i've been reading Steve Levinson's book on 'Space in language and cognition'.
many interesting ideas on developmental / behavioural psychology, brain sciences and psycholinguistics. some of these ideas shed quite a bit of light on several of the questions i'm exploring in my own research.
central to his thesis, and one which he comes right up in saying, is that "frames of reference in language and thought are the heart of complex spatial thinking".
that's a red cape to a geographer if there ever was one.
he goes on to elaborate on the centrality of frames of reference by posing two philosophical conundrums, the first from Aristotle, and the second from Molyneux (which was posed to John Locke in 1690):
- if a boat is moored in a flowing river, is the place always changing, since the containing fluid is?
- if a blind man, who knew by touch the difference between a cube and a sphere, had his sight restored, would he be able to recognise the same objects under his new perceptual modality?
Levinson used Molyneux's question to put forward the argument that the primary direction in which one might convert frames of reference is from the egocentric to the allocentric (ie, from the orientation-bound, to the orientation-free).
in some ways, this conversion is illustrated in the discourse surfaced by the teams of pupils which successfully navigated the various routes i tasked them to, last year.
further, if Aristotle's boat is freed from its moorings, would it be moving along the channel, or would the world be flowing past the boat?
the latter is a perfectly serious proposition, and its egocentricity forms the basis of the Micronesian indigenous navigation system.
on the other hand, languages used in cultural systems to which we are more accustomed (ie, those languages with relative coordinate systems) tend to favour 'piloting' rather than 'dead reckoning' (estimation of position by calculating distance on each course).
such allocentric coordinate systems encourage people who are enculturated in them to produce mental maps which are either strip-maps (non-branching views linked by turns and paths; after Tolman (1948)) or unoriented survey maps (branched, but with no externally fixed coordinates).
by some happy coincidence, Levinson elaborates on this distinction by the example of (wait for it) navigating around a "giant, international hotel" :-P
'piloting', more than 'dead reckoning', is, of course, the more relevant to my present research. piloting has been defined by Gallistel (1990) as the usage of "observable landmarks to help one locate one's position on a mental map, and thus to currently unobservable landmarks". so this tells me that the study which i carried out is to a large extent influenced by the predominant language system used by our pupils.
in other words, the way we think about the world depends on how we speak about the world.
hmm...
Reg Golledge, of the University of California, Santa Barbara, has done a lot of work which is relevant in this field as well. he has found that while people from 'Western' cultures can build relatively good strip-maps, they have difficulty integrating these strip-maps into a survey map because the strip-maps tend to be logically deficient. specifically, these strip-maps do not preserve metric angles (Tversky 1981, 1998).
because of the implicit role of enculturation into allocentric frames of reference, which has been alluded to so far, it would be worthwhile to revisit Piaget.
Levinson, quoting Karmiloff-Smith (1992) contends that Piaget, who might be "out of fashion due to his tabula rasa assumptions" is still "instructive... within the spatial domain". according to Piaget, the child starts with the simplest topological notions and, from age four, proceeds to the axes and angles of Euclidean geometry in later childhood. Bowerman and Levinson (2001) build on that, and suggest that language induces conceptual development in spatial cognition. this, of course, has strong shades of Vygotsky.
by the way, for those of you wondering what the function of a map is, well, at least according to Gallistel (1990), it is to:
"make accessible the imperceptible by systematic relation to what can be perceived"
Technorati Tags: cognition, discourse, education, geography, landmarks, learning, maps, memory, navigation, place, Vygotsky, wayfinding
