. Gibson, who has constructivist elements in his thinking. So he would say that 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 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 another 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. 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 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. So you’re back on the veldt six million years ago, and you hear something rustling in the bushes. 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 pumped 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 means fear, because it might mean 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 pretty much prepare to do anything. And that’s really hard on you. And 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 if you have to fight with a tiger in the next five minutes, it doesn’t really matter if you’re going to die of smallpox in a year. So your body just shuts off everything that isn’t useful. And then 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 that’s kind of what this diagram indicates. So 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 presuppositions, you’re going to be in a state of chaos. 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you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in 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and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going to be in a state of chaos, and you’re going 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Right? So that’s a cool idea too. So, and here’s a way of understanding that. A way of understanding equilibrated states at a high level of abstraction. So think about this. So, your kid’s in a soccer game, and 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 them. 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 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. How about developing your skill as a physical being? Ah, that’s a good one. Developing your skill 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 play. And then you win across huge swaths 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 two 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 Piagetian theory. And there’s some elements of it. A lot of what you learn if you take Piaget generally speaking is stage theory. And compared to what Piaget 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. 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 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 high level negative abstractions to characterize your behavior or that of others. What you have to do is 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. So 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, alright. So we’ll see you Thursday.