Artificial Tears

Sometimes it’s tough being a fiction writer. Today at staff meeting I had to tell my characters that, as of this morning, they are no longer real. They are in denial, refusing to return to work until their full ontological status has been restored. Also, they have renounced Levi Bryant as a vampire.

Norms as Mutual Intentionality

According to experimental psychologist Michael Tomasello, human language, learning, culture, and cooperation are all built on a common foundation of shared intentionality. Humans are like other animals in that they act with intent: they seek food, flee from predators, pursue mating opportunities, and so on. Humans differ from other animals in recognizing that other humans also act with intent. In Tomasello’s paradigmatic exemplar, a 12-month-old (pre-linguistic) human infant points to an object that someone else is seeking. By pointing, the infant simultaneously demonstrates that he understands the other’s intentions with respect to the pointed-at object, and he expects the other to understand the pointing gesture as an intentional act of information-sharing.

In Why We Cooperate (2009), Tomasello proposes that shared intentionality serves also as the basis for norms. Norms of cooperation make sense in this context: if each of us wants food, and each of us knows that the other wants food, then we are both functioning within a joint intentional frame. Establishing a norm for sharing food is useful for avoiding a fight, during which some third individual might sneak up and steal the food from both of us or a predator might eat us both for lunch.

But what about norms of conformity? If no one is actually harmed by violating a social convention, why do humans both follow and enforce the convention? The preschool teacher tells a kid to put the coat over there in the corner: why does the kid do it, rather than just tossing her coat wherever she feels like it? Piaget claimed that social rule-following is motivated initially by authority: if I toss my coat the teacher will punish me. Piaget asserted that only later, after kids have internalized authority-driven conformity, lose their thoroughgoing egocentricity, and start seeing one another as autonomous agents, do kids start enforcing the coats-go-over-there rule on one another.

So here’s a study that Tomasello conducted to evaluate the Piagetian theory of developmental acquisition of norm-based behavior:

“Three-year-old children were shown how to play a one-person game. When a puppet later entered and announced that it, too, would play the game, but then did so in a different way, most of the children objected, sometimes vociferously. The children’s language when they objected demonstrated clearly that they were not just expressing their personal displeasure at a deviation. They made generic, normative declarations like, ‘It doesn’t work like that,’ ‘One can’t do that,’ and so forth. They do not merely disapprove of the puppet playing the game differently; he is playing it improperly. This behavior is of critical importance, as it is one thing to follow a norm — perhaps to avoid the negative consequences of not following it — and it is quite another to legislate the norm when not involved oneself.”

In this study the rules don’t regulate the players’ cooperative social interaction within the game; rather, the rules are the game — they define the game — and playing the game is not a social activity but a solitary one. In learning the game the kids in this study were not subjected either to reward for following the rules or to punishment for breaking them. The puppet doesn’t play the game less effectively by not following the rules, since changing the rules changes the game. The puppet isn’t cheating an opponent or keeping a teammate from succeeding — isn’t violating mutual cooperative expectations — by not playing properly. In learning from the adult how the game is “supposed” to be played, the adult doesn’t have to describe the rules or make a mistake and then correct herself. Merely demonstrating how the game is played is enough to activate expectations in the observing kids about how the game should be played.

According to Tomasello, results of this study demonstrate that

“even young children already have some sense of shared intentionality, that is to say, that they are part of some larger ‘we’ intentionality. I contend that without this added dimension of some kind of ‘we’ identity and rationality, it is impossible to explain why children take it upon themselves to actively enforce social norms on others from a third-party stance, expecially those norms that are not based on cooperation but rather on constitutive rules that are, in an important sense, arbitrary.”

Tomasello contends that this sense of collective intentionality witnessed in three-year-olds is a generalized manifestation of the “he is me” identification with the other that is already manifest in the joint intentional behavior of those 12-month-old pointing infants he previously told us about. Conforming to the arbitrary rules of a game and enforcing them on others is not that different from participating in “language games,” in which specific meanings are arbitrarily assigned to specific sounds or physical markings — a game that can be played by oneself as well as with other people.

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For readers with a philosophical orientation to normativity as it relates to human cognition and society, you might want to check in with bloggers Duncan Law, Deontologistics, Planomenology, and Minds and Brains.

Fiction Update

“Then she walked into the bathroom, looked at herself in the mirror, and vomited into the toilet.”

Thus ends part four of the novel that I’ve been writing since mid-November. One more part to go.

Empirical Theater

Reading Michael Tomasello’s monograph Why We Cooperate (2009), I’m struck by the cleverness of the studies that he and his colleagues run in evaluating theories empirically. The experiments are staged like very short one-act plays, with scripts and actors and props and multiple showings. There’s always a stooge in these plays, someone who doesn’t realize that it is a play, who is immersed in the mise-en-scene and who extemporizes. It’s the spontaneous performance of the stooge that generates the data, but it’s the staged and scripted part that embeds data in theory. Experimental design is part of the art of science.

Tomasello briefly describes a number of experiments for investigating the possibility that something like altruism is an innately human capability. In several of these experiments an adult human faces some sort of problem, and the stooge — usually either a human infant or a chimpanzee — is in a position to help. Here’s one study which the stooge has access to information that could help one of the actors.

“Researchers set up a situation in which twelve-month-old, pre-linguistic infants watched while an adult engaged in some adult-centered task such as stapling papers. The adult also manipulated another object during the same period of time. Then she left the room, and another adult came in and moved the two objects to some shelves. The original adult then came back in, papers in hand, ready to continue stapling. But there was no stapler on her table, as she searched for it gesturing quizzically but not talking at all.”

How do the infant human stooges respond to this scenario? Here are some of the features in the stooge’s performance that the experimenters looked for:

  • Did the stooge help the adult locate the stapler by pointing or otherwise indicating its presence on the shelf?
  • In providing this information, did the stooge discriminate between the stapler and the other extraneous object that would not be useful in performing the stapling task?
  • Did the stooge demand the stapler for him/herself (e.g., by whining or reaching), or was s/he content for the adult to use it for stapling the papers?

This little bit of theater incorporates a number of scientifically salient features. The infant stooges can’t use language, but they can point — a competency that first emerges in human development at around 11-12 months of age. Similarly, chimps can point but they cannot use language — which means that this sort of experiment can provide ethologically comparative findings. The stooges have to infer the adult’s intentions in order to provide her with helpful information. And the stooges must want the adult to achieve her own intentions rather than usurping the missing piece of equipment for their own use.

Abstraction as Work, Universals as Artifacts

In Aronofsky’s film Pi, Max is looking for the patterns that underlie the surface details. For Max, the stock market is like the game of Go is like the Torah is like the cream swirling in his coffee: all of them are built up from the same sort of deep structure; all of them iteratively change states through the movement of the same deep process. So too with Max’s understanding of his own mind: underlying any particular configuration of thoughts or any sequential train of thought there are the same deep structures and processes. And so, inevitably for Max, the mind is like the stock market is like Go etc. etc. — the same deep structures, the same deep processes. The world and the mind both embody the same abstract universals. Ultimately for Max, those abstract universals are the voice of God.

According to Chomsky, underlying the wide variety of human languages, with their idiosyncratic rules for word order and conjugation and possessives and so on, there is a universal grammar, a common set of deep structures and processes for forming meaningful utterances by which all languages operate. Per Chomsky, the reason that any human child can learn any human language is that human brains are hard-wired with a set of deep structures that map onto the universal grammar. Language and mind both embody the same abstract universals.

Tomasello disagrees with Chomsky. Tomasello acknowledges that is possible to arrive at an abstract understanding of language by which all specific languages can be compared with one another. However, this linguistic “universal grammar” is best understood as an abstract cultural artifact constructed by linguists. Children learn to understand and to speak from the bottom up, through repeated exposure to specific words, phrases, and sequences. Kids soon learn that language functions as a communication tool: linguistic symbols function as metaphors for specific situations in the world to which the speaker wants to draw the listener’s attention. Only gradually do children build up a more abstract understanding of their own language, enabling them to construct intentional, meaningful, complex, grammatically correct utterances on the fly.

To be sure, humans are uniquely capable of forming categories and abstractions, as well as of making the sorts of comparisons across categories by which symbols and metaphors operate. But the content of the categories and abstractions and metaphors that humans construct don’t necessarily precede or underlie the work that humans perform in constructing them. Chomsky’s universal grammar might do useful work in the sense that it describes many common features shared by all languages. But it works in a way not unlike (excuse the metaphorical thinking) a hammer or an algorithm for doing long division or a general schema for going to restaurants. Each is a multi-purpose cultural artifact useful for performing intentional actions in a variety of specific situations. Just because a hammer works for breaking nutshells and putting nails into boards and pounding veal for scallopini doesn’t mean that all humans have the structure of hammers prewired into their brains, or that nutshells and nails and veal all share the same underlying structure in the world. The hammer is a cultural artifact, invented and incrementally improved upon by generations of humans in order to perform various specific tasks that involve the same abstract general operation of pounding.

It’s conceivable that the movement from concrete to abstract, from specific to universal, reflects not a dawning awareness of a fundamental “universal grammar” that has always underlain all the surface diversity in human minds and cultures, but rather an incremental and progressive movement in human culture toward some future state of abstract universality waiting for us out there at the end of history.  If I were more philosophically literate I might be able to draw an analogy to Kant and Hegel here. What seems more likely is that generalized abstractions are thought up, passed on to others, and improved upon to the extent that they enable humans to do specific kinds of work in specific situations. As the nature of the work changes, so do the workers’ tools. Universal grammar has proven itself a useful tool for working linguists. As linguistic work gets more complicated, linguists incrementally modify the universal grammar tool. If it’s useful to them, they invent altogether new linguistic tools and teach one another how to use them.

The Grammar of the World

17 FEB UPDATE — I should have supplied more context for this post. The main purpose of Tomasello’s book, which I quote extensively here, is to present the empirical evidence supporting a “usage-based” theory of language development versus the two main alternatives: the universal grammar theory of Chomsky et al., and the connectionism models of neurolinguists and cognitive scientists.

Tomasello offers two main objections to universal grammar theory: linguistic diversity and developmental change. Human languages exhibit a wide variety of grammatical structures, which would seem to be maladaptive if all humans are pre-wired to structure their utterances the same ways. Even if, on a highly abstract level and with many exceptions, all human languages can all be made to fit into a universal schema, anyone actually learning to understand and to speak any actually existing language must learn its unique and idiosyncratic structural properties. If grammatical competence is prewired into human brains, then children would be expected to generalize spontaneously from only a few examples of canonical grammatical form into mature adult speech. However, empirical evidence on children’s language acquisition shows that this doesn’t happen. Kids build up competence incrementally and unevenly from the specific examples they hear from other language-users. It seems that competence is achieved not by brain maturation but by categorization and analogical reasoning and practice — the same way human children learn to master other skills prevalent in the societies they grow up in.

Connectionist models are predicated on the assumption that children can learn language without a prewired language module built into the brain’s architecture. Through trial and error, corrected via feedback from other language users, a brain can presumably wire itself to understand and to generate grammatically correct statements. Connectionist simulations via computerized neural network models can build competence in using the basic components of language; e.g., nouns, verbs, modifiers, subject-object relations. However, these simulated learning models are weak where universal grammar theory is strong; i.e., the models don’t generalize across different kinds of examples, and they don’t handle complex sentences very well. Tomasello contends that, to overcome these limitations, connectionist models don’t need grammatical prewiring; rather, they need an understanding of communicative intent. Humans learn grammatical elements and their interconnections not in isolation but in the context of use. People use language with the intent of orienting one other jointly toward some selected features of the world. Absent this understanding of context and intentionality, connectionist models can categorize and analogize from examples only on surface linguistic features like word order and synonyms. The ability to infer similarity in meaning across two statements, both grammatically correct but structurally quite different from each other, requires the learner to infer the speaker’s communicative intent.

*  *  *  *  *

John ran. John went for a run. Both sentences describe the same actor performing the same action in the world. Linguistically though the two sentences are structured differently. The verb in the first sentence is run, whereas in the second it’s go. The word run also appears in the second sentence, but it’s embedded in a prepositional phrase where it functions not as a verb but as a noun. Because of these structural differences, the two sentences carry slightly different connotations.

What is the relationship between language and the world, between the grammar of a sentence and the grammar of the situation it describes? In Constructing a Language (2003), Michael Tomasello proposes that the joint communicative intentions of speaker and hearer determine not just what is said but also how it is said — “that language structure emerges from language use, both historically and ontogenetically.” I’ve written a number of posts about Tomasello’s ideas; here is an extended passage from Chapter 5, “Abstract Syntactic Constructions” (with emphases added by me):

*  *  *  *  *

The prototypical paradigmatic linguistic categories, and the only ones that are even candidates for universal status, are nouns and verbs. The classic notional definitions — nouns indicate person, place, or thing; verbs indicate actions — clearly do not hold, as many nouns indicate actions or events (party, discussion) and many verbs indicate non-actional stats of affairs that are sometime very difficult to distinguish from things indicated by adjectives (as in be noisy, feel good, which in different languages may be indicated by either a verb or an adjective)…

Langacker (1987b) has provided a functionally based account of nouns and verbs that goes much deeper than both simplistic notional definitions and purely formal properties. Langacker stresses that nouns and verbs are used not to refer to specific kinds of things but rather to invite the listener to construe something in a particular way in a particular communicative context. Thus, we may refer to the very same experience as either exploding or an explosion, depending on our communicative purposes. In general, nouns are used to construe experiences as “bounded entities” (like an explosion), whereas verbs are used to construe experiences as processes (like exploding). Hopper and Thompson (1984) contend further that the discourse functions of reference and predication provide the communicative reason for construing something as either a bounded entity, to which one may refer with a noun, or a process, which one may predicate with a verb. Importantly, it is these communicative functions that explain why nouns are associated with such things as determiners, whose primary function is to help the listener to locate a referent in actual or conceptual space, and verbs are associated with such things as tense markers, whose primary function is to help the listener to locate a process in actual or conceptual time (Langacker, 1991; and see Chapter 6). After an individual understands the functional basis of nouns and verbs, formal features such as determiners and tense markers may be used to identify further instances.

Relying on the notion of prototypical categories, Bates and MacWhinney (1979, 1982) proposed that early nouns are anchored in the concept of a concrete object and early verbs are anchored in the concept of concrete action – and these are generalized to other referents only later (very similar to the hypothesis that subjects are originally anchored in agents). The problem is that young children use adult nouns from quite early in development to refer to all kinds of non-object entities (such as breakfast, kitchen, kiss, lunch, light, park, doctor, night, party), and they use many of their verbs to predicate non-actional states of affairs (like, feel, want, stay, be; Nelson, Hampson, and Shaw, 1993). Also problematic for accounts such as these, grounded in the reference of terms, is the fact that early in development young children also learn many words that are used as both nouns and verbs, for example, bite, kiss, drink, brush, walk, hug, help, and call (Nelson, 1995). It is unclear how any theory that does not consider communicative function primary — in the sense of the communicative role a word plays in whole utterances — can account for the acquisition of these so-called dual category words. Instead, the developmental data support the view that children initially understand paradigmatic categories very locally and mosaically, in terms of the particular kinds of things particular words can and cannot do communicatively…

Overall, children’s early paradigmatic categories are best explained in the same theoretical terms as their other cognitive categories… [T]he essence of concepts lies in function; human beings group together things that behave in similar ways in events and activities. In the case of linguistic categories such as nouns and verbs, however, it is important to be clear that these are categories not of entities in the world (that is, not referents) but of pieces of language (words and phrases). When words and phrases are grouped together according to similarities in what they do communicatively — grounded in such functions as reference and predication — cognitively and linguistically coherent categories are the result.

Spinning Plates

Once when I was a kid my parents took me to the circus. I remember two things about it. The encounter with the scary clown of course was one. The other was the plate-spinner. Maybe eight sticks are impaled in the ground; on the table is a stack of plates. The performer picks a plate off the top of the stack, centers it on the point of the first stick, and starts it spinning. While that one spins he picks up another plate, balances it atop the second stick, and spins it. Quickly the guy goes back and gives the first plate another spin. And so on, stick by stick, plate by plate, until every stick is topped by a spinning plate. Applause.

Except this particular plate-spinner, on this particular day at the circus, was having a miserable time of it. By the time he got a plate spinning on, say, stick number six, the plate on stick three would wobble and fall, crashing to the hard floor and shattering. One by one, over and over, the plates kept breaking. My parents and I were sitting in the front row so we could see the effort and the exasperation on the plate-spinner’s red and sweating face. I felt bad for the guy. My father didn’t. The first plate fell and my father grinned; with the second he chuckled. As the act turned catastrophic, the sound of each newly-shattered plate was accompanied by another outburst of my father’s raucous laughter. Seated so close to the performer I could see the humiliation, the rage, the fear that he would never get all of those plates spinning at once, would never stop the cascade of crashing china and the violent onslaught of my father’s laughter.  I was humiliated, both for the plate-spinner and for myself.

I’m about halfway through writing a novel that might turn out to be the first in a series. The novel’s structure follows a sort of soap-opera format, in which several separate but interrelated stories are developed simultaneously, alternating from one story line to another to another. In the first part of the novel I introduce one main story line and hint at a second. In the second part I advance the first story incrementally while I get the second story going. In the novel’s third part a third story line kicks in while the other two stories move forward a bit farther. Describing to a friend the process of writing this way, I likened it to someone sitting in front of a control console pushing a row of levers forward, each one a little bit at a time. Now I’m thinking it might be more like spinning plates.

Portraits of the Imaginary

Here are a few more of daughter Kenzie’s pieces. You can see the whole gallery here.

“Brianne Tweddle,” acrylic on paper, 2008

“Lashes” and “Flairflare,” acrylic and house paint on canvas board, 2010

“The Creative Process,” watercolor on paper, 2010

“So Dead,” charcoal and acrylic on canvas board, 2010

Brassier’s Concepts and Objects

1. The question ‘What is real?’ stands at the crossroads of metaphysics and epistemology. More exactly, it marks the juncture of metaphysics and epistemology with the seal of conceptual representation.

Ray Brassier’s essay in The Speculative Turn consists of a sequence of numbered paragraphs. I’ve found Brassier’s longer works to be pretty tough sledding, which I attribute as much to the scantiness of my own philosophical background as to the density of the author’s prose. Right from the top, though, I can tell I’m going to agree with much of what Brassier has to say about the real in this essay. Take ¶1. In discussions elsewhere I and others have asked “But how do you know that the real is such-and-such? To ask this question, I’ve been informed, is to confuse ontology with epistemology. I agree that how one knows about things is different from what one knows about them, which in turn is different from what is. Of course the universe exists independently of what I know about it and how I know it. But if I claim to know something about the universe, then I have to talk about the knowing bit too, don’t I? Or, like Brassier says in ¶2:

2. Metaphysics understood as the investigation into what there is intersects with epistemology understood as the enquiry into how we know what there is. This intersection of knowing and being is articulated through a theory of conception that explains how thought gains traction on being.

So I’ll just read along, paragraph by paragraph, jotting down and commenting briefly on some of Brassier’s ideas that I think are right.

3. …Thought is not guaranteed access to being; being is not inherently thinkable. There is no cognitive ingress to the real save through the concept. Yet the real itself is not to be confused with the concepts through which we know it. The fundamental problem of philosophy is to understand how to reconcile these two claims.

Bhaskar’s Realist Theory of Science has been invoked as justification for the premise that the universe must be a certain way in order for it to be intelligible to sapient beings like humans. But I don’t know why that should be the case. I remember reading theoretical physicist David Bohm’s contention that scientists don’t truly understand quantum mechanics and other aspects of the subatomic world. Scientists take the empirical observations and calculate the formulae and invent metaphors for explaining their the results but, Bohm insists, that isn’t really understanding. Suppose there are absolute limits to human understanding, even when enhanced by technologies that haven’t yet been invented. Does this absolute epistemological frontier necessarily chart the edge of what the universe could possibly be like? That seems awfully presumptuous to me. Here again I’m with Brassier.

9. …The claim that ‘everything is real’ is egregiously uninformative…

Is a photograph of a crow as real as the crow depicted in the photograph? Sure, in a way: photo and crow both exist in the world. But isn’t there a relationship between crow photo and photographed crow that needs to be acknowledged and described? Isn’t the crow somehow more real than the photo of it? I think so.

15. Unless reason itself carries out the de-mystification of rationality, irrationalism triumphs by adopting the mantle of a scepticism that allows it to denounce reason as a kind of faith. The result is the post-modern scenario, in which the rationalist imperative to explain phenomena by penetrating to the reality beyond appearances is diagnosed as the symptom of an implicitly theological metaphysical reductionism. The metaphysical injunction to know the noumenal is relinquished by a post-modern ‘irreductionism’ which abjures the epistemological distinction between appearance and reality the better to salvage the reality of every appearance, from sunsets to Santa Claus. It is not enough to evoke a metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality, in the manner for instance of ‘object-oriented philosophies’, since the absence of any reliable cognitive criteria by which to measure and specify the precise extent of the gap between seeming and being or discriminate between the extrinsic and intrinsic properties of objects licenses entirely arbitrary claims about the in-itself.

Just as a crow is more real than the photo of the crow, so is a crow more real than my perception of the crow — or at least it seems that way to me.

18. However, in the absence of any understanding of the relationship between ‘meanings’ and things meant… the claim that nothing is metaphorical is ultimately indistinguishable from the claim that everything is metaphorical. The metaphysical difference between words and things, concepts and objects, vanishes along with the distinction between representation and reality…

Just as a crow is more real than my perception of the crow, so is a crow more real than my saying “That is a crow” — or so it seems to me.

28. …The gap between conceptual identity and non-conceptual difference—between what our concept of the object is and what the object is in itself—is not an ineffable hiatus or mark of irrecuperable alterity; it can be conceptually converted into an identity that is not of the concept even though the concept is of it…

Though the crow is more real than my idea of a crow, my idea of a crow is still related to and contingent on the crow. All ideas about crows are real, in the sense that they exist in people’s heads, and heads are part of the world. But the idea “crows are black birds” isn’t merely different from the idea “crows are fungi that live at the bottom of the sea”: it’s better, truer, more accurate in its description of the thing that the idea is about.

29. …The scientific stance is one in which the reality of the object determines the meaning of its conception, and allows the discrepancy between that reality and the way in which it is conceptually circumscribed to be measured. This should be understood in contrast to the classic correlationist model according to which it is conceptual meaning that determines the ‘reality’ of the object, understood as the relation between representing and represented.

Sure. Most scientific research concerns itself with incrementally closing the measured discrepancy between the object under investigation and the scientific conception of that object.

33. …It is undoubtedly true that we cannot conceive of concept-independent things without conceiving of them; but it by no means follows from this that we cannot conceive of things existing independently of concepts, since there is no logical transitivity from the mind-dependence of concepts to that of conceivable objects. Only someone who is confusing mind-independence with concept-independence would invoke the conceivability of the difference between concept and object in order to assert the mind-dependence of objects.

I’m thinking of crows that fly and nest in trees. Now I’m thinking of crows that live at the bottom of the sea. Both are real ideas. I could imagine the second kind of crow, but that doesn’t mean I’ll find any down there on the ocean floor. But crows flying, crows in trees — they really are there even when I’m not thinking about them. Are there real philosophers who don’t believe this, or they imaginary philosophers?

34. …To claim that Cygnus X-3 exists independently of our minds is not to claim that Cygnus X-3 exists beyond the reach of our minds. Independence is not inaccessibility. The claim that something exists mind-independently does not commit one to the claim that it is conceptually inaccessible.

Also this: The claim that something is conceptually accessible does not commit one to the claim that it is not the real essence of that thing.

36. …Argumentative stringency has never been the litmus test for the success of any philosopheme…

Heh.

42. …the first humans who pointed to Saturn did not need to know and were doubtless mistaken about what it is: but they did not need to know in order to point to it…

It seems pretty far-fetched that the first humans would have thought about a Saturn before perceiving it: first comes the thing that is, then the knowing that it is. You’ve probably heard the apocryphal story that the American Indians couldn’t see Columbus’s ship because they had no concept for it. That’s always struck me as crap — beginning in infancy, a person’s attention is drawn to the unusual, the unexpected, the unknown thing. Knowledge-about a thing can be wrong of course, but what if I discover that the thing I perceive, or the thing I’ve heard about, is an illusion or a fantasy — that the thing isn’t? Then I learn that knowing-that can also be false.

Sad Little Monkey

Last night’s dream… I’m riding a city bus to a scheduled meeting with a woman who went to college with my wife. Somehow I fail to get off at the right stop. I hop on another bus, but quickly I realize that it’s taking me even farther from the rendezvous point. I call my wife and tell her to let her friend know that I’m not going to make the meeting. I’m already way off course, and my poor sense of direction means that I probably won’t be able to find my way at all now.

Eventually I get home. As I recount my navigational failures to my wife and daughter I start getting weepy. I try to explain: “It’s like I have a sad little monkey perched on my shoulder pointing the way to go, but he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” Immediately I start feeling better, smiling even.

I wake up.

Academically Adrift

Here’s the summary of a new book showing that US university students don’t learn much while they’re in school. The study, conducted by two sociologists, focused on the acquisition not of specific content but of critical thinking and analytical reasoning. While students showed improvement over four years of college, the improvements, say the researchers, weren’t large: on average, seniors scored about half a standard deviation higher than newly-enrolled freshmen.

According to the statistical rule of thumb, a 0.5 standard deviation change constitutes a moderate effect, so maybe the researchers are being unduly pessimistic. As far as I can tell, however, the researchers didn’t compare seniors with an age-matched cohort of non-students, so it’s not possible to distinguish school learning from other learning experiences from maturation. The write-up also doesn’t say whether the study accounted for dropouts — it’s possible that those students who make it all the way through to graduation score better not because they learn in school but because they have more innate aptitude for abstraction and analysis.

Some other key findings cited from the article:

The main culprit for lack of academic progress of students, according to the authors, is a lack of rigor. They review data from student surveys to show, for example, that 32 percent of students each semester do not take any courses with more than 40 pages of reading assigned a week, and that half don’t take a single course in which they must write more than 20 pages over the course of a semester. Further, the authors note that students spend, on average, only about 12-14 hours a week studying, and that much of this time is studying in groups.

The research then goes on to find a direct relationship between rigor and gains in learning:

  • Students who study by themselves for more hours each week gain more knowledge — while those who spend more time studying in peer groups see diminishing gains.
  • Students whose classes reflect high expectations (more than 40 pages of reading a week and more than 20 pages of writing a semester) gained more than other students.
  • Students who spend more time in fraternities and sororities show smaller gains than other students.
  • Students who engage in off-campus or extracurricular activities (including clubs and volunteer opportunities) have no notable gains or losses in learning.
  • Students majoring in liberal arts fields see “significantly higher gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills over time than students in other fields of study.” Students majoring in business, education, social work and communications showed the smallest gains. (The authors note that this could be more a reflection of more-demanding reading and writing assignments, on average, in the liberal arts courses than of the substance of the material.)

“[E]ducational practices associated with academic rigor improved student performance, while collegiate experiences associated with social engagement did not,” the authors write.