Norms, Words, and Ideas

Discussion 1

Look at this photograph of a baby. Can the baby see a rattle? Explain your answer.

–well the baby’s eyes work, so yes the baby can see the rattle.

–but does it see a rattle?

–well it doesn’t know what a rattle is, so it doesn’t know that it is a rattle, perhaps it just sees a shape.

–But the baby doesn’t know what a shape is either, or a colour, or a texture. So it can’t know that it sees those things either!

The baby can see the rattle in the sense that it’s eyes function, but it can’t see a rattle insofar as it cannot understand it as a rattle.

What we see is limited by our ideas

The English word ‘idea’ was borrowed from the Latin word which came from the ancient Greek ἰδέα which was a variation on εἴδω meaning ‘I see’.

If I ask you, 'what's this object?' You will probably use words like 'gold', you might say it looks like two skittles stuck together. You will use all the ideas that you have to describe it. But unless you know what it is, you won't describe it as that - that isn't what you will see.

Discussion 2

Look at these two paintings. Describe them briefly in words in your book and then make a quick copy of them.

Painting 1: La Giaconda (Mona Lisa) by Leonardo da Vinci

Painting 2: Convergence by Jackson Pollock

Notice how you've drawn what you have seen - if you've described Convergence as 'a scribble', you will have drawn a scribbe. If you've described the Mona Lisa as 'a woman', that's what you will have tried to draw.

What you see when you look at these paintings are described by concepts, types of things. (You probably won’t recognise the particular river behind the Mona Lisa, but you will recognise that it is a river.)

Discussion 3

Look again at the Jackson Pollock painting. Can you think of any way in which you can apply other concepts to it? Perhaps you could describe the different colours, or the thickness of the lines, or perhaps you can see little shapes in it, e.g. –there’s a triangle, there’s a square, that looks like a dog etc.

By applying concepts to things, we can get to know them better. We get to see them better.

Discussion 4: Learning to see - an interesting case

In 1910, two French surgeons wrote about their successful operation on an 8-year-old boy who had been blind since birth because of cataracts. When the boy’s eyes were healed, they removed the bandages, eager to discover how well the child could see. Waving a hand in front of the boy’s physically perfect eyes, they asked him what he saw.

He replied weakly, “I don’t know."

“Don’t you see it moving?” they asked.

“I don’t know” was his only reply.

The boy’s eyes were clearly not following the slowly moving hand. What he saw was only a varying brightness in front of him. He was then allowed to touch the hand as it began to move; he cried out in a voice of triumph: “It’s moving!” He could feel it move, and even, as he said, “hear it move,” but he still needed laboriously to learn to see it move.

-from ‘Catching the light’, by Arthur Zajonc

Why did the boy not know whether he could see the hand moving?

In order to understand what's going on here, we need to understand these three different but related ideas:

Norms
Words
Ideas

Norm

A norm is a tool we use for thinking.

The word norm comes from the latin norma, which meant ‘a carpenter’s square’. Norma, in turn, comes from the Greek γνώμων (gnomon), which comes from the verb γιγνώσκω meaning to know, and literally means ‘that which knows’ or 'a knower', 'a discerner'.

A norm is a rule, a pattern, a standard, anything that we can compare to something else to help us describe it. I can use my hand as a norm, for example, and say that my boardpen is shorter than my hand.

A norm helps us to make distinctions, put things in categories, label things, put things in order and so on.

But most of our norms aren't made out of plastic and metal, they are made out of words and actions.

Norms can be made of words used in particular ways

If you were going to play pilla-pilla/tag in the playground, how would you decide who was 'it' (the catcher)?

Dips are norms - tools used for labeling or categorising people.

Counting is a norm - used for describing how many things, years, etc. there are.

But we have learnt all sorts of norms.

Task

Empty out your pencil case and describe the contents of it.

What norms did you use?

There are loads of different types of norms. For example...

The numbers
The alphabet
The days of the week, months, calendar system,
Maps
This is black/a dog/ etc. (definitions by pointing)
Examples and archetypes, including stories as examples of heroism/nobility/kindness etc.
Definitions
Necessary truths
Proverbs
Heuristics
Principles
Certain types of theories

Ideas

So a norm is a pattern that we can compare other things to.

A word is what that pattern is made of.

What is an idea?

A norm is like a pattern. Like this mosaic.

A word is like a stone that makes up the pattern.

An idea is like the job that the stone does in the pattern, the way it is used.

Just as I could use different stones to fill this gap, so could I use different words or gestures to do the same job. Instead of 'three', I might say 'tres', or 'the same number as there are sides of a triangle'. I might even just hold up three fingers.

Think about how someone might learn the idea of '3':

Imagine he has just had his third birthday. When you ask him how old he is, he replies ‘3’.
He also holds up 3 fingers as he does so. It takes him a while, and sometimes he has to check and use his left hand to force the fingers into place.
He knows that when we go down in the lift, he shouldn’t press the button with the 3 on it because we never need to stop on that floor.
He knows he’s not going to get 3 biscuits, so he only asks for maximum of 2.
He recognises the 3 marked on the floor for hopscotch but doesn’t really understand why other than it has some relationship to hopping and jumping.
He can read off the number 3 from the number plates of the cars.
He knows that when there were 4 in a bed and they all ‘rolled-over and one fell out’ there were 3 in the bed after that… and so on.

So, his understanding of the number 3 is embedded in all of these little interactions and routines - in all these norms.

The concept or idea of three is intersection of all these norms, the space left in the mosaic.

But there are other alternatives that can fill the same gap:

Summary

A norm is any rule, pattern, or activity that discerns.

Many of the norms we are interested in are partly made up of words.

An idea is the job done by the words, the way the words are used.

#logic

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