Date: Tuesday, Jan 28th at 9am Pacific Time (USA)
Guest Speaker: Eugene Subbotsky, Reader (Emeritus) Lancaster University, UK
Summary:
Dialectical thinking is often characterized as reconciling opposing ideas or points of view. In this presentation, we will consider how an individual reconciles contradictory beliefs that the individual holds. For example, research shows that even in adults, the belief in physical causality can coexist with the belief in magical causation.
In four experiments, children and adults were tested on their understanding and practical application of various phenomena, with phenomenalistic perception of these phenomena and understanding of scientific mechanisms underlying these phenomena competing for the government of participants’ verbal judgements and their practical actions.
Three models of the relations between old and new knowledge were revealed:
- Replacement: Knowledge replaces the phenomenalistic perception in judgements and behaviour.
- Merging: Knowledge mixes up with phenomenalistic perception.
- Conservation: Knowledge becomes a subdominant mode controlling people’s verbal judgements, with phenomenalistic perception being a dominant mode that controls people’s actions.
All three models run next to each other depending on the strength of phenomenalistic perception and mastery of educational efforts to install the rational understanding.
Recording:
Reading
Vygotsky discussed how object substitutions in pretend play become a pivot for transferring different “fields of meaning” in The Role of Play in Mental Development (see page 97 in Mind in Society). There is the transference from the visual field to the semiotic field, and
there can be multiple transferences to different semiotic fields. A stick can be used as if a riding horse, or as a magic wand, or as a sword, or an oar (or a baseball bat or a support for a tent or to draw pictures in the sand, etc. etc.) Another way of describing this is to use
Gregory Bateson’s theory of pretend play as reframing reality by saying “Let’s Pretend”
or “What if . . .?” or “As if . . .”
But cultures put limits on what can be reframed (what is sacred and what is taboo).
Some cultures are not open to new perspectives at all. Other cultures allow thinking outside the box only in a certain sphere of activity. The formal logic of science, as Eugene
has demonstrated, coexists with other unscientific modes of thinking. This requires
developing a metacognitive awareness of coexiting modes of thinking in order to regulate them systematically and a tolerance for what T.S. Kuhn referred to as the inevitable “essential tension” (Kuhn, 1977)