2015 Personality Lecture 05: Constructivism: Jean Piaget

Okay, so today we're going to talk about P, and P is a constructivist. A constructivist is someone who's attempting to answer the question, "Where does your personality come from?" Now, for P, it would be more something like, "Where do your models of the world come from?" But his idea of a model of the world is so broad that it's perfectly reasonable to use personality as a proxy.

So, here's one of P's initial propositions: The common postulate of various traditional epistemologies—epistemologies are theories of valid knowledge—is that knowledge is a fact and not a process. And that if our various forms of knowledge are always incomplete and our various sciences still imperfect, that which is acquired is acquired and can therefore be studied statically. Hence the absolute position of the problems: What is knowledge? Or how are the various types of knowledge possible under the converging influence of a series of factors?

We are tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process more than a state. Any being or object that sciences attempt to 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 par. He puts in parenthesis, "We are well aware, on the other hand, of the fine book by Thomas on scientific revolutions."

The first aim of genetic epistemology—because that's what he called his field—is therefore, if one can say so, to take psychology seriously and to furnish verifications to any question which each epistemology necessarily raises. Yet, replacing the generally unsatisfying speculative or implicit psychology with controllable analysis. To know means to act. Human knowledge is essentially active. To know is to transform reality in order to understand how a certain state is brought about. Knowing an object does not mean copying it; it means acting upon it.

Knowing reality means constructing systems of transformation that correspond more or less adequately to reality. Knowledge is a system of transformations that becomes progressively adequate. In fact, if all knowledge is always in a state of development and consists in proceeding from one state to a more complete 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 P addressed himself to; they're very fundamental questions: Upon what does an individual base judgments? What are his norms? How is it that these norms are validated? What's the interest of such norms for the philosophy of science in general, and how does the fact that children think differently affect our presumption of fact itself?

More problems: How do children conceptualize number in space and time and speed? How do they understand that objects hidden from view are actually still there? How do they understand that entities that can transform from one place to another are the same entities? How do we understand chants or moral concerns, play patterns, and dreams? How is it that we imitate others, and what does it mean that we can?

Now, here's a definition of constructivism; this is from P as well: Knowledge does not begin in the eye, and it does not begin in the object. It begins in the interactions. There's a reciprocal and simultaneous construction of the subject on the one hand and the object on the other. There's no structure apart from construction, either abstract or genetic.

Now, let's take some of that apart. The first thing that P is pointing out is that trying to understand what knowledge is by referring to a body of facts seems to be somewhat problematic because facts shift with time, and people understand facts differently at different stages of development. Even though hypothetically we all live in the same world, it 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 P is a pragmatist. Pragmatic people basically say that because they're interested in what constitutes truth. And of course, we know that we don't have absolute truth about anything. So the question is, if you don't have absolute truth about anything, how do you know when what you know is enough?

The pragmatic answer to that is you set your own conditions for truth with each of your actions. 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.

P's notions of what constitute valid knowledge structures seem to be very much pragmatic in origin. And it's also partly because P is a thinker who's deeply considered the fact of human embodiment. In fact, I think P has done that more than any of the thinkers that we're going to talk about. For P, 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. 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 P. You can think of for P, in some sense, that reality is a field of latent information, and in interacting with that information, you code some of it both physically and abstractly. 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 Padian 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, for, as I said, for P, the body of knowledge that guides you is always action predicated.

Now, I want to provide you with another way of understanding P so that as we go through what he has to say, we can not only understand what he has to say but we can link it to the other things that we're going to talk about. Now, there's a man named Jerome Bruner who talked about narrative constructivism. Bruner said we seem to have no other way of describing live time save in the form of a narrative.

So, I'm going to review a little bit for you what might constitute a basic narrative, and then I want to talk to you about the way that narratives transform. Because one of the Padian 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.

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.

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 Padian point of view.

P assumes that there are 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. If any of you know anything about Thomas, that is roughly equivalent to Thomas Kuhn's theory of normal science.

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. 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?

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.

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 lot of them are physiological.

So you have to change the assumptions that you use to deal with the world. 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. If you continue to use the same schema, then you're stuck at a developmental stage that you shouldn't be stuck at; that'd be roughly equivalent to Freud's idea of 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 Padian schema or 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. 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: One is that you're somewhere—that's point A—and the next is you want some transformation in the world to occur; otherwise you wouldn't be acting, right? So you have some vision of the outcome that you wish to obtain, and then you have a sequence of behaviors.

At the most fundamental level of analysis, you have a sequence of embodied behaviors that you can apply to the world, and hopefully that produces the transformation that you want.

Now, you can take a page from biology and you can say, well, a lot of these schemas 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 that 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. Again, I'm going to repeat that: the animal's problem is how to fulfill a motivational state.

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. You want to come up with a solution that will satisfy all those constraints simultaneously.

Now, P would regard a solution like that—an equilibrated state. An equilibrated state is a solution that isn't producing anomalies or novelties when it's enacted in the world. So, it's important to understand this because it forms part of the Padian theory of morality.

Now, P, 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, and he published his first scientific paper when he was 10, which was on the behavior of mollusks. The next year, he was offered the curatorship of a museum in Switzerland, but his parents, given his developmental stage, had to tell the people who wanted him to take over the curatorship that he was only 11 and that it probably wouldn't be appropriate.

Now, when P was an adolescent, he went through what you might describe as a messianic crisis. He actually regarded messianism as a developmental stage that often characterized late adolescence. At that stage, people are concerned with the relationship between their individual lives and the broader social community.

When he was in that messianic stage and very much concerned about morality, he was also suffering from the tension between scientific and religious points of view. 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 we'll 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've found a mode of operation that simultaneously works for you and for your family.

A higher-order equilibrated state would be happy you in a happy family in a happy city, let's say. There are multiple levels of potential equilibration, and one of P’s fundamental claims was that an equilibrated state was preferable, so there's a value judgment there to a disequilibrated state.

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: There's family A, and there's family B, and they're competing in a local environment. 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.

So the load is whatever they have to do plus the conflict they have to go through in order to do it. In many cases, if the situation is disequil enough, then the conflict that you have to go through to do whatever it is that you want to do actually requires more energy than the thing itself.

P's point was that in a happy family—let's say an equilibrated family—both the individuals and the family as a unit can move forward without wasting a lot of time in conflict. So P'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; it'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.

P 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 P'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-Padian notion that there might be a finite number of equilibrated solutions to a set of given problems. 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 are other things that you can't do.

You're bounded by a set of limitations and possibilities. One of the limitations seems to be that your family has to be sufficiently well integrated so that you get a certain amount of attention. 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 afterward as a consequence of that lack of initial stimulation that they never recover. You can see right off the bat that one of the preconditions for even 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. You know, you have to be exposed to a certain amount of information flow and so on. 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, play, social interaction, and language—because if any of those are lacking in the initial developmental stages, depending 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 there's a set of constraints within which a family can survive as a family without blowing apart. 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.

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. 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.

It's also a powerful argument against moral relativism. Now, you know, relativism is a tricky thing because you can ask yourself, "Well, are people the same or are they different?" 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?"

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. 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.

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, you know, I think there are going to be more smartphones in the world next year than there are people.

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, like I said, P is a good antidote to moral relativism because the idea that—think about it this way—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. 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. You can also think about a game as an equilibrated state, for example, P 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.

Then you might say, "Well, all the players finish the game, and they're still friends." 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. You can have competition within an equilibrated state—a social community—without problem as long as everybody agrees on what the rules for the competition are.

P actually regarded competition as a necessary element of games because he said that a game—it's very interesting—he actually thought of competition, in some sense, as necessarily tied in with cooperation. Here's an example: take a hockey game. So, then we could say, "Well, are people playing hockey competing or 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.

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. That means there's a set of constraints around how that player has to interact with his teammates. 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, "Okay, fine, fine, people are cooperating within the team, but what about between teams?" The answer to that is, well, they're cooperating insofar as they follow the rules. 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.

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. That's pretty interesting too. P actually believed that children couldn't become social until at their earliest stages of development, as far as P was concerned, children in some sense were playing by themselves.

The reason they're doing that is because they're not very organized yet; their bodies are sort of not completely under their control. You could think of a child as a non-equilibrated set of quasi-functional and quasi-unified knowledge subsystems. 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 melinated yet.

The baby's kind of melinated from a nervous system perspective in the center of its body and its mouth is pretty wired up, but the rest of it isn't very formed. What the child has to do is integrate him or herself as an individual entity and bring all those subsystems online into something that's sort of integrated across reasonable lengths of time. Then the next goal is to do that with someone else, and that's about three years old when social play starts.

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," you know, 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.

One of the things P 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. You don't just want a game that everybody can play, 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.

If it's a good game, just playing it is interesting, but winning is also something. That places another constraint on those games that people find that people are willing to voluntarily play. 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? You should work as hard as you can and give what you can to the community. If you need something from the community, it should be given to you, and you think, "Well, that seems like a pretty positive presumption." 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.

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. The plumber game and the lawyer game are obviously different at all sorts of levels of analysis, and 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.

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. In most games that are enjoyable to play multiple times, you set out some pretty serious constraints, but within that system of constraints, they enable a lot of freedom.

So, alright, that's an overview of P, P-H-Jedan Theory. I mean, I'm particularly interested, with regards to this course, in P'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 disrupt that state.

This class can go ahead without interruption as 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 can think about that as a consequence of some degree of tyranny—people have made comments 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 to cross time.

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. You're biologically an equilibrated system in so far as you're healthy, right? Because none of your DNA has decided to make a go of it on its own, which is basically what happens when you develop cancer.

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. You can imagine that's a very, very tight set of constraints, and there's certainly lots of situations where none of those are going to be met.

So what's your motivation for learning? This fits very well into cybernetic models of learning as well. Well, you're motivated to learn when what you do doesn't produce what you want it to do. 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 to bring it about. If it doesn't work, then you have to reexamine your assumptions.

You know, it's funny—you have to reexamine your assumptions, which would be part of accommodation because you'd be shifting around the assumptions of the theory within which you're operating, but you're also going to be assimilating new information too.

So for example, you know, if you're maybe 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.

You might say, "Well, what's the evidence that they're inaccurate?" The answer is, well, you aren't engaging in any romantic relationships, and that's the whole point of the theories, so they're inaccurate in so far as they're not producing the desired outcome.

Okay, so then you might say, "Well, what could you do about that?" One would be, well, you could gather some more information. One of the things I do with my clients, for example, if they happen to be terrified of the opposite sex—which, you know, generally is 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.

It's a form of exposure. You could say if you're using the old kind of habituation theory, "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.

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. Some of it's built in at a procedural level, which means maybe they become more fluid and less awkward in their non-verbal self-presentation, but at the same time, they're also incorporating abstract knowledge that's going to help them expand their domain of competence.

For P, 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.

Well, that's something else. We'll talk about here. So, okay, 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. There's more or less two things that can happen. One is what you want to have happen, and the other is something other than what you want happens.

Sometimes the thing 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.

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 micro-elements 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. That requires a radical revamping of the system that you're using to schematize your world.

You might say, "Well, that would be motivating. That would motivate you to see what you did wrong and to change it so you could go to medical school." But sometimes it's just hopeless. This is a radical act of accommodation—you're doing something else, you know? And you might go through an intervening period of tremendous chaos.

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 A, then what you want can happen, and that's great because you move forward plus you validate the whole theory.

Or you can move forward and something that you don't expect happens, and you don't understand it, and that stops you. 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?" That's a very complicated thing to figure out.

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 schemas—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—schema that has oriented you across wide swaths of time and space, then that's really going to disregulate 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.

I'll show you as we proceed a little more formal way of schematizing that because when you're reading P you might ask, "Well at what point does assimilation become accommodation?" 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—at least for you. Otherwise, why wouldn't you pick that? Okay, so those are pretty fundamental assumptions.

Then you can think, "Well, how much of your schema do they underlie?" Well, your judgment about your intelligence—let's say also your relative ability, because, you know, ability isn't only intelligence; that's a big one, right? You bring that with you pretty much wherever you go.

There may be some domains where you think, "Well, I'm not as smart as I could be there," but it's usually quite a general assumption. Let's say you write the LSAT and you just bomb out—looks like you're not as smart as you thought you were. 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, it turns out you weren't. You can see that because those presuppositions are so fundamental, disrupting them is going to produce a fair degree of negative emotion.

You can tell from this diagram you can 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.

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. It's very difficult to accommodate to that. One of the things I think that P missed, at least to some degree, is that there's often catastrophic discontinuities in the stage progression.

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 I told you, I think I told you my nephew's dream about the dragon? Did I tell you that? Yeah? Okay, so he was going through a stage transition at that point because, well, there were two things happening. One was that he was going off to kindergarten; that's a big deal. And then there was some instability in the family.

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. His dream, first of all, laid out for him the problem. The problem was there were problems; those are all the little bitey things that were jumping up on them—those are problems. But that's not the problem.

The problem is that the problems keep coming. 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.

What do you do under those situations? He had the symbolic notion first in the dream, although I triggered that with my questions, which was, well, you go right for the source of the problems, and you do something about that.

Now, part of the reason that P thought that the study of knowledge was best construed as the study of the acquisition of knowledge is because you could say, "Well, here's a situation. Do you know what to do?" 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. So what's the solution to the set of problems that you have no answer to? The answer to that is 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. You can imagine that if a dragon is belching fire and smoke and that's turning into little beak-demons, that the firebox, which is a place of transformation, seems to be the core of the problem.

He went to the core of the problem, cut part of it out, and then he used that as a shield. Now, that'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.

I would say 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.

If you do an analysis of why it works, it's not exactly that they become less afraid. Let's say somebody's agoraphobic and they don't want to go into an elevator; you teach them to go into the elevator. You might say, "Well, they're less afraid of the elevator." But that'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 exploration 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.

This is a set of ideas that's in keeping with P's pragmatic viewpoint because, let's see, sorry about that. So you might say, "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.

One of the presuppositions of science is that the object exists independently of its value, but if your cognitive schemes are more or less action-predicated, then that isn't exactly how the world manifests itself to you—not as an objective reality. 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 was written by J.J. Gibson, who has constructivist elements in his thinking. 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. 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 the 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 packsacks 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. You manifest positive emotion to the tools and negative emotion to the obstacles. Then there's class, which is things that you don't know—things you can't 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.

I might as well tell you about this too. 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.

What happens is that your body has default responses, and one of the default responses is that you freeze. You tend to respond to anything that's unexpected as if it has a predatory impulse. You know, so you're back on the velt six million years ago, and you hear something rustling in the bushes.

It's probably a pretty good idea to freeze because perhaps it's a predator, and you don't want to attract its attention. 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.

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.

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, how do you prepare to act if you don't know what to do? The answer is, you prepare to do anything. 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.

Partly because your body suppresses your immune system while you're in the state of not knowing what to do next because, you know, if 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.

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. 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? 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.

That's why you die sooner, and you're more likely to develop infectious diseases and all sorts of things. That's even true if you control for absolute income.

So, that’s kind of what this diagram indicates. 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, so what you're doing doesn't work, then you're going to fall into an intermediate period of chaos.

The chaos is going to be proportionate to the importance of the proposition that was disrupted, and the importance is going to be proportionate to how much you use that axiom across multiple situations. I can give you a scientific example. You may remember, perhaps not, a couple of years ago there was a report from someone in Europe that they had managed faster-than-light communication.

Now, the right response to that was: "No way!" Because that means the most fundamental physical theory we have—that's passed like 50,000 other tests—is wrong. They say, "Well, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." But had it been true, it would have been earth-shattering because it would mean that the physical theory that physicists used—not only to ramp up their career but to actually deal with the world—had a fundamental axiom error.

It turned out that there was something wrong with their measurements, which is one of the problems when something unexpected occurs. You don't know if it's some damn trivial thing because you haven't calibrated a machine properly or whether you've just discovered, you know, a new part of the secret to the universe.

So generally, you should assume that you've calibrated your machine improperly. I should also tell you something about something that's akin to that with regards to a self-protective mode of reconstructing your schema. One of the things that happens to depressed people is something like this.

So maybe they go out, and you know, they try to have a conversation with someone in a coffee shop, and you know, maybe that person's having a horrible day or maybe, you know, they're very disagreeable and extroverted, which makes them kind of narcissistic, and so they're rude. The depressed person thinks, "I can't talk to people. It's bad people that can't—bad, useless people can't talk to people. I'm a bad, useless person."

"I've always been a bad, useless person, and as far as I can tell, I'm going to be a bad, useless person as far as I can see into the future." Well, you could say, "Well, what's wrong with that?" Because it’s TR. Maybe it's true. Maybe the reason the person won't talk to you is because, like, you're just wrong in a million different ways.

But let's not jump to conclusions. The rule there—the mental hygiene rule—is to pick the simplest possible explanation and, until you disprove that, accept it. One of them would be, "Well, that person's probably not having such a good day" or, "Maybe that person's not having such a good day."

You know, or maybe if I smiled at them a little more brightly and somewhat less pathologically, they would have talked to me. It's important to remember when you make mistakes in your life: Don't start out with generic high-level criticisms. It's a pathway to self-destruction.

Assume minor, alterable changes until proven otherwise. So anyways, it's a big problem because it's not that easy to figure out where the mistake is when you make a mistake that stops you from getting what you want.

"Yes," is that similar to the concept of a—yes, it is. It's the Aam's razor on the value side of the equation: assume a small error, assume a small reparable error, and then, if that doesn't work out, then assume a slightly larger reparable error, and I'll show you a schema for understanding that in a minute that's akin to P's construction of the world from the bottom up.

So, let me show you that here. This is a very helpful diagram, I think. If I can find it... Alright, we're going to go at this a couple of different ways. So look at the top diagram—it's a hierarchy. Alright? So you might say, "What does it mean to be a good person?" You might think, "Well, that's an empirical question."

But from the Padian or pragmatic perspective, that's not exactly right because what being a good person is, is an abstract representation of an aggregation of action-oriented behaviors and presuppositions that have a similarity across context. Now, we're going to decompose it.

This is for, say, an adult of about 35. What's one element of being a good person? Well, you might say being a good parent. It's not a necessary element, but, you know, it's one of the ones that would fit there. So what does it mean to be a good parent? Well, you could say, roughly speaking, that you have a good job and that you take care of your family.

Then you might say, "Well, what does it mean to take care of your family?" Now, one of the things I would like you to note is that these are abstractions—good person, good parent, take care of your family—they're abstractions. The question is, what do they represent or what are those abstractions made up of?

Now, lots of the abstractions that we use are made up of descriptions of the world. Scientific categories are like that, but these aren't scientific categories; they're pragmatic categories. They're actually made up of action, not of objective facts.

Objective facts; they're not made out of objective material at all; they're a whole different thing: good person, good parent, take care of your family. Okay, what does it mean to take care of your family? Well, there's a bunch of things it means, but one of them might be you cook meals, and you play with the baby.

Okay. So then, what is it mean to complete a meal? Well, it looks like, in this example, you're cooking corn. What do you have to do? You have to cut it, you have to set the table, you have to do dishes.

Now you can imagine you could decompose those too. What do you have to do if you're doing the dishes? Well, you have to grip a dish, you have to move your hand in a twisting motion, you have to push this arm forward and turn on the tap.

Okay, so what's cool about that is you can see where the mind—which is the part of us that's capable of abstract considerations—meets the body. People are always wondering, "Well, how do you solve the mind-body problem?" Well, this is one of the ways you solve it: you assume that abstract categories are actually abstract representations of patterns of action, and then you decompose them till you get to the action.

It's like, how do you go underneath this? What's next on the hierarchy? It doesn't matter because you're not conscious of it anyways. It's muscle movements; it's cell; it's electrical information that your cells are sharing. It's completely irrelevant to you; it's not part of your consciousness.

You can do this; you can't move a—if you know, you can't move an identifiable finger muscle because you don't know which ones they are. So one of the things P would point out is that one of the characteristics of a baby when the baby's first born is that it has—it can do these sorts of things. It comes equipped to do these sorts of things; those are basic reflexes.

Now, they're more basic than this, but a child can do this. It can stick out its tongue, which is really helpful because that means it can mouth everything in its vicinity, which is exactly what a child does. The reason it does that is because this little exploratory apparatus here is quite wired up.

So what the child assumes, so to speak, first, is the world is a place to put in your mouth, and that's why babies are always putting everything they can in their mouth. Now, the tongue is absolutely covered with sensory and motor nerves, so it's an unbelievably facile exploratory tool.

The child starts to extract out information about the world by using its oral reflexes, to a large degree, to begin with. Now, it can also move its eyes, although it's not really quite so good about that. And you know, because its eyes cross a fair bit, it takes a while to get both of them coordinated. It can hear things and so on. It's got a sense of touch.

But it's equipped to start operating on the world at the highest resolution, level of analysis. So, we could say, think about it this way: as you move up a chain of abstractions, your representations get lower and lower in resolution, understand? So, for example, being a good person is a much lower resolution description than picking up a fork prior to setting it on the table, although picking up a fork is a micro-element of being a good person.

So that's a high-resolution description. Another thing that you can know is that if you make a mistake, try to decompose the problem into high-resolution representations. It's lazy not to; not only that, it's insulting.

So you know, you come home, and maybe your partner has agreed to make a meal, and the thing is scorched to death. You know, and so you say, "You are not a good person! You've never been a good person and you're never going to be a good person."

It's like, well, they're not a good person in so far as they weren't able to, you know, make the meal. But you could start with a micro-analysis: "It's like why exactly did that burn since that's not the desired outcome?" Then you can help the person disentangle the sequence and you can find out where the error occurred.

Maybe they were distracted by something else or whatever, but it's a very difficult analytic process. But I can tell you, if you're going to maintain an equilibrated state with yourself and with people around you, stay away from the low-resolution abstractions.

When you're discussing something important, go down to the micro level, you know? Here's an example that you might consider with regards to children as they develop. So, the baby's laying on its crib on its back. You know, it's trying to get its act together, and it's got to organize its arms, and it's got to organize its legs, and it's got to figure out how to move them because it's just hitting itself in the head with its arms.

PJ would say a child will be laying there and go like this, and that'll sort of startle them. One of the things they'll do is try to do it again. In that way, the child uses imitation of itself to start building up the basis of predictability.

It's a bloody brilliant idea, you know? So that's part of the groundwork that the child lays to start understanding the world. It's going to be putting things in its mouth, and then it's going to notice similarities between the way something feels and how it feels when it's in the mouth, and it's going to notice that this motion is good for grabbing bottles, but it's also good for grabbing teddy bears.

So maybe teddy bears and bottles are in the same category to begin with, and the category is things you can grab and bring close to you, which is a perfectly reasonable category, though it's not an objective category. The child is chaining all these things together and developing more and more sophisticated abilities with its body, and at the same time because it becomes more facile with its body, it can analyze the world at a higher and higher level of resolution.

It's a circular process: information in, development of tools; expansion of knowledge, information in, development of tools; expansion of knowledge. You sort of boot yourself up fundamentally, and you do it from the bottom up.

Now, let's say you've got a three-year-old—this is a good example of how children differ at different developmental stages. Maybe you have a 15-year-old; you say, "Clean up your room!" Now, that is a low-resolution representation. When you use that low-resolution representation on the 15-year-old, you assume that they know the following things.

So we're going to put that aside for a moment. Now you're talking to a three-year-old, and you're in their room, and the room is scattered with junk because they've been playing. You say, "Now it's time to clean up your room!" and then you leave, and then you come back in 20 minutes, and what’s happened?

No, the child's playing with some toy, and you say, "Didn't you hear what I said?" The answer to that is, "Well, I heard it, but I didn't have any idea what you meant." And the reason that I didn't have any idea what you meant is because I don't have the micro-processes embodied in me.

So then you take the three-year-old and you say, "Do you see your bear?" The child goes, "Yes," because they've got seeing down. You point; they can see what you're pointing at. Great, that's a little micro-routine.

Then you say, "Could you go pick up that bear?" and they know that one too. So then they'll go pick up the bear, and you might point to a space on the shelf that's empty and you could say, "Well, could you put that bear in that space?" and they've got that too.

So then you want to help them clean up the room, but you don't want to do it for them. Well, what do you do? You build up all the micro-routines. It's painstaking, hey! If you're a parent, you're just going to think, "Well, go play; I'll clean up the room." But then you'll be cleaning it up until the child is 15 because they won't develop the micro-routines.

You might as well just start right off the bat and go through the painstaking process of building up the procedural knowledge as the ground for the abstract conceptions. Because the next time you want the child to clean up the room, you could start by saying, "Pick up the toys on the floor and put them where there's space on the shelf." Maybe they've generalized across those, you know, more concrete instances of cleaning up so that they can use the abstract representation to govern themselves.

This also helps you figure out what it means for something to mean something. You might say, "Well, that's meaningful!" What does that mean? Well, partly, it means that you have the underlying structure so that you can take the abstract utterance and decompose it into actionable sequences in the world.

Now sometimes meaningful also means you could use the information to reconfigure the abstractions that you use to guide action in the world. So that's a bit more complicated, but you get the point.

Now, part of the reason we can communicate—and this is quite interesting, and this is sort of in keeping with P's ideas—is I kind of know what you know. Now, why do I know that? Well, it's because I—it's not because I know you, because I don't—but it's because you're like me a lot. I mean, physiologically, we're not clones, but the similarities are obviously there.

So I can assume that you have some relationship with your body that more or less parallels the relationship I have with my body, and then I can also assume that since the environment you grew up in was sufficiently similar to the environment that I grew up in so that the schema of actions and abstractions that constitutes your personality is similar enough to mine so that I can use abstractions and you'll know what they mean.

It's a very complex and sophisticated theory of communication, right? Because it assumes that—where is the meaning in a word? Well, the word is embedded in a phrase, and the phrase is embedded in a sentence, and so on. That's complicated, but the meaning is that I compress a whole sequence of action strategies and representational schemas into a phrase, and I toss it to you, and you decompose it, and then you've got the meaning.

Some—some, like, you can't do something—how do you play the piano? Well, you sit in front of it and move your hands up and down the keys, right? That's too low resolution to be useful, especially if I know that you don't know how to play the piano. But if I can assume sufficient shared experience and shared biological commonality, then I can use high-level abstractions, and we can exchange information.

So alright, so the Padian notion, at least in part, is that you're interacting with the world constantly, and you're doing that in order to extract out from the world what you need and to increase your competence at getting what you need, right? So that's a cool idea too.

Here's a way of understanding that way of understanding equilibrated states at a high level of abstraction: 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.

Maybe their team wins the game because he tripped them and elbowed him, and the kid comes off the pitch, "Yes! We won!" 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.

You should say, "That's no way to win." 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 a little too high resolution for 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!

So when you say, "Well, it doesn't matter whether you win or lose; it matters how you play the game," what you're saying is the proper equilibrated state is not victory within a game; it's the ability to play many games and to extract out value from each instance of playing.

You went 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.

Then you start playing games with them, and the games are cooperative and competitive. 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 be able to play with them.

You'll have a whole network of games, which is all the games you play with all your friends in all the different circumstances. 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.

That'll mean that you're socialized enough to start to develop some autonomy, individuality, and independence. 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.

That, in 90 minutes or thereabouts, is the essence of Padian theory. There are some elements of a lot of what you learn if you take P generally speaking as stage theory, and compared to what P 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.

It's an extremely useful way of thinking, you know? So, and we'll close with this from a practical perspective because I try to only teach you things that I think have practical utility so that means if you know them, you'll understand yourself and others better, and you'll get along with them better. 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: don’t use high-level negative abstractions to characterize your behavior or that of others. What you have to do is—the thing is that if you have someone, for example, maybe you have a roommate who can't cook, or maybe you are that roommate, it's like in order to help someone like that, you have to decompose the process until you hit the level at which they're competent.

Then you have to teach them how to integrate those things that they know into the next stage of development. It's a complex decomposition and then you're actually helpful. 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, 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, we'll see you Thursday. [Applause]