Amplifying, Attenuating and Transduction

What happens between our perceptions and our communications? One way of thinking about it is to think of a transducer which converts perceptions into communications (the 'T' in the middle is a transducer)

But what does 'amplification' and 'attenuation' mean in the context of perception?

Luhmann talks of a 'perception system' (or a psychic system) and a communication system, and how the two relate through 'structural coupling'. We might just as easily say they relate through transduction. But 'perception' is very hard to talk about - because as soon as we talk about it, it becomes communication.

We could characterise it as 'difference' - and maybe certain differences get made 'big enough' (amplified) for them to be transduced. Attenuation is easier - we hear the communications we can deal with in our perception - and ignore the ones we can't (so the frog never knows the water is getting hotter!)

On the other side, communications are amplified through social engagement. And the attenuation occurs as we select those who we talk to, and what we choose to talk about.

'Learning' is probably no more that twiddling the attenuators and amplifiers!

Jazzy improvisation today!

Cause and Blame and Wittgenstein

It is not unusual for things to go wrong in education. Indeed, most things that we try tend merely to 'sort of' work (depending on who you talk to), or conversely 'sort of' not work. And when things go badly wrong, it's tempting to blame things.. or people. But when we 'blame' things we mistakenly think we are identifying the cause. But blame and cause are not the same. Blame is tied up with personal subjectivity, those aspects of it which relate to personal identity and injury mixed with a subjective reading of causal mechanisms. Causal mechanisms on the other hand, are not necessarily subjective (although our ideas about them might be): causal mechanisms are discoverable - but it takes some cool heads!

Identifying cause means identifying how things really work. Given the evidence of things that actually happen, it probably means that some theory or idea about how things ought to be needs to be revised. The challenge then is to find more effective ways of expressing our ideas about reality which better fit the phenomena we see. Only through doing this can we realise the value of doing things (whether they work or not), and better prepare ourselves for the likely outcomes for the next intervention.

But this raises an interesting question. For what we are doing is understanding better what the university is through observing what it does under certain conditions. But how can you understand what something is by looking at what it does? Surely the causes for something are antecedent to that thing's existence? Yet I think this is a reasonable thing to do: it's where Aristotle got it right, and Hume got it wrong.

But it struck me that Wittgenstein had some sort of insight into this when he shifted his thinking from the Tractatus to the Philosophical Investigations. He always maintained that philosophical problems resulted from misunderstanding what language is. He spent the first part of his career analysing propositions for their inherent meaning. Later on, he realised this was a mistake: you can't understand language from analysing what it is; only by looking at how it is used - in effect, what it does.

The video is my explanation of what education does in cybernetic terms for our Chinese students.

Learning fetishism and the ontology of educational institutions: A response to Graham Attwell

I had a thoughtful response from Graham Attwell (see http://www.pontydysgu.org/2010/11/learning-and-instiutions/) after yesterday's post. He said that I "seem to think institutions exist outside social, political and cultural forces in society". Of course I don't - in fact the very opposite. I ought to say, however, that I used to be more sympathetic to Graham's position than I am now, having done a lot of work on Personal Learning Environments - only to see learners and teachers struggle with the concepts and technologies and feel alienated by the process.

What are the ontological implications of the ultra-personalised anti-institutional model of education proposed by those advocates of learner-driven education? It is an individualistic model of a society of learners seeking to increase personal power (I want my learning and I want it now!), yet strangely unconcerned with the morphology of their collective agency and the institutional forms it takes. (Despite the fact that most advocates of this are employed by institutions!) Institutional overthrow is one thing (but be careful what you wish for!); but to suppose the individual is separable from those collective social forms which shape them (starting with their families) seems to me to be a category mistake: persons, it strikes me, are not singular entities, and learning is not an individual activity. To think otherwise is what I would call 'learning fetishism'.

My argument is that persons as agents reproduce and transform the social structures they inhabit, and in turn are conditioned and constrained by those social structures. Learning is tied up in the process; it is not an end in itself. This structure-agency ontology is well-known in sociology, being associated with Giddens, Bhaskar and Archer (although they disagree on the details!). Learning Fetishism wants to change the structural context of education as a way of changing the agency of individuals so that ideal 'learning' processes as ends in themselves emerge in those individuals. But this is to fail to see the symbiotic co-determination of agents and structure. Institutions and the learners are a single organism, making it very difficult to intervene in structure without addressing individual motivations which are shaped by structure and contribute to its existence. Usually, such structural interventions don't work because individuals don't see 'what's in it for me'. The extreme end of learning fetishism seeks to remove the institutions so as to remove the structural impediments to transforming agency. But this is like taking a scalpel to part of the organism without knowing what that part really does. The consequences (were there to be a realistic peaceful way of doing it) are likely to be terrible. These are the natural consequences of the mistaken belief that learning is an end in itself.

Learning fetishism I think is a form of utopian idealism which I now believe is quite pernicious. It is not that people with this view are not well-intentioned: clearly they are. But they leave the door open to those who aren't, who may seek to destroy institutions for their own purposes - and our current government, with its sharpened scalpels at the ready, is showing some worrying signs of wanting to do this. If we're not careful, we'll be back on Hayek's "Road to Serfdom" (see http://mises.org/books/TRTS/)

Looking down the wrong end of the telescope? What's with the 'learning' fetish?

There is a misconception that pedagogy is about psychology (thanks to Oleg for this insight!). Learning concerns psychology; pedagogy is about the sociology of educational organisation, institutions, etc. For to teach on a one-to-one basis is entirely different than to teach 1 to 100. The pedagogy reflects the organisational situation. It occurs to me that this misconception has deep implications. For we persist in justifying everything we do in educational technology (which is fundamentally pedagogical) around the psychological benefits for ‘learning’ rather than considering its broader sociological implications – particularly those concerning the longevity of institutions.

Why do we make this mistake? Is it because to appeal to the ‘benefits to learning’ of using technology is virtually impossible to establish with any certainty? (.. and such impossibility is a useful defence in the face of scrutiny!?)

Is it because ‘learning’ is seen as the index of a person’s economic worth and the value they extract from education? Or indeed, the value which they demand from it as paying customers?

Maybe our adherence to ‘learning’ lies in the traditional definition of ‘learning’, where a person of 'great learning' was someone able to communicate in a wide range of registers, with reference to a wide range of reading, and whose analytical linguistic performances bear testimony to this preparation and consequent high social standing.

Whatever has happened psychologically is only available for inspection through what Wittgenstein calls ‘skilled performances’ – linguistic and technical. But such performances are necessarily social performances, and so the institutional context that nurtures and supports their development is as important as the individual minds that appear to produce them.

For all our talk of the technology impacting on the relatively short lives of learners, their economic effectiveness, their 'purchasing power', etc... how often do we talk of technology impacting on the much longer lives of institutions and the social life that embraces them?

Even work which purports to address the needs of institutional organisation, it is indirectly focused on the needs of learners, not institutions: CRM is a good example.

The lives of institutions are very long indeed. They remain fundamental building blocks of civil society, playing a role not just in the support of fashionable means of production, but in the peaceful development and emergence of new means of production (from feudalism to individualism for example). Their only enemies are those who seek to corrupt society for personal gain.

Human life is short. But in its passage of 80 years (in the West) or so, amongst the ends of an individual human life is its continued reproduction and transformation of the things that outlast it, that will continue to nurture civil society for centuries to come. This is a much bigger picture than the ‘learning’ picture: To focus on the individual at the expense of what can be sustained, on the ephemera of life rather than its ends may be a costly mistake.

Deep and Shallow thinking and Practical Action

Rationality is probably all we've got. But in a world of confusing surface phenomena, where so much sparkles at us and demands our attention, critical rationality can sometimes find itself passed over in favour of a 'this is cool! live in the moment' philosophy. At its most pernicious, such a philosophy will ground itself in a gently or event delightfully confused relativist philosophy, which embrace multiple narratives as a way of escaping the challenge of seriously exploring the relationship between deep rational judgements and collective coordinated action.

Deep thinking means turning everything into questions. Ultimately, it results in taking a rationally justifiable position. If such a position is sufficiently warranted, and it is taught well (now there's the real challenge), then some sort of coordinated action is possible. This is my position.

Shallow thinking often involves thinking strategically. It works with simulacra of rational justifiability. It seeks to persuade others into coordinated action through guile and self-interest. Coordinated action is indeed possible - but those who coordinate it know deep down that it will only serve its own purpose (and possibly theirs). It cannot escape some hint of cynicism.

Most work in E-learning falls into the second category. Indeed, most work on social policy. Any branch of inquiry which cannot ask certain questions is inevitably heading this way. But I believe deep thinking is necessary. How can it be made more possible?

Isn't this the job of Universities??

Music, Conversation and Harré

I had a fascinating and wide-ranging chat to Rom Harré over lunch on Thursday at the LSE. We started talking about bureaucracy and the inauthenticity of governance in educational institutions, and (what I took to be) the relationship between the social structural conditions for governance and the agency of those who are responsible for it. In a way, this set the scene for a broader discussion of teaching, learning, knowledge, positioning theory, music and language.

We turned to education, where I gave a brief overview of my work, and my particular interest in Harré's 'Positioning Theory' and how it relates to teaching: the challenges of teaching, of the nature of knowledge, of knowledge's relationship to insight, and how these issues relate to the organisation of education. And, of course, the nature of language.

This led to a consideration of Harré's relationship to Critical Realism. The reification of social categories within Critical Realism is a concern. Possibly because of their adherence to 'objective rationality', they seem to be less aware than one would wish of the role of language in making distinctions. I mentioned my discomfort with the utopianism of critical realism. I think we agreed that CR was an awkward mix of an innovative realist philosophy with a rather old-fashioned radicalism. The extent to which it is very difficult to critique the Critical Realist position with Critical Realists was something I discussed with reference to the role of personal identity with processes of social construction of knowledge. We had discussed earlier the importance of insight into the personal dimension of knowledge. Harré mentioned that he places particular emphasis on the teaching of biography of key thinkers. This does seem to be something missing from Critical Realism.

Then we talked about music. I expressed how I thought music had a rhetorical nature, in that the musical 'acts' seem to serve to maintain a biological state of both the listener and often the performer. Schenker fascinates both of us, and the issue of the 'family resemblance' between a reduction of a piece and the original raises many questions which we didn't get an opportunity to explore. He's just co-authored a book on the psychology of music: this stuff seems timely! (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Psychology-Music-Siu-Lan-Tan/dp/product-description/1841698687) Sentences may work in a similar way to music, he remarked.  I wonder if it's not so much sentences, but conversations which function in this way. The video is a way of exploring this.

Open publication - Free publishing - More somethhing

Being, Causing and more Birds

Following my previous post about the problems inherent in attributing behaviour (e.g. birdsong) to mental phenomena, there is something I want to explore further.

Artistotle says in the Posteria Analytics that to know something is to know its cause. For him, that would mean to know its material nature, its form, the agency which brought it into being and its purpose. For Aristotle, cause is a real thing in the world. But this is not our modern understanding of cause, which largely we inherit from Hume. With Hume, cause is an idea, constructed through observation of regular successions of events. It is the regular succession of events of neuronal firings and bird tweetings which lead to the ascription of mental causation in this case.

But getting back to Aristotle for a second, one of the things about the four causes is that although we might think of them providing the prior conditions for a things existence (that it has a material, a form, someone or something makes it, and it has a purpose), this prior-ness is something which we inherit from Hume. Some of the conditions for existence may only be understood through understanding the causal power of the thing in question. This is particularly true of a thing's purpose. It may also be true of the efficient cause (who makes it), and I wonder if it is true of the formal cause too.

This is methodologically useful, because I think it is easier and more practical to study the causal power of a thing than to speculate on the prior conditions for its existence - be they neuronal firings or flapping butterflies. It also ties neatly into Stafford Beer's POSIWID principle: the purpose of a system is what it does. Understand what something does rather than speculating on antecedent (mental or otherwise) causes may be a more productive route for the study of birdsong and many other phenomena.