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Psychology of Communication: constructivism
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Psychology of Communication: constructivism
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The constructive (sic) paradigm ….. stress (sic) the notion that whatever gets into the mind has to be constructed by the individual through knowledge discovery […] with a focus on the process of assimilation and accommodation of knowledge. In other words, meaning is perceived as inseparable from one's own interpretation […..] Its emphasis is not in the interactions of the individual with the environment (including other social beings) but more on how the mind constructs knowledge.
Hung and Ang (undated)
There is a wealth of empirical evidence for this view, for example from experiments in 'directed perception'. It is also apparent from such research into perception that a cultural dimension is also involved in much of the construction of meaning for the sense data received. Gregory, for example, produces a compelling argument for Westerners' experience of the Müller-Lyer illusion, the Ponzo figure and so on being due to our experience of the 'carpentered world'. A striking example is quoted by Marshall McLuhan in his essay Why non-literate societies cannot see films or photos without much training (McLuhan (1962)). He recounts the showing of an educational film featuring a sanitary inspector showing what would be required in a primitive African village in getting rid of standing water. In very slow time the inspector went through a series of essential activities such as draining pools, putting away empty tins and so on. When the villagers had seen the film and were asked what they had seen, they replied that they had seen a chicken. The film makers had not even realized that there was a chicken anywhere in the film, but, on reviewing it, they found that, indeed, a fowl passed over one corner of the frame for about a second in a film which lasted around five minutes. (for further details, see the section on Perception and Culture)
The use of this example by the media theorist McLuhan is significant, since the social construction of reality, rather than the individualist view referred to by Hung and Ang above, has become social science orthodoxy. In learning theory, social constructivism is generally traced back to Vygotsky, but in social science generally, it is a virtually unassailable perspective which, in one way or another, coupled with the 'linguistic turn' in philosophy and social science, has characterized Marxian understanding of the operation of ideology, semiological analyses of media influence, structuralist anthropology through to post-structuralism and beyond to post-modernism.
According to Vygotsky 'the development of mind is the interweaving of biological development of the human body and the appropriation of the cultural/ideal/material heritage which exists in the present to co-ordinate people with each other and the physical world' (Cole and Wertsch (undated)) Vygotsky's main preoccupation was with mediation through language, but he was concerned also with other 'tools', including art, maps and diagrams etc. According to Cole and Wertsch, it follows from this that
The dominance of language as a paradigmatic model of society and the mind, by now banal (and possibly fallacious anyway -see below) (e.g. Lacan's view that 'the unconscious is articulated like a language' or Kristeva's claim that 'What semiotics has discovered ... is that the law governing ... any social practice lies in the fact that it signifies; i.e. it is articulated like a language' etc.) acts as a salutary reminder of the fallacy of the 'conduit metaphor' of communication (Reddy (1979)), which, though probably more appropriate to information theory than to human communication, remains an influential common-sense conceptualization of communication. George Lakoff (1995) argues that just as the conduit metaphor misleads us into believing that meanings exist independently of the process of communication and the situatedness of that communication in terms of individuals, their cultures and subcultures, so also the notion which he claims to be central to AI, namely that 'thought is mathematical logic', falsely suggests to us that reason is disembodied. Though Lakoff does not say so, this implies that there can be no 'correct' method of teaching since teaching methods need to be attuned to the 'embodied' reasoning which learners have acquired through socialization. Damasio has also presented persuasive arguments for both the 'embodidness' and 'enculturedness' of reason:
The automated somatic-marker device of most of us lucky enough to have been reared in a relatively healthy culture has been accommodated by education to the standards of rationality of that culture. In spite of its roots in biological regulation, the device has been tuned to cultural prescriptions designed to ensure survival in a particular society. If we assume that the brain is normal and the culture in which it develops is healthy, the device has been made rational relative to social conventions and ethics. The action of biological drives, body states, and emotions may be an indispensable foundation for rationality [….] Rationality is probably shaped and moulded by body signals, even as it performs the most sublime distinctions and acts accordingly
Damasio (1996/1994)
(Note: somatic marker device - the device which provides us with an emotional, 'gut' response to an idea. Because the feeling is about the body, Damasio uses the adjective somatic; because it 'marks' an image (for example when we envisage the possible outcomes of a course of action), he refers to it as a marker. The term should be taken to include both visceral and non-visceral sensations.)
Although it would be a brave academic who would challenge the social constructivist paradigm in the social sciences, there are significant challenges from outside sociology. Pinker (1994) does an impressive demolition job on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, a fundamental attack on even the weakest versions of linguistic determinism which, in its various guises, is central to semiologically influenced social critiques. He continues his attack (1998) by demonstrating that claims about culturally influenced perception (see Gregory and McLuhan above) are largely social science folklore, part of what he disparagingly refers to as the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), fatally flawed in his opinion by its assumption that culture can be radically separated from biology and that culture is an autonomous entity.
Though far more polite and reserved than Pinker, Chomsky has also been critical of various facets of social constructivism over many years. Saussure's linguistics is seen by him as fundamentally flawed, Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology shows 'nothing akin to language' in the study of kinship and merely succeeds in showing 'that humans classify, if they perform any mental acts at all' (1968). If Chomsky's arguments in favour of an innate universal grammar are accepted, then why should we not suppose that the development of personality, behaviour patterns and cognitive structures are similarly genetically determined? Chomsky refers back to Plato's argument that we can't possibly know everything we know simply as the result of experience. We must have some innate knowledge:
To question that is about as sensible as to suppose that the growth of an embryo to a chicken rather than a giraffe is determined by nutritional inputs.
Chomsky (1996: 10)
Behaviour modification
Berlo on learning
cognitivism
Conditioned Reflex
Schramm's Fraction of Selection
Social learning theory
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