A few weeks ago, Helen reported on a wonderful conversation she had with her 7 year-old daughter on the ontological status of numbers. Helen also remarked that the children of scientists and researchers are often the subject of all kinds of ‘experiments’ unbeknownst to them. I must confess that I’ve performed a wide range of cognitive ‘tests’ on my kids, but before social services are called I can assure you all that they greatly enjoyed it and saw it all as a fun game. I have in particular done the false belief task with both, at different ages, and can report that they fall squarely within the expected results!
Now, as some readers may recall, I am working quite extensively on reasoning, deductive reasoning in particular, both from a philosophical and a psychological perspective. So I’ve been through most of the voluminous literature on the psychology of reasoning (my own account of the findings can be found in chapter 4 of my forthcoming book, draft available here), and as is well known, in experiments with deductive tasks, participants overwhelmingly fail to give the ‘right’ response from the point of view of the canons of deduction as traditionally construed. And yet, these studies were almost all conducted with participants having a fairly homogeneous educational background, namely undergraduates of North-American and Western European universities. My hypothesis is that even the modicum of ‘logical competence’ that does emerge from the experiments is by and large a product of the formal education they received. To test this hypothesis, one would have to isolate the education component and thus undertake the same or similar experiments with participants with a very different educational background, in particular unschooled subjects. Unfortunately, very few studies of this kind have been conducted, but the ones which have do suggest that unschooled participants tend to engage with the task materials in *very* different ways.
(UPDATE: There is a recent paper in BBS making a very similar point: 'The weirdest people in the world'.)
The most famous of these studies is Luria’s work on unschooled, mostly illiterate peasants in rural Soviet Union in the 1930s, but only published in 1976. Here’s one example of the dialogues he entertained with the participants:
E: In the Far North, where there is snow, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North and there is always snow there. What color are the bears there?
S: I don't know what color the bears are there, I never saw them.
_ _ _
E: But what do you think?
S: Once I saw a bear in a museum, that's all.
E: But on the basis of what I said, what color do you think the bears are there?
S: Either one-colored or two-colored : : : [ponders for a long time]. To judge from the place, they should be white. You say that there is a lot of snow there, but we have never been there!
Luria’s own conceptualization of the interactions was that, for the most part, participants refused to engage in the task; either refusal to answer for lack of personal experience, or an ‘overly creative’ interpretation of the premises. Chapter 1 of the wonderful PhD dissertation of Marian Counihan (with one of the best titles ever: Looking for logic in all the wrong places) gives an overview of Luria’s as well as other studies with illiterate, unschooled participants, and suggests that, rather than ‘refusing to reason’, participants have an understanding of what is expected of them which differs significantly from the experimenter’s, and interpret the premises in ways that are coherent but not as intended by the experimenter. In other words, they are just simply ‘playing a different game’, i.e. they have a very different understanding of the pragmatics of the situation. (She has also conducted experiments with unschooled participants in South-Africa, with fascinating results.) I find her analysis entirely convincing; it has shaped significantly my own thinking about deduction and reasoning. (Full disclosure: Marian is a former colleague and a friend.)
I want to illustrate the cogency of her analysis by an anecdote, a conversation I had with my 4 year-old daughter some time ago. Upon going to bed on a Thursday, she said to me: ‘Tomorrow is Friday, so tomorrow is bring-a-toy-to-school day!’ I couldn’t resist, and reformulated what she had just said as: ‘Tomorrow is Friday, and every Friday is bring-a-toy-to-school day, so…’. I wanted to see if she would draw the simple conclusion that the next day would be a bring-a-toy-to-school day. Instead, she answered: ‘So tomorrow is swimming class day!’ (which is true, also on Fridays)
What would Luria and others make of this exchange? Would they say that she ‘refused to engage in the reasoning task’ by mentioning something that had not yet come up at all (swimming class)? It is very likely that they would, but there is a sense in which giving me the reply I expected, ‘Tomorrow is bring-a-toy-to-school day!’, would have been Griceanly inappropriate; it would not have been informative. Instead, my daughter replied with something that made a lot of sense in the context of a going-to-bed, presumably sensible conversation; a new piece of information. It reminded me once again of how important the pragmatics of the experimental situation is (as pointed out by Counihan, following Stenning and van Lambalgen (2008)), and of how the game of being ‘examined’ is something that is typically learned in formal educational settings. In a classroom, it is normal for the teacher to ask a question even if he knows the answer, and in particular if the student knows (in fact, assumes) that the teacher knows the answer. In most everyday life situations, however, it’s very strange to request information which you already possess. This may explain at least partially many of the experimental results with unschooled participants, who can’t quite figure out what is expected of them and what game they should be playing.
Clearly, my 4 year-old daughter is not yet accustomed to being ‘quizzed’ – good for her!
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