A Logic of Learning

I don't know how anyone can say anything defensible about learning. Learning is like an "itch" - it is what Searle calls an aspect of "epistemic subjectivity" - something we know about in our individual consciousness, but provides no direct object for shared social inspection and agreed definition. Yet in the dreary world of educational research, so many academics insist at some point in defending their educational innovation with some kind of statement about what learning is. What they imply by such a statement is what learning isn't - and what learning isn't is the particular practice in education that they don't like, as opposed to the one that they "sell". How can they possibly know?

The fact that we think we have some idea of what learning is is important. It impacts on our educational practice. I once asked a friend (who is a leading education academic) my favourite question, "Why is education so crap?" and he said "bad theory". But that raises the question as to what a good theory might look like. Since we can say nothing defensible about what learning is, how could we establish any ground for good theory?

Theory generates expectations. Bohm pointed out that the word theoria has the same root as "theatre". Theory, he says, is a "theatre of the mind" - where our expectations about what might happen play out. But whilst it might be impossible to agree a single "play", it might be possible to agree on the logical principles upon which all our different plays are constructed. There is, after all, a logic to the plays of Shakespeare, to the politics of Machiavelli, to the music of Bach or the military tactics of Julius Caesar.

To be more precise, there is "logic" in the sense that we learn about on philosophy and mathematics courses. It belongs to the classical world of Aristotle. It involves principles like the law of the excluded middle. This logic is also the logic which underpins the way in which we think about computers and technology, and in turn it drives our thinking about social organisation, big data, statistics, metrics and so on.

But the logic of nature is not this. It works differently. The logic of Shakespeare, Bach, Machiavelli and even Caesar embraces contradiction. Only recently have such logics been explored, partly through the discovery of logical principles in nature (quantum mechanics and biology) which appear to similarly embrace them. At the moment, I am exploring the logic of Stephane Lupasco (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St%C3%A9phane_Lupasco) and the work of Joseph Brenner, whose 'Logic in Reality' presents itself as a new way forwards in logical thinking which might be able to express a deeper logic which might unite aesthetics, biology, quantum mechanics with learning.

So whilst we might not (and cannot) agree about what learning is, we can unpick the logic upon which our propositions about learning are formed. Doing this is to tunnel under the foundations of our current mad discourse in education. It's a strategy for reformulating an approach to education which acknowledges learning as metaphysical whilst embracing it within a transformed scientific approach.