As the Oxford Companion to Philosophy points out, ideas ‘are entities that only exist as contents of some mind’ (Brown, 1995 ). That in no way suggests they are not important: in a very real sense, humans are just ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’
(as Shakespeare’s Prospero suggests in The Tempest ). However, it is highly signifi cant for research exploring student thinking that the ideas learners have are only directly available to them and have to be inferred indirectly by researchers .
Representing Ideas
If our ideas are purely personal, subjective experiences, then we cannot show them to anyone else. Rather we have to represent them in a public space if we wish to
‘share’ them with others. This representation can take a number of forms: we can express our ideas in prose or poems; we can draw out our ideas, act our ideas out or make fi lms, compose music, compile photoessays or dance them out. The key point
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is that, whatever form representation takes, the representation is different from the original idea – the thought – and so the representation can never be a replica of the idea .
There is symmetry here with the situation described in terms of perception (above). The representations of the external world in the nervous system are necessarily different in form to the information reaching the senses: equally, the representations we make in the external world of our ideas are necessarily different in form to those ideas.
I have referred elsewhere to Popper’s use of the notion of three worlds: the physical world, the world of subjective experience and the world of ideas in the abstract, or Worlds 1, 2 and 3 (Popper, 1979 ; Taber, 2009b ). These ‘Worlds’ contain fundamen- tally different types of things, and we can never move something from one of these worlds to another. So the abstract notion of a Platonic Form such as an ideal sphere only exists in World 3. A physical (World 1) object such as the sun or a ball bearing may be considered to approximate it, but even if it is considered ‘spherical’, it cannot be the same as the abstract notion of a sphere.
The human mind is capable of thinking about both actual objects that may be designated as spherical and about the geometrical form of the sphere in abstract, but in both cases these are mental representations (World 2 objects), so ‘the image of a Platonic Form that occurs in a person’s mind would be an idea in our sense’ (Brown, 1995 , p. 389). This might be seen as a parallel to the distinction made in discussing language with metalanguage (e.g. between the word ‘banana’ and a banana): a word is not what it represents, and a sentence is not its meaning.
In this book I have not emphasised the notion of the different worlds but rather have stressed the assumption that conscious experience such as ‘having ideas’ is associated at the cognitive systems level with processing of information, which in turn is based on the properties of the physical (electrochemical) structure of the human brain. In the terms set out in the previous chapter, an account of the conscious experience such as ‘having ideas’ is a description at the mental level; an account of the processing of information is a description at the computational or system level; and an account in terms of the electrochemical structure of the human brain would be a description at the physical level. However, there is a close parallel here with the three Worlds formalism, with the mental description concerning World 2, the systems description representing an idealised account in World 3 and the physical description being about World 1.
The mental experiences we have are clearly different in form to the electrical patterns of activation in the brain that are associated with them. Although those patterns ‘translate’ (give rise) to ideas in terms of conscious experience, they are actually in the form of a ‘code’. That code also has to be translated into behaviour to represent what is coded in the external world, in the public space available to others. The representation formed in the external world is thus at least two stages removed from the idea experienced.
This is represented in Fig. 4.9 , where the left-hand image offers a dualist interpretation (see Chap. 3 ), where ideas are translated into brain processing which leads to actions that can be examined by others in the external word (e.g. writing,
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speaking). In this volume it is considered more appropriate to consider mental notions such as ideas as being an emergent property of the brain. In this concep- tualisation (see the right-hand image in Fig. 4.9 ) electrical activity in the brain is considered as the basis for mental experience: nonetheless, ideas are still two repre- sentational stages away from behaviour that reports those ideas.
I stress this point as it is a fundamental assumption underpinning this book that because ideas can only be expressed by being represented in some other form than ‘thought’, we cannot assume that representations of ideas have true fi delity to the ideas being represented . Indeed, in principle, the representations cannot be ‘the same as’ what is being represented. This is indicated in Fig. 4.10 , where the representation is in the external world and takes a physical form such as sound, inscriptions, bodily movement, etc., quite different from the nature of thought itself.
Figure 4.10 shows that the processing of information in the ‘executive’ processing module that correlates with consciousness (having an idea) can lead to action in the external world to represent our thinking. Signals from the executive processor can activate areas of the brain concerned with the voluntary control of movement (the motor cortex), which then sends signals to the muscles to bring about speech, writing, gesturing, etc. There is in effect a ‘motor interface’ to represent electrical activity into action in the external world, just as there is a sensory interface to represent stimuli into electrical activity. As with the sensory interface (which includes the retinas, the mechanism of the ear, the olfactory membranes, etc.), the motor interface is not physically a single entity, but rather consists of various spatially distributed components. There are many places in the body where motor nerves stimulate different muscles.
So in representing an idea, the motor system is used to produce talk or to write, etc., and so the brain needs to bring about coordinated physical activity. This is some- thing we generally take for granted, but clearly for some individuals, especially the
Fig. 4.9 Representations available to public scrutiny are indirect indicators of ideas Expressing Ideas
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young or those with particular disorders, producing coherent speech or readable handwriting is non-trivial. For many of us, expressing our ideas in some forms may be challenging. If I was asked to dance or paint a representation of electromagnetic induction or photosynthesis, then even assuming I was able to conceptualise how I wished to express my idea of the concept in that form, I would not be confi dent that I could execute the representation as I would intend. I might feel more confi dent in using speech or writing, but that may not apply to all young people we interrogate in our research. Clearly this is important in research if we assume that the representa- tions that people make of their ideas are a good guide to their ideas. This is often recognised when the literacy skills of young children may limit their ability to read research instructions/questions or produce written answers, but in principle this is always an issue that limits what we can achieve in research into students’ ideas and so their understanding and their learning.
Fig. 4.10 Representing ideas in the external world
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To some extent individuals can check upon the representations they make in the world, at least to the extent that they can monitor them through their own senses, that is, perception produced through processing in the cognitive system as outlined earlier. For example, we can monitor our own speech productions, and if we detect mistakes make a corrected utterance. However, ‘slips of the tongue’ may go unnoticed, and of course the mechanism by which we obtain sensory information about our own actions in the world is subject to the same processes of representation, fi ltering, interpreting and tidying that accompany any other perceptions, with the added complication that we have strong expectations of how our representations will be enacted in the world. To represent this, in Fig. 4.11 , the percept is a limited representation of the enacted representation of the original idea, in part infl uenced by knowledge of what was being represented: this is the very knowledge which is absent when interpreting the public representations made by others. More permanent representations – writing, drawings, etc., may be easier to check in this
Fig. 4.11 Feedback to check on representation made in external world: does the percept of our representation match the idea we were trying to represent?
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way than more ephemeral actions such as gestures and speech that do not leave a permanent trace in the environment. But even here, the issues of interpretation are relevant. A person who produces an inscription that offers several readings because it can be readily understood in several ways is likely on reading back their own production (i.e. public representation) to interpret the writing according to the intended meaning and may well not detect any ambiguity.