5. The Structure of Knowledge

Experience is not a veil that shuts off man from nature, it is a means of penetrating continually further into the heart of nature.

—John Dewey

No account of human learning could be considered complete without an examination of culturally accumulated knowledge, its nature and organization, and the processes whereby individual learners contribute to and partake of that knowledge. Individual learning styles are shaped by the structure of social knowledge and through individual creative acts; knowledge is formed by individuals. To understand learning fully, we must understand the nature and forms of human knowledge and the processes whereby this knowledge is created and recreated. Piaget, in the conclusion to his 1970 book, Genetic Epistemology, describes three approaches to learning and knowledge creation and their relation to learning from experience:

These few examples may clarify why I consider the main problem of genetic epistemology to be the explanation of the construction of novelties in the development of knowledge. From the empiricist point of view, a “discovery” is new for the person who makes it, but what is discovered was already in existence in external reality and there is therefore no construction of new realities. The nativist or apriorist maintains that the forms of knowledge are predetermined inside the subject and thus again, strictly speaking, there can be no novelty. By contrast, for the genetic epistemologist, knowledge results from continuous construction, since in each act of understanding, some degree of invention is involved; in development, the passage from one stage to the next is always characterized by the formation of new structures which did not exist before, either in the external world or in the subject’s mind. [Piaget, 1970a, p. 77]

The empiricist, apriorist (rationalist), and genetic-epistemology (interactionist) perspectives on the acquisition of knowledge have defined epistemological debates in Western philosophy since the classical Greek philosophers. In the seventeenth century came the first challenge to the dogma of religious and political authority. The unitary worldview of medieval scholasticism that had dominated the Christian world up until that time gave way to the development of rational and later, empirical concepts that made possible control and mastery of the material world. In the seventeenth century, knowledge was thought to be accessible to the mind alone through rational analysis and introspection. The rationalist philosophers—most notably Descartes, Spinoza, and Libnetz—posed the thesis that truth was to be discovered by use of the tools of logic and reason. Ideas were real and a priori to the empirical world. Since experiences were merely reflections of ideal forms, it was the ideal forms in the mind that gave meaning to experiences in the world. As Descartes put it:

[God] laid down these laws in nature just as a king lays down laws in his kingdom. There is no single one that we cannot understand if our minds turn to consider it. They are all inborn in our minds just as a king would imprint his laws on the hearts of his subjects if he had enough power to do so. [Cited in Frankfurt, 1977, p. 36]

The eighteenth century gave rise to the antithesis of rationalism—empiricism. According to the empiricist philosophers—Locke, Hobbes, and others—knowledge was to be found in the accumulated associations of our sense impressions of the world around us. The mind was a tabula rasa, recording these accumulated sense impressions but making no contribution of its own save its capacity to recognize “substance.” Truth was to be found in careful observation of the world, a notion that gave rise to a burgeoning of scientific investigation in the eighteenth century.

The nineteenth century saw a synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist positions in the critical idealism of Kant, the first of the interactionist epistemologists. For Kant, the mind possessed a priori equipment that enabled it to interpret experience—specifically, equipment to locate forms in time and space and equipment to understand order and uniformity. Thus, the laws of geometry and logic were considered to be beyond experience and essential for interpreting it. Truth in critical idealism was the product of the interaction between the mind’s forms and the material facts of sense experience.

The interactionist epistemology of experiential learning theory, however, is different in some significant ways from the Piagetian interactionism of genetic epistemology. As has been suggested, Piaget’s interactionism is decidedly rationalist in spirit. Consider, for example, his explanation of how it is that mathematical formulations have consistently anticipated subsequent empirical findings:

This harmony between mathematics and physical reality cannot in positivist fashion be written off as simply the correspondence of a language with the object it designates. . . . Rather it is a correspondence of human operations with those of object operators, a harmony, then, between this particular operator—the human being as body and mind—and the innumerable operators in nature—physical objects at their several levels. Here we have remarkable proof of that preestablished harmony among windowless monads of which Liebnitz dreamt. . . the most beautiful example of biological adaptation that we know of. [Piaget, 1970a, pp. 40–41]

Substitute the processes of “biological adaptation” for “imprinting of his laws on our hearts,” and the “human operations” of the mind according to Piaget are nearly identical with the “inborn laws” of Descartes in the quote just cited. For both men, the powers of the mind are directly connected with the structure of reality. This rationalist orientation is reflected in the predominant position of action in Piaget’s theory about how knowledge is created. For him, sensations and perceptions are only the starting point of knowing; it is the organization and transformation of these sensations through action, most particularly internalized actions or thoughts, that creates knowledge. Knowledge then, for Piaget, is the progressive internalization of the action transformations through which we construct reality—a decidedly rationalist interactionism in which sensation (or knowing by apprehension) is secondary.

The interactionism of experiential learning theory places knowing by apprehension on an equal footing with knowing by comprehension, resulting in a stronger interactionist position, really a transactionalism, in which knowledge emerges from the dialectic relationship between the two forms of knowing.¹ This dialectic relationship is not the Kantian dialectic, in which thesis and antithesis stand only in logical contradiction, but the Hegelian dialectic, in which contradictions and conflicts are borne out of both logic and emotion in a thesis and antithesis of mutually antagonistic convictions.

1. We focus in this chapter on the prehension dimension of apprehension and comprehension rather than the transformation dimension of intention and extension, because the prehension dimension describes the current state of our knowledge of the world—the content of knowledge, if you will—whereas the transformation dimension describes the rates or processes by which that knowledge is changed. Although both content and process are legitimate aspects of structure, it is the content of knowledge and its form that have been the primary concern of epistemology, Piaget’s emphasis on behavioral transformation notwithstanding. This is in a sense a convenience of exposition, since enduring effects of transformation processes will be represented in the content of knowledge just as the rate of water flowing into a tub is reflected in the level of water in the tub.

To better understand the nature of this dialectic, let us examine the nature of the two knowing processes whose opposition fuels it. To begin with, knowing by apprehension is here-and-now. It exists only in a continuously unfolding present movement of apparently limitless depth wherein events are related via synchronicity—that is, a patterned interrelationship in the moment (compare Jung, 1960). It is thus timeless—at once instantaneous and eternal, the dynamic form of perceiving that Werner calls physiognomic (see Chapter 6, p. 204). Comprehension, on the other hand, is by its very nature a record of the past that seeks to define the future; the concept of linear time is perhaps its most fundamental foundation, underlying all concept of causality. As Hume pointed out, the mind cannot learn causal connections between events by experience alone (apprehension). All we learn through apprehension is that event B follows event A. There is nothing in the sense impression to indicate that A causes B. This judgment of causality is based on inferences from our comprehension of A and B.

The interplay between these two forms of knowing in the creation of knowledge is illustrated in what has been a difficult circular-argument problem in physics—the fact that speed is defined by using time and time is measured by speed. In classical mechanics, speed and time are coequal, since speed is defined as the relation between traveled space and duration. In relativistic mechanics, however, speed is more elementary, since it has a maximum velocity (the speed of light). This formulation led Einstein to ask Piaget, when they met in 1928, to investigate from the psychological viewpoint questions as to whether there was a sense of speed that was independent of time and that was more fundamental (acquired earlier). What Piaget and his associates found (Piaget, 1971) was that speed is the more basic notion, based on perception (apprehension), whereas time is a more inferential, complex construct (based on comprehension). Their experiments involved asking children to describe a moving object that passed behind nine vertical bars. Seventy to 80 percent of the subjects reported movement acceleration when the object passed behind the bars. Piaget’s conclusion was that following the moving object with one’s eyes was handicapped in the barred sections by momentary fixations on the bars, causing an impression of greater speed in the moving object. The apprehension of speed thus seems to be based on the muscular effort expended in attending to a moving object. The comprehension of time, however, occurs later developmentally and is much more complex. The apparent circularity of space/time equations in physics therefore appears to be psychologically rooted in the dialectic relationships of knowing speed by apprehension and time by comprehension.

A second difference between knowing by apprehension and knowing by comprehension is that apprehension is a registrative process transformed intentionally and extensionally by appreciation, whereas comprehension is an interpretive process transformed intentionally and extensionally by criticism. Michael Polanyi describes this difference in his comparison of articulate form (comprehension-based knowledge) and tacit knowledge (based on apprehension):

Where there is criticism, what is being criticized is, every time, the assertion of an articulate form. . . . The process of logical inference is the strictest form of human thought, and it can be subjected to severe criticism by going over it stepwise any number of times. Factual assertations and denotations can also be examined critically, although their testing cannot be formalized to the same extent.

In this sense just specified, tacit knowing cannot be critical . . . systematic forms of criticism can be applied only to articulate forms which you can try out afresh again and again. We should not apply, therefore, the terms critical or uncritical to any process of tacit thought by itself any more than we would speak of the critical or uncritical performance of a high jump or a dance. Tacit acts are judged by other standards and are to be regarded accordingly as a-critical. [Polanyi, 1958, p. 264]

The enduring nature of the articulate forms of comprehensive knowledge makes it possible to analyze, criticize, and rearrange these forms in different times and contexts. It is through such critical activity that the network of comprehensive knowledge is refined, elaborated on, and integrated. Any attempt to be critical of knowledge gained through apprehension, however, only destroys that knowledge. Criticism requires a reflective, analytic, objective posture that distances one from here-and-now experience; the here-and-now experience in fact becomes criticizing, replacing the previous immediate apprehension. Since I am an avid golfer, this fact has been illustrated in my experience many times. In approaching a green to putt the ball, I note the distance of the ball from the hole, the slope of the green, the length and bend of the grass, how wet or dry it is, and other relevant factors. I attempt to attend to these factors without analyzing them, for when my mind is dominated by an analytic formula for hitting the ball (for instance, hit it harder because it’s wet), the putt invariably goes awry. What seems to work better is an appreciation of the total situation (the situation being defined by my previous comprehension of relevant aspects to attend to) in which I, the putter, ball, green, and hole are experienced holistically (no pun intended; compare Polanyi, 1966, pp. 18–19).

Much can be said about the process and method of criticism; indeed, most scholarly method is based on it. The process of appreciation is less recognized and understood. Thus, it is worth describing in some detail the character of appreciation. First, appreciation is intimately associated with perceptual attention processes. Appreciation is largely the process of attending to and being interested in aspects of one’s experience. We notice only those aspects of reality that interest us and thereby “capture our attention.” Interest is the basic fact of mental life and the most elementary act of valuing. It is the selector of our experience. Appreciation involves attending to and being interested in our apprehensions of the world around us. Such attention deepens and extends the apprehended experience. Vickers, along with Zajonc (see Chapter 3), suggests that such appreciative apprehensions precede judgments of fact; in other words, that preferences preceded inferences:

For even that basic discriminatory judgment “this” is a “that” is no mere finding of fact, it is a decision to assimilate some object of attention, carved out of the tissue of all that is available to some category to which we have learned, rightly or wrongly, that it is convenient to assimilate such things. [Vickers, 1968, pp. 139–140]

A second characteristic of appreciation, already alluded to, is that it is a process of valuing. Appreciation of an apprehended moment is a judgment of both value and fact:

Appreciative behavior involves making judgments of value no less than judgments of reality. . . . Interests and standards . . . are systematically organized, a value system, distinguishable from the reality system yet inseparable from it. For facts are relevant only by reference to some judgment of value and judgments of value are meaningful only in regard to some configuration of fact. Hence the need for a word to embrace the two, for which I propose the word appreciation, a word not yet appropriated by science which in its ordinary use (as in “appreciation of a situation”) implies a combined judgment of value and fact. [Vickers, 1968, pp. 164–198]

Appreciation of apprehended reality is the source of values. Most mature value judgments are combinations of value and fact. Yet it is the affective core of values that fuel them, giving values the power to select and direct behavior.

Finally, appreciation is a process of affirmation. Unlike criticism, which is based on skepticism and doubt (compare Polanyi, 1958, pp. 269ff.), appreciation is based on belief, trust, and conviction. To appreciate apprehended reality is to embrace it. And from this affirmative embrace flows a deeper fullness and richness of experience. This act of affirmation forms the foundation from which critical comprehension can develop. In Polanyi’s words:

We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge. Tacit assent and intellectual passions, the sharing of an idiom and of a cultural heritage, affiliation to a like-minded community; such are the impulses which shape our vision of the nature of things on which we rely for our mastery of things. No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework. [Polanyi, 1958, p. 266]

Appreciative apprehension and critical comprehension are thus fundamentally different processes of knowing. Appreciation of immediate experience is an act of attention, valuing, and affirmation, whereas critical comprehension of symbols is based on objectivity (which involves a priori control of attention, as in double-blind controlled experiments), dispassionate analysis, and skepticism. As we will see, knowledge and truth result not from the preeminence of one of these knowing modes over the other but from the intense coequal confrontation of both modes.

A third difference between knowing by apprehension and by comprehension is perhaps the most critical for our understanding of the nature of knowledge in its relationship to learning from experience. Apprehension of experience is a personal subjective process that cannot be known by others except by the communication to them of the comprehensions that we use to describe our immediate experience. Comprehension, on the other hand, is an objective social process, a tool of culture, as Engels would call it. From this it follows that there are two kinds of knowledge: personal knowledge, the combination of my direct apprehensions of experience and the socially acquired comprehensions I use to explain this experience and guide my actions; and social knowledge, the independent, socially, and culturally transmitted network of words, symbols, and images that is based solely on comprehension. The latter, as Dewey noted, is the civilized objective accumulation of the individual person’s subjective life experience.

It is commonly assumed that what we are calling social knowledge stands alone from the personal experience of the user. When we think of knowledge, we think of books, computer programs, diagrams, and the like, organized into a coherent system or library. Social knowledge, however, cannot exist independently of the knower but must be continuously recreated in the knower’s personal experience, whether that experience be through concrete interaction with the physical and social world or through the media of symbols and language. With symbols and words in particular, we are often led into the illusion that knowledge exists independently in the written work or mathematical notation. But to understand these words and symbols requires a knower who understands and employs a transformational process in order to yield personal knowledge and meaning. If, for example, I read that a “black hole” in astronomy is like a gigantic spiral of water draining from a bathtub, I can create for myself some knowledge of what a black hole is like (such as the force of gravity drawing things into it) based on my concrete experiences in the bath. This, however, is quite a different knowledge of black holes from that of the scientists who understand the special theory of relativity, the idea that gravity curves space, and so on. Personal knowledge is thus the result of the transaction between the form or structure of its external representational and transformational grammar (social knowledge, such as the bathtub image or the formal theory of relativity) and the internal representational and transformation processes that the person has developed in his or her personal knowledge system.

Immediate apprehended experience is the ultimate source of the validity of comprehensions in both fact and value. The factual basis of a comprehension is ultimately judged in terms of its connection with sense experience. Its value is similarly judged ultimately by its immediate affective utility. Albert Einstein describes the relation between apprehension and comprehension thus:

For me it is not dubious that our thinking goes on for the most part without use of signs (words) and beyond that to a considerable degree unconsciously. For how otherwise should it happen that sometimes we “wonder” quite spontaneously about some experience? This “wondering” seems to occur when an experience comes into conflict with a world of concepts which is already sufficiently fixed in us. Whenever such a conflict is experienced hard and intensively, it reacts back upon our thought world in a decisive way. The development of this thought world is in a certain sense a continuous flight from “wonder.” . . .

I see on the one side the totality of sense experiences and, on the other, the totality of the concepts and propositions which are laid down in books. The relations between the concepts and propositions among themselves and each other are of a logical nature, and the business of logical thinking is strictly limited to the achievement of the connection between concepts and propositions among each other according to firmly laid down rules which are the concern of logic. The concepts and propositions get “meaning,” viz. “content,” only through their connection with sense-experiences. The connection of the latter with the former is purely intuitive, not itself of a logical nature. The degree of certainty with which this relation, viz. intuitive connection, can be undertaken, and nothing else differentiates empty phantasy from scientific “truth.” [Schilpp, 1949]

More directly, the physicist David Bohm says, “All knowledge is a structure of abstractions, the ultimate test of the validity of which is, however, in the process of coming into contact with the world that takes place in immediate perception” (1965, p. 220).

Comprehensions, on the other hand, guide our choices of experiences and direct our attention to those aspects of apprehended experience to be considered relevant. Comprehension is more than a secondary process of representing selected aspects of apprehended reality. The process of critical comprehension is capable of selecting and reshaping apprehended experience in ways that are more powerful and profound. The power of comprehension has led to the discovery of ever-new ways of seeing the world, the very connection between mind and physical reality that Piaget noted earlier (compare Dewey, 1958, pp. 67–68). Dewey describes the powers of comprehension over the immediacy of apprehension in his reference to William James:

Genuine science is impossible as long as the object esteemed for its own intrinsic qualities is taken as the object of knowledge. Its completeness, its immanent meaning, defeats its use as indicating and implying.

Said William James, “Many were the ideal prototypes of rational order: teleological and esthetic ties between things . . . as well as logical and mathematical relations. The most promising of these things at first were of course the richer ones, the more sentimental ones. The baldest and least promising were mathematical ones; but the history of the latter’s application is a history of steadily advancing successes, while that of the sentimentally richer ones is one of relative sterility and failure. Take those aspects of phenomena which interest you as a human being most . . . and barren are all your results. Call the things of nature as much as you like by sentimental moral and esthetic names, no natural consequences follow from the naming. . . . But when you give the things mathematical and mechanical names and call them so many solids in just such positions, describing just such paths with just such velocities, all is changed. . . . Your “things” realize the consequences of the names by which you classed them.”

A fair interpretation of these pregnant sentences is that as long as objects are viewed telically, as long as the objects of the truest knowledge, the most real forms of being, are thought of as ends, science does not advance. Objects are possessed and appreciated, but they are not known. To know means that men have become willing to turn away from precious possessions; willing to let drop what they own, however precious, in behalf of a grasp of objects which they do not as yet own. Multiplied and secure ends depend upon letting go existent ends, reducing them to indicative and implying means. [John Dewey quoting William James, 1958, pp. 130–131]

Our primitive ancestors leaned toward a dogmatic affirmation of apprehension and a tenacious reliance on immediate sensation and feelings, a concrete approach to knowledge that was manifest in the formulation of animistic world views and a “science of the concrete” (Levi-Strauss, 1969). In Plato’s Phaedrus, the ancients’ mistrust of comprehension is nicely portrayed in the mythical conversation between the Egyptian god Thoth, who invented writing, and Thamus, a god-king who chastises Thoth for his invention:

This discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence; and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without its reality. [From Sagan, 1977, pp. 222–223]

The modern tendency, however, is to embrace the comprehension pole of the knowledge dialectic and to view with suspicion the intuitions of subjective experience. The clearest and most extreme intellectual expressions of modern reliance on comprehension are manifest in the domination of American psychology by behaviorist theories and methodologies and in the epistemological philosophy that spawned behaviorism—logical positivism. In a zeal born out of the upending of the tidy system of classical physics before the discoveries of modern twentieth-century physics, positivism sought to affirm that all knowledge must ultimately be based on empirical or logical data. In this way, the most dogmatic of the positivists denied the existence of subjective experiences (apprehensions) except insofar as these were verifiable by a community of observers following logical and scientific conventions (comprehensions).

In response to the positivists’ dogmatic embrace of comprehension, Polanyi proposes an equally dogmatic embrace of apprehension to confront the modern supremacy of analytic powers:

As I surveyed the operations of the tacit coefficient in the act of knowing, I pointed out how everywhere the mind follows its own self-set standards, and I gave my tacit or explicit endorsement to this manner of establishing truth. Such an endorsement is an action of the same kind as that which it accredits and is to be classed therefore as a consciously a-critical statement.

This invitation to dogmatism may appear shocking; yet it is but the corollary to the greatly increased critical powers of man. These have enhanced our mind with a capacity for self-transcendence of which we can never divest ourselves. We have plucked from the Tree a second apple which has forever emperiled our knowledge of Good and Evil, and we must learn to know these qualities henceforth in the blinding light of our new analytical powers. Humanity has been deprived a second time of its innocence, and driven out of another garden which was, at any rate, a Fool’s Paradise. Innocently, we had trusted that we could be relieved of all personal responsibility for our beliefs by objective criteria of validity—and our own critical powers have shattered this hope. Struck by our sudden nakedness, we may try to brazen it out by flaunting it in a profession of nihilism. But modern man’s immorality is unstable. Presently his moral passions reassert themselves in objectivist disguise and the scientistic Minotaur is born. [Polanyi, 1958, p. 268]

We are thus led to the conclusion that the proper attitude for the creation of knowledge is neither a dogmatism of apprehension or comprehension nor an utter skepticism, but an attitude of partial skepticism in which the knowledge of comprehension is held provisionally to be tested against apprehensions, and vice versa. The critical difference between personal and social knowledge is the presence of apprehension as a way of knowing in personal knowledge. It should be clear that the apprehensional portion of personal knowledge is all that prevents us from losing our identity as unique human beings, to be swallowed up in the command feedback loops of the increasingly computerized social-knowledge system. Because we can still learn from our own experience, because we can subject the abstract symbols of the social-knowledge system to the rigors of our own inquiry about these symbols and our personal experience with them, we are free. This process of choosing to believe is what we feel when we know that we are free to chart the course of our own destiny.

This tension between common sense and expert knowledge, between cognitive security without responsibility and cognitive responsibility without full security, is the interior dynamics of the knowledge situation. The indefiniteness of much detail in common sense, its contradictions, its lack of established grounds, drive thought to seek definiteness, consistency, and reasons. Thought finds these in the criticized and refined knowledge of mathematics, science, and philosophy, only to discover that these tend to thin out into arbitrary definitions, pointer readings, and tentative hypotheses. Astounded at the thinness and hollowness of these culminating achievements of conscientiously responsible cognition, thought seeks matter for its definitions, significance for its pointer readings, and support for its wobbling hypotheses. Responsible cognition finds itself insecure as a result of the very earnestness of its virtues. But where shall it turn? It does, in fact, turn back to common sense, that indefinite and irresponsible source which it so lately scorned. But it does so, generally, with a bad grace. After filling its empty definitions and pointer readings and hypotheses with meaning out of the rich confusion of common sense, it generally turns its head away, shuts its eyes to what it has been doing, and affirms dogmatically the self-evidence and certainty of the common-sense significance it has drawn into its concepts. Then it pretends to be securely based on self-evident principles or indubitable facts. If our recent criticism of dogmatism is correct, however, this security in self-evidence and indubitability has proved questionable. And critical knowledge hangs over a vacuum unless it acknowledges openly the actual, though strange, source of its significance and security in the uncriticized material of common sense. Thus the circle is completed. Common sense continually demands the responsible criticism of refined knowledge, and refined knowledge sooner or later requires the security of common-sense support. [Pepper, 1942, pp. 44–46]^*

* Reprinted from World Hypotheses by Stephen C. Pepper by permission of the University of California Press, Berkeley, California.

Root metaphors are drawn from experiences of common sense and are used by philosophers to interpret the world. Each of the major philosophies has cognitively refined one of these root metaphors into a set of categories that hang together and claim validity by all evidence of every kind. From the seven or eight such clues or root metaphors in the epistemological literature, Pepper argues that there are only four that are relatively adequate in precision (how accurately they fit the facts) and scope (the extent to which all known facts are covered) and can thus claim the status of a world hypothesis.

The first of these, Pepper calls formism (also known as realism), whose root metaphor is the observed similarity between objects and events. The second is mechanism (also called naturalism or materialism), whose root metaphor is the machine. The third is contextualism (better known as pragmatism), with the root metaphor of the changing historical event. The final relatively adequate world hypothesis is organicism (absolute idealism), whose root metaphor is achievement of harmonious unity. None of these world hypotheses is reflected in pure form in the work of any single philosopher, since most philosophers tend to be somewhat eclectic in their use of world hypotheses. For purposes of understanding, however, we can say that formism originated in the classical works of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and mechanism in the works of Democritus, Lucretius, and Galileo. Contextualism is more modern, originating in the works of Dewey, James, Peirce, and Mead, as is organicism, developed primarily in the work of Hegel and Royce.

The isormorphism between Pepper’s system of world hypotheses and the structure of the learning process becomes apparent in his analysis of the interrelationships among the four world hypotheses. Formism and mechanism, the two world hypotheses underlying modern science, are primarily analytic in nature, wherein elements and factors are the basic facts from which any synthesis is a derivative. Contextualism and organicism, on the other hand, are synthetic, wherein the basic facts are contexts and complexes such that analysis of components is a derivative of the synthetic whole. Within both the analytic and synthetic world hypotheses there is a further polarity between dispersive and integrative strategies of inquiry. Formism and contextualism are both dispersive in their plan, explaining facts one by one without systematic relationship to one another. Indeed, both formism and contextualism see the world as indeterminate and unpredictable. Organicism and mechanism are integrative in their plan, believing in an integrated world order where indeterminance is simply a reflection of inadequate knowledge. Because they seek integrative determinant explanations, the strength of the integrative world hypotheses (organicism and mechanism) is precision and predictability; their weakness is lack of scope, their inability to achieve an integrated explanation of all things. The dispersive world hypotheses, on the other hand, are weak in precision, offering several possible interpretations for many events, but strong in scope, since their explanatory range is not restricted by any integrative principle.

Figure 5.1 shows Pepper’s system of world hypotheses overlaid on the structural dimensions of the learning process. The analytic world views emphasize knowing by comprehension, and the synthetic world views give primary emphasis to knowing by apprehension. The dispersive philosophies emphasize transformation by extension, the discovery and explanation of laws and events in the external world; the integrative philosophies emphasize transformation by intention, the search for underlying principles and integrated meaning.

In its very essence this concept [law] preserves something vital in the formistic conception of “form” as well as something vital in the mechanistic conception of “regular interrelationship” among the parts of a machine. And I can think of no statement of either formism or mechanism as a metaphysical view, calculated to appear at all persuasive to any modern mind, which has not somewhere drawn upon those features of modern science which synthesize earlier formism and mechanism in precisely this fashion. [Burtt, 1943, p. 600]

There is, however, an important sense in which the two analytic world hypotheses support different modes of inquiry based on the dispersive nature of formism and the integrative nature of mechanism. Mechanism as an integrative strategy is better suited as a foundation for basic research in the physical sciences and mathematics, whereas formism’s dispersive plan is more attuned to inquiry in the applied sciences and the science-based professions, where the dictates of practical circumstance often take precedence over the achievement of integrative frameworks. Even though the dispersive nature of formism creates constant difficulties of precision because of the many interpretations to which a single fact is amenable, from a practical standpoint this variety offers flexibility in problem solving.

Formism’s root metaphor of similarity is based on the commonsense perception of similar things. It is reliance on this root metaphor that allows the creation of systems of classifications based on similarity, such as the periodic table of elements or biological phyla. It is also the basis by which the validity of models, maps, and mathematical relationships is judged—that is, by similarity of these symbolic comprehensions to the reality being studied. Thus, the formist theory of truth is correspondence; the truth of a description lies in its degree of correspondence to the object of reference.

The modern formist inquiry strategy, sometimes called scientific empiricism, places great emphasis on the judgments of concrete existence through reports of sense experience controlled by the conventions of logic and scientific method. In this sense, even logical positivism, which adamantly denies any metaphysical foundation, is based on formism, since similar judgments by scientists of their sense experience are the basis for confidence in positivistic statements. Knowledge in modern formist inquiry is created when the community of scientists is able to agree on the reliable and accurate location of phenomena in time and space—to answer the inquiry questions, “When?” and “Where?” Singer (1959) traces the Platonic origins of such space/time individuation and compares this empirical approach to the rationalist Leibnitzian approach:

As for the tradition, it goes back at least as far as to Plato, who in his Timaeus makes space the “pure matter” that individuates general qualities (i.e., takes care of the distinction between this thing and that other precisely like thing). And from Plato’s time down, it would be possible to trace an imposing history of spacetime individuation. As for practical sanctions, our courts of justice recognize the all-important difference between the evidence established by “identification by minute description” and the evidence established by “individuation by space-time coordinates.” The former, Leibnitzian, method of identification is exactly the one underlying our present method of “police identification.” With sufficient refinement of detail, Bertillon measurements may be made to constitute an indefinitely minute description of the kind of man a certain individual is. But suppose the accused “identified” with the culprit to the limit of available description; how long would he remain in the dock could he establish an “alibi”? In insisting that the same individual cannot be in two places at the same time, in admitting that two individuals, however like, can be, the law throws the whole weight of its authority on the side of Kant and against Leibnitz. [Singer, 1959, p. 43]

The basic units of knowledge in formism are empirical uniformities and natural laws. The emphasis is on the analysis, measurement, and categorization of observable experience and the establishment of empirical uniformities defining relationships between observed categories—that is, natural laws—with a minimum of reliance on inferred structures or processes that are not directly accessible to public experience.

Mechanism as a world hypothesis is less trusting of the appearances of sense experience and relies more on rationalist principles to analytically separate appearances from reality. The root metaphor of mechanism is the machine, and knowledge in mechanism is refined by analyzing the world as if it were a machine. Central to this analysis is the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Primary qualities are those features and characteristics that are essential to describing the functioning of the machine. The traditional primary qualities have been size, shape, motion, solidity, mass, and number. In the case of a lever, for example, the primary qualities would be the length of the lever, the location of the fulcrum, and the weights applied at either end. Secondary qualities would be all other characteristics of the lever, such as its color and the material the weights are made of, that are not essential to explaining its functioning. As Democritus, one of the classical founders of mechanism, put it, “By convention colored, by convention sweet, by convention bitter; in reality only atoms and the void.” There are six steps or categories in mechanistic analysis:

1. Specification of the field of location in time and space. (In mechanism, everything that exists exists somewhere, unlike classical formism, where form exists independently of particulars in time and space.)

2. Identification of primary qualities.

3. Description of laws governing primary qualities.

4. Description of secondary qualities.

5. Principles for connecting secondary qualities and primary qualities.

6. Laws for regularities among secondary qualities.

The theory of truth in mechanism is somewhat problematic, since, as Pepper points out, primary qualities can be known only by inference from secondary qualities; in other words, they are comprehensions:

. . . all immediate evidence seems to be of the nature of secondary qualities (all ultimate primary qualities such as the properties of electrons and the cosmic field being far from the range of immediate perceptions); moreover, this evidence seems to be correlated with the activities of organisms, specifically with each individual organism that is said to be immediately aware of evidence. All immediate evidence is, therefore, private to each individual organism. It follows that knowledge of the external world must be symbolic and inferential. . . . So that in a mature mechanism, the primary qualities and all the primary categories are not evidence but inference, or if you will, speculation. [Pepper, 1942, pp. 221 and 224]

The proper theory of truth for mechanism thus lies in the correlation of primary qualities with secondary qualities in what Pepper calls the causal adjustment theory of truth: Does knowledge of the machine in question allow the person to make causal adjustments with predictable consequences for secondary qualities?

The basic units of knowledge in mechanism are the primary qualities or structures that make up the world. Structuralism is thus a modern variant of mechanism. Model building is a typical inquiry method of mechanism that seeks to answer the basic inquiry question, “What is real? What are the basic structures of reality?”—as, for example, in the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule.

We must stand in awe of the achievements of modern science and thereby give great credibility to the scientific inquiry methods based on formism and mechanism. These represent the highest refinement of human powers of comprehension. Yet ironically, the greatest achievement of scientific inquiry may be the discovery of its own limitations. The history of science is marked by the successive overthrow of widely accepted views of the nature of reality in favor of new, more all-encompassing but more question-provoking views. Today there is little dogma in enlightened scientific inquiry, for the assumptions on which scientific systems of comprehension are based have been challenged by scientific discoveries at the forefront of knowledge. The invention and later validation of non-Euclidian geometry in Einstein’s theory of space and time brought down the principles of nineteenth-century science and the “self-evident” Kantian a priori forms on which they were based. A number of subsequent discoveries brought into question the very notion of permanent external objects independent of the observer. Whether light is a wave or particle depends on how it is measured. The so-called “bootstrap” theory of the nucleus suggests that subatomic particles inside the nucleus of the atom have no self-sufficient existence, since their properties are determined by their neighbors, and vice versa. Thus, particles in the nucleus gain existence only when they are knocked out of the nucleus by a scientist. The well-known Heisenberg principle of indeterminacy showed that one cannot measure both the location and the momentum of a particle with certainty. In Heisenberg’s words, “What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning.”

There are corresponding limitations and indeterminacies in formal systems of logic. In 1931, Kurt Gödel showed that no consistent formal system sufficiently rich to contain elementary arithmetic can by its own principles of reasoning demonstrate its own consistency, a theorem that defined the limits of comprehension as a way of knowing. From Gödel’s theorem we are led to the conclusion that to judge the logical consistency of any complex formal system, we must go outside it. Commenting on this indeterminate characteristic of formal systems, a characteristic that he calls tacit meaning, Polanyi says:

Thus to speak a language is to commit ourselves to the double indeterminacy due to our reliance both on its formalism and on our own continued reconsideration of this formalism in its bearing on our experience. For just as, owing to the ultimately tacit character of all our knowledge, we remain ever unable to say all that we know, so also in view of the tacit character of meaning, we can never quite know what is implied in what we say. [Polanyi, 1958, p. 95]

The assumption of intellectualism goes contrary to the facts of what is primarily experienced. For things are objects to be treated, used, acted upon and with, enjoyed and endured, even more than things to be known. They are things had before they are things cognized. . . . When intellectual experience and its material are taken to be primary, the cord that binds experience and nature is cut. [Dewey, 1958, pp. 21 and 23]

The systems of social knowledge based on the synthetic world hypotheses operate under something of a handicap, since they must express understandings stemming from apprehension in the social language of comprehension. When the linear, digital descriptions of language and mathematics are used to describe the holistic, analogic context of apprehended experience, the result often seems exceedingly complex and abstract. Yet organicism and contextualism have proven themselves strong in the field of human values and practical affairs—areas where the analytic world theories are weak. Pepper states, for example:

It may be pointed out that the mechanistic root metaphor springs out of the commonsense field of uncriticized physical fact, so that there would be no analogical stretch, so to speak, in the mechanistic interpretations of this field, while the stretch might be considerable in the mechanistic interpretation of the commonsense field of value; and somewhat the same, in the reverse order, with respect to organistic interpretations. Moreover, mechanism has for several generations been particularly congenial to scientists and organicism to artists and to persons of religious bent. Also, the internal difficulties which appear from a critical study of the mechanistic theory seem to be particularly acute in the neighborhood of values, and counterwise the internal difficulties of organicism seem to be particularly acute in the neighborhood of physical fact. [Pepper, 1942, p. 110]

Like mechanism and formism, the synthetic world theories contextualism and organicism tend to combine and:

. . . are so nearly allied that they may almost be called the same theory, the one with a dispersive, the other with an integrative plan. Pragmatism has often been called an absolute idealism without an absolute; and, as a first approximate description, this is acceptable. So a little more emphasis on integration, as Dewey for instance shows in his Art as Experience, produces a contextualistic-organistic eclecticism; as likewise a little less emphasis on final integration in organicism, as is characteristic of Royce. Royce even called himself somewhere a pragmatic idealist. [Pepper, 1942, p. 147]

The contextualist approach, however, has a certain affinity to the world of practical affairs in business, politics, and the social professions, whereas the organistic approach, with its emphasis on absolute values and ideals, is more attuned to the humanities, arts, and social sciences.

The root metaphor of organicism is what Burtt calls harmonious unity. The metaphor stems from the biological organism growing to its fulfillment. The central concern of organismic worldviews is growth and development, with a focus on the processes whereby the ideal is realized from the actual. These processes are most often conceived as some process of differentiation and higher-order integration. This process is teleological toward the absolute, not evolutionary as in the biological principles of natural selection, which are closer to contextualism’s open-ended developmental processes. The organismic view of development is the basis of modern humanistic developmental psychology—most notably, Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization—and in somewhat more dispersive, contextual, evolutionary forms, organicism is the basis for research in cognitive and adult development. Much historical analysis is loosely based on the organistic world hypothesis, although Hegel’s teleological progression to the Absolute is widely questioned. To modern organicists, Hegel’s view of development was a dogmatic and unnecessarily narrow progression from maximum fragmentation to his ultimate integration via the dialectic process:

Hegel was right, say these later organicists, in the inevitability of the trend of cognition toward a final organization in which all contradictions vanish. He was right in his observation that the nexes of fragments lead out toward other fragments which develop contradictions and demand coherent resolution. He was right in his idea that these nexes have a particular attraction for those relevant traits which are peculiarly recalcitrant to harmonization with the facts already gathered. It was the aberrations in the orbit of Uranus, those recalcitrant data which refused to harmonize with the Newtonian laws, that particularly attracted the attention of astronomers and led to the discovery of Neptune. In all these things Hegel was right. But he was wrong and invited undeserved ridicule for the organistic program by his fantastic, arbitrary, and rigid picture of the path of progress. [Pepper, 1942, pp. 294–295]

The theory of truth in organicism is coherence and is derived from the endpoint of development, the Absolute—an organic whole that includes everything in a totally determinant order. Thus, the truth of a proposition is the degree to which it is inclusive, determinant, and organized in an organic whole where every element relates to every other in an interdependent system. There is a certain similarity in this description of organismic truth to the primary quality structures of mechanism, but in mechanism, the emphasis is on structures, whereas in organicism, it is on the processes by which progress is made to the determinant orderliness of the whole.

The basic inquiry question of organicism is one of ultimate values—why things are as they are. Whereas mechanism relies on symbols and the denotative functions of language, there is a tendency in organicism to rely on images and the connotative aspects of language to describe the apprehensions (appearances) from which reality emerges. DeWitt identifies five characteristics of organic concepts: They are holistic, visually apprehended, organized aesthetically and neatly, and functionally based:

In sum [these characteristics] emphasize the relation of organic concepts to ordinary experience; that is, experience in a universe where straight parallel lines meet at infinity, where the sun visibly rises and sets, where the earth is flat (at least its curvature is of no practical importance), where cause and effect have a direct sequential relationship, where action does not take place without an immediate objective as the motive of the action, where objects are visibly finite. This is the universe which accounts for almost all our everyday experiences but represents a very limited range of experience—involving, if you will, the statistical fallacy that frequency of occurrence is an index of importance. [DeWitt, 1957, p. 182]

The final world hypothesis is contextualism. Although Pepper treats each of the four systems evenhandedly in his 1942 book, later, in Concept and Quality (1966), he embraces a modified version of contextualism (he calls his new world hypothesis “selectivism”) as the most adequate of the existing world hypotheses. The advantage of contextualism (selectivism) over the other three world hypotheses is that it integrates fact and value in an open-minded and open-eyed way—a way that is emergent and slightly optimistic, with no dogma of method or tool save a commitment to humanity. The root metaphor of contextualism is the historical event—not the past historical event, but the immediate event, alive in the present—actions in their context evolving and creating the future. Contextualism as a synthetic world hypothesis is concerned with the concrete event as experienced in all its complexity. The one constant in contextualism is change. Reality is constantly being created and re-created. Thus, the permanent forms of formism or structures of mechanism cannot exist in the contextualist worldview. Whitehead (1933, p. 255) puts it this way: “Thus the future of the universe, though conditioned by the immanence of its past, awaits for its complete determination the spontaneity of the novel individual occasions as in their season they come into being.”

Inquiry in contextualism is focused on the quality and texture of the immediate event as experienced; hence its association with phenomenology. Lewin’s (1951) conception of the person’s life space as a field of forces in which behavior is determined by ahistorical causation (only forces existing in the moment, such as a memory, determine behavior) is a primary example of contextually based theory. In this theory of truth, the contextualist works from the present event outward in what is called the operational theory of truth. The basic inquiry question is how to act or think. Actions are true if they are workable; that is, if they lead to desired end states in experience. Hypotheses are true when they give insight into—are verified by—the quality and texture of the event to which they refer. Hypotheses thus achieve qualitative confirmation by the experiences to which they refer. In pure contextualism, however, the truth of a hypothesis gives no insight into the qualities of nature; for nature is constantly emerging and changing. A hypothesis is only a tool for controlling nature. “It does not mirror nature in the way supposed by the correspondence theory, nor is it a genuine partial integration of nature in the way supposed by the coherence theory of organicism” (Pepper, 1942, p. 275).

If the central mission of the university is learning in the broadest sense, encompassing the student in the introductory lecture course and the advanced researcher in the laboratory, library, or studio, then it seems reasonable to hypothesize that different styles of learning, thinking, and knowledge creation are the focal points for cultural variation among disciplines. Different styles of learning manifest themselves in variations among the primary tasks, technologies, and products of disciplines—criteria for academic excellence and productivity, teaching methods, research methods, methods for recording and portraying knowledge—and in other patterns of cultural variation—differences in faculty and student demographics, personality and aptitudes, values and group norms. For example, Anthony Biglan (1973b) has found significant variations in departmental concerns and organization. In the soft areas (social professions and humanities/social science), there is less faculty interaction than in the hard areas (science-based professions and natural science/mathematics); and in the hard areas, this interaction is strongly associated with research productivity. Hard-area scholars produce fewer manuscripts but more journal articles. The emphasis in soft areas is on teaching, and in hard areas on research. Applied areas (social and science-based professions) show more faculty social connectedness than do basic areas (humanities/social science, natural science/mathematics). Their research goals are influenced more by others, including outside agencies, although they are less interested in research than are their basic area colleagues. They publish more technical reports than their basic area colleagues, whose interest in research is not reflected in the time they spend on it.

In reviewing other research on differences among academic disciplines, one is struck by the fact that relatively little comparative research has been done on academic disciplines and departments. The reason for this lies in the same difficulties that characterize all cross-cultural research—the problem of access and the problem of perspective. The relatively closed nature of academic subcultures makes access to data difficult, and it is equally difficult to choose an unbiased perspective for interpreting data. To analyze one system of inquiry according to the ground rules of another is to invite misunderstanding and conflict and further restrict access to data.

To study disciplines from the perspective of learning offers some promise for overcoming these difficulties, particularly if learning is defined not in the narrow psychological sense of modification of behavior but in the broader sense of acquisition of knowledge. The access problem is eased, because every discipline has a prime commitment to learning and inquiry and has developed a learning style that is at least moderately effective. Viewing the acquisition of knowledge in academic disciplines from the perspective of the learning process promises a dual reward—a more refined epistemology that defines the varieties of truth and their interrelationships, and a greater psychological understanding of how people acquire knowledge in its different forms. Twenty years ago, Carl Bereiter and Mervin Freedman envisioned these rewards:

There is every reason to suppose that studies applying tests of these sorts to students in different fields could rapidly get beyond the point of demonstrating the obvious. We should, for instance, be able to find out empirically whether the biological taxonomist has special aptitudes similar to his logical counterpart in the field of linguistics. And there are many comparisons whose outcomes it would be hard to foresee. In what fields do the various memory abilities flourish? Is adaptive flexibility more common in some fields than in others? Because, on the psychological end, these ability measures are tied to theories of the structure or functioning of higher mental processes, and because, on the philosophical end, the academic disciplines are tied to theories of logic and cognition, empirical data linking the two should be in little danger of remaining for long in the limbo where so many correlational data stay. [Bereiter and Freedman, 1962, pp. 567–568]

It is surprising that with the significant exception of Piaget’s pioneering work on genetic epistemology, few have sought to reap these rewards.

The research that has been done has instead focused primarily on what, from the perspective above, are the peripheral norms of academic disciplines rather than the pivotal norms governing learning and inquiry. Thus, studies have examined political/social attitudes and values (Bereiter and Freedman, 1962), personality patterns (Roe, 1956), aspirations and goals (Davis, 1965), sex distribution and other demographic variables (Feldman, 1974), and social interaction (Biglan, 1973b; Hall, 1969). The bias of these studies is no doubt a reflection of the fact that psychological research has until quite recently been predominantly concerned with the social/emotional aspects of human behavior and development. Concern with cognitive/intellectual factors has been neatly wrapped into concepts of general intelligence. Thus, most early studies of intellectual differences among disciplines were interested only in which discipline has the smarter students (for example, Wolfe, 1954; Terman and Oden, 1947).

The hypothesis to be explored in this section is that since learning, broadly conceived as adaptation, is the central mission of every discipline and profession, the cultural variations among fields of inquiry and endeavor will be organized in a way that is congruent with the structure of the learning process and the structure of knowledge. When one examines academic disciplines in the four major groupings we have identified—the social professions, the science-based professions, humanities/social science, and natural science/mathematics—it becomes apparent that what constitutes valid knowledge in these four groupings differs widely. This is easily observed in differences in how knowledge is reported (for instance, numerical or logical symbols, words or images), in inquiry method (such as case studies, experiments, logical analysis), and in criteria for evaluation (say, practical vs. statistical significance). Figure 5.2 illustrates the specific relationship predicted among fields of inquiry, the structure of knowledge, and the structure of the learning process. We have in the preceding section elaborated on the relation between knowledge structures and the learning process and have seen in this analysis suggestions concerning the relation of knowledge and learning to living systems of inquiry. Synthetic knowledge structures learned via apprehension are associated with qualitative, humanistic fields, whereas analytic knowledge structures learned via comprehension are related to the quantitative scientific fields, dispersive knowledge structures learned via extension are related to the professions and applied sciences, and integrative knowledge structures learned via intention are related to the basic academic disciplines.

We now examine how others perceive the differences between academic disciplines and whether these perceptions are congruent with the structure of knowledge and learning. Anthony Biglan (1973a) used a method well suited to answer these questions in his studies of faculty members at the University of Illinois and a small western college. Using the technique of multidimensional scaling, he analyzed the underlying structures of scholars’ judgments about the similarities of subject matter in different academic disciplines. The procedure required faculty members to group subject areas on the basis of similarity without any labeling of the groupings. Through a kind of factor analysis, the similarity groupings are then mapped onto an n-dimensional space where n is determined by goodness of fit and interpretability of the dimensions. The two dimensions accounting for the most variance in the University of Illinois data were interpreted by Biglan to be hard-soft and pure-applied. When academic areas at Illinois are mapped on this two-dimensional space (Figure 5.3), we see a great similarity between the pattern of Biglan’s data and the structure of knowledge and learning described in Figure 5.2. Business (assumed equivalent to accounting and finance) is accommodative in learning style and contextualist in knowledge structure. Engineering fits with convergent learning and formist knowledge. Physics, mathematics, and chemistry are related to assimilative learning and mechanistic knowledge, and the humanistic fields—history, political science, English, and psychology—fall in the divergent, organistic quadrant. Foreign languages, economics, and sociology were divergent in Biglan’s study rather than assimilative as in Figure 4.4. Biglan also reported that the pattern of academic-area relationships in the small-college data was very similar to that in the Illinois data.

These two studies suggest that the two basic dimensions of experiential learning theory, abstract/concrete and active/reflective, are major dimensions of differentiation among academic disciplines. A more extensive database is needed, however. The learning-style data came from a single occupation, and in the case of some academic areas, sample sizes were small. Biglan’s study, on the other hand, was limited to two universities, and differences here could be attributed to the specific characteristics of these academic departments.

In search of a more extensive and representative sample, data collected in the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education’s 1969 study of representative American colleges and universities were examined. These data consisted of 32,963 questionnaires from graduate students in 158 institutions and 60,028 questionnaires from faculty in 303 institutions. Using tabulations of these data reported in Feldman (1974), ad hoc indices were created of the abstract/concrete and active/reflective dimensions for the 45 academic fields identified in the study. The abstract/concrete index was based on graduate student responses to two questions asking how important an undergraduate background in mathematics or humanities was for their fields. The mathematics and humanities questions were highly negatively correlated (−.78). The index was computed using the percentage of graduate-student respondents who strongly agreed that either humanities or mathematics was very important:

Thus, high index scores indicated a field where a mathematics background was important and humanities was not important.

The active/reflective index used faculty data on the percentage of faculty in a given field who were engaged in paid consultation to business, government, and so on. This seemed to be the best indicator on the questionnaire of the active, applied orientation of the field. As Feldman observed, “Consulting may be looked upon not only as a source of added income but also as an indirect measure of the ‘power’ of a discipline; that is, as a chance to exert the influence and knowledge of a discipline outside the academic setting” (1974, p. 52). The groupings of academic fields based on these indices are shown in Figure 5.4.

The indices produce a pattern of relationships among academic fields that is highly consistent with Biglan’s study and the managerial learning-style data. The results suggest that the widely shared view that cultural variation in academic fields is predominantly unidimensional, dividing the academic community into two camps—the scientific and the artistic (for example, Snow, 1963; Hudson, 1966)—is usefully enriched by the addition of a second dimension of action/reflection or applied/basic. When academic fields are mapped on this two-dimensional space, a fourfold typology of disciplines emerges. In the abstract/reflective quadrant, the natural sciences and mathematics are clustered; the abstract/active quadrant includes the science-based professions, most notably the engineering fields; the concrete/active quadrant encompasses what might be called the social professions, such as education, social work, and law; the concrete/reflective quadrant includes the humanities and social sciences.

Some fields seem to include within their boundaries considerable variation on these two dimensions of experiential learning theory. Several of the professions (particularly management, medicine, and architecture) are themselves multidisciplinary, encompassing specialties that emphasize different learning styles. Medicine requires both a concern for human service and scientific knowledge. Architecture has requirements for artistic and engineering excellence. Management involves integration of both quantitative and qualitative analysis in active decision making. Several of the social sciences, particularly psychology, sociology, and economics, can vary greatly in their basic inquiry paradigm. Clinical psychology emphasizes divergent learning skills, experimental psychology emphasizes convergent skills, and industrial and educational psychology emphasize practical, accommodative skills. Sociology can be highly abstract and theoretical (as in Parsonian structural functionalism) or concrete and active (as in phenomenology or ethnomethodology). Some economics departments may be very convergent, emphasizing the use of econometric models in public policy, and others are divergent, emphasizing economic history and philosophy. Indeed, every field will show variation on these dimensions within a given department, between departments, from undergraduate to graduate levels, and so on. The purpose of this analysis is not to “pigeonhole” fields but to identify a common structural model for learning, knowledge, and field of inquiry that is useful for describing variations in the learning/inquiry process in any specific educational or work setting.

1. Service (from chambermaid to therapist)

2. Business contact (from peddler to promoter)

3. Organization (from messenger to president)

4. Technology (from laborer to inventor)

5. Outdoor (from laborer to specialist)

6. Science (from helper to scientist)

7. General culture (from clerk to scholar)

8. Arts and entertainment (from stagehand to artist)

Reviewing studies of the characteristics of persons in these fields, she states:

Groups are so arranged that, with one exception, contiguous ones are more closely related than noncontiguous ones. Each of groups IV, V, and VI is related to the other two to about the same degree. Group V placed between IV and VI, observing the close relationship between these two. The groups are arranged in this way because IV is also related to III and VI to VII, whereas V is less closely related to any of the others. The arrangement should be thought of as circular, that is, Group VIII is related to Group I as well as to Group VII. [Roe, 1956, pp. 144–145]

In her later work she suggests that in the circle arrangement, Groups I, II, III, VII, and VIII are classified as people-oriented career areas, whereas Groups IV, V, and VI are non-people-oriented, and thus “an ordered, counterclockwise arrangement of these groups is not untenable” (1957, p. 217). These remarks serve to orient her career classifications on the two-dimensional framework of experiential learning theory.² Figure 5.5 shows the correspondence between Roe’s circle of careers and the structures of learning, knowledge, and fields of inquiry postulated by experiential learning theory. (Categories IV and V are reversed here, since I share Roe’s concern about the misplacement of the outdoor category, and in experiential learning theory terms, category IV (technology) should be more abstract.)

2. Other schemes show a similar isomorphism, such as that of Holland (Osipow, 1973, p. 60); compare Samuelson (1982) for the suggested link between experiential learning and Roe’s work.

In addition, Figure 5.5 represents the developmental levels within each career path as sixlevel pyramids rising from each category. These levels, according to Roe, are defined by increasing levels of responsibility, capacity, and skill.³ In this framework, higher-level jobs require greater integrative complexity and adaptive flexibility (see Chapter 8) in order to deal with the greater extension of their responsibilities in time and space. Jacques has suggested that this extension can be measured with great reliability in jobs by what he calls the time span of discretion. As he defines it:

The higher a person goes in an executive system, the longer is the time framework within which he or she works. . . . A job’s size can be directly and simply measured by completion times targeted for the longest tasks that are required to be carried out in that role, namely the time span of discretion. [Jacques, 1979, pp. 126–127]

Thus, the highest-level jobs in the eight career paths, such as scientist, inventor, and artist, have time spans of discretion that transcend even lifetimes, whereas jobs at the lower levels are increasingly constrained in their time (and space) limits.

Figure 5.5 may serve as a focal point for a review of the very lengthy progress of argument in this chapter. It shows the relationships among the structure of learning, the structure of social knowledge, and living systems of inquiry (academic fields) and endeavor (careers). It has been argued here that the isomorphism among these structures is rooted in the structure of learning and, in particular, in the integration of the apprehensive and comprehensive way of knowing the world. Social knowledge is a cultural tool that comes alive only in the personal knowledge of the user. In the unique individuality of apprehended experience lies the creative force for expanding, shaping, and validating social knowledge. This social knowledge, in turn, is invaluable in guiding people in their choices of experiences in a field of personal life space and physical reality that is expanding continuously, often by the proactive human tendency to choose experiences that explore and expand these boundaries. We have seen that the success of this learning venture is highly dependent on the proper attitude—an attitude of partial skepticism requiring that each act of knowing be steadily steered between the Scylla of appreciative apprehension and the Charybdis of critical comprehension. The course thus steered is the path to development.

3. In experiential learning theory terms, these levels can be seen as stages of development toward integrative complexity. Referring to the cone model of development to be described in Chapter 6 (Figure 6.3), the reader can imagine viewing the cone from the bottom with the facing slopes of the cone peeled back to display the six levels of development described in each of the eight pyramids. These six levels roughly correspond to the six levels of consciousness described in Chapter 6 (Figure 6.2).

Update and Reflections

It is sometimes said that a man’s philosophy is a matter of temperament and there is something in this. A preference for certain similes could be called a matter of temperament and it underlies far more disagreements than you might think . . .
One keeps forgetting to go right down to the foundations.
One doesn’t put the question marks deep enough down.

—Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value

We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

—Anias Nin

In Chapter 5, The Structure of Knowledge, I described William James’ dual knowledge theory that poses a dialectic relationship between appreciative apprehension and critical comprehension. The opposing realms of direct experience and abstract thought make knowledge not a static thing but a dynamic process of knowing where abstract social knowledge is continually created and re-created in the personal knowledge of individuals. The apparent certainty of the written word is continually judged and evaluated throughout history by the experience of those who read it.

The experiential learning theory definition of learning as the creation of knowledge through the transformation of experience implies an isomorphism between the learning process, the nature of the knowledge created through it, and the learning spaces such as academic disciplines and occupations where knowledge is created (see Figure 5.2). The relationships between learning styles and educational specialization, professional careers, jobs, and adaptive competencies described in Figure 4.11 provide one example of this isomorphism. Chapter 5 further explores these relationships through the work of Stephen Pepper and Michael Polanyi.

The experiential learning theory knowledge creation process is influenced by Polanyi’s concepts of tacit and explicit knowledge paralleling the experiential learning theory concepts of personal and social knowledge (see pp. 157, 158, and 163). He believed that the tacit knowledge that underlies explicit knowledge is more fundamental; the base on which all knowledge resides. We know more than we can tell and, because of this, language and data alone cannot make knowledge explicit. Every human creation began with the appreciative apprehension of a concrete experience much of which lay in a tacit dimension beyond explicit naming and communication. The experience was shaped, named, and renamed forming an “idea” that was shared with others to become social knowledge that continued to be refined in their personal knowledge.

This spiraling process of personal and social knowledge in the process of knowledge creation is illustrated in one of the first experiential learning theory knowledge creation studies. Carlsson, Keane, and Martin used the experiential learning theory learning cycle framework to analyze the bi-weekly reports of research and development project teams in a large consumer products corporation. Successful project teams had work process norms that supported a recursive cycling through the experiential learning cycle. Projects that deviated from this work process by skipping stages or being stuck in a stage “indicated problems deserving of management attention” (Carlsson et al., 1976, p. 38).

In the mid-nineties Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) introduced a similar spiral of knowledge creation using Polanyi’s tacit/explicit dimension of knowing to create a four-phase model of knowledge creation in Japanese companies that describes four modes of knowledge conversion. The first phase, Socialization, is tacit to tacit knowledge conversion through sharing concrete experiences. Externalization is the second phase converting tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge through dialogue and reflection that articulates one’s tacit knowledge into words and images while eliciting the same process from others. This is followed by Combination, explicit to explicit knowledge conversion to systematize and apply explicit knowledge and information for organizational transfer. The fourth phase is Internalization where explicit knowledge is converted back into individual tacit knowledge by direct experiences that actualize and apply explicit knowledge through learning by doing. The model describes a continuous learning spiral that requires an organizational learning process that initiates and sustains it.

The model was later updated (Nonaka, Toyama, and Konno, 2000) to include Kitaro Nishida’s concept of ba (Nonaka and Konno, 1998) or learning space as it is called in experiential learning theory (see Chapter 7 Update and Reflections). Arguing that knowledge needs a place to be created, shared, and used, they see ba as the time and space necessary for individuals to meet and interact for knowledge creation. They describe four types of these learning spaces that correspond to the four modes of the knowledge creation cycle respectively: Originating ba, an experiential place where individuals share and empathize with others; Dialoguing ba, where individuals share mental models to articulate tacit knowledge into concepts; Systematizing ba, where explicit knowledge is translated into written form for communication to larger groups; Exercising ba, where explicit knowledge is translated into action renewing the tacit component of knowledge in individuals.

Other research with the measures has found relationships with the worldviews and personality characteristics. Germer et al. (1982) developed the Organicism/Mechanism Paradigm Inventory (OMPI) to assess individual relative preferences for two of Pepper’s worldviews: organicism and mechanism. The OMPI is a forced choice inventory that asks individuals to choose their preference for the mechanistic or organic alternative on items that cover philosophical issues such as ontology, epistemology, image of man, analysis and causality, change, dynamics, and methodology, and practical concerns of ordinary people such as marital relationships, parenting, occupational, legal, and other interpersonal relationships. It is not clear why the OMPI creators chose these two worldviews to oppose each other since the primary oppositions as described above seem to be formism vs. organicism or mechanism vs. contextualism. Also, Pepper’s linear arrangement of the four by their relative distance from each other is formism-mechanism-contextualism-organicism. Pepper states, for example, “Formism and Organicism are especially hostile to each other” (1942, p. 147). That being said, the OMPI does seem to contrast the analytic (abstract) worldview with the synthetic (concrete) view since neighboring formism/mechanism and organicism/mechanism “seem to shade into one another” (1942, p. 147). Johnson et al. (1988) found that both formism and mechanism in the World Hypothesis Scale (WHS) (Harris, Fontana, and Dowds, 1977) correlate with OMPI mechanism, and organicism and contextualism from the WHS correlate with OMPI organicism.

Johnson et al. (1988), in a validation study of the OMPI, found that the two worldviews are associated with different personality characteristics. Organicists, who view reality in terms of changing, holistic patterns, are imaginative, aesthetic, complex, and changeable. They tend to be fluid, changing and creative, non-conforming, participative, and imaginative in their cognitive style and interpersonally active, autonomous, and individualistic. Mechanists, who see reality in terms of stable, isolated elements, are down-to-earth, inartistic, simple, and predictable. They tend to be orderly, conventional, conforming, objective, and realistic in cognitive style, and interpersonally passive, dependent, and reactive. They conclude, “In short, individuals’ personalities mirror their overall philosophical views” (1988, p. 833).

Also found were relationships between worldviews and theoretical orientations and practices. They studied four groups of scientists—sociobiologists, behaviorists, personality theorists, and human developmentalists—finding that their philosophical preferences on the OMPI were related to their theoretical predilections based on analysis of written statements of theoretical preference, journal publications, and symposia presentations. For example, they found that dialectically oriented human developmentalists endorsed an organismic worldview, whereas behaviorists espoused a mechanistic philosophical worldview on the OMPI.

Johnson, Howey, Reedy, Gibble, and Ortiz (1989) studied four different occupational groups. In a group of hospitality educators, organismic scorers on the OMPI had an orientation that values theory above facts, choice over impersonal causality, and nonreductionism over physicalism. The reverse was true of mechanistic educators. A group of Head Start employees and day care workers who were organismically inclined tended to value a holistic over a problem-solving approach to teaching. A group of psychology faculty and graduate student psychologists with artistic vocational interests scored high on organicism. In the fourth group organismically oriented psychotherapists showed more positive attitudes toward using music in psychotherapy.

Harris et al. (1977) developed the World Hypothesis Scale (WHS) to measure Pepper’s four worldviews. They found that pairs of friends sharing compatible world hypotheses experienced greater satisfaction in their relationships. Incompatible friends stated that they had less in common and would be less likely to remain friends and would not like to work together on an academic project. Similarly, patients who participated in psychotherapies based on world hypotheses compatible with their own perceived the therapies more positively.

In a subsequent analysis Becher extended his analysis to examine disciplinary subcultures, the sub-disciplines or specialties within disciplines. In many cases these sub-disciplines fragment the unity of a discipline and are countercultural to the dominant norms of the discipline: “. . . there is an anarchic tendency for some sub-units, even in the heartlands of their discipline, to appear more closely related to counterparts in the heartlands of other disciplines than to sub-units in their own” (1990, p. 336). These specialties can also facilitate communication and interaction with other disciplines that share their inquiry norms, and can be the breeding ground for new ideas and approaches. There have been numerous studies of learning style differences within disciplinary sub-specialties that support Becher’s analysis. For example, Plovnick (1975, 1980) studied learning style differences in senior medical students finding that family medicine and primary care were specialties chosen by accommodative and divergent medical students, internal medicine was chosen more often by convergers, and academic medicine and pathology tended to be chosen by assimilative students. Similarly, Loo (2002a, 2002b) found learning style differences among business students majoring in accounting, finance, and marketing.

Ludwig Huber (1990), while agreeing with Becher that the structure of knowledge influences the structure of disciplines, argues that the cultures of disciplines are embedded more deeply in social structure and are associated with traits such as political affiliations, social class, and private life preferences that cannot be solely attributed to epistemological differences through a process of social reproduction based on Bourdieu’s concept of habitus.

Bourdieu defines habitus as, “systems of durable, transposable dispositions, structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures, that is, as principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing a conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them” (1990, p. 53). The practices emerging from habitus are both durable “structured structures,” rules of the game, and generative structuring structures, strategies of the game, that allow for creativity and innovation within the structure. Habitus-shaped practices operate for the most part at practical and tacit levels with little conscious intention and reflection. Gerholm, for example, argues that acquiring tacit knowledge is critical for success in academia and disciplines such as the arts, though there are few possibilities to acquire it in graduate education. Thus, success in these fields favors those with habitus-acquired cultural capital, “a stock of knowledge, a frame of reference and a capacity to make the proper judgments which are called ‘taste’”(1990, p. 269).

The concept of habitus, though more encompassing in a scope that includes lifestyle, values, and dispositions, is similar to the experiential learning theory concept of learning style. “Habitus gives practices a particular manner or style. The disposition of habitus identifies certain individuals as risk takers, others as cautious, some as bold, others as timid, some as balanced, others as awkward. Individuals do not simply conform to the external constraints and opportunities given them. They adapt, seize the moment, or miss the chance in characteristic manners” (Swartz, 2002, p. 63S).

Habitus practices and the academic fields where they are enacted are part of a deeper spiral of learning and knowledge creation that extends beyond individuals into the social structure. “Born into certain fields and then initiated into others, and finding themselves in certain positions, people somehow grasp how the game works, learn by doing and incorporate the generating schemes very much as a child learns its mother tongue and patterns of social behavior, i.e., a practical competence (le sens pratique, a feel for the game) without knowing the rules or consciously complying with them. Thus, a correspondence—not determination—is at work between the field (the structures in which the history of a society has become institutionalized) and the habitus (the actors’ dispositions in which the same history has been incorporated): they produce and structure one another and are reproduced and structured by one another” (Huber, 1990, p. 248).

So some 25 years later when I had found another holistic worldview in experiential learning, I was delighted to discover that book again. The way his structural analysis of knowledge mapped so perfectly onto the structure of learning in experiential learning theory gave me confidence that I was onto something important. It also gave me a holistic perspective on how to approach my research. Pepper argues that his world theories should be kept pure and consistent in their internal structural corroboration, but used eclectically in their application in practice. “Hence the insistence upon the exclusion of eclecticism within the world theories, and at the same time the recommendation to make reasonable use of it in estimating the results of world theories” (1942, p. 341). “Since these four world theories were regarded by us as having about the same degree of adequacy, no one of them can be the judge of the others. Our general stand, therefore, is for rational clarity in theory and reasonable eclecticism in practice. . . . In practice, therefore, we shall want to be not rational but reasonable, and to seek, on the matter in question, the judgment supplied from each of these relatively adequate world theories” (1942, p. 330). “None of these theories of truth gives way to the others. Nevertheless, this survey gives a more balanced and informed conception of the subject than could be got in any other manner” (1942, p. 347).

In any event, I did not begin Experiential Learning with an explicit plan to use “reasonable eclecticism” in my reliance on the worldviews of formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism, but it gradually became explicit in the process of writing that I was doing just that. Writing Chapters 1 and 2 I was not aware of explicitly following a contextualist approach though it is how they appear in retrospect. In Chapter 3 I did explicitly recognize that I was taking a mechanistic approach with my structural analysis of the foundations of the learning process followed by the structure of knowledge in Chapter 5. Chapter 4 contrasted the typical formist roots of individual type theories with my contextual approach to learning style. Chapter 7 was less explicitly constructed with a combination of formism and mechanism known more commonly as logical empiricism. Being about development, Chapters 6 and 8 were inevitably based on the organismic or idealist worldview.

Reading critical reviewers of this book, I fear that I may have confused readers by approaching the topic with Pepper’s “post-rational eclecticism.” Miettinen (2000) is particularly upset by my eclectic use of multiple root metaphors and holistic approach. “Kolb says that he. . . [wants] to suggest through experiential learning theory a holistic integrative perspective on learning. . . . The method and procedure can be called eclectic. Kolb unites terms and concepts, extracting them from their historical context and purposes and puts them to serve the motives of his own presentation. As a result theoreticians with quite different backgrounds, motives and incompatible conceptions can be used as founders and ‘supporters’ of experiential learning. . . . One cannot help concluding that Kolb’s motive is not critical evaluation or interdisciplinarity but an attempt to construct an ‘attractive’ collection of ideas that can be advocated as a solution to the social problems of our time and to substantiate the usefulness of his learning style inventory” (2000, p. 56). Miettinen then, mistakenly, argues that my eclectic approach is contrary to Pepper’s approach citing a passage which argues that an eclectic method that takes the best of the world hypotheses is not appropriate for the creation of an adequate world hypothesis. Pepper was referring there to the creation of an adequate world hypothesis that could compete with his four adequate hypotheses, not to the application of world hypotheses where he advocates a “reasonable eclecticism” in practice (see the Pepper quote above).

Others more pointedly suggest that I have botched or ignored their particular epistemological preference and adopted another that is particularly distasteful to them. Richard Hopkins, an avid phenomenologist, in “David Kolb’s Learning Machine” writes, “And it is curious that in a book that couples experience with learning, and that draws on a variety of philosophical perspectives, there should be so little reference to the major world philosophy of experience” (1993, p. 53). He argues that the book “ultimately breaks down under the weight of its structuralist reductions.” (1993, p. 46). He cites a paragraph at the beginning of Chapter 3 that begins, “The approach. . . will essentially be structural,” as evidence for his argument that the book is based on a structuralist, mechanistic approach. In the omission he leaves out the words “in this chapter” (see Chapter 3, pp. 65–66) and ignores the first sentence of the next paragraph, “. . . we have seen in the last chapter how the more phenomenological, descriptive models of learning described by Lewin and Dewey are enriched and corroborated by Piaget’s structural dimensions of cognitive development—phenomenalism/constructivism and egocentrism/relativism.”

Similarly, Garner (2000) argues that my work is based on a formist epistemology citing a paragraph in Chapter 4 where I suggest the problem with type theories is their formist epistemological base. He discounts a sentence later in the paragraph that states, “An alternative epistemological root metaphor, one that we will use in our approach to understanding human individuality is that of contextualism.” As an avowed Jungian organicist (or idealist as he calls it), Garner says that Jung’s typologies, “are the main foundations for the development of his learning styles” (2000, p. 341), which is not the case. He states, “Kolb is arguing that his work falls within a contextualist position and, at the same time believes he is able to connect his work directly with Jung’s idealist position. To bring together these two contradictory epistemologies is highly problematic and connections between the two must be viewed exceptionally cautiously” (2000, p. 343).

What I take from the above examples are the perils of trans-disciplinary, integrative scholarship that falls outside of established institutional and disciplinary boundaries. As others have noted, work that falls between disciplines is likely to be acceptable to neither. D. Christopher Kayes in his review and critique of experiential learning theory critics examined their argument against the multi-paradigm approach of experiential learning theory. “Because ELT lacks strong institutional standing, the argument goes, it lacks the institutional clout necessary to contribute to codified knowledge, and thus, ELT remains impotent in furthering any one profession” (2002, pp. 141–142). His reply emphasizes the value of the multi-disciplinary approach. “Criticisms that ELT lacks sufficient institutional standing to influence academic advancement may suffer from a kind of professional myopia that constrains learning research to a highly consensual body of knowledge. . . . If the study of management learning seeks to increase learning in the academy, then it might use experiential learning theory as a guide. If the best learning systems engender diversity, then the best approach is to broaden, not narrow the field of inclusion. . . . An alternative approach comes from Geertz’s (1983) idea of ‘blurred genres’ in which scholars enlist multiple disciplines. . . . ELT—with its humanist ideology, pragmatic aims, scientific justification and interdisciplinary roots—provides a lucid example of such blurring” (2002, p. 142).

Such is the deep and passionate adherence, which I have described above, to our epistemological worldview that we are particularly alert, and sometimes “hostile,” to use Pepper’s term, to perceived challenges from other worldviews. While Pepper maintains that his four-world hypotheses are independent and of about equal adequacy, capable of presenting credible interpretation of any facts and events, dialogue among adherents to the different worldviews can be difficult. Because they are based on different root metaphors, they ask different questions and have different criteria for successful answers. Yet I still persist in my holistic multi-disciplinary view. The scholarly conversations generated, including the misunderstandings, are enlightening to us all. I find some company with Pepper, who responding to critics of World Hypotheses replied, “. . . whether the root metaphor theory was not a world theory itself or one of the already described world theories pretending to be neutral, it is almost a sufficient reply to record that the root metaphor theory has been accused by various persons of being every one of these world theories. . .” (1942, pp. 347–348).