Re: [xmca] conservation

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

David writes:

"Fair" and "not fair," as with "more," "less," and "same," are bound
into a variety of broad cultural practices that could be seen as
absorbing children's responses in these experiments..."

Of course, these experiments would be impossible without language and the child's familiarity with a variety of cultural practices. The whole set-up of being questioned by a strange adult is familiar to some children, not to others. My main point  was that I can't bring myself to accept that what goes on in a conservation task is *solely* a consequence of the fact that child and adult interpret the words differently or, for that matter, that child and adult interpret the situation and its demands differently.

What is hard to convey, yet compelling, about the video I mentioned is the quality of the non-verbal component. The child's excitement when the crackers are brought out. Her expression of disappointment and puzzlement when the experimenter distributes them unfairly. And then, most intriguing and puzzling of course, the fact that she relaxes contentedly when her cracker is divided in two. What kind of language game about 'fair' would one have to be playing to think it fair when the other person has two crackers and one has only two halves?

Mike, thanks for the pointers to relevant literature. I suppose I am simply trying to resolve my own confusion, having taught one week LSV's critique of Piaget's early concept of ecogentrism, then the next week taught Piaget's explanation of failure to conserve. LSV rejected Piaget's proposal (or assumption) that the child is animistic and syncretic in their reasoning, and this because they are individualistic, verging on autistic, and need to be socialized. He certainly didn't accept Piaget's view that the world simply IS dualistic (thought versus matter, external versus internal, object versus sign)  and the child has to learn (be forced actually) to accept this, to accommodate to the demands of this reality and give up fanciful assimilation.

By the time of the conservation tasks Piaget's explanation of the limits of cognition in early childhood was different. As I understand it, it was that the forms of mental representation which the child is capable of at this age are limited. They are static and centered: the child is able to represent states of affairs but not their transformations, and will tend to focus on one dimension or aspect of a multi-dimensional situation. Since the child cannot form a mental representation of the pouring of liquid or the flattening of clay they cannot think about these transformations. Because they cannot think about the transformations their reasoning is dominated by their perception (of states), and perception in these experiments is misleading. 

Egocentrism (as in the 3 mountain task, for example) is now just one manifestation of these characteristics of representation, not the central theoretical concept as it was in Piaget's earlier work. But in several ways the moral is the same. The child must come to recognize the distinction between appearance and reality. The child must come to appreciate that another person has a distinct point of view. And in all this language plays no constitutive role, it is simply the medium of expression of the child's thought.

LSV of course was very critical of this last point, and those contemporary researchers who have paid more attention to the linguistic demands of the task are clearly onto something important. But it seems to me that they fall into the general tendency of many of those who adopt unquestioningly the representational model of mind (i.e., that people know the world through their mental representations), that the child has mental representations from the outset. That in these tasks the child *sees* the same things as the adult, and merely *talks* about them differently. As Lara says, that is considering only language without considering the relationship between language and thought.

This is the age where LSV emphasizes that the child's perception has been completely transformed by language. The child, he says, now perceives a world of things with definite meanings, because language has broken the world in ordered objects. "At the end of [infancy]," he writes, "the child begins to experience, for the first time, a structurally- and objectively-formed world," as "speech changes the structure of perception," to a kind of seeing, he suggests, that finds more in an object than what is immediately given in the perceptual act. Thinking too is transformed at the end of infancy, it is no longer completely perceptual but now also verbal; it is a "“visual-practical restructuring of the perceived field.”

The child now "sees more" in each object. I can only think that LSV's explanation of failure to conserve would have started here. The child sees each half of her cracker as more than it is. I don't mean she sees more cracker, I mean that she sees, perhaps, a unit, a "one" and then a "two." Only later will she become able to see that one unit may both be equal to and different from another unit: that her "one cracker" is both equivalent to and yet not equal to the adult's "one cracker." LSV suggests that at this stage word and object are not yet differentiated: could it be that in counting the child transforms the objects in front of her own eyes? Her words have a direct impact on her perception. Later attention and memory will direct and correct this new way of seeing. For the moment the child's use of speech has brought a new order to her consciousness of the world. It is not yet the order that adults have, but neither is it an inadequate adaptation to a built-in dualism.

Martin



On Feb 26, 2010, at 10:32 AM, mike cole wrote:

> Dear Columbian colleagues--- The literature on this topic goes way back both
> historically and ontogenetically.
> 
> At I noted earlier, some of the early work is summarized in LCHC (1983)
> which is in the lchc publications at lchc.ucsd.edu. There is a book by
> Micahel Siegal (1991) on this topic, and article by Rochel Gelman early
> on, 1972. This same line of discussion generated the "its all there at
> birth" literature by, among others, Baillargeon, Spelke, Wynn, et al. for
> conservation of number, causality, etc.
> 
> Other than Martin's initial question about LSV's view, in what context to
> what ends would you like to take this up?
> 
> Back on the weekend.
> mike
> 
> On Fri, Feb 26, 2010 at 7:19 AM, Jorge Fernando Larreamendy Joerns <
> jlarream@uniandes.edu.co> wrote:
> 
>> Hi, all,
>> Martin's example is wonderful. But assuming that there's something
>> perceptual is a much less parsimonious hypothesis than exploring in depth
>> the issue or word meaning or a conversational feature, for example. Was the
>> question followed up by others? Often, in conservation tasks the
>> experimenter falls to the temptation to bring about "spectacular effects"
>> and fails to test whether there are simpler ways to account for the child's
>> answers. Sorry, but still skeptical.
>> 
>> Jorge
>> 
>> 
>> Jorge Larreamendy-Joerns, Ph.D.
>> Profesor Asociado y Director
>> Departamento de Psicología
>> Universidad de los Andes
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Feb 26, 2010, at 9:52 AM, Martin Packer wrote:
>> 
>> David, Mike, Jorge...
>>> 
>>> I do know Margaret Donaldson's book questioning the child's understanding
>>> of the researcher's language in conservation and other Piagetian tasks. And
>>> just recently Rod mentioned Valerie Walkerdine's work showing how 'more' and
>>> 'less' are understood in terms of everyday family practices.
>>> 
>>> But I show a brief video when I teach this topic in my undergraduate
>>> classes; I think it may even have come with Mike's textbook, as an
>>> instructor's resource. I watched it again yesterday. In one segment, the
>>> adult places one graham cracker in front of the child and two in front of
>>> herself, then asks, do you think that we shared those fairly? The child
>>> looks mildly offended and says no, because you have two and I have this. The
>>> adult then breaks the child's cracker into two pieces! She asks, now is it
>>> fair? The child replies, with a big smile, yes, because we both have two!
>>> 
>>> I can't convince myself that this is entirely a linguistic phenomenon,
>>> though differences in word meaning may certainly play a role. There's
>>> something perceptual too. At this time in his work, although Vygotsky had
>>> died before any conservation tasks were performed, Piaget was still arguing
>>> that the child needs to come to appreciate basic dualisms, such as that
>>> between appearance and reality. Vygotsky, of course, argues forcefully
>>> against this in Thought and Language. How would he have extended the
>>> arguments he made about egocentric speech to lack of conversation? Would he
>>> have suggested that changing word meaning transforms the child's perception,
>>> so a cracker broken in half no longer is perceived as two?
>>> 
>>> Martin
>>> _______________________________________________
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>>> xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
>>> http://dss.ucsd.edu/mailman/listinfo/xmca
>>> 
>> 
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