Blogging Chapter Five: Section Five

[kellogg]

K-DRG: You said that in the lowest stage, the syncretic heaps, the child just acts, by trial and error. So for example if we hold up a picture of an imaginary beast we ask children to guess what it is, pretty much anything goes.

LSV: That’s true. It always surprises me how often teachers begin their classes with “What’s this?” Either the child knows what it is, or the child has to guess. You can’t actually guess a name, you know.

K-DRG: You can guess a family name. Particularly in Korea! And once you know a family name, and you know the relationship to between two people, you can guess whether or not the second one has that name.

LSV: Right. The syncretic heaps are really a little like names that the child gives things, for no particular reason. But the complexes are more like family names: they suggest some factual relationship between all the members of the complex.

K-DRG: What do you mean by “factual”?

LSV: I mean that it’s objective. The child is older; the child knows that his own whims and wishes are not the same thing as what he sees.

K-DRG: So why are complexes different from concepts?

LSV: Functionally, they are not. The adult uses the word “amusement park” and the child knows immediately what he’s talking about. The word refers, quite objectively, so something that they both know. But they are organized differently. They are structured differently.

K-DRG: How is the complex organized?

LSV: Remember that in the syncretic heap, anything goes. But in the complex, anything OBJECTIVE, anything FACTUAL, and ACTUAL resemblance between some member of the complex and some other object will allow the child to say that the other object is a member of the complex. So for example, the child picks up a small yellow triangle, and sees that it’s a “cev”. ANYTHING small, ANYTHING yellow or even light-colored, and ANYTHING triangular or trapezoidal, will then be called a “cev”.

K-DRG: So for example “Caribbean Bay” is connected to “Pirates of the Caribbean”.

LSV:  And NOT connected to “Ocean World”, unless the child has been there and knows that there is a factual link.

K-DRG: I see, because there’s no objective connection between the names.

LSV: Right. But if the child has been there, then the child know that there is water in both places. But then the child might think that the local sauna is an amusement park too!

K-DRG: There were three different types of syncretic heap. Are there three different types of complex too?

LSV: No, there are five. The first is called an associative complex. The child just picks up a small yellow triangle and associates things to it. And ANY association will do: small, light colored, big down here and small up there. The word “cev” just functions as a kind of family name for a whole bunch of things that are vaguely related in different ways to each other.

K-DRG: But isn’t a lot of ADULT thinking just like this?

LSV: Sure! In fact, some adult thinking is syncretic. The problem is that NO child thinking is conceptual. Not yet!