Schedule for Today

1. Schedule for Today • Announcement about Wednesday • Match your presentation to revised schedule. • Presentation – symbolic interactionism and semiotics. • Discussion

2. Communication Process

3. Question of Paraffin? • If you asked for paraffin in the United States, what would you get?

4. Paraffin or Kerosene? • If you asked for paraffin anywhere else in the world, what would you get?

5. What is the issue here? • The symbol (paraffin) means something different to different cultures. • To communicate, they will have to develop a shared symbol system. • Communication is basically the sharing of symbols that mean approximately the same thing to those communicating.

6. What does that have to do with Symbolic Interactionism? • Symbolic interactionism is essentially interacting through a shared set of symbols. • It also implies that we cannot think without those symbols.

7. Thoughts on language Philo – words as approximations of truth.

8. Motto of Renaissance scientists “Nullius en verba”

9. Semiotics • Words are signifiers by convention and have no relation to the signified Ferdinand de Saussere

10. “The words of our language have meaning only insofar as there exist a public criteria for their correct use.”Ludwig Wittgenstein

11. Key Point Language is constructed by humans to create shared meaning. Words mean what they do by convention, not because of truth.

12. Question? So what does it mean from a philosophical point of view that language is constructed by humans to communicate knowledge?

13. Answer? Would it not follow that the knowledge being transmitted would be affected by the constructed language so it too would be constructed?

14. Elaboration Likelihood Model

15. Question? What do the words ‘able’ and ‘start’ imply?

16. Answer • They imply that there is a place, cognitively speaking, where the person can understand what I am saying and beyond which, he or she cannot. • Start also indicates that a journey is going to take place.

17. Essence of the cognitive journey You will start with what you know, interpret the words based on your past experience for what those words mean, add the new concepts to your existing knowledge and come out at a different point.

18. Key Tenet of Constructivism We actively construct knowledge by blending sensory input, including words, with what we already know based on our past experience.

19. What do these have in common? • Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. • Perception is reality. • Schema Theory

20. Jean Piaget 1896-1980 1850 1900 1950 2000 1859 Origin of The Species

21. Piaget Children seek equilibrium. When faced with new information they either assimilate it into existing schemas or accommodate the information by creating new schemas based on old ones. Either way, they construct reality by blending the old with the new.

22. Not a new concept • One man’s judgment may not be truer than another man’s, but may be better. Socrates • We can never know the noumenal (real) world, only the phenomenal (perceived) world. Kant

23. Giambattista Vico “Vico was the first modern philosopher to discover in his own mind, and in the European past, all human destiny. ‘We can know nothing’ he said, ‘that we have not made.’” William Yeats in On the Boiler

24. “Can’t ever compare what is seen with what really is.”Albert Einstein, 1955

25. Evolution and Constructivism Darwin’s Theory of Evolution provided a different lens with which to view cognition.

26. Question? • If you can’t see objective reality, what is cognition for? • To order your experiential world in such a way as to increase your chances of survival.

27. Question? • Why do we have the senses we do? • Because they allow us to gather information from our environment that allows us to survive – NOT because they allow us to know an objective reality.

28. Key Point Everybody makes theories and hypotheses about the world and uses those beliefs to create plans of action because we have to have an ordered experiential world to survive.

29. Summary: Evolution and Constructivism Likely presence of cognition and motivation for learning was not to find an objective reality but to create an ordered experiential world that increased our chances of survival.

30. Continuum of Constructivism Radical Cognitive Tenets #1 & #2 #3 #4 Social

31. Basic tenets of constructivism 1. Knowledge is not passively accumulated, but rather is the result of active cognizing by the individual. 2. Cognition is an adaptive process that functions to make an individual’s behavior more viable given a particular environment.

32. Cognitive Constructivism Accepts the two basic tenets, but believes you can still construct knowledge that reflects an objective reality.

33. Social and Radical Constructivists Accept first two tenets. 3. Cognition organizes and makes sense of one’s experience, and is not a process to render an accurate representation of reality.

34. Whatever worldview we construct, we do not have any means to validate it. Sextus Empiricus c. 200 CE

35. “Objectivity is the delusion that observations can be made without an observer.”Heinz von Foerster

36. Social Constructivists 4.Knowing has roots both in biological/neurological construction and in social, cultural and language-based interactions. • Lev Vygotsky • George Herbert Mead • Ludwig Wittgenstein

37. Lev Vygotsky 1896-1934 1850 1900 1950 2000 1859 Origin of The Species

38. Vygotsky’s stance • You don’t learn to become social; you become social to learn. • Learn from the outside in.

39. George Herbert Mead 1863-1931 1850 1900 1950 2000 1859 Origin of The Species

40. Mead’s stance There is not subjective reality or objective reality, only inter-subjective reality.

41. Symbolic Interactionism • Humans act toward people and things based on meanings they assign to those people and things. • Meaning arises out of social interaction that people have with each other in the exchange of symbols. • An individual’s interpretation of symbols is modified by their own thought process.

42. Key points • We can’t think reflexively before we have symbols to think with. • Language is the software that activates the mind, so we need to become social to learn.

43. Mead’s great contribution • Idea that we can put ourselves in the role of others, which is responsible for the development of self-concept and reflexive thought. • Self is a function of language. Without language, we have no self-concept.

45. Ludwig Wittgenstein1889-1951 1850 1900 1950 2000 1859 Origin of The Species

46. Stance • We can’t know anything outside of language – it is all we have to think with.

47. Fritz Maulthner Language is an instrument designed to satisfy a multiplicity of human needs. As such, it is an imperfect tool for exploring and depicting reality.

48. “Truth is not to be found inside the head of an individual person, it is born between people collectively searching for truth, in the process of their dialogic interaction.”Mikhail Bakhtin

49. Key Question How would a human develop cognitively without language? Develop a personal symbol system that would allow them to think at a reasonably high level.

50. Einstein