new domain of of axiomatic thinking that's the right way to think about it

say each of these people that were discussing each of these theories comes

out the construction of the world from a different perspective and it's it's

really fundamentally different it's different way deep down at the level of

fundamental assumptions and so Piaget who's a who's probably the world's most

famous developmental psychologist but although he didn't consider himself a

developmental psychologist he considered himself a genetic epistemology and what

that meant was that he was interested in Paestum ology which is how knowledge

structures work and genetic means formulation of and so he was interested

in how children formulate their knowledge structures in the world and he

was a constructivist because he believed that human beings construct the they

don't only construct the representations of the world and it's deeper than that

it's more like they construct the world itself now it depends to some degree on

what you think of as the world and of course that's so there's a reality

definition issue that's nested at the bottom of this and it's a very complex

one and so I'm going to have to walk you through it piece by piece now Piaget was

a genius he was he wrote a paper I believe on mollusks when he was ten and

had it published in a scientific journal and he was offered the curatorship of a

museum as a consequence of that and his parents had to write the museum

directors and tell them that he couldn't curate the museum because he was only

ten and so that gives you some idea about Piaget and he's published many

many many books and many of them haven't been translated into English yet and so

he was quite the he was quite the you know large intelligence creature and he

studied all sorts of things so I'm gonna tell you a little bit about

constructivism I'm gonna start with a quote from Piaget and it's uh it's he's

some book some of his books I found quite straightforward and some of them

very difficult and I think it's often because of the quality of the

translation this happens to be a relatively difficult section I don't

think it's translated that well but whatever we're going to go through it

I'll explain it to you a little bit so Piaget said the common postulate that's

assumption of various traditional epistemology

theories of valid knowledge is that knowledge itself is a fact

and not a process and then if our various forms of knowledge are always

incomplete and our various science is still imperfect that which is acquired

is still acquired and can therefore be studied statically hence the absolute

position of the problems what is knowledge or how are the various types

of knowledge possible under the converging influence of a series of

factors we're tending more and more today to regard knowledge as a process

more than a state any being or object that Sciences attempts to hold fast

dissolves once again in the current of development it is the last analysis of

this development and of it alone that we have the right to state it is a fact

what we can and should then seek is the law of this process quotes we are well

aware on the other hand of the fine book by kuhn on scientific revolutions now

there is an awful lot of information in that paragraph so we'll unpack it a

little bit before we go on now one way of looking at science is that it's a

collection of facts right that's that's what Piaget is stating to begin with and

that we assume that the facts that science has gathered are facts and

Static but if you observe them across time what you find is that scientific

facts tend to shift and transform because scientific theories that are

applicable in one century let's say turn out to be less applicable in the next

now there's been a lot of argument and discussion about this because the fact

that facts change seems to indicate that they're not so self-evidently fact and

there are people and perhaps Kuhn would be among them who believe that science

consisted of the juxtaposition of paradigms so those are sets of axioms

within which something operates and the paradigms he considered them often in

commensurate you couldn't move from one to another because the axioms were

different there was no necessary no what what might you say there was no

necessary means of communication between them but and and and Piaget knew of

Thomas Kuhns work that's the scientists structure of scientific revolutions

which was published in 1962 it's a classic text in the philosophy of

science and and what Piaget soon more was more like a I would say

more like a classic view of science where so for example when Newton came up

with Newtonian physics there was a set of propositions upon which Newtonian

physics was based and then when Einstein transformed those propositions what

happened was that Newtonian physics became a subset of Einsteinian physics

and so the way that Piaget looked at the development of factual ideas at least in

part was that you'd come up with a set of ideas that were facts and then that

would be superseded by a different theory within that within which that

original theory would be nested and so that what happens that each theory in

some sense although it transforms it becomes more complete as the scientific

progression continues now Kuhn didn't precisely believe that although exactly

what Kuhn meant by a paradigm shift because Kuhn originated that term isn't

clear but he didn't seem to actually believe that science had this capacity

to present a series of facts and then alter the underlying presuppositions and

then to nest that within a broader series of facts like you would assume if

you were thinking about the relationship between Newton and Einstein

so Newtonian physics is a subset of einsteinium physics so now that's kind

of how Piaget thought about how human beings developed knowledge he believed

that we came up with well let's say you wanted to chop down a tree that might be

a good example I mean you could use a dull axe made of bronze and it's like

well that would chop down the tree it'd be a lot of work though and then maybe

you replace that with a sharp steel axe that's designed like a wedge so that you

can really hack down a tree with it or maybe you replace it with a saw and so

the it's not like the bronze axe could chop down the tree but the steel axe can

do a better job in the saw can do even a better job and so the way that Piaget

thought about the transformation of human knowledge structures from from

infancy onward essentially was that infants would produce a representation

of the world that was sort of low resolution but quite tool like it would

work in the world but then as they progressed the nature of those tools

would become refined that sometimes transform completely so some sometimes

imagine that a child would use in a sense a low resolution picture of

something and then they would increase its resolution

as they filled in the details that would be assimilation that's the page idea

notion of assimilation you're using the same basic theory but filling in the

details and then now and then you'd have to switch to another picture entirely

and that would be more like accommodation that's where you'd have to

transform your internal structures completely in order to properly

represent an act within the world and so that's the basic difference between

accommodation and assimilation so assimilation is like micro alterations

and accommodation is transformation of the knowledge structure itself and so

that's part of so what khun pointed out was that there'd be a set of facts and

then there'd be an anomaly arise of some sort so like at the end of the 19th

century the only remaining anomaly was at least one of the remaining anomalies

was that no matter which direction you shine a light beam in and no matter how

fast the platform on which you're standing is moving the light beam has

exactly the same velocity which seems impossible so you know if the earth is

moving this way around the Sun and you shine a light off the earth you'd expect

the speed of light to be the speed of light plus the speed of the earth and

then if you shone it the other way then you'd expect the speed of light to be

the speed of light - the earth speed but that isn't what happens no matter how

fast the platform on which the person shining the light is standing the speed

of light is always the same to every observer so and people kind of thought

of that as that wasn't the only anomaly but that was one of them

thought of that is the only anomaly left in physics at the end of the 19th

century and turned out that was a bad one how long there was some other ones

as well like the fact that light tends to behave as a wave and a particle more

or less at the same time which doesn't seem possible so there's a couple of

things left over in Newtonian physics that the Newtonian physics couldn't

explain but by the end of the 19th century there were famous scientists

saying yeah well we got this all wrapped up there's really nothing left to

discover and then Along Came quantum mechanics and Einstein Yin relativity

and bang the whole world was like really different and quantum mechanics is much

more comprehensive theory of the world then Newtonian physics all of the

electronics you used wouldn't work if quantum physics wasn't correct roughly

speaking and so that little tiny anomaly blew into something that knocked the

slats out underneath from underneath the entire axiomatic structure of Newtonian

physics it showed it was wrong at its fundamental levels

even though it turned out to be a subset a correct subset of something that was

much broader and so you can kind of think of that as that's what kids are

doing as they progress they develop a theory that accounts for a certain set

of you could say fact but this is another place it gets tricky and then

they modify those and make them more and more refined but now and then they have

to under grow quite a transformation not be a stage transition in Piaget and

thought that that's the stage transition idea and that would be akin in some

sense to a kuhnian scientific revolution now what Piaget is trying to state here

is that because you there's this weird problem with facts which is that they

tend to transform across time you know like if you go take a biology course

right now in 20 years pretty much everything you read you learned or very

much of what you learned will turn out to have been wrong and that's kind of

weird because it isn't wrong right now and you think well how can it be wrong

in 20 years and that that's a really complicated problem and in order to

solve that you kind of have to think about facts like tools instead of them

as thinking about them as objective independent realities because a bad tool

can still work as a tool whereas a bad fact just kills you stone dead and so

there's any ways in any case that seems to be a completely unnecessary phenomena

Oh God there's no reason for that that's just

sheer spite as far as I can tell mm-hmm okay so so here's one of psays

propositions and and it is that because facts flux in some sense across time

you're looking for something that doesn't change across time to call it a

real fact and so what Piaget is trying to point out in this let's call it

introductory paragraph is that the one thing that doesn't change is the manner

in which people generate facts rather than the facts themselves so the

ultimate fact is a fact about the way people generate facts all right and so

psays theory in part is a is a theory about how knowledge is acquired and

transformed and so it's not that no it's not a study of the knowledge itself it's

a study of the process by which the knowledge is generated and he believed

that that process was unchanging at least with regards to human beings and

so you could think of the Piaget alien genetic epistemological mystery as being

how is it that people form and transform representations of the world and one of

his conclusions about that is that there's a standard process and then the

reason that I'm telling you about Piaget right now is because as far as I can

tell the standard Piaget daeun description of the manner in which

knowledge is acquired and transformed is the same thing that's represented in the

mythology of the shamanic transformation which is that there's a state of being

and then it's derp up disrupted by something chaotic and there's a

disintegration period and that's the space between the stage transitions for

for children in which time they're often upset because their little theory about

the world isn't learning it isn't working anymore

and then in that chaotic period they adjust themselves to new anomalies and

anomalies or what occur when you act in the world and what you want to happen

doesn't happen right because that means there's something wrong with your

knowledge structure if you act and then something happens you don't want to

happen something's wrong with the way you're representing the world or you

could say something's wrong with the world but good luck with that although

you know people can modify the world as well as modifying their belief

structures and people do that a lot but so this the piagetian stage transition

as far as I can tell is a micro case of the broader idea of the the existence

an orderly state its dissolution into a chaotic state because something

unexpected has occurred and then it's retransfer Meishan into a more

integrated state now Piaget would say well the initial state and the chaotic

state and the final state aren't the ultimate realities the ultimate reality

is the process of moving through those stages and that's how people acquire

knowledge and that's you could say that's the central element of human