Re: [FRIAM] metaphor and talking across skill levels

[Steve Smith]

Nick - Interesting paper... I've only skimmed it, but it does attend to the intersection of a few of my projects and will spend a little more time with it... it lead me to some other interesting collateral material such as: http://www.hyle.org/journal/issues/10-1/ess_laszlo.pdf I'm curious if Bruce or Ruth have anything to say on this topic... I'm not sure if they are still on this list or if they fled exclusively to WedTech?  Bruce related to me at roughly a year ago, his reasons for believing that the "hydraulic flow" metaphor for dc circuits was flawed.   He had a simulation which demonstrated some inconsistencies between his model of electrons (and holes?) moving in a conductor diverged from water molecules moving in piping.   I seem to remember that his distinction was compelling, but *still* probably not relevant to the novice learning basic electrical circuits.   This opens the question of how we work with knowledge and start simple enough to understand easily, but then eventually graduate to a more complete model of the phenomena in question? This article makes the distinction well, but I don't see it offering a methodology or even insight into how to evolve one's understanding from novice to expert... how to manage the series of metaphors (or perhaps, series of levels of sophistication in a common overarching metaphor from which the others are derived or inherit from?)   I have in fact been interested for some time about the relationship of Alexanders' "Pattern Languages" (which is where the GO4 drew the inspiration for their "Design Patterns" ca 1993?), Inheritence in Object Oriented Programming, and Conceptual Metaphors.   - Steve Colleagues,   As groups dedicated conversations across many boundaries of expertise, I thought this article might interest you.  It can be found at   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272997521_Varying_Use_of_Conceptual_Metaphors_across_Levels_of_Expertise_in_Thermodynamics?showFulltext=true   One of its authors, Tamer Amin, was a Clark Phd who worked on how students understand heat and light and natural selection.   Here is the abstract:   Many studies have previously focused on how people with different levels of expertise solve physics problems. In early work, focus was on characterizing differences between experts and novices and a key finding was the central role that propositionally expressed principles and laws play in expert, but not novice, problem solving. A more recent line of research has focused on characterizing continuity between experts and novices at the level of non-propositional knowledge structures and processes such as image-schemas, imagistic simulation and analogical reasoning. This study contributes to an emerging literature addressing the coordination of both propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures and processes in the development of expertise. Specifically, in this paper we compare problem solving across two levels of expertise – undergraduate students of chemistry and PhD students in physical chemistry – identifying differences in how conceptual metaphors are used (or not) to coordinate propositional and non-propositional knowledge structures in the context of solving problems on entropy. It is hypothesized that the acquisition of expertise involves learning to coordinate the use of conceptual metaphors to interpret propositional (linguistic and mathematical) knowledge and apply it to specific problem situations. Moreover, we suggest that with increasing expertise, the use of conceptual metaphors involves a greater degree of subjective engagement with physical entities and processes. Implications for research on learning and instructional practice are discussed.   As you all know, I have taken the greatest pleasure in teasing my “hard” science colleagues about their use of psychological terms of art such as “attraction, wanting, etc.” to articulate physical concepts.  I think Amin and his collaborators are  going to tell us that those metaphors ain’t for nuthin’.    Nick   Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/   ============================================================ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com

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