Out of curiosity (about constructivism) I started reading Jean Piaget’s Language and Thought of the Child. I am still at the beginning, so this comment is mostly meta:
It is interesting (kinda obvious in hindsight), how different a person sounds when you read a book written by them, compared to reading a book about them. This distortion by textbooks seems to happen in a predictable direction:
People sound more dogmatic than they really were, because in their books there is enough space for disclaimers, expressing uncertainty, suggesting alternative explanations, providing examples of a different kind, etc.; but a textbook will summarize this all as “X said that Y is Z”.
People sound less empirical and more like armchair theorists, because in their books there is enough space to describe various experience and experiments that led them to their conclusions, but the textbook will often just list the conclusions.
People sound more abstract and boring, because the interesting parts get left out in the textbooks, replaced by short abstract definitions.
(I guess the lesson is that if you learn about someone from a textbook and conclude “this guy is just another boring dogmatic armchair theorist”, you should consider the possibility that this is simply what textbooks do to people they describe, and try reading their most famous book to give them a chance.)
So my plan was to find out how exactly did Piaget mean his abstract conclusion that kids “construct” models of reality in their heads… and instead here is this experiment how two researchers observed two 6-years old boys at elementary school for one month and wrote down every single thing they said (plus the context), and then made a statistic of how often when one kid says something to another, there is no response, and it is okay because no response was really expected, because small kids are mostly talking to themselves even when they address other people… and I am laughing because I just returned from playground with my kids, and this is so true for the 3-years old. -- More disturbingly, then I start thinking about whether blogging, or even me writing this specific comment now, is really fundamentally different. Piaget classifies speech acts primarily by whether you expect or don’t expect a response; but with blogging, you always may get a response, or you may get silence, and you will only find out much later.
a large number of people, whether from the working classes or the more absent-minded of the intelligentsia, are in the habit of talking to themselves, of keeping up an audible soliloquy. This phenomenon points perhaps to a preparation for social language. The solitary talker invokes imaginary listeners, just as the child invokes imaginary playfellows.
I started reading as a research, now I read because it is fun.
Out of curiosity (about constructivism) I started reading Jean Piaget’s Language and Thought of the Child. I am still at the beginning, so this comment is mostly meta:
It is interesting (kinda obvious in hindsight), how different a person sounds when you read a book written by them, compared to reading a book about them. This distortion by textbooks seems to happen in a predictable direction:
People sound more dogmatic than they really were, because in their books there is enough space for disclaimers, expressing uncertainty, suggesting alternative explanations, providing examples of a different kind, etc.; but a textbook will summarize this all as “X said that Y is Z”.
People sound less empirical and more like armchair theorists, because in their books there is enough space to describe various experience and experiments that led them to their conclusions, but the textbook will often just list the conclusions.
People sound more abstract and boring, because the interesting parts get left out in the textbooks, replaced by short abstract definitions.
(I guess the lesson is that if you learn about someone from a textbook and conclude “this guy is just another boring dogmatic armchair theorist”, you should consider the possibility that this is simply what textbooks do to people they describe, and try reading their most famous book to give them a chance.)
So my plan was to find out how exactly did Piaget mean his abstract conclusion that kids “construct” models of reality in their heads… and instead here is this experiment how two researchers observed two 6-years old boys at elementary school for one month and wrote down every single thing they said (plus the context), and then made a statistic of how often when one kid says something to another, there is no response, and it is okay because no response was really expected, because small kids are mostly talking to themselves even when they address other people… and I am laughing because I just returned from playground with my kids, and this is so true for the 3-years old. -- More disturbingly, then I start thinking about whether blogging, or even me writing this specific comment now, is really fundamentally different. Piaget classifies speech acts primarily by whether you expect or don’t expect a response; but with blogging, you always may get a response, or you may get silence, and you will only find out much later.
I started reading as a research, now I read because it is fun.