The Philosophy of Human Learning

Christopher Winch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134717811
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Philosophy of Human Learning addresses current concerns with the nature of human learning from a distinctive philosophical perspective. Using insights derived from the work of Wittgenstein, it mounts a vigorous attack on influential contemporary accounts of learning, both in the 'romantic' Rousseauian tradition and in the 'scientific' cognotivist tradition. These two schools, Professor Winch argues, are more closely related than is commonly realised.

1
INTRODUCTION

Reconsidering Learning

Why the subject is important

This book is a philosophical treatment of the concept of learning as it applies to child-rearing and education. Such a book is necessary because of the distorted way in which learning has been treated by many psychologists and those educationists who have been influenced by them. Learning is an important part of human life and the major concern of our education and training systems, not to mention the institution of child-rearing in any society. In addition, life is a matter not just of having more experiences but of preparing for and reflecting on experience. These activities can be called ‘learning’ just as much as the acquisition of knowledge, skill and understanding in childhood and early adulthood. Learning is, then, at the heart of human experience and, as such, a proper matter for a philosophical treatment, particularly where a rescue operation is necessary.

First, a word of clarification. I use the term ‘learning’ generically to cover not only those situations where people apply themselves deliberately and carefully to acquiring knowledge, skill and understanding, but also to those situations where they acquire these things either without apparent effort or through the normal processes of growth. The terms ‘acquisition’ and ‘development’ respectively are usually applied to these cases and I shall follow such usage but cover the full range of my concerns under the term ‘learning’, constantly bearing in mind both the similarities and the differences between the cases. The idea of learning through a quasi-biological form of development will, however, be critically discussed in Chapter 7. In addition, I shall be concerned with learning in both the task (trying to learn) sense and the achievement (having succeeded in learning) sense, and the discussion and context should make clear the distinction if it is necessary to do so.

My particular concerns in writing this book are as follows.

1. I wish to rescue learning from the exclusive concern of the social sciences (psychology and linguistics in particular) and to defend the importance of a distinctive philosophical perspective on the subject.
2. I shall be challenging representationalism, behaviourism, developmentalism and Rousseauian romanticism as influential accounts of learning. I hope that it will be evident from the development of my argument that these approaches are far more closely related to one another than is commonly supposed and that all four have common roots which themselves stand in need of a vigorous critique.
3. I wish to treat aspects of learning that are neglected by most writers, as well as those more commonly considered. The former category includes the concept of attention and religious and aesthetic aspects of learning. In the latter category, memory, language and moral learning have all received extensive treatment which has largely passed into conventional wisdom. These conventional accounts will be given a thorough critique and an alternative point of view will be put forward.
4. I wish to emphasise the social, affective and practical nature of learning. These are three features that have received relatively little attention, but they are, I believe, of fundamental importance in gaining any understanding at all of how or why human beings learn anything.

Towards the end of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein remarks that:

The confusion and barrenness of psychology is not to be explained by calling it a ‘young science’; its state is not comparable with that of physics for instance, in its beginnings…. For in psychology there are experimental methods and conceptual confusion….

The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by.¹

These remarks remain as true as they were nearly fifty years ago and can also be applied, to a large degree, to educational and linguistic thinking (both of which are heavily influenced by psychology).

When I say that the concept of learning needs examination, I do not wish to be understood as saying that we need an alternative theory. This is not necessary, desirable or even possible. In the course of the book, I shall show that much current thinking about learning (including what is called ‘acquisition’ and ‘development’) is confused and barren and should be discarded without regret. But the possibility of giving a scientific or even a systematic account of human learning is also mistaken.

One of the reasons why it has seemed possible to provide such accounts is that psychologists interested in learning have consistently failed to pay enough attention to certain aspects of human life, particularly those con-cerned with religion and the arts and, more generally, those aspects that have an irreducibly social, practical and affective dimension. Indeed, one of the main themes will be that the social, practical and affective dimensions of human life are central and need to be implicated in virtually every aspect of accounts of learning in different practices and situations. When one does so, the importance of context in understanding learning becomes apparent and this undermines the tendency to see our understanding of learning in terms of a grand theory.

These cautionary notes should not be taken to imply complete pessimism about our understanding of learning. The cautions are more about the dangers of theory-building than they are about the possibility of understanding. What we need, it will be argued, are not more theories but more description and more understanding of what is already before us. In certain important respects, the theories stand in the way of our understanding. What has been said should not be taken to mean that it is not possible to gain new knowledge and insight into the way in which people learn; it is, however, more likely that such knowledge will be piecemeal and related to particular activities than that it will form or be derived from grand theory.

It is inevitable that much of what I have to say will be concerned with children, often very young children, and the years in which most education takes place. This is inevitable, given that so much learning takes place in the earliest years of our lives. Certainly, the world of education has been deeply influenced by some of the theories that are described in subsequent chapters. To the extent that I am critical of practices based on those theories, there are implications for the way in which education is organised. But there will be no attempt to prescribe exactly what should go on in the nursery or the classroom, although the possible implications should, in most cases, be clear enough. There has, however, been too much dogmatic prescription of pedagogical practice in recent years for anyone to venture into this area without a great deal of humility and respect for the particular circumstances in which learning takes place. Instead, I shall be content if the implications of the criticisms of learning theories that are made here are debated within the teaching profession as a means of reviewing and reconsidering current practice. But learning does not take place solely in childhood and so the scope of the book will be broader than what is directly relevant to education.

That area of philosophy known as epistemology has been concerned with questions of how knowledge is acquired and the distinction between knowledge and belief. Epistemology is not concerned with empirical questions about how we learn, but with providing a framework in which such questions can be answered. Questions about how we learn are closely related to these epistemological preoccupations and rest on them to a large extent. The scientific enterprise of learning theory rests on a variety of related epistemological positions and cannot be understood except in terms of them. Much of the book will be concerned with those positions and why they are wrong. To the extent that learning theory rests on faulty epistemology it is, to a large degree, compromised. Therefore much of my concern will be epistemological, looking at the presuppositions behind learning theories and showing how empirical results derived from those theories are largely irrelevant to the questions in hand.

Most, if not all, modern learning theory derives from a tradition of thinking about human knowledge and human nature that stems from the work of Descartes on the one hand and Locke on the other. Despite the fact that these two philosophers are commonly thought to belong to different camps (rationalist and empiricist respectively), and despite the fact that there are significant differences in approach between the two of them, chiefly to do with the existence or otherwise of innate mental principles or ideas, there are enough similarities for it to be possible to talk of a common epistemological position from which modern learning theories draw their inspiration. It is also fair to say that there has been a growing rapprochement between empiricism and rationalism in contemporary philosophy which builds on the common ground that exists between them.² The starting point of both epistemologies is the existence of individuals, whose conscious awareness forms the basis of all knowledge. This individuality is conceived of more in mental than in corporeal terms. The common epistemological position that, historically, both empiricism and rationalism share is, then, a form of methodological individualism based on a conception of human beings as mental primarily and corporeal secondarily. This is one of the assumptions that will come under attack in subsequent chapters and the consequences of that attack ramify through the accounts offered of various aspects of human learning. Briefly, this assumption results in accounts of learning that neglect the practical, social and affective.

The picture is, however, complicated in various ways that make an onslaught on mentalism and individualism inadequate in itself. The first of these is the tendency of one strand in empiricism to eschew its mentalist assumptions and to concentrate on the corporeal nature of humanity and its continuity with the animal world. In doing so, it adopts a view, inspired by Descartes and continued by Kant, that, in so far as humans are part of the natural world and, hence, subject to causality, they can be treated as automata for the purposes of scientific understanding.³ This empiricist-derived approach, known as behaviourism, has been and continues to be influential in psychology and education. Behaviourists seek to explain learning in terms of modifications to bodily movements by external stimuli. Ironically, the behaviourist programme requires the observer or scientist who investigates learning to be in the position of the empiricist’s individual, who takes in raw sense data concerning the behaviour of the creature observed (whether it be animal or human is not to the point) and forms generalisations on the basis of it.⁴

The second complication lies in the way in which some strands within Cartesianism have become subordinated to a physicalist view of the world, in modern linguistic and learning theory. This tendency has been boosted by the growing importance of computer technology and the seeming promise that this gives for providing a model for the operation of the human mind. Modern cognitivism, as the most influential contemporary variants of Cartesianism are now called, tends to be a physicalist version, where the mind and the brain are identified and the symbolic abilities of the human mind are explicable in terms of neural structures and processes.⁵ The third complication lies in developmentalism: an approach to human growth and learning derived from Rousseau, but continued through the work of Piaget and others, which emphasises the qualititative differences in learning capacity which relate to the different stages of childhood and young adulthood. It is arguable though, that developmentalism is more of an elaboration than a wholesale revision of mentalistic individualism.

The fourth and final complication is the liberationism that again derives from the work of Rousseau. Rousseau stresses the need to free humans from the overt subordination of one human will to another if education is really to be achieved. This implies, as I shall argue, a freedom from authority. Much modern learning theory therefore has a distinctly utopian, liberationist and anti-authoritarian bias which has had a profound influence on Western patterns of child-rearing and education. In fact, a failure to appreciate the normative nature of human life, particularly including childhood, lies behind all these approaches to learning; it is therefore not surprising to find explicit connections between, for example, cognitivism (with its emphasis on methodological individualism) and Rousseauian progressivism (with its emphasis on individual freedom) in the work of some influential modern writers.⁶

Insights from the work of Wittgenstein

The long tradition of thinking about the human mind and the nature of learning that I have described as mentalistic individualism has reigned, practically unchallenged during this century, up to and including the present time. The only challenge of really major importance to have emerged has come from the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. While his challenge to the epistemology of mentalistic individualism has received some attention, the profound implications of his work for the various projects of explaining human learning have been much less considered. These implications can be summarised briefly, but the detail of the book will spell them out.

First, Wittgenstein cast doubt on the view that knowledge should be assimilated to certainty. This view, expressed in the Cartesian cogito argument and in the direct awareness of ideas and impressions in the empiricists, is replaced with reference to beliefs and attitudes that underpin all our behaviour and which can be expressed as agreement in reactions and in judgement. There are certain beliefs to which we hold fast and which form the basis of all other judgements; it makes no sense to doubt them as there is no framework within which they can be doubted. Certainty about some general matters of fact is a prerequisite of our ability both to gain knowledge about and to cast doubt on other matters of fact.⁷ Therefore, although we learn to be certain about many things from our earliest days (for example, that everyday objects do not disappear and reappear all the time), when we learn, we do not thereby become certain about what we know. In fact, it is possible for us to come to doubt what we know and for our doubts to exist within a framework of bedrock beliefs about which we are certain. It follows that knowledge exists within a system of practices and beliefs that are not themselves properly describable as knowledge but which are the prerequisites of knowledge. Wittgenstein makes certainty normative, prescribing a framework for knowledge, while, at the same time, acknowledging that the boundaries between certainty and knowledge are sometimes vague and may fluctuate over time. These ideas are of importance to the understanding of later learning (see Chapter 12).

Second, Wittgenstein drew attention to human natural history. He did not mean by this that we should regard ourselves as automata as the Cartesians regarded animals. Rather he wanted to question the view that we are composed of two parts—one mental, the other corporeal—and to stress that a general separation of the two is unintelligible. There are a number of implications that follow from this shift in emphasis:

• The connection between cognitive, conative and affective aspects of human nature is very close; although they can be conveniently separated for certain purposes, it is a mistake to think that they are in a sense distinct faculties of mind. In particular, our feelings and emotions (which themselves have a cognitive aspect) as they are manifested to others are important in understanding our behaviour in ordinary life; they do more than provide clues to what we think and feel, they are, to a large extent, constitutive of it.
• We understand thought, feeling and action as attributes of people rather than of minds. Learning from the reactive behaviour of others is fundamental to our becoming human and is bound up with our ability to recognise and respond to gestures and facial expressions that are themselves part of the agreement in reaction that forms the background to knowledge.
• The affective side of human nature is very important for understanding motivation, interest and desire, including the desire to learn. Behaviour-ists have, it is true, paid attention to motivation as important to learning, as have developmentalists, but they have both dealt with it in a hopelessly crude and inappropriate way.
• A further consequence of emphasising our animal nature is Wittgenstein’s stress on the importance of training for learning. Most cognitivists regard training with horror and behaviourists tend to conflate it with conditioning, but for Wittgenstein it was of fundamental importance. It is through training that we develop the responses that allow us to take part in human life: to use and understand language; to perform simple and then more complex everyday and practical tasks; and to become morally, religiously and artistically aware. Human training is a normative activity whose possibility rests on agreement in reactions. It is through training that we first learn to follow rules, and it is through being able to follow rules that we can go on to learn more through instruction, explanation and discovery.⁸
• I shall argue that it is a further, although unstated, consequence of this approach that learning to act and to acquire abilities is both intimately bound up with learning that certain things are the case and is also important in its own right.⁹ This again is an area of learning that has suffered relative neglect, apart from very crude treatments on the part of behaviourists.

Third, Wittgenstein drew attention to the social nature of human life. He did this primarily through arguing that there could be no such thing as private rule-following.¹⁰ The truth of Wittgenstein’s claim has been contested by many philosophers, but so has its interpretation. I shall deal with both of these in subsequent chapters but will confine myself to a couple of observations here. Wittgenstein’s claim does not rest on scepticism about individual memories as some commentators have thought, nor does it apply only to rules that are necessarily unshareable, like those that govern a private sensation language. The claim is more radical than that; it is that one cannot get a grip on the notion of right or wrong, correctness or incorrectness, without there being a social institution of rule- following. No normative activity could exist ab initio in the life of a solitary. Since the possibility of memory claims rests on the possibility of being wrong as well as right, it makes no sense to appeal to memory claims except in a social context where such claims can be meaningfully assessed.¹¹

The social nature of rule-following implies that human learning is more than just an individualistic activity.¹² Most psychologists, linguists and educators who concern themselves with learning pay little attention to this social dimension and, even where they do, it is given an extremely superficial treatment in terms of, for example, the importance of co-operation. Taken seriously, understanding the social nature of learning goes far deeper than this, at a variety of levels ranging from the interpersonal to the political. Exploring this implication is one of the major themes of this book.

Learning and institutions

If human learning has an irreducibly social basis, then what is there to be said about the importance of society in shaping learning? In what follows I shall concentrate particularly on the kinds of society in which we live, namely advanced, post-industrial s...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION
• 2: THE CARTESIAN AND EMPIRICIST HERITAGE OF LEARNING THEORIES
• 3: THE ROMANTIC VIEW OF LEARNING
• 4: LEARNING IN A NORMATIVE CONTEXT
• 5: LEARNING, TRAINING AND BEHAVIOURISM
• 6: REPRESENTATION AND LEARNING
• 7: DEVELOPMENT
• 8: LEARNING LANGUAGE
• 9: LEARNING AND CONCEPT FORMATION
• 10: MEMORY AND LEARNING
• 11: ATTENDING, THINKING AND LEARNING
• 12: LATER LEARNING
• 13: LEARNING ABOUT RELIGION
• 14: MORAL LEARNING
• 15: LEARNING TO MAKE AND TO APPRECIATE
• 16: CONCLUSION
• NOTES
• REFERENCES