Included with this message is a reply to one of the messages I forwarded
on to a close friend, Mike Lee. Mike works with me at Novell. I thought
he had some good comments, so I asked him if he minded if I forwarded
them to the list. Enjoy!
----forwarded message--
> Everybody is agreeing that, in order to describe life-changing learning,
> terms are required that allow one to register change without having to say
> that a later state negates a former state. One reason is that the prior
> state may be legitimate and workable, even insightful, and the
> registration of change shouldn't entail a finding of error, although one
> may add such a finding.
I also think having such terms is very important, for a different reason.
It has been occurring to me that, traditionally, the psychological goal of
learning in most people is toward homeostasis: people want to gain some
insight, add some knowledge that will allow them to reach a new resting
point, where their knowledge and understanding of something is complete.
The sense they have when learning is, before I didn't completely
understand this, but now with this final new learning, I get it.
I've been thinking lately that the goal of my learning should be not to
restore homeostasis, but to upset it. Implicit in homeostatic motivation
to learn is that I only seek to learn in areas where I am having a problem
already. I go to school in order to solve my problem of getting trained
for a career. I think about my intimate relationships because I want to
solve a communications problem I am having. Such a learning style will
help me function adequately in most areas, or to solve problems where I am
not functioning adequately, but that is all. I am not going to transform
any area of my life where I don't already have a problem.
I want to think about learning as a way of creating new problems for
myself, rather than just a way of solving old problems. I don't know
exactly how you get to this state, where you learn to upset your balance
rather than restore it. Perhaps a lot of it is done if you treat learning
as entertainment. Perhaps it requires a more systematic approach to
getting new information into your system (start reading an encylopedia
starting with A, pick new books to read at true random, etc.).
Ayn Rand's theory of concepts included the idea that a concept does not
mean its definition. (I think this idea is her most important
philosophical contribution.) By this she means that the full meaning of a
concept includes more than what is contained in the definition--that a
definition is just a tag or a set of rules that help you decide what
objects do and do not belong under the heading of a given concept. But
when you use the concept itself, you are not referring to the definition,
but to each and every object "pointed to" by the concept, and including
all the characteristics of those objects, whether or not you are aware of
all of them.
For example, the concept chair might be defined as "A movable single seat
with a back" to quote one dictionary definition. The definition doesn't
include colors, styles, shapes, sizes, but refers to chairs of all colors,
styles, shapes and sizes. The definition is useful because it lets you
look at any given object and decide whether or not it is a chair. The
concept is useful because it includes all the chair objects in the world,
including chairs designed in ways you've never visualized or that don't
exist yet. When one of these chairs is designed or created, you know that
it is a chair, even though it doesn't look exactly like the chairs you
were familiar with when you first formed the concept chair.
I think her idea of concepts has a great deal of value in understanding
how we learn. Not every new learning destroys all the old concepts we
have. Learning just expands and makes us more aware of the features and
nature of the objects our concepts refer to. When I gain a new insight on
something more abstract than a chair (such as love, justice, truth), it is
not that my previous concept of truth was wrong or not useful; it is just
that I have recognized something new that is included in the concept of
truth. Thus I continue to grow, but I am still anchored by past concepts
which were valid at the time I formed them and continue to be valid as I
change. I am not just in chaos, having to worry that everything I think
today may turn out to be wrong tomorrow.
I will bet you would like Rand's Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.
If you read it, read the expanded version, not the original version. The
expanded version has several interviews with her about the ideas presented
in the original monograph, that greatly extend and clarify what she was
getting at.
Later.
Mike
-- Posted to LO by Benjamin Compton <bcompton@geocities.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>