Epistemology

I teach a graduate class on learning theories and we're starting to enter the world of radical constructivism. My students are reading about Piaget, among other people, and in re-reading some of Piaget and von Glasersfeld I am always thinking about Milo & Nora's cognitive development. 

Even though I know, intellectually, that the mind organizes the world as it organizes itself, it is hard to remember this in day to day interactions with people. It is so easy to forget that the kids' universe is not my universe. Milo and Nora don't even have a sense of identity yet, in the sense that they know that they are individuals who are separate from us and separate from one another. This is most apparent right now when Milo looks at himself in the mirror. He points to his image and says "Noona!" (Nora). When I say "No, that's you! That's Milo!", this does not serve as a perturbation for Milo. 

Piaget wrote about the processes of assimilation and accommodation. We assimilate when we take something as an instance of a known thing. Any differences that might exist between our experience of the new thing and our existing scheme are not perceived. So when Milo sees an old lady on the sidewalk and says "Baby!" he is assimilating what he sees into his (very broad) baby scheme. He does not perceive any differences between the old lady and a baby. I shouldn't even state it that way, because I don't believe it like that. To state it that way makes it sound like I believe there is this external world that people are perceiving more or less accurately, and I am perceiving the old lady more accurately than Milo perceives the old lady. But I believe that the mind organizes the world rather than the other way around, and Milo's world is not the same world as my world. I am agnostic about whether the world is even there. I don't think it matters. I do not believe that any of us perceive the world in any direct or accurate way. Our perceptions are fully mediated by our existing cognitive structures.

So anyway, if a person assimilates something into his scheme and then experiences an unexpected consequence, that results in a perturbation. People deal with perturbations in all kinds of ways. Often we will diffuse these perturbations by not attending to them or talking them away or doing whatever it takes to not change our schemes. But sometimes we will change our schemes as a result of the perturbation, and this is called accommodation, or learning. When Milo calls the old lady "baby", I say "that's not a baby, that's a lady." But this is kind of dumb on my part because this doesn't lead to any accommodation for Milo. Maybe he's expecting me to say "yes, that's a baby!" and when I don't, this is sort of surprising to him. But it's not making him change his scheme at this time.

It is very easy for me to forget the subjective nature of knowledge and truth and think that I can just tell people stuff and that will work. That almost never works. I know this in the context of being a math teacher (or researcher) and can often figure out what will be a true perturbation for a student. But I am pretty clueless about it in the context of being a parent, which is interesting. Trying to figure out what Nora and Milo's world is like is fascinating to me, it is like a trip through the looking glass.