A friend who has read a few of my blog entries recently handed a book to me:

Marton, F., & Booth, S. (1997). Learning and awareness. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

The main thesis of the book is to ascertain how people experience the world and learn from it: “by learning about how the world appears to others, we will learn what the world is like and what the world could be like” (p. 13).

The first chapter is entitled: “What Does It Take to Learn?” It recounts the conversation of Meno from Thessalonica, Plato, and Socrates. Meno wishes to define the concept of virtue. When Socrates suggests that they search for an answer, Meno objects asking how one can search for something when one does not know what it is. This is known as Meno’s Paradox. Socrates agrees that this is a good question for if the object being sought is already known, then one need not search for it; if the object being sought is completely unknown, then it is impossible to search for it as one would not know it if he/she saw it. (This is outlined much more clearly on this website: Meno’s Paradox. Meno’s Paradox has been since shown to suffer from the fallacy of equivocation because the ambiguous phrasing of the question (in particular “Is it possible to know what you don’t know?”) which fails to acknowledge that one can know the question to be answered or one can know the answer to the question to be answered.)

Plato attempts to refute this line of reasoning by suggesting his Theory of Recollection which proposes that people have innate knowledge about the world. They can draw upon this innate knowledge to recognize answers and solve problems. However, this gave rise to the mirror image of Meno’s Paradox:

Just as you cannot search for knowledge in the world outside, you cannot recollect knowledge from within. That which is already recollected you do not need to recollect; and that which is not recollected you cannot recollect because you do not know what you are trying to recollect. Indeed, if you were to come upon it, you would not know that it is what you want to recollect. (p. 3)

Again, this suffers from the fallacy of equivocation because it is possible for someone to know that he/she needs to recollect; the person knows to ask a question.

In any case, it is an interesting line of thought and regardless of the fallacy of equivocation, the answer to the question of what it takes to learn has not been answered. The chapter goes on to discuss a variety of related paradoxes within the most recent and popular of philosophies in the field of education. The authors tackle Empiricist philosophies and the related learning theories of Behaviourism and Cognitivism. They also show some philosophical paradoxes in the more rationalist learning theories such as Individual Constructivism and Social Constructivism. In addition, they also discuss ideas of innate knowledge as supported by Chomsky in the realm of linguistics.

Behaviourism

Marton & Booth suggest that the behaviourists, such as Pavlov and Skinner, sidestep the problems of Meno’s Paradox because they constrain their theories only to observable behaviour rather than knowledge or how people do what they do:

 . . . Skinner was not at all sensitive to the distinction between the reinforcing (or punishing) potential of experiences, on the one hand, and the content and structure of experiences on the other. The former has possible implications for whether or not, or to what extent, people do some particular thing, whereas the latter must be taken into account in order to understand how they do what they do. Skinner overgeneralized operant conditioning far beyond the limits of its explanatory power when, for one thing, he sought to account for learning language. (p. 5)

Innate Knowledge

With regard to language acquisition in children, Noam Chomsky heavily criticized Skinner’s work. Chomsky supported a theory of a universal grammar; that is, humans have a built-in propensity to apply a general set of rules governing communication. The acquisition of specific dialects and different languages is a manifestation of a subset of grammatical rules. He proposed this based on children’s uncanny ability to acquire language though their immediate environment may not offer all required data (vocabulary, syntactic rules). As the authors suggest, this has the distinct flavour of Plato’s concept of forms and his Theory of Recollection. However, Martin & Booth suggest Chomsky’s universal grammar still suffers from the mirror image of Meno’s paradox forcing philosophers to question how the specific variants can be derived from the general structure. I suppose that one could argue that while the universal grammar supplies the underlying means of conceptualizing or ordering the world, but the child’s actual exposure to the world guides the specific formation of the outward linguistic expression.

Individual Constructivism

Smith and Ragan argue that Constructivism and all its variants are really philosophical viewpoints belonging to the Rationalist movement rather than actual learning theories (1999). In any case, Individual Constructivism, in its most radical form, posits that each individual creates a personal reality.

According to Piaget, knowledge is constructed by the individual through her acts, through her interaction with the environment, by means of the complementary adaptive mechanisms of accommodation (in which the individual adjusts to the environment) and assimilation (in which the environment is adjusted to the individual. In this process progressively more advanced levels of knowledge evolve. (p. 7)

This viewpoint appears to stem back to the philosophical teachings of Protagoras and the sophists (see previous blog) who "recognized that each person had his own experience, and therefore his own reality" (Tarnas, 1991, p. 27).

Piaget does not explain how advanced levels of knowledge supplant lower levels of knowledge or how development proceeds in certain directions. Marton & Booth suggest that this is yet another expression of Meno’s Paradox. Furthermore, since the individual is “bound” within his/her own world of individual meaning, how can he/she interact with the “real” world? “If knowledge is not innate and it if does not come from the world, where does it come from” (p. 8)?

Cognitivism

Cognitivists consider their learning theories to be the more scientific of all of them. Cognitivism attempts to explain the individual’s outer behaviour by studying the inner processes (p. 12). In general cognitivist terms, sensory stimuli emanate from the environment. These stimuli are detected through an individual’s sensory perception and interpreted through internal symbols. An individual processes these symbols (thinking) and responds. The question arises, how are the internal representations developed and used? It suggests that in order to obtain, interpret, or use knowledge, “we must have it already” (p. 10). In order to choose an appropriate schema for problem solving, we must already have a procedure for identifying the problem and selecting the appropriate mechanism.

Social Constructivism

According to Smith & Ragan (1999), the main assumption of social constructivists is that “[learning] is collaborative with meaning negotiated from multiple perspectives” (p. 15). Contextualism, engulfing situated cognition, posits that situations can only be understood within their original and authentic contexts. The world as observed by researchers assumes that participants view the context in the same way. While cognitivists explains the outer world through study of the inner world of individuals, Vygotsky, a constructivist, attempts to explain the inner world of individuals by their outer, social world.

Conclusion

Marton & Booth suggest in the conclusion of the chapter that Individual Constructivism and Social Constructivism are “mirror images of each other” (p. 12). To move forward in understanding how people learn or how people acquire knowledge, “one has to transcend the person-world dualism” (p. 12). Although, I understand that Meno’s Paradox is flawed according to the fallacy of equivocation, I am still pondering a question: If the learner and his/her environment are inherently connected and cannot be separated, does that resolve the paradox? Afterall, the learner would have all the requisite knowledge of the world of which he/she is an intrinsic part. Therefore, the learner would not only know what questions to ask, but as an active part of the world, he/she would have access to the answer.

References

Marton, F., & Booth, S. (1997). Learning and awareness. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Meno's paradox.   Retrieved December 23, 2007 from http://www.everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=1191977

Smith, P. L., & Ragan, T. J. (1999). Instructional design (2nd ed.). Toronto, Ontario: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.