In other threads I have suggested how and why Bruner's original work in the 40s and 50s, whilst leading to the "Cognitive Revolution" and a valuable programme which has focused on the dynamics of folk psychology - has also detracted from important work in behaviour science in its own right.
The following extracts from Bruner's 1972 book "Beyond the Information Given: Studies in the Psychology of Knowing" should suffice to show both the target and nature of my challenge. In passing, it's worth pointing out that Bruner's New Look in perception, ie that it is inferentially mediated, is in direct contrast to Gibsonian direct perception.
In "Fragments of Behaviour: The Extensional Stance" and associated threads here, I have been developing the case that Bruner's work and much psychology since, must be seen to be descriptive - and in stark contrast to the normative principles of scientific justification, which does not go beyond the information given, but explicates lawful relations through scientific research's accumulation of data. Under such conditions, we do not go beyond the information given by simply interpolating and extrapolating.
Many years ago, Charles Spearman (27) undertook the ambitious task of characterizing the basic cognitive processes whose operations might account for the existence of intelligence. He emerged with a triad of noegenetic principles, as he called them, the first of these being simply an affirmation that organisms are capable of apprehending the world they live in The second and third principles provide us with our starting point. One of these, called "the education of relations," holds that there is an immediate evocation of a sense of relation given the mental presentation of two or more things. "White" and "black" evoke "opposite" or "different." Thc third principle, the "education of correlates," states that in the presence of a thing and a relation one immediately educes another thing. "White and "opposite of" evokes "black." I think that Spearman was trying to say that the most characteristic thing about mental life, over and beyond the fact that one apprehends the events of the world around one, is that one con stantly goes beyond the information given. With this observation I find myself in full agreement, and it is here that my difficulties start. For, as Bartlett (1, p. 1) put it,
Whenever anybody interprets evidence from any source, and his interpretation Contains characteristics that cannot be referred wholly to direct sensory obser,a~jon or perception, this person thinks. The bother is that nobody has ever heen able to find any case of the human use of evidence which does not inClude characters that run beyond what is directly observed by the senses. So, according to this, people think whenever they do anything at all with evidence. If we adopt that view we very soon find ourselves looking out upon a boundiess and turbulent ocean of problems.
It may help to begin with some rather commonplace examples of the different ways in which people go beyond information that is given to them. The first of these represents the simplest form of utilizing inference. It consists of learning the defining properties of a class of functionally equivalent objects and using the presence of these defining properties as a basis of inferring that a new object encountered is or is not an exemplar of the class. The first form of going beyond, then, is to go beyond sense data to the class identity of the object being perceived. This is more remarkable an achievement when the new object encountered differs from in more respects than it resembles other exemplars of the class that have been previously encountered. A speck on the horizon surmounted by a plume of smoke is identified as a ship, so too a towering transatlantic liner at its dock so too a few schematic lines in a drawing. Given the presence of a tew defining properties or cues, we go beyond them to the inference of identity Having done so, we infer that the instance so categorized or identified has the other properties characteristic of membership in a category. Given the presence of certain cues of shape, size, and texture, we infer that the thing before us is an apple; therefore, it can be eaten, cut with a inife, it relates by certain principles of classification to other kinds of t~0its, and so on. The act of rendering some given event equivalent to a Class of other things, placing it in an identity class, provides then one of the most primitive forms of going beyond information given.
What we have said thus far obviously has implications for educational practice, and it is with one of these that we wish to conclude. How shall we teach a subject matter? If the subject matter were geometry we readily would answer that we teach the person those axioms and theorems a formal coding system - that will maximize the ability of the individual to beyond the information given in any problem he might encounter A problem in geometry is simply an incomplete statement, one that has unknowns in it. We say, "Here is a three-sided figure: one side measures x, and the other y, the angle between them is z degrees and the problem is to find the length of the other side and the size of the other two angles as well as the area of the triangle." One must, in short, go beyond what is given We know intuitively that, if the person has learned the formal coding system he will be able to perform such feats.
But how to describe the history of a people or, say, Navaho Culture? I would propose that much the same criterion should prevail here as we apply to geometry. The best description of a people s history is that set of propositions that permits a given individual to go beyond the information given to him. This, if you will, is the history of a people, the information that is necessary to make all other information as redundant or predictable as possible. So, too, in characterizing Navaho culture: that minimum set of propositions that will permit the largest reconstruction of unknowns by people to whom the propositions are revealed.
Let me in general propose this test as a measure of the adequacy of any set of instructional propositions - that once they are grasped, they permit the maximum reconstruction of material unknown to the reconstructor. Morton White (31) argues persuasively for this position when he says,
We ought to start by observing that a history contains true statements about the whole course of . . . [an] object's existence. True statements about the fu ture of the object will be as much part of its history as true statements about its remote past. We must observe that some of these statements have causal implications whereas others do not . . . The next thing to observe is that there are two kinds of historians, two kinds of students who want to approximate the whole truth about a given object. First there are those who conceive it as their task to amass as many true singular statements as can be amassed at a given moment, and in this way approximate the ideal of the historian. Clearly this seems like the way to approach an infinite or very large number of statements - gather as many as you can. But then there are historians who are more discriminating, who recognize that some singular statements are historically n10re important than others, not because they fit in with some moral point of view but because they are more useful for achieving the history of the object as here defined. The first group is near-sighted. It tries to amass everything in sight On the theory that this is a sure method of getting close to the whole truth But It fails to realize that those who select facts which seem to have causal significance are more apt to come to know things about the future and past of the object (pp. 718-19).
White then goes on to compare the criterion of "causal fertility" in history with the criterion of "deductive fertility" in logic, noting that "both at attempts at brevity . . . are motivated by a desire for intellectual economy." In the broadest sense, the economy is a predictive economy - to be able to go beyond givens to a prediction of unknowns. l would submit that it is only by imparting "causally fertile" propositions or generic codes that general education in the broad range of human edge is made possible. General education does best to aim at being generic education, training men to be good guessers, stimulating the ability to go beyond the information given to probable reconstructions of other events.
The foregoing has been a programmatic discussion of the conditions by which it becomes possible for people to go beyond the information given them or, as Bartlett (1) has put it, to go beyond evidence, to fill in gaps, to extrapolate. We have posed the problem as one involving the learning of coding systems that have applicability beyond the situation in which they were learned. In essence, our proposal is that we emphasize those conditions that maximize the transferability of learning; in pursuit of that we have urged that psychologists examine more closely what is involved when we learn generically - the motivational conditions, the kinds of practice required, the nature of the set designed for gaining an optimally generic grasp of materials. Rate of acquisition and rate of extinction in learning have occupied us for a generation. Perhaps in the coming generation we c,m concern ourselves more directly with the utility of learning: whether, one thing having been learned, other things can be solved with no further learning required. When we have achieved this leap, we will have passed from the psychology of learning to the psychology of problem solving"