The Principle of the Thing

Photo by Tatiana Syrikova in Pexels

Perhaps nothing is as stereotypical of 2 and 3 year-olds as their questioning. “Why” is their dominant response to their exploration and learning. Young children are seldom content with the what; they want to know the so-what that is the why behind the what.

“Why” questions are answered by a rare species of proposition called a principle. Principles are almost never made explicit in educational circles at any level and yet they constitute the most powerful tools in any person’s cognitive tool box.

This blog is intended to begin to operationalize your quest for principles that lead to deep and durable learning.

What follows is an approximate transcript of the podcast called “It’s the Principle of the Thing.”

Humans are born curious. The curiosity of a baby is a wonder to behold. First with the eyes and ears and later through crawling and even tasting they relentlessly explore their environment. Their exploration is not satisfied by their sensory experiences; sensation is a means to the end of detecting patterns that begin to make sense of the world. Patterns are named leading to language acquisition. Language allows toddlers to ask questions and “why” becomes a dominant theme for the healthy two-year-old. Asking “why” anticipates a cause-effect answer which puts existing concepts into service and creates new concepts as well.

Questioning is a primary attribute of beginner’s mind and question-asking is focal in developing Learner’s Mind in adults. If you’re not familiar with Learner’s Mind, I developed many of its dispositions last season on this podcast. What I did not develop is this emphasis on question-asking. I saved that for this season.

Last season I encouraged my listeners to create space for focused exploration. Adults tend to overemphasize searches of their existing knowledge base when puzzled. The adult emphasis on efficiency tends to discount the value of exploration. Focused exploration recognizes the need for new perspectives and new concepts. The ideal way to focus exploration is by generating questions.

Humans are wired to seek answers to questions, especially “how” and “why” questions. Questions are the rocket fuel of exploration—they propel learners.

A 2022 book, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal by Justin Gregg contrasts human and animal cognition. Gregg repeatedly calls humans “why specialists.” He says, “Humans’ why specialist thinking offers us two cognitive skills that animals like bettongs [a group of small wallabies] lack: imagination and understanding of causality.” Gregg’s main thesis is that these human distinctives are what get us into trouble. Gregg thinks we would be better off if we just noticed patterns and did not care about why the patterns are there or how we might use them. I disagree with Justin Gregg’s thesis, but I agree that asking why is a human distinctive. This defining human attribute is a positive, not a negative.

An indicator that we have not fully embraced learner’s mind is the willingness to shrug off the pursuit of causality. This is common among both adults and adolescents when they utter “it is what is.” Many have also abandoned the law of non-contradiction: two contradictory things can’t both be true. “So, something doesn’t make sense. Lots of things don’t make sense.”

Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” embraced cognitive incongruity:

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself.
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

 
In today’s podcast I want to explore the kind of proposition that establishes causality.

Propositions are assertions that connect concepts. Principles are propositions that answer how or why questions. Principles are the power tools of thinking. Exploration is really a quest for principles that unlock understanding. Principles satisfy our need for things to make sense. When something makes sense, we don’t have to struggle to remember it or to use it in future learning or problem-solving.

I am using principle in a restricted sense. Unfortunately, there has been a great deal of dithering over the centuries in the way principle is used. Originally a principle was “a fundamental concept in a science” and was later broadened to mean more generally the “origin, source, first cause”. Still later it came to mean “a fundamental truth or proposition on which others depend; a general statement or tenet forming the basis of a system of belief.” OED

I maintain that a cognitive principle has four attributes. Two of these have already surfaced in this brief exploration of the etymology of a principle. The first two distinctives are:

1.     Principles are propositions. They tie concepts together in a way that makes an assertion.

2.     Principles are broadly applicable. This is explicit in the OED’s definition “a general statement or tenet forming the basis of a system of belief.” It is implicit when the OED says it is “a fundamental truth or proposition on which others depend.” Another way of saying this is that principles are foundational.

Principles are propositions that answer how and why questions. A simple way of stating this third attribute is that principles are explanatory. They establish causality. They make sense which is another way of saying that through principles we understand. Understanding means our curiosity has been satisfied. As “why specialists” we have achieved our learning goal (at least for the present).

In the DIKUW taxonomy of epistemology that I developed in season 1 (D = data, I = information, K = knowledge), understanding is the U. There is only one more level and that is W. W stands for wisdom. Wisdom points to the future. What are you going to do now that you understand? How does understanding help you solve problems and make wise decisions? This is part of the power of a principle. The fourth attribute is that principles are predictive. Principles are meant to be applied and not just collected.

Prediction is on two levels. The first level is the logical inference from the principle to other contexts. This is near term. It is deductive in the form of If ______ (the principle) then in a particular context _____ will be the result.

Image by Ali Asad from Pixabay

Since the World Cup recently concluded, let’s take the offside rule in soccer and evaluate whether a particular player was offside in a specific instance.

Perhaps you rightly respond that offside is a rule and not a principle. My response is that there is a principle underneath the offside rule. That is why there is sometimes disagreement between fans and referees about whether a particular run at a goal could be properly nullified with an offsides penalty.

The offside rule seems concrete if a bit opaque: “A player is in an offside position if: any part of the head, body or feet is in the opponents' half (excluding the halfway line) and any part of the head, body or feet is nearer to the opponents' goal line than both the ball and the second-last opponent.” There are, however, three traditional exceptions to a rigid interpretation of the rule. I’ll give you one and link to the others in my blog.

“Even if a player doesn’t get the ball, that player can be offside. . . .
The officials must judge if the player without the ball is involved in the play in some way — for example, by challenging for the ball or, say, obstructing the goalkeeper’s vision. In that case, the player would be judged offside despite not having touched the ball.

So, on what basis are these judgment calls rendered? Based on a principle of which the offsides rule is but one manifestation. And what is the principle? I think it is the principle of competitiveness. Competitiveness in a contest is maximized when there is fair play. This is sometimes characterized as a level playing field. A compact statement of the principle is important. Constructing a pithy statement of the principle is an appropriate cognitive challenge because it demands mental clarity. Pithy principles are also memorable.

Here's one formulation of the principle of competitiveness:

Practices which systematically reduce the competitiveness of a game must be outlawed.

This is a cause-effect statement. It explains when rules will need to be constructed.

In soccer the principle addresses the need to avoid cheap goals. Here’s the rationale as explained by a soccer authority: “The offside was constructed to deter players from always lurking near the opposition goal to look for scoring opportunities.

Without the offside rule, long balls could be kicked directly towards team-mates placed in the opposition goal area and would prove to be too effective, thereby reducing the element of skill and strategy in football [soccer] games.”

The same basic principle is in place with the three seconds rule in basketball which was created to keep players from parking themselves under the basket indefinitely waiting to make easy shots. Instead, players are forced to keep moving and dart through the key periodically hoping for a timely pass.

The so-called 4 corners “offense” used by the wily coach Dean Smith of UNC Chapel Hill was basically a game of keep-away using skilled ball-handling to keep the ball out of the hands of the opposing team. It led to very low scoring games which were not fun to watch. The shot clock was created in the 1980’s to minimize the length of time one team could keep the ball without having to shoot. The shot clock is an application of the principle of competitiveness. The principle is propositional, broadly applicable, and explanatory in terms of cause and effect.

Rules should be based on principles, but the rules themselves are not the principles.

Big ideas are another area of potential confusion. Big ideas are important. They are take-home lessons, important summary statements. It would be an improvement to most instruction if the big ideas were emphasized front and center and not buried in a haystack of information. However, many big ideas are not principles. The usual problem is a failure of a big idea to explain—that is it doesn’t deal with causation.

Image by WikiImages from Pixabay

For example, Mark Twain is reputed to have said, “History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes”

This big idea is propositional (it makes an assertion that there are patterns). It is broadly applicable to all of history. It is predictive in the weak sense that it asserts there will be parallels between current events and events in the past. Where it fails altogether is that it doesn’t deal with causation. Because of this it is not a principle. It is a useful aphorism that invites observers to look for parallels. Whether finding a parallel produces any leverage in the present is another matter. As George Santayana said, “Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Let’s move back to prediction as an element of a principle. We’ve considered the near-term implications of a principle in a particular context. These are logical inferences. Even more important is the ability to use the principle to predict long-term consequences. This is often what we mean when we refer to wisdom. Wisdom has been called “the best means to the best ends.” This involves a projection into the future. This long-term future may be affected by interventions we make in the near-term based on application of the principle. Some call this long-view “second-order” thinking.

The Hippocratic Oath implores physicians “first of all, do no harm.” What this means is that current interventions have consequences that ripple into the future and some of them may cause unintended harm. An example of this is a family friend who had innovative heart surgery as a child to correct a serious problem. After several decades of health, this young mother had to have a liver and a kidney transplant because the surgery damaged these organs over time through elevating the blood pressure of circulation to just these organs. These unintended physician-induced consequences are termed iatrogenic.

As we project the long-term consequences of a principle, it is appropriate to consider “Chesterton’s Fence.” G.K. Chesterton in 1929 illustrated the application of an idea that encountered a barrier: “let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. A more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

This takes us back to understanding as a prerequisite to prediction. In this case the learner needs to understand why the fence was put there before they can evaluate whether the conditions now allow it to be removed.

If you want to explore principles in greater depth, I suggest you read chapter 5 in my book, Unforgettable: Enabling Deep and Durable Learning.

Principles are formulated as the culmination of a quest that curiosity initiated. Principles answer the how or why questions that we’re hard-wired for. Principles satisfy our desire to understand deeply so that we can live wisely. Because principles are broadly applicable, a small number of principles govern many specifics. This simplification empowers us to solve groups of related problems and devote more time and energy to thinking about implications and consequences.

Principles are powerful because they are purposefully constructed by individual learners to answer how and why questions that matter to them. This personal recognition of patterns is the only means of achieving deep understanding.

Here are situations which involve an unstated principle. Try to construct a compact (pithy if possible) statement of a principle at stake in each situation.

Remember that a cognitive principle has each of the the following four attributes:

1. Propositional

2. Broadly applicable

3. Explanatory

4. Predictive

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