Birds and patterns

Excerpted from James Paul Gee's "What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy":


If the human mind is a powerful pattern recognizer—and the evidence very much suggests it is—
then what it most important about thinking is not that it is “mental,” something
happening inside our heads, but rather that it is social, something
attuned to and normed by the social groups to which we belong or seek to
belong. Since this statement so violates our commonsense notions of psychology,
let me hasten to explain.

Let’s, for a moment, consider a birdwatching club. Birdwatchers are
good at seeing some elements (features) of birds and quickly extending the
pattern to name a particular type of bird. Thus they may see a flash of graybrown
and a splash of white under the body as a small bird flits in and out of
tall grass in an open grassland. They will, at least in much of the United
States, conclude they have seen a bobolink, even if they have not seen all the
bird’s other salient features. If they see a flash of brown-brown and a splash of
white under the body of a slightly larger bird flitting among the trees of a
forest, they will conclude they have seen a flicker, a type of woodpecker, even
if they have not seen the bird’s distinctive purple spots and yellow shaft.

The first thing a birdwatching club needs to do is ensure that all its
members have had the right experiences in the world to have formed such
patterns and engaged in such ways of filling them out in the field. People can
wander around on their own and experience—and pay attention to—all sorts
of things to do with birds, many of them interesting, but not all that helpful if
you want to be a contributing member of the birdwatching club. Perhaps
every time you have hiked you have never seen birds in open grassland (easy
to happen, unless you are out early in the morning or at dusk, when the birds
are active and often sitting atop a grass stalk or small plant, since otherwise
the birds are on the ground hidden below the tall grass). You conclude that
there are no bird species that live in open grassland. You have formed a
(wrong) pattern in which open grassland is negatively associated with birds.
The bird club will see to it that you get out to some open grassland at the
right time of day so you can see the bobolinks and meadowlarks. Why? Because
they want you to have similar enough experiences as the other club
members so that you can share knowledge with them.

The first thing the bird club does is see to it that new members come to
share a lot of experiences of the world of birds and birding with the other
members, so that they will share some common patterns and ways of completing
them when they have seen only some features in a pattern. Then the
members can make lists of all the birds around in the winter in a given part of
the country or find out that birds that live in open grasslands are much more
endangered than the forest songbirds that have received almost all the publicity
concerning their supposed decline. Now they also can engage in competition
as to who are the best birdwatchers in the sense of being able to
identify the most different species of birds in a given place during a certain
set amount of time, since they are now all adept at the basic practice and
norms of the “game.”

But there is a second thing the bird club must do. Say Mary Smith, a
member in good standing, all of a sudden comes to the club one day and says,
given what she has seen out in the field, that she is pretty sure that what she
saw was a dodo, an extinct species of bird. Perhaps, more realistically, Mary
Smith keeps claiming to have seen ivory-billed woodpeckers (which are
probably extinct, but we’re not sure) rather than pileated woodpeckers
(which certainly exist, though they are not horribly common), based on a
flicker of some distinctive features. (She never seems to get a full view of the
bird before it flies off.) Both birds look similar, though ivory-billed woodpeckers
are bigger and have a somewhat different bill. Given how unlikely it
is that anyone will see an ivory-billed woodpecker (though, if they are not extinct,
it is possible), the club will insist that any member who claims to have
seen one has seen it well and very carefully checked the identification. (If you
see a big black woodpecker with a red crest that looks a lot like Woody
Woodpecker, it’s almost certainly a pileated woodpecker.)

If, in either case, dodo or ivory-billed woodpecker, Mary Smith persists,
what happens? At first, the club refuses to publish her lists in its newsletter.
Eventually, if she persists further, the club kicks her out. What’s going on
here? The club is norming (yes, policing, if you like) its members’ patterns
and ways of filling them out. If a member deviates too far from the patterns
and ways of filling them out in the field that the club, as a social group, considers
normative, then the club “punishes” the member in order to bring him
or her back in line. It’s not that, if ivory-billed woodpeckers still exist, no
member could see one and get it published in the club’s newsletter. But seeing
an ivory-billed woodpecker, like seeing any bird in the context of birdwatching
as a social practice, is not just a mental event, it’s also a social event.
There are social rules or norms about what counts as having seen an ivorybilled
woodpecker, and, in this case, they are strict.

The point of this diversion about birdwatching is this: The patterns and
ways of filling them out that count are not really the ones inside the heads of
the members (though they are there, of course). All the members, as individual
human beings, have a myriad of patterns about birds, and ways of filling
them out in the field, in their heads. But the club, as a social group, has a set
of norms and values that determines certain sorts of patterns and ways of filling
them out in the field as “ideal” (central). This ideal might actually not be
what is in anyone’s head. The ideal is an “attractor,” an ideal toward which
individuals in the club gravitate and toward which the social practices (the
“policing”) of the club pushes them when they get too far away from it.

If someone questions what constitutes the “right” pattern in regard to
seeing an ivory billed woodpecker or, more realistically, what are the right patterns
in terms of which one can identify the many types of (similar-looking)
sparrows or seagulls, people in the club don’t open up anyone’s head. They
engage in dialogue (negotiation and contestation) with each other, inspect
their practices, read their texts, and, yes, ask certain people what they think,
probably the old-timers or “insiders” and not the newcomers or marginal
members. In the end, if thinking is a matter of pattern reorganization and filling
our patterns, then thinking is at least as much social as it is mental and individual.
Actually, it is more social than mental and individual. Of course, this
idea violates traditional ways of thinking about psychology. So be it.

Even if you are not into birds, you surely have seen many sparrows and
you have formed patterns in your mind in regard to them. You probably associate
being little and brown with being a type of sparrow very strongly. You
may well associate being in a city or in the yard of a suburban house with
being a sparrow. You may, in terms of the patterns in your mind, recognize a
few different types of sparrows (perhaps you have noticed that some in your
yard have a little yellow cap on their head and some don’t), or maybe you
don’t and see them all as basically the same type of bird. You have a set of elements
associated with sparrows in your head, and you associate them more
or less strongly with each other and with being a sparrow.

These sparrow patterns you have in your head, which are perfectly normal
for “everyday” people, will not work for being a “birder.” From the
standpoint of a birdwatching club, they are the wrong patterns, and the club,
should you seek to join it, would help to give you other experiences that
would shift the patterns in your head more toward its ideal. For people who
have been normed by other birdwatchers and their practices and texts, their
heads contain patterns in terms of which there are a great many different
types of sparrows, many of which look quite a bit a like. They associate a
great many of these with nonurban and nonsuburban settings, and, in fact,
they associate the common house sparrow with finches and not New World
sparrows at all.

Since the world is replete with features and people are powerful pattern
recognizers, anyone can form almost any sort of interesting pattern in his or
her head—forming all sorts of concepts and subconcepts. None of this is
“right” or “wrong” until we ask which social group helps to norm (or police)
patterns (concepts) in this or that domain that we wish to be part of. If you
want to join a birdwatching club, you have to admit that the patterns in your
head about sparrows are wrong; if you don’t want to join the club, then the
patterns may very well be just fine from the point of view of some other
group, if only your own culture, community, or family. Again, the patterns
are in our heads, but they become meaningful (“right” or “wrong”) only from
the perspective of the workings of social groups that “enforce” certain patterns
as ideal norms toward which everyone in that group should orient (even
if the patterns in their heads never resemble the ideal perfectly). Of course,
for some purposes, though perhaps not for others, some groups’ practices
work better than do those of other groups.

What I have said about our birdwatching club is true of any group. We
humans belong to a myriad of social and cultural groups. Some of these
groups are families and communities of various sizes. Some are cultural
groups defined in various ways. Some are what I have called in previous chapters
“affinity groups.” (The birdwatching club would be an affinity group.)

Affinity groups are groups wherein people primarily orient toward a common
set of endeavors and social practices in terms of which they attempt to
realize these endeavors. In such groups people orient less towards shared
gender, race, culture, or face-to-face relationships, although all of these can
play a secondary role. People can be in affinity groups where they rarely see
many of the members face-to-face (e.g., the group may communicate in part
at a distance via media, whether it’s print, the Internet, or what have you).
Adrian was part of several different overlapping affinity groups in his work
and play with video games.

Could a person think and reason outside the scope of any group, that is,
with no group serving to norm his or her patterns and ways of filling them
out? As Wittgenstein pointed out long ago, in a different context, such people
would have no way to accurately test whether their patterns were veridical.
Of course, the world would speak back when they tried to operate in and
on it in terms of their patterns. But this would just be more experience of the
world in terms of which their patterns were formed in the first place. Only
when others have normed our patterns and ways of filling them out, so that
we can be fairly confident that we are not “fooling” ourselves because of our
own self-interest, desires, or idiosyncratic ways, can we trust our patterns in a
particular domain.

Does this mean that no one can think an “original” thought? Of course
not. But all the scientists, for example, who have thought original thoughts
that their fellow scientists have never (eventually) come to see as close to the
ideal patterns in their domain have thought thoughts that, at least of yet, no
one knows about. As of yet, at least, their thoughts don’t “count” as part of
their domain and are not “published” (spread in speech or writing).

And, of course, what counts to a group as an ideal pattern and way of filling
it out in new experiences changes with time. I have already pointed out
that the norms and values of groups are contested and negotiated. They are
no more stable than is our concept of a bedroom (which we can shift when I
link a hot plate to the room), and for the same reason. When the group confronts
a new experience (in the world or in ideas), this experience can change
the links (associations) among all the elements in the patterns the group considers
ideal or normative, though this change happens through dialogue in
speech and writing, not just via private thoughts.