J. Shotter.
"What can Programmed Minds Do?"
In this paper I want to try to distinguish (because space is so limited, it will be a mere sketch of how the distinction might be drawn) between those forms of teaching which can be carried out according to a prearranged programme - whether executed by man or machine, and those which cannot. This amounts to distinguishing three phases of teaching:
The fact is, as Bernstein (1960,1965) has shown and Wittgenstein (1953) argued, that to speak intelligible English is not to be competent in all the uses to which that skill can be put. Acquiring a language is like acquiring a box full of tools and a skill at using them - there are still further skills to be acquired: making garden sheds, cart-wheels, and so on. And having a skill in one area is not necessarily to have it in others. Similarly, there seems to be more to learning a language than just learning to talk.
I shall argue that the symbols and formalisms used in the teaching situation - even 'chalk and talk' - have meaning only against a background of knowledge acquired in a quite unformalisable way. Thus its acquisition cannot be mediated by any programmed device.
The programmed learning situation is often characterised like this: "(It) is very close to individual tuition in many respects. Information is presented to the students. ...The major difference, apart from the fact that the student is involved with a machine rather than another human being, is that the sequence of instruction is prearranged" (Annett, 1966). And, as the teaching situation is usually conceived of as one where 'the teacher intends by his activities to communicate certain information', this seems to [end p.85] be a perfectly reasonable account. However, this is to conceive of the situation as if the teacher and his pupils began with a common usage of language, as a gift. They do not necessarily do so, and neither can they necessarily acquire it in the classroom.
Why then is teaching thought of in this way, seeming to ignore an essential phase of the process? It all seems to follow from an image that we have in the western world of the nature of man and his knowledge. Although it has undergone many modifications in detail, it seems to be our philosophic heritage from Plato that has determined it in broad outline. I shall give it a special name:
The formalist's mythology: man as a formal system: "Men are thought of as individuals in possession of their natural language. While they are aware of themselves, the world around them (including the other men in it) is - initially, at least - unknown to them. They must explore it, and then tell others of their findings. Such communicable knowledge is thought to be the only true and certain knowledge upon which intelligent action can be based. Man is thought of as having a mind (or central nervous system) and a body, and in some way knowledge 'stored' in the central nervous system can be used to direct and regulate the actions of the body. T~e knowledge that the central nervous system contains can be represented, formally, as elemen- tary units related in some way to one another. When we act intelligently, we think before we act, and thinking is placing these elements into new arrangements (in modern terms, it is 'data processing'). Learning is simply considered to be storing knowledge in the 'mind' (in modern terms, it is like feeding data into a computer)."
Such an image of man has created many mysteries. Those of relevance here are: How is language learned ? How are our 'thoughts' and our actions related ? What is the relation between our knowledge of a whole and our knowledge of its parts?
Interpreting our observations of man through this mythology has led to a lack of distinction between learning by being told and learning by doing; between knowledge derived indirectly via symbolic systems and that derived directly from living and acting in the world - and to a lack of appreciation that the former depends upon the latter. It has led to the belief that everything of significance about the world and men (Minsky, 1968; Sutherland,1968) can be expressed in formalisms; also, the belief that only what is consciously intended by a teacher is revealing of his knowledge in the educational setting; and many other attitudes to do with localising intelligence 'in the head'. But most importantly, it places undue emphasis upon what we do consciously and deliberately, and produces 'selective non-attention' to what we do spontaneously [end p.86] and naturally, quite unawares. Yet these are the context of our deliberate actions.
To return to the teaching situation where, it is said, 'Information is presented to the students. ...' To be thoroughly objective, what is presented is not information at all - the teacher makes noises with his mouth, chalk-marks on the blackboard, ink-marks on paper, and so on. What is there so special about these activities that marks them off from all the other patterns of activity in the child's world ? They function as more than just signs, more than just 'discriminative stimuli' learned by reinforcement, each directly controlling a specific response. The fact is that, unlike animals and new-born babes, our circumstances usually do not affect us directly, we 'interpret' them, and we seem to do this through acquired schemes or organization, through symbolic forms or structures (Cassirer, 1957). And by the time we reach adulthood most of us possess many such structures, that we have acquired from others. As evidence of this, compare the descriptions of a room given by people with difference competencies, from their different 'points of view': as a physicist (e.g. Eddington and his 'two tables'); as an architect; as a builder; as a decorator; as a house-proud housewife; as a student; as a landlord; as a psychologist (?) and so on.
But more than just determining our way of 'seeing' the world, such structures seem to help us to consciously plan our actions, and to regulate them in the course of their execution (Vygotsky, 1962; Luria, 1961).
Such acquired schemes of organization seem to be of two distinctly different kinds: implicit or intuitively known ones, and explicit or consciously known ones. The first sort we acquire unawares and use in an appropriate way quite spontaneously -an ability to explain their structure is quite irrelevant to their use. As children, we acquire language skills in this way. The second sort, those that we might call our 'laws' or 'theories', we learn in a conscious, deliberate and laborious manner. And even when in possession of them, while able to enunciate the rules for relating their various elements, we are unable to apply them without conscious deliberation on their appropriateness.
The distinction above is that whereby the knowledge of a competent performer is distinguished from that of a competent expositor of the performer's art. While it is the task of the performer to perform, it is the task of the expositor to provide descriptions - systematically related ones, if possible - of the performer's activities.
While the performer and the expositor may be the same person, it is clear that they need not be. But it is also clear that it is only the results of the expositor's art that can be embodied in a teaching machine, yet it is the performer's art that the pupils are usually required to learn!
What might then be the relation between the acquisition of a competency, [end p.87] and the acquisition of knowledge of the rules that describe competent performances. As far as acquiring a linguistic competence, we can say straight away: such rules need in no way be involved in the production of a competent performance. Currently, an ability to produce a significant analysis of language proceeds from an ability to understand it, and not vice versa. It is an understanding that has been gained in some other way than being presented with patterned sequences of speech elements. Language cannot be learned in that way because there are no fundamental elements abstract enough within which to represent acoustically different utterances of the 'same' word ( Fodor , 1966). While different analytic schemes can be imposed upon speech for certain purposes - to enable us to recode it for instance into distinctive ink-marks on paper - if there are any 'psychologically real' fundamental elements in speech, no one has yet succeeded in discovering them - an artificial recognizer of fluent speech yet remains to be built.
In learning a language, the speech that the child is 'presented' with is always part of other ongoing human activities - these are its context. A mother does not talk to the child just to teach him to talk, that is not her aim at all. She attempts to co-ordinate in some way his activity with hers - and she tries to do it in every way that she knows. And the fact is long before the child can talk, she can do this very effectively (Kalmus, 1966).
Can we provide a new image of man which makes the process of language acquisition more intelligible than the formalist's image? I think we can. It begins to emerge from the writings of philosophers like Cassirer (1953) and Wittgenstein (1953) and psychologists like Vygotsky (1962), Luria (1961) and Piaget (1952) .I shall call it simply:
The new mythology: men as the creators and possessors of symbolic structures and formal systems: "It is not an image of man as a self-aware individual at all. It is an image of men living together, initially like animals, reacting to one another directly and spontaneously - but in ways modified by knowledge initially derived from direct bodily encounters. Before they created language, they were aware of nothing of their own nature and planned nothing consciously or deliberately. But then they created amongst themselves a means for co-ordinating their communal activities - language. In doing so, not only did they make themselves aware of aspects of their otherwise spontaneous activities, they also provided themselves with a means for modifying these activities in a deliberate fashion. Once it was possible to request an act of another, and he of you, it was possible to request it of oneself. As ways of life became stabilized and it was possible to request organized sequences of actions of another, and he of you, it became possible to plan, and to regulate one's own activity. While it was the internalized actions of the individual that made thought [end p.88] (Piaget), it was the internalization of dialogue (Vygotsky) that changed syncretic thought into organized thought. Whereas the original creation of language was blind - there was no pre-established plan or guide - the child now creates language again, but with his mother and friends as guides. Men can learn language because they created it - and learning to speak is guided creation."
This then is a tentative approach towards a new mythology through which to interpret our knowledge of man and men. Its main features are its suggestion that the 'contents of the mind' are dependent upon the actions of the body, and furthermore, are structured in a way directly relevant to their execution. And that in learning a language, besides learning a means of co-ordinating communal activities, one acquires a means of organizing and reorganizing one's own 'contents of the mind'.
If this seems to suggest that we are first active without thinking, then the answer must be 'Yes, it does, but are not all living things ?' If it also seems to suggest that we can never be taught to do what we cannot already do, then the answer is also 'Yes, it does, but what 'theory of learning' does 'not?' But note, the mythology has it that when something is 'learned', it is transferred from the realm of the spontaneous to the realm of the deliberate, i.e. it is brought, not under the teacher's control nor under that of any other situation, but under the pupil's own control. Once an act can be done deliberately, out-of-context, to alleviate no special need, it may be interpolated into ongoing spontaneous activities thus modifying them.
To modify an apohorism of George Miller's (1963): our new activities are our old spontaneous ones deliberately reconstituted into new ones. How does all this bear upon what we can hope to do with instructional devices which can only exhibit patterns of formalisms ? They cannot be used to teach the use of formalisms, and what is there left to teach once the significance of the formalisms has been grasped?
Consider a very circumscribed and highly stable way of life indeed (or 'form of life' to use Wittgenstein's term), that revolves around a small number of distinctive ink-marks on paper, i.e. Logic. First, all participants have to come to an understanding of the conventions concerning the arrangement and rearrangement of the elements into acceptable patterns: this is the initial phase, and as Wittgenstein points out, it involves tacit agreements about 'forms of life' (§241) and judgements (§242). Once in possession of this knowledge, the individual's task is to work out from a basic set of patterns (the axioms) other patterns (theorems), and this, even though it is only manipulation of formalisms, takes time and effort, but one can develop a skill at it. And the theorems that one can derive by its employment may serve to 'short-cut' the labours of others.
Such manipulation of formalisms can be purely mechanical. We can and do make machines to do it, and it is notable that it is only such functions that are in fact being successfully simulated upon a computer, those that are our highest marks of distinction from the beasts, those that distinguish us less being harder to simulate.
The above account of doing Logic suggests that we should distinguish between a phase when the seed, so to speak, of a symbolic structure is sown, the phase of dialogue creation, and the phase in which the individual brings it to flower, the phase of discipline: it is only for the second phase that I think machines can be used, and indeed, it may be more satisfactory in every way to do so. The phase of information transmission begins only after individuals have done some work at their discipline.
This still leaves a problem: logic and mathematics are not descriptions of actual things, they are just expressions of general schemes of organization. Teaching someone to manipulate the formalisms in which they are represented is doing nothing more than making him skillful in that respect, 'seeing' that they can be used to organize some other body of knowledge is left to the pupil, and, as far as the teacher is concerned, to luck. There is no telling whether the pupil is in possession of the appropriate sort of experiences to put them to effective use or not. Thus the situation where teaching machines are used for disciplining people's skills at using things is quite different from that involving just formalisms. It seems that the things themselves, not formal representations of them, should be present. And there should be continual interaction between the instructions that the child is given and his manipulation of the things in question, instructions being consequent upon the results of his manipulations. Only in such a situation would nothing be left to luck, left to the child to 'see' at a later date the connection between what he was being told to do and learning how to do it.
Such situations raise many problems, too many for discussion here. I have restricted my purpose in this paper to pointing out the function of symbolic structures in men's affairs, and surmising about the way that they are created and used.
When Skinner (1958) says "In assigning certain mechanizable functions to machines, the teacher emerges in his proper role as an indispensible human being." I hope my comments will go some way towards indicating what functions are 'mechanizable' and in what way a human being is 'indispensible'. [end p.90]
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