Taxonomies of Mind

Marcus Bussey 

To arrive at an holistic understanding of the cognitive development of the child we must find a model to describe the multifaceted nature of humanity.  Such a model would need to have the flexibility to accomodate the recent philosophical shifts that have stressed the relative nature of ‘reality’, a postmodern sensibility, while still containing within it the strength and vigour to promote a synthetic and satisfying vision of the evolution of human consciousness. 

When faced with the wide ranging descriptions of this evolution the truth of the Enlightenment philosopher Helvetius’ observation that, “Man is a model exposed to the view of different artists; every one surveys it from some point of view, no one from every point of view”[1], is brought home. Over the century there have been many such ‘artists’ seeking to describe the cognitive development of the child, the most influential being Jean Piaget.  The model he arrived at has held sway in the educational world for over fifty years now.  It is convincing in both its detail and in its convenience of application but it is flawed and incomplete as it does not allow for deeper forms of understanding, for cultural distinctions and for wide ranging variations in the ages at which children can enter into his categories.  

Piaget’s model has seduced the great majority of western educators because it is so elegant.  There is a sense of the self evident truth of it yet when we look at the thinking of L.S.Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, Howard Gardner, Noam Chomsky, or Kieran Egan, to name but a few, we are also struck by a sense of validity which we would embrace to get a broader, more effectively useful image of the child. 

Further more, if we expose our schema to the disturbing yet deeply invigorating critiques of the critical thinking of Jurgen Habermas[2] who questions the political role that images of knowledge have both societally and institutionaly; and of the disruptive analysise of the postmodern thinkers Michel Foucault[3] and Jean-Francois Lyotard[4] who push our conception of knowledge out beyond the comfort zone of complaceny into the deeper waters of being where structure lies hidden beneath the surface of things like a reef waiting to scuttle the boats of the unsuspecting.  Then we find that the need for a model to ‘make sense of it all’, to, as the political scientist Sohail Inayatullah puts it, “reinstate the vertical in social analysis, ie from postmodern relativism to global ethics”[5], becomes all the more pressing. 

  Such a model by accomodating layers of consciousness, moving the debate from the superficial “to the deeper and marginal”, while still allowing for a range of “transformative actions” at both the level of policy and at the level of individual agency[6] will have relevance where it really counts: in the lives of people.

Causal Layered Analysis  

Causal layered analysis (CLA), an emergent futures tool developed by Inayatullah, is a model which offers us the flexibility to read the theories of cognitive development in a coherent way as it allows for previously exclusive modes of understanding to inhabit the same theoretical space.  There is no doubt that this method could be used superficially to gloss over major differences in orientation and perspective, but that is not the intention of its author.  

Inayatullah places this method in the tradition of critical futures which ‘is less concerned with disinterest, as in the empirical, or with creating mutual understanding, as in the interpretive, but with creating distance from current categories.”[7]  As such it is what is unique or different about each category which is to be highlit, rather than what is similar - it is interested in making heterogeneity work for us in giving meaning to the complexity of existence rather than in homogeneity which seeks to find one voice for all occasions.  Essentially the latter category is doomed to failure while the former is always at risk of dissolution.  Thus it is the attempt, the ever renewable process of creating meaning, which becomes priveleged rather than one authoritative discourse. 

There are four layers of analysis within the CLA framework.  

·         Layer 1: “Litany”, a superficial and disconnected space inhabited by popular unreflective slogans.  It deals with quantitative trends and problems and is the domain of the mass media and party politics.

 

·         Layer 2:  “Social”, offers some in depth analysis at a social, historical, economic and cultural level.  This is the domain of most academic work and of those working in policy institutes.

 

·         Layer 3: “Structural”, looks at the deeper issues of structure, discourse and world view.  Here we understand that discourse and the language of discourse are complicit in framing issues - ie they constitute the issues under examination.

 

·         Layer 4:  “Myth and Metaphor”, here we find the deep stories that define and frame our emotional responses to issues, the unconscious dimension.[8]  

Scanning the field  

Current text books on cognitive psychology will offer us lists of some of the major categories to dominate the field this century.  Piaget’s model always gets the most coverage with less space being offered to Vygotsky.  There will be mention of some alternatives to this dominant constructivist model, for instance Lee and  Gupta, in an excellent introducory psychology text, allow a few pages for the nativist approach of Chomsky and Jerry Fodor.  The value of this examination is seen to be in knowing that there is an alternative view, “that contrasts with that of Piaget”[9] who offers a general as opposed to a domain specific intepretation of cognition.  They go on to examine the multiple intelligence theory of Howard Garner, then briefly describe the behaviourists as “the scientific descendents of John Locke” and look equally briefly at the social interactionism of Jerome Bruner. 

As a text for students they are offering no more than a current map for influential or dominat knowledge forms and derivative, marginal ones.  Theorists like Kieran Egan, who offers a recapitulationist interpretation of cognition, do not even get a mention.  Other texts such as Bjorklund’s Children's Thinking[10] offer a similar break down, but the dominance of Piaget’s thinking is acknowledge by him receiving a chapter to himself. 

The key theories to dominate the field are: 

·         Constructivism - child initiates their own learning which expands through an active dialogue with the environment; 

·         Behaviourism - child is an empty vessle who learns through coming in contact with their environment;

·         Nativist and associationists - child recieves a particular level and pattern of genetically determined abilities, these remain stable over time;

·         Recapitulationists - the child’s development follows the evolution of humanity from the primordial savage mind to the enlightened human one, meaning making occurs through moving from the whole to the specific;

·         Social Interactionism - mind is shaped by culture; mental life unfolds with the aid of cultural codes and traditions. 

Putting the Method to work  

CLA offers some interesting insights when applied to these categories.  What Inayatulaah described as the vertical within this method is a debt to Foucault, the French postmodernist, who developed the metaphor of ‘archaeology’ as a way of digging beneath the surface of things to uncover the roots of a cultural or social practice like ‘psychologising’.  A clearly cultural practice which has sought to draw to itself the credibility of science to add weight to its assertions about humanity. 

  The model also has a more conventional, horizontal aspect which allows us to place models within the current academic orientations of left, right and centre; subjective or objective; positivist, humanist, or neo-humanist; and so on.  It goes without saying that such orientations owe everything to their own ‘archaeologies’ and the root metaphors which inspire them. 

Put simply, CLA has a clear ontological thrust which asks the unasked question: What metaphor lies at the root of each ‘isms’ description of human nature?  This is fundamental because as Helvetius reminds us, all researchers are artists working with their own subjective image of what is primary about the human condition.  Thus for Piaget the child makes themselves, sui generis, through a dialogue with their environment.  This self-making is an instinctual drive which is invariant, following a set pattern of stages working through sensori motor, pre-operational, concrete operational to formal operational.  Fellow constructivist Vygotsky, also believes in the self generation of cognition within the child, but he places much more emphasis on the role of the environment and significant others in the child’s life. 

Piaget’s model is elegant and has its roots in the Enlightenment vision of ‘Man’ as the measure of all things.  Vygotsky on the other hand is indebted to Marxist analysis of humanity as evolving through clashes with material existence.  Humanity as a whole, not as a conglomerate of individuals.  To pursue Helvetius’ artist metaphor and take a great work of art to represent each thinker’s representation of the essence of humanity, Piaget’s Layer 4, unacknowledged and unconscious, image might be Jacob Epstein’s sinewy representation of Ecce Homo.  Vygotsky’s mythic, Layer 4, roots are better described with reference to the muscular imagry of Ferdinand Leger, as captured in a painting like The Builders, in which the men are part of the steel and machinery they use.

  Now working horizintaly we can see that Piaget’s model fits quite comfortably within the domain of the second layer as a penetrating attempt at mapping human consciousness which is, in his mind, reasonable, and fundamentally rational.  The second layer of CLA being fundamentally the domain of empiricism and analysis. Vygotsky also inhabits this layer but moves a little deeper, acknowldging the force of social structures in the formation of human consciousness.  His is not as elegant an analysis, not offering neat categories that can describe and validate a child’s progress, but he does allow for society to have a voice in the formation of the child.  He is more aware of the power of structure in the formation of identity. 

More Digging, more Metaphors  

Interestingly behaviourism also has its roots in the Enlightenment but rather than looking to Rousseau for inspiration it looks to Locke, describing the child as a tabula rasa.  The text books do not give much time to the simple behaviourism of Pavlov or Skinner.  Yet for the purposes of this excersise it is helpful to bring them in.  Behaviourism, by describing the human as a machine that is to be programmed, through repeated stimulus and response, by their interaction with the environment; by seeing humanity as the sum of our experiences, can be placed within the first layer as an example of unreflective empiricism based upon a shallow conception of human consciousness.[11] 

A metaphor for this conception of humanity might be found in the works of Michelangelo, who left us the enigmatic Prisoners, human figures trapped in stone, emerging but forever stuck, being unfinished.  They remind us of Condillac’s description of humanity as “a statue constructed internally like ourselves, and animated by a mind which as yet has no ideas of any kind.”[12]  For Condillac, as for his behaviourist descendents, the senses were the key to learning, and humanity was trapped by them in an often unforgiving environment.  The psychological upshot of such a bleak proposition was that the mind needed to be conditioned to the ‘good’ though exposure to positive influences. 

The nativist position of Chomsky moves towards the level of structure, what he calls a ‘Universal Grammar’,  (Layer 3) because it sees human meaning making as resulting from our ‘languaging’ our environment[13].  Chomsky sees a direct link between language and consiousness, he points to how governments and the media simplify language (simple language = simple mind) in order to supress critique[14].    Thus his method is disruptive of categories and more virulently political than previously examined methods.  Other nativists are not as difficult as Chomsky.  For instance, Fodor has a much less complex position.  Essentially he argues “that we are all born with identical representational and computational systems, which are genetically prestructured to allow us to make sense of the world in which humans evolved.”[15]

 

A visual metaphor to situate Chomsky’s thinking in Layer 4 could be taken from Michelangelo again.  The famous creation image of Jehova and Man in the Sistine Chapel, underwrit with the phrase: “In the beginning was the word”, gives voice to the poweful Judeo-Christian quality of his thinking.  Fodor on the other hand makes claim to nothing so grand, and might best be characterised by a piece from the modernist painter Peter Halley such as Two Cells with Circulating Conduit.[16] 

Egan and Bruner  

Fodor occupies a Layer 2 position while Chomsky moves between Layers 2 and 3, offering a more problematic description of the development of consciousness, meaning and language.  Kieran Egan, on the other hand, offers a revitalised version of the recapitulationist theory[17] which holds that human beings develop consciousness through a series of stages, roughly analogous to the stages of human evolution, that move them from a mythic undifferentiated sensibility, through romantic and philosophic consciousness to the ironic perspective that characterises full mastery of the adult world. He is interested in the role of the mythopoetic in the formation of meaning, while pointing to deep structures in our thinking that respond to story as a powerful tool in understanding the world[18]. 

Egan’s method, growing as it does from an imaginative conception of human consiousness, as opposed to the empirically seductive conception of the human mind as a mathematical and predictive organism, reaches more deeply into the layering of Inayatullah’s analysis.  It is essentially a third layer theory which identifies structure as the origin of our meaning making.  I feel that the metaphor at the root of Egam’s schema is more darkly mythic and could well be characterised by Goya’s highly charged  Saturn Eating His Children, an image that evokes the human struggle towards perfection, a journey from chaos to order that is derived from an integration of consciousness through an unending process of ‘retelling’ our story. 

Bruner makes a case for a model of cognition that derives from the mind’s experience of culture.  For him, “Learning, remembering, talking, imagining: all of them are made possible by participating in a culture.”[19]  Culture, it could be said, provides the language with which we create our self-image.  Like Chomsky, Bruner’s model moves between the deeper discourse of structure found in Layer 3 and the more superficial, Layer 2, claim that human beings only have meaning when in a collective: the rhetoric of ‘One hand Clapping’. 

There is a richness about his description which draws me to a pictorial metaphor of simplicity and power such a Matisse’s well known painting Primerva, in which the circle of dancers celebrate life.  This image seems to capture the central dialogue of the self with the collective which Bruner holds to be the narrative that both constructs “a version of ourselves in the world” and provides us with “models of identity and agency”[20]. 

Towards a Taxonomy of Mind  

This brief analysis places most of the theories of cognitive development within the second category with the behaviourists being closest to the level of litany and with Noam Chomsky’s nativist position and Jerome Bruner’s social interactionism being closest to the third layer.  Kieran Egan’s recapitulationist position falls within the third layer.  

I think it is the metaphor’s that underwrite these various theoretical positions that both provide them with their essential power as well as explain their current position within educational circles.  They also provide us with a useful taxonomy for understanding western conceptions of self, as all these models are heavily culture bound, while leaving the door open for further enrichment of our images through the introduction of non-western metaphors.  

Lets arrange these Layer 4 images clearly, so that we can better understand their relationship to the dominant corporate managerial agenda for education.  This will be helpful for our then looking at possible alternative visions of the child and cognition.  To further speed up this process the essential qualities of each metaphor, gained from an application of horizontal placement of theory within the CLA framework, will be identified, so that their appeal or rejection can better be understood. 

 

Constructivism - Piaget               Ecce homo                      Humanist;Passive

Constructivism - Vygotsky           The Builders                   Socialist; Active

Behaviourism -
Pavlov and Skinner                      Prisoners                         Positivist; Passive

Nativist - Chomsky                      Michelangelo’s Creation   Humanist; Active

Nativist - Fodor                           Two Cells with
                                                      Circulating Conduit            Positivist; Passive

Recapitulationists - Egan            Saturn Eating His Children   Evolutionist; Active

Insights into the Managerial Mind

This simple taxonomy throws some light on why Piaget has come out in front of the ‘pack’ in educational institutions today, dominated as they are by a managerial ethos.  For a start, any theory that allows agency to individuals and groups is supressed within a corporate managerial setting.  Such a setting operates on an authoritarian model, is product rather than process oriented, and has a high regard for clearly managable categories.  Though temperamentaly suited to the positivism of behaviouralism, this is currently out of favour because it is seen to ‘lack heart’, and because behaviouralism itself questions the effects of environment on learning.  Corporate managerialist environments are not renowned for their plasticity or humanity, they are therfore not open to question.

Fodor’s nativist theory is so passive as to not allow for the virtue of education within its paradigm.  The managerial approach is highly attached to its image of efficacy, thus any claim that suggests that ability is inherent to the organism is too threatening to its raison d’etre.  Bruner’s inter-active theory is also highly threatening to the managerial consciousness which needs the self sustaining individual to be the owner of their destinys in order to better equip them for effective action within an economic rationalist environment.

  This leaves only Piaget, who offers a comfortably heroic humanism, in which agency is circumscribed by stage/developmental sequence, and yet who offers a quietistic image of humanity as hostage to their own cognitive wiring.  Enough of the oppositional theories are also contained within Piaget’s theory - social influence, instinctual learning patterns, imaginative unfoldment, etc... to also allay the unease that might arise over the excessive focus on purely rational, mathematico-linguistic process that privelege this way of knowing over others.

  Loose Ends

  Using the CLA model as a tool in the analysis of current models of cognitive development raises many issues.  Foremost amongst these is the question of cultural domination of a field such as cognition by the west.  When all the dominant models of mind are rooted in western metaphors there is only limited applicability to educational process. 

  It also raises the question of the possibility of finding descriptions of mind that may take more account of the deeper layers of consciousness validated by such a model.  The implications are great for theories of education such as those of Maria Montessori, Rudolf Steiner and Prabhat Rainjan Sarkar who all offer more deeply spiritual and synthetic visions of the child and the function of education in human development.

  Finally, CLA helps us to see the validity of multiple positions, removing the need for analysis as the handmaid of choice, we subscribe to one model or the other, and making room for synthesis, we take parts from all models, as a goad to action.  Here the function of ‘getting real’ cannot be underestimated.  To teach, and to be guided by theory, is essentially an activity of conscious selectivity in which we vigorously engage with theory in order to better understand our craft and the children and future we serve.