Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7fkt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T11:31:16.179Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On Learning, Playfulness, and Becoming Human

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2018

Christopher Joseph An
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay aims to develop the so-called ‘transformational view’ of human development (advocated by McDowell and Bakhurst) by advancing a play-based model of learning. I first consider challenges to this view posed by Luntley and Rödl who argue that the learning encounter must presuppose some rational faculty already present in the prelinguistic child. Rödl in particular considers joint attentional episodes in which child and adult attend to objects in their environment together as signifying a uniquely rational consciousness active in the human child. I however argue on phenomenological grounds that this intellectualist treatment is implausible and unconvincing. I propose a play-centered treatment (inspired primarily from Huizinga) that is more sensitive to the life of the child. This perspective of play I maintain scaffolds a shared normative space which enables self-conscious, responsive, and intelligible thought and action. This account motivates what I call a participatory play model of learning which is constitutively non-intellectual but is nonetheless intelligent. It is non-intellectual because it emphasizes building co-reactive relationships and participation in shared cultural practices. But it is also intelligent because it makes possible a distinctively human mode of understanding grounded on an interactive, relational, and imaginatively reflexive engagement with the world.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 93 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 3 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 McDowell, J., Mind and World, 2nd edition (1st edition, 1994) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 125Google Scholar.

2 Ibid., 84.

3 Ibid., 126.

4 Bakhurst, D., The Formation of Reason (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 9, 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid., 9.

6 Luntley, M., ‘Training and Learning’, Educational Philosophy and Theory 40 (2008), 698CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Ibid.

8 Rödl, S., ‘Education and Autonomy’, Journal of Philosophy of Education 50 (2016), 84CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Ibid., 87.

10 Ibid., 91.

11 Ibid.

12 While Rödl uses joint or shared consciousness, most developmentalists refer to the same phenomenon as joint attention. I will follow this latter, more conventional term for the phenomenon.

13 Ibid., 95.

14 Ibid., 96.

15 Ibid., 94.

16 Bakhurst, D., ‘Training, Transformation and Education’, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 76 (2015), 310CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17 Ibid.

18 Gallagher, S., ‘Seeing Things in the Right Way: How Social Interaction Shapes Perception’, in Doyon, M. and Breyer, T. (eds), Normativity in Perception (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)Google Scholar.

19 Rödl's account is in some sense analogous to theory-of-mind or ‘mindreading’ approaches to social cognition which accounts for our ability to understand others in terms of having a specialized mental mechanism that give us the capacity to draw inferences or simulations regarding the mental states of others. This thoroughly mentalistic, observational, and individualist model of social cognition is contrasted with more interactive models which accounts for our understanding of others in terms of our context-based interactions and second-personal relations with others. My phenomenological treatment is of a piece with this latter interactive approach. For more on interaction theory see Gallagher, S. and Hutto, D. D., ‘Understanding Others Through Primary Interaction and Narrative Practice’, in Zlatev, J., Racine, T. P., Sinha, C. and Itkonen, E. (eds), The Shared Mind: Perspectives on Intersubjectivity (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2008)Google Scholar.

20 Gallagher, ‘Seeing Things in the Right Way: How Social Interaction Shapes Perception’, 122.

21 Ibid.

22 McDowell, J., ‘The Myth of the Mind as Detached’, in Schear, J. K. (ed.), Mind, Reason, and Being-in-the-World: The McDowell-Dreyfus Debate (New York: Routledge, 2013)Google Scholar.

23 Noë, A., Varieties of Presence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Ibid., 127.

25 Huizinga, J., Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1949), 2–3 Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., 4.

27 Ibid.

28 Huizinga makes a critical distinction between ‘primitive’ forms of play exhibited by young animals and infants and ‘higher forms’ displayed in human social-cultural practice. Huizinga is interested in analyzing the higher forms of play, what he calls ‘social play’. Ibid., 7.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid., 2.

31 Ibid., 10.

32 Ibid., 7.

33 Ibid., 9.

34 Ibid.

35 Ibid., 11.

36 Noë, Varieties of Presence, 34.

37 Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 10.

38 Ibid.

39 Gopnik, A., The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009), 111Google Scholar.

40 Strawson, P. F., ‘Freedom and Resentment’, Proceedings of the British Academy 48 (1962), 187–211 Google Scholar.

41 Herrmann, E., Call, J., Hernández-Lloreda, M. V., Hare, B., and Tomasello, M., ‘Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis’, Science 317 (2007), 1360–1366 CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

42 Ibid.

43 Ibid., 1360.

44 Bruner, J. S., ‘From Joint Attention to the Meeting of Minds: An Introduction’, in Moore, C. and Dunham, P. J. (eds), Joint Attention: Its Origins and Role in Development (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1995), 11Google Scholar.

45 Saxe, G. B., ‘Studying Cognitive Development in Sociocultural Context: The Development of a Practice-Based Approach’, Mind, Culture, and Activity 1 (1994), 135–157 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46 McGeer, V., ‘Co-reactive Attitudes and the Making of Moral Community’, in Langdon, R. and Mackenzie, C. (eds), Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2012)Google Scholar.

47 Bakhurst, The Formation of Reason, 138.

48 This capacity for proleptic attribution can only happen in a cultural-historical context as argued by Michael Cole: ‘Only a culture-using human being can “reach into” the cultural past, project it into the future and then “carry” that conceptual future “back” into the present to create the sociocultural environment of the newcomer's development.’ Cole, M., ‘Culture and Development’, in Keller, H., Poortinga, Y. H., and Schölmerich, A. (eds), Between Culture and Biology: Perspectives on Ontogenetic Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 310Google Scholar.

49 Segerdahl, P., ‘Can an Ape Become Your Co-author? Reflections on Becoming as a Presupposition of Teaching’, in Peters, M. A. and Stickney, J. (eds), A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education: Pedagogical Investigations (Singapore: Springer, 2017)Google Scholar.

50 Ibid., 545–546.

51 Ibid., 544.

52 Di Paolo, E. A., Rohde, M., and De Jaegher, H., ‘Horizons for the Enactive Mind: Values, Social Interaction, and Play’, in Stewart, J., Gapenne, O., and Di Paolo, E. A. (eds), Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010), 44Google Scholar.

53 Other animals are social as well but their sociality does not affect their maturation. Their maturation can be said to go through the same developmental trajectory as can be observed in other non-social animals. What they have is a biologically determined sociality; their biological maturity directs their sociality. In the case of humans, while this may also be true, what makes our sociality distinct is how our sociality itself fundamentally directs our maturity and as such is deeply integrated in the course of our development.

54 I appropriate this notion of the hybrid nature of the human being from Cole, ‘Culture and Development’, 317.