The Act of Creation (88 page)

(of names and other
properties), and of dynamic
changes-in-time
. The latter give
rise to a vague 'feeling of causal relations' [20] derived from the
cumulative experience that 'things make other things do things'. At
this stage, word-classes begin to emerge which roughly correspond to
substantive-nouns, adjective-attributes, and action-words or verbs. But
these classes, and the types of relations implied in them, remain for
a long time fluid. The child's progress towards grammatically more
correct forms of speech is mainly due to imitation and conventional
training -- which mask the fact that behind the increasingly adult forms
of expression, magic ways of thought survive. They survive, of course,
even in the adult, and never vanish completely. Thus the stabilization
of the codes of grammar and syntax in no way corresponds to the dynamic
evolution of thought, and inferences drawn from the former to the latter
have for a long time misled child psychologists. [21]

 

 

With the momentous realization that 'one thing leads to another',
intimations of causality emerge from the fluid pool of perceived
'togetherness' and 'relatedness'. The "homo novus" has now set out
on a long and tortuous road, which has in fact no end, except where,
of his own choice, he will come to rest -- theological causality,
mechanical causality, statistical probability -- gods playing billiards
or throwing dice. But children are philosophical optimists, and the same
process of empirical induction which earlier on led to the discovery
that all things have names, now leads to the discovery that all things
have 'becauses'. The sequel is a familiar one: the naming question is
replaced by the 'why' question which is many a parent's despair; just
as a thing was incomplete without a name, so now an event has a free
valency which must be filled by a 'because'. The actual content of the
proffered explanation, the when, and how, and how much, is as yet of
secondary importance; 'the sun does not fall down because it is yellow'
is accepted as quite as satisfactory an answer as 'the dolly is called
dolly because that's her name'. Just as, at the earlier stage, when a
name was not immediately offered, it was invented to fill the vacancy,
so now, when no 'because' is proffered at once, an expiation is provided
ad hoc by the child itself. And just as the invention of names is guided
by onomatopoeia or private associations, so the causal explanations of
children are derived from their private matrices of thought.

 

 

The questioning mania is reinforced by the desire to attract attention and
to be in the centre of events; it is a typical mixture of participatory
and self-assertive motivations. Lorimer made a record of all the why's
asked by a child of four years, eleven months, in the course of four days
[17], which is both charming and instructive. (One asterisk signifies
that no answer was given; two asterisks: no answer given, question
not repeated):

 

1. Why do you have this box for your feet?
2. Why did they bring the bed down from the attic?
3. 'Take your dollies in now, Joyce!' Why?
4. 'Fix the rug! You caught your feet under the edge of it!' Why?
Why did I?
5. Why did you take two cookies?
6. Why does the watering-pot have two handles?
7. Why did he put the solder in so many places?
8. 'The song-sparrow isn't pretty to look at' -- Why isn't he pretty?
9. 'The bobolink has a brown coat in winter.' Why?* Why?
10. 'It was careless of you to lose your shovel.' Why?* Why?
11. 'This is your orange juice.' Why?**
12. 'You are to sit here, in Daddy's place.' Why?* -- Please,
Mother, tell me why.
13. Do we have bangs at the back of our heads? 'No!' Why?* Why, Mother?
14. 'And then he made a mast for his little boat.' Why? Please tell
me why he made a mast.
15. Why do you wash the hair off (the razor)?
16. (Putting on bathrobe without putting her arms in the sleeves)
Is this good? 'No.' Why?* -- (impatiently) Why? Speak out! (but then
without waiting for an answer) Because it wouldn't stay on. 'There,
you thought it out for yourself, didn't you?'
17. Why did you stub your toe? 'Because I wasn't watching out.' Why?
18. 'I will tell you a story about this willow plate' -- Why?**
19. 'Please hurry, Joyce!' Why?* -- Because you want me to wash?*
Why didn't you wash first? Because you knew I wanted to go
with Daddy?
20. See the little tea things! Why did we buy them? 'Why do you think?'
Because we might use the others all up.
21. Why did you use both a fork and a spoon in making that cake?
22. Why did you sit in that chair, Mother?
23. 'Please don't climb in that chair!' Why?**
24. Why are you putting up that screen?**
25. Why are you opening that window?**
26. Why does the little chicken grow in the shell?
27. 'You can't win by jumping up and down!' Why?
28. Jeremiah, Jeremiah. He got into a pit, didn't he? Why did they
put him into a pit?
29. 'Please be careful not to break the bean-plants.' Why?
30. I saw your blue apron through a crack in the door. I thought it
was a spider. 'A spider isn't blue, dear!' Why?* -- Please, Mother,
tell me why a spider isn't blue.
31. 'You shouldn't talk about a visitor's beard, Joyce, until he
has gone!' Why?* Please tell me why.
32. Why don't you have a beard, Mother?
33. I want to cut my eyebrows in half! 'Oh! You wouldn't want to do
that!' Why? Because I would look funny?
34. Why do we have eyebrows?
35. Why must I hurry?
36. Why should I wait for candy until after supper?
37. Why did you speak to that man?
38. 'Please don't bang the car-door!' Why?*
39. Why did the chickens walk in front of the car?
40. 'It is time to go home for dinner now!' Why?*

 

A certain number of these questions are obviously motivated by the
desire to attract attention or intended as a protest; others are
quasi-automatic exercises of the questioning habit -- they remind one
of
Leerlauf
activities in vacuo. But others, such as Nos. 2, 9,
26, 32, are expressions of genuine curiosity; Lorimer put thirteen out
of forty questions into this category, judging them by content and the
child's expression. It is curiosity of a new type, no longer directed at
the practical or playful uses of things only, but at the mystery of their
'becauses'.

 

 

The word 'because' now plays a similar part to that which the word 'name'
did before: an abstracted relation has become a relatum, concretized in
a verbal symbol. The child's concept of 'becauseness', i.e. causality,
will undergo a series of changes, but not the verbal symbol which refers
to it. Later on, the causal relation will enter as a relatum into the
higher matrix of 'logical categories'; and even later this class, in its
turn, will become a member of the matrices of epistomology, psychology,
and so on.

 

 

 

Explaining and Understanding

 

 

This leads us to the question of the nature of explanation.

 

 

Earlier on I quoted Craik's suggestion that the nervous system's main
function is 'to model or parallel external events', and that 'this process
of paralleling is the basic feature of thought and explanation'. [18]
In terms of the present theory the 'model' consists of hierarchies of
flexible matrices with fixed codes, abstracted by the organism according
to its lights. Insight and understanding then become relative terms,
the degree of understanding depending on how many different aspects of
reality have been abstracted, how sharply they are discriminated, to what
extent the abstract codes lend themselves to explicit formulations, and
the degree of precision and error which the model reveals when subjected
to the test of empirical verification.

 

 

We have seen that it is necessary to distinguish between
progress
in understanding -- the acquisition of new insights,
and the
exercise
of understanding at any given stage of
development.
Progress
in understanding is achieved by the
formulation of new codes through the modification and integration
of existing codes by methods already discussed: empirical induction,
abstraction and discrimination, bisociation. The
exercise
or
application of understanding -- the explanation of particular events --
then becomes an act of subsuming the particular event under the codes
formed by past experience. To say that we have understood a phenomenon
means that we have recognized one or more of its relevant relational
features as particular instances of more general or familiar relations,
which have been previously abstracted and encoded.

 

 

The conventional test of understanding is verbal explanation -- the
subject is invited to name the general rule of which the event to be
explained is a particular instance. But the availability of such neat
and ready explanations is the exception rather than the rule -- unless
the explanation was learned by rote -- because, in the first place,
the codes which govern perception and cognition function below the level
of focal awareness; in the second place because a great number of codes
which govern thinking are unverbalized -- including the codes of verbal
thinking, grammar, and syntax; thirdly because there are emergent,
'nascent' codes which are still unstable and cannot be 'pinned down',
but are sometimes nevertheless of decisive help to understanding. We thus
arrive at a whole series of gradations in understanding and explanation --
such as:

 

 

(a)
Unconscious
understanding mediated by the dream -- a form
of internal discourse in which specific experiences are subsumed
under very old, emotion-charged matrices with pre-verbal codes. The
transformations and disguises which people and events undergo in the
dream may be described as acts of recognition of different appearances
as the 'same thing' on the scales of symbolic relevance peculiar to the
dream. Myth, folklore, fairy-tale, the fantasy world and magic causality
of the child are mainly inspired by this type of understanding; and the
explanations offered by primitives and children for their beliefs are
true explanations in the sense defined.

 

 

(b)
Tentative
explanations, which indicate that the matrix
into which the event is to be incorporated is still in the process of
construction by trial-and-error learning and hypothesis-formation.

 

 

(c)
Half-understood
explanations referring to matrices in "statu
nascendi" which, unlike (b), are being formed mainly by unconscious
guidance, by unverbalized analogies, etc.

 

 

(d) Explanation by explicit
analogy
-- its validity depending on
whether it is arrived at by selective or Procrustean methods.

 

 

(e)
Implicit
understanding, when the phenomenon is recognized as
an instance of a relation which has been abstracted but cannot be made
verbally explicit.

 

 

(f) The same as (e) plus a verbal label. The abstracted pattern can
now be
named
but not otherwise verbally described, ('sweet',
'pungent', 'beautiful' -- visceral, kinesthetic, aesthetic experiences).

 

 

(g)
Explicit verbal
explanations and definitions which sound
precise and convincing, but where the codes to which they refer contain
some hidden axiom,
idée reçue
, unwarranted assumption.

 

 

(h)
Over-explicit
, rigid definitions which explain away problems
as meaningless by taking the verbal components of the symbolic model
to pieces -- forgetting that the 'exact' sciences have always operated
with fuzzy concepts, that good cooks work in dirty kitchens, and that
the sterilization of verbal concepts leads to sterility.

 

 

Other headings could be interpolated into this list. Compared with
the relatively few levels of understanding in the rat and even the
chimpanzee, man's explanatory hierarchies represent a veritable tower
of Babel; not merely because they reach higher, but because there are
more finely graded levels between the unconscious processes at the base,
and the abstract symbolism at the top.

 

 

Thus instead of talking of insight and understanding as all-or-nothing
processes, and making verbal explanation a test for passing school
exams, we should proceed by more cautious statements, such as: Johnnie
has now understood that a phenomenon P is a particular instance of a
general relation R which he can name; he has also understood that R is
a particular instance of S, which he can also name. He may further have
grasped that S is a particular instance of T which he has abstracted but
which he cannot verbalize; or it may dawn on him that experiences of the
type S have something in common, and are perhaps particular instances
of some general relation T, which, however, he has not yet abstracted.

 

 

It follows that the degree of clarity and penetration of Johnnie's
understanding must not be judged by the 'absolute height' he has reached
in any 'vertical' abstractive hierarchy, but by the mastery he has
attained on his own particular level. This depends on the factors already
discussed, where the multi-dimensionality of experience (the intersection
of several abstractive hierarchies in it) was taken for granted. Thus a
garage mechanic may have a more complete understanding of the structure
and function of motor cars than a theoretical physicist, in spite of the
latter's more extended abstractive hierarchies; and an experienced Nanny
may know more about children than an experimental psychologist. 'Vertical'
progress in abstraction is of primary importance in the theoretical
sciences only, but not in other domains of experience which are of greater
significance to the majority. This may be the reason why the abstractive
hierarchies were built up so very slowly in the learning process of the
human species -- although the native equipment for it was given millennia
ago -- and are acquired at an equally hesitant rate by the child.