Divine Revelation and Human Learning

A Christian Theory of Knowledge

David Heywood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754608509
• eBook ISBN: 9781351943338
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

How do we learn about God? In an age of competing world-views, what is the basis of the Christian claim to offer the truth about God, the world and ourselves? David Heywood charts a path through the study of human knowledge, showing how the insights of theology, philosophy and psychology complement and amplify one another, and bringing the experience of revelation within the scope of the study of human learning. He shows the relationship between human psychology and the work of the Holy Spirit and demonstrates the credibility of the Christian claim to a transforming knowledge of God in Jesus Christ. Offering a new model for the relationship of theology to the natural and social sciences, David Heywood shows how the claim of Christian theology to deal in issues of universal truth can be upheld. For Christian education, this book provides a theological rationale for the use of methods of teaching and learning of educationally proven effectiveness.

Chapter 1
Knowing the World

Seeing and Looking

Most of us assume that seeing is believing; our senses tell us the truth; what we see is what is in front of us. Experiments in perception however tell a very different story.

Card Trick

Some fifty years ago Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman recruited 28 students from Harvard and Radcliffe Universities for an experiment in perception. They showed their volunteers a series of ordinary playing cards for small fractions of a second, testing to find out how long it took them to recognize them (Bruner and Postman, 1949). The experiment made use of a piece of equipment known as a tachistoscope, which presents an image for fractions of a second. The length of the exposure is gradually increased until the subject recognizes the image correctly and the number and duration of exposures required is recorded. A tachistoscope parallels situations like moving around an unfamiliar room in the dark, when we may be uncertain of what we are actually looking at, and experiments with it can be used to show how we go about making sense of what we see.

Among the playing cards the students were asked to recognize Bruner and Postman had included some ‘trick’ cards: a black three of hearts, a black four of hearts, a red two of spades, a red six of spades, a black ace of diamonds and a red six of clubs. Following the usual procedure, they were presented with the cards one by one in exposures of increasing duration until they correctly recognized each one. Not surprisingly it took much longer, that is more exposures of longer duration, to recognize the trick cards.

The most interesting outcome of the experiment however was what happened when the volunteers failed to recognize the trick cards. One common type of failure was the ‘dominance reaction’ in which either colour or, more often, shape was dominant. Faced with a black four of hearts, the participants would report seeing a four of spades or, more often, a (red) four of hearts. Another type of failure was the compromise. Subjects would report a red six of spades, for example, as purple, brown, black on a reddish card, rusty colour or ‘black but with redness somewhere’.

From time to time most of us have the experience of coming across a mis-spelled word and struggling to remember the correct spelling. This type of recognition failure, disruption, also occurred in the experiment, usually after the students had exhausted their previous ‘hypotheses’ about what the card might be. A first attempt to recognize a black ace of diamonds might be to name it as the (red) ace of diamonds. On being told that this was wrong the volunteer might switch to colour dominance and label it as the ace of spades. When this failed he might try compromising and suggest a brown or purple ace of diamonds. By the time the third hypothesis proved wrong his expectations of normality were thrown into disarray. One exclaimed, ‘I can’t make the suit out, whatever it is. It didn’t even look like a card that time. I don’t know what colour it is now or even whether it’s a spade or a heart. I’m not even sure what a spade looks like!’

Sometimes a particular type of recognition failure such as the dominance reaction would fixate. The students would go on insisting that a black four of hearts was a four of spades until the time was up. Recognition, when it did come, was often preceded by a sense of wrongness. The subjects would say, ‘There’s something wrong about that card but I can’t quite work out what it is.’ When they finally recognized the trick cards the light usually dawned quite suddenly. All at once they realized that they were seeing ‘odd’ cards and began to allow for them. Bruner and Postman called it the ‘My God!’ reaction in which the students would say things like, ‘Good Lord, what have I been saying? That’s a red six of spades!’ The delay in recognition came about not only because they had to allow for new possibilities but also because they had to discard their previous expectations about what playing cards are supposed to look like. Once these expectations were overturned and replaced by a new ‘set’ in which the anomalous cards were allowed for, they began to recognize them much more quickly.

Schemata

Bruner and Postman’s results are the kind of thing we might intuitively expect but what is the explanation for them? First it is obvious that their previous experience was preventing the students from recognizing what they were actually seeing. Some, looking at a black six of hearts, perceived it as a six of spades. Others, struggling to account for the unfamiliar, actually made up brown or purple cards. In these cases the effect of previous experience was to distort perception of a new and unfamiliar pattern. In others, however, the unaccountable new experience had the effect of thoroughly disrupting and throwing their previous expectations into question.

In every case the observers were using their prior knowledge of what playing cards look like to cope with the task of recognizing the cards shown to them. We might say that each of them had a ‘schema’ (plural: ‘schemata’) for playing cards based on their previous experience. The schema told them what playing cards were supposed to look like and generated a strong expectation of what they were to see in the experiment. The schema made it possible for the participants to recognize the ordinary playing cards very rapidly after seeing them for only a small fraction of a second. But it also made the task of recognizing the unexpected cards considerably harder. Sometimes and in some people the schema was powerful enough to distort their perception, leading them to report seeing cards which did not exist. Sometimes their awareness of the actual visual image was more powerful, powerful enough in some cases to throw the schema itself into crisis. But even more significantly, in every case the result of the experiment was to modify the participant’s schema. Having recognized the presence of trick cards in the batch, their expectations changed intelligently to take them into account.

The Bruner and Postman experiment is one of many which suggest the vital role played by past experience in perception, recognition and learning. Most of the time it is easy to assume that what we hear, see or touch is what is there. In fact what is going on is a much more subtle process. When we see, touch or hear successfully it is because we already know what we are perceiving. The relevant schema, based on past experience, organizes the raw data available to our senses quickly and efficiently. Every so often, however, we meet situations when our expectations, based on past experience, lead us astray. We see someone in the street we think we recognize. We touch something in the dark which gives us a fright until we discover what it is. We think we hear someone nearby mentioning our name. We misread a word or phrase in a book or on a poster. Very rarely, however, do the schemata based on our previous knowledge fool us for long. We seem to be sufficiently open to the physical environment to allow our five senses to put us straight very quickly. The expectations generated by our schemata may be strong but there exists in most people an even more powerful desire to understand the world correctly.

Remembering

The word ‘schema’ was introduced into modern psychology by Sir Frederic Bartlett in his ground-breaking book of 1932, Remembering. Like Bruner and Postman, Bartlett noticed in his experiments what he called an ‘effort after meaning’. A particular pattern of lines so readily evoked an aeroplane that practically all the participants overlooked the ‘error’ in the accompanying words: ‘An Airoplaxe’, and recalled them as ‘An Aeroplane’. The only person who did not make this error was a man who failed to recognize the drawing as representational in any way. A picture of a noticeboard by a gate suggested to 80 per cent of observers the words ‘Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted’, although in practice the lettering was too small to be distinguishable. It seemed to Bartlett that perception was not so much a process of passively receiving stimuli from the external environment by means of the senses as an action in which those stimuli are given a meaningful context. ‘A great amount of what is said to be perceived,’ he concluded, ‘is in fact inferred’ (1932, p. 33).

Another experiment Bartlett called the method of repeated reproduction. He asked his volunteers to read a piece of writing through twice and after 15 minutes to try to write it down from memory. He then asked the volunteers to come back after various periods of time, sometimes a few hours, a day or two, a few weeks or in some cases even years and write the piece again. Bartlett tried this method with eight different short stories as well as descriptive and argumentative pieces and found a surprising uniformity about the way his volunteers both remembered and failed to remember the details of what they had read. His findings offer further interesting insights into the way schemata work.

The story Bartlett reports in Remembering is a North American folk-tale called ‘The War of the Ghosts’. He chose this piece, about three hundred words in length, because it came from a culture obviously different to that of the 14 young men and 6 young women who read and tried to remember it. It included a number of dramatic incidents but the links between them were far from obvious for people of our culture. Finally it had a rather strange and supernatural ending in which a young man dies after fighting with ghosts and Bartlett was interested to see what his volunteers would make of the supernatural.

First he found that ‘odd’ details in the story could be made acceptable by labelling the story or the characters in it as ‘non-English’. Just as the volunteers in the playing-card experiment had been able to adjust their expectations when they realized that they were being shown a number of trick cards, Bartlett’s Cambridge students of the 1920s were able to adjust their expectations of the stories by accepting a ‘strange’ or ‘different’ character. Even so almost every participant inserted familiar details in the stories in place of unfamiliar ones: ‘canoes’ became ‘boats’ and ‘hunting seals’ ‘fishing’.

Another change was the links in the stories. Hardly any of the volunteers accepted the lack of obvious connection between incidents in the story. Words like ‘nevertheless’ and ‘and so’ began to creep into their retellings right from the start and the more incomprehensible features of the story were simply left out. Some of the volunteers supplied a whole context for the story. A student of anthropology decided that the ‘ghosts’ were in fact a rival clan and retold the story accordingly, omitting all reference to the supernatural. A young woman produced a version based on the idea of dream symbolism. All the participants strove to make the story ‘make sense’ by supplying links based on their own culture and experience for those based on the story’s own inner logic. Over time their memories of the stories were gradually assimilated to the pattern of their everyday experience.

Bartlett also noticed that when they came to retell the stories his volunteers would often begin by remembering one important detail. Their memory of the whole story would then gradually crystallize around the particular event or item they had first called to mind. Interestingly, however, it was not its part in the story which made the first remembered detail important but the interests or temperament of the storyteller. It might be a familiar word, a comic association or a link with a participant’s own particular interest. It was the schemata of the teller’s own previous experience which made those particular details memorable rather than anything intrinsic to the story itself.

Finally, Bartlett’s volunteers usually supplied an overall tone to the stories they told. Not only did they remember the stories as happy or sad, frightening or mysterious, but their reconstructions tended to fit in with the emotional label they gave to the story as a whole. Events were subtly changed, links made and motives attributed to the characters in such a way as to make sense of the tone of the story. Bartlett called this sense of tone an ‘attitude’, which he described as a complex psychological state hard to analyse and mainly a matter of emotion.

Although Bartlett’s experiments were conducted in the 1920s, interest in them resurfaced with the emergence of cognitive psychology in the 1960s and 1970s. More recent experiments have confirmed and developed his findings. One particularly interesting example of the influence of schemata on memory is the transmission of a North Carolina ballad called ‘The Wreck of the Old “97”’ (Wallace and Rubin, 1988). The song describes a train crash that took place in 1907 and was transmitted in a variety of versions. By the 1930s it had been recorded four times in two different versions and the discrepancy eventually gave rise to a celebrated copyright trial in 1934, at which five ballad singers performed five different versions of the song, in which the number of verses ranged from 5 to 14 and crucial differences included the name of the driver, the name of the train and the cause of the crash itself. In the 1980s the researchers visited North Carolina and searched out ballad singers who were still performing the song. They discovered five, each of whom was asked to give a second rendering six months later. Not one gave exactly the same performance both times. Words were added or deleted, phrases sung in a different order and even whole verses added or omitted.

Yet despite the fluidity of its performance a number of constraints appeared to be operating which ensured the survival of the song in recognizable form over several generations. Interestingly these constraints reflect the ballad tradition within which the song is set as much or more than the story of the train crash itself. As well as the narrative structure of the story, they include the number of beats in a line, the number of lines in a verse, the meaning or gist of the verses and the order of the verses. Wallace and Rubin comment, ‘It is as if the rules or constraints, rather than the particular telling, are being transmitted’ (1988, p. 286). Furthermore beyond all these is the influence of existing models in the ballad tradition – the story of the ship that never returned or the tragedy of parted lovers. These models and the musical and poetical constraints form the schemata that guarantee the continuity of the song even while specific details of the story change over time.

Not only is a great amount of what is said to be perceived in fact inferred but a great amount of what is said to be remembered is reconstructed. In the story experiment the process of remembering worked almost like rationalization, as Bartlett’s volunteers subtly shaped their memories to fit their overall impression of the tone of the story and substituted familiar and comprehensible details for the strange and unfamiliar, or like crystallization, as one detail, selected on the basis of its importance to the teller, provided a clue to the reconstruction of the rest. In ‘The Wreck of the Old “97”’ the structures and patterns of the local ballad tradition have shaped the transmission of the song and the story within it. Bartlett’s work has given rise to a tradition of research which demonstrates that memories are not just passively recorded but actively shaped by means of the schemata derived from past experience.

Schemata as Mental Processes

But what is a schema? Bartlett defined it as ‘an active organisation of past reactions’ (1932, p. 201). Schemata are the way past experience is organized and made available to interpret the present. They are a tool for both recognition and remembering. Moreover, schemata must be both psychological and physiological – psychological because they handle processes such as memory and interpretation, physiological because they handle the raw physical data of perception, the light and sound waves available to the senses and the neural messages which carry them. A schema is therefore a feedback mechanism whereby physical experience is assimilated, stored and made available in psychological form for future use.

Bartlett lived in the days before computers. But his ideas have immediate relevance in the field of computer modelling of human thinking. A computer has a physical basis consisting of electrical connections and its function is to store and use information. Computers have memories and can be programmed to use stored information to recognize patterns of both light and sound. Since the 1960s cognitive psychology using computer-based models has grown to become a major force in psychology (Bruning et al ., 1995, p. 1) and schemata accepted as a standard account of the data-structures of which our memories consist (Baddeley, 1999, pp. 152–4; Smith, 1998, pp. 402–10).

The Structure of Memory

The earliest influential attempt to describe the kind of data-structure a schema might be was a paper entitled ‘A framework for representing knowledge’ published in 1975 by Marvin Minsky of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Taking as his starting point the use of computers to simulate visual processes, Minsky proposed a theoretical framework by which to understand the way in which the knowledge required by the computer for the simulation of vision might be represented. Minsky called his hypothetical data-structures ‘frames’ but explicitly stated that his work was to be seen as an attempt in the tradition of Bartlett and also Thomas Kuhn to investigate the representation of knowledge in memory. In view of this the terminology of frames and schemata can be taken as interchangeable.

The frame or schema is a data-structure representing a stereotyped situation such as the layout of a room, the routes between home and work, correct etiquette at a formal dinner or the way to service a car. The ‘top level’ of a schema is the information which is always true of the situation to which it relates. In the schema for a room, for example, walls, floor and a ceiling are mandatory. If we open a door and they fail to appear, the expectation of finding a room on the other side must be revised: a coal-cellar perhaps, or else a roof-garden. If we walk into a building expecting a restaurant but find ourselves in a place with no chairs or tables, ex...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Stylistic Note
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Knowing the World
• 2 The Big Picture
• 3 Thinking and Feeling
• 4 Knowing the Self
• 5 Theology Among the Sciences
• 6 The Image of God
• 7 The Jesus of Faith and History
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject index