Compos Mentis

It's just a crazy Schema

I was just scrolling down to the bottom of my blog and I found out that I don't have all of my posts up anymore. I've only had this thing a couple of days and already I've written so much I have to check the archives to see my older ones. Anyway, I'm sure you don't care, but it's a big deal to me.
My philosophy teacher is a great guy. It's been the first time since Doc. Stone that I've really been able to have a philosophical argument with someone who has studied a lot more than I have. The class is way too easy, but we occasionally have discussions that I really enjoy. A while ago we discussed schemas, which are the main way people organize the facts that they know.
Consider grocery stores. Most people can go into a grocery store they have never been to before and not have too much trouble with finding the things they need. They have a general framework that corresponds to those stores with food in aisles. This general framework is the schema, and it is the same way we know how to find books in libraries, rules about sports we have not seen or played, or how to clean a strange bathroom, if we were so unlucky. The main idea is that these things are abstract and general, rather than specific. Another point is that they are mostly unconscious acts. We don't think about what the inside of a grocery store is like, we just are expecting what we have outlined in our schema.
After we talked about this in class, I realized how much this way of organizing thoughts is connected to language. Consider the word "dog." What comes to mind? Oftentimes it's a visual image of a specific dog, one that we might perhaps have some connection to. Then comes the vital characteristics of all the entities that we consider to be dogs: I think first of the tail, and then usually the teeth. If we continue, more come to mind: four legs, barking, buries bones, etc. When we use the word "dog," then, we are not describing a real dog but the idea of 'dogness' that matches our schema for dogs.
Let me also say that it is during the consideration of the characteristics that we find we can connect our schemas. I think of dogs, then think of the waggly tail, which shares some properties with, say, snakes, then from snakes I think of scales, which reminds me of scale armour, which reminds me of castles, etc. etc. So each schema is not a wholly independent entity, but is connected to the whole like a cluster on a web.
This explains, using the first principle I stated about schemas, why words are so hard to define. we have to use abstract notions to describe other abstract notions, always a tricky proposition. (This is why so many smart people go into concrete subjects, such as mathematics. That's also why they hate it when those concrete subjects, such as mathematics, turn out to be more abstract than they thought.)
The other principle of schemas shows why people are so hard to convince. They are 'trapped' so to speak, in their schemas. The best example is politics. Politicians persuade people by appealing to their schemas. No issue can be resolved because the various sides are working with different schemas of the issues at hand.
Schemas are very powerful and useful ways of looking at the world, but sometimes they need to be sidestepped. It is important to realize that everyone thinks like this when you interact with them. You never know.

posted by Emmett @ 13:45