Explain Your Reasoning
Those students who can better navigate the social-semantic space—not necessarily those who know more or can reason better—will be able to produce better explanations.
So, last time we looked at how language is generated and understood, from the private-experiential to the social-linguistic symbolic space and back. A question that naturally arises from this is whether the social space—where ideas are mutually identified, digitized, organized, and mapped relative to each other semantically—has an effect on the private-experiential.
The social-semantic space is like a floating blackboard on which we mutually locate, organize, and connect communal ideas. We then use this technology to talk to (and influence) each other. This involves three conversions:
In the first conversion, then, the normative rules of the communication protocol guide the speaker, step by step, in the conversion of the experiential intent into an ordered set of instructions for imagination [this is the message]. . . The first conversion, then, transfers meaning from the private realm to the realm of the social. By doing this, it makes it communicable: it turns something that is privately experienced into instructions that the others can understand.
It is the message, then, the ordered set of instructions for imagination, that provides the input for the next conversion, which is indeed the conversion to formal structure. The message is converted into a formal configuration consisting of the perceptible structures of the words and constructions (their signifiers), and the phonological, morphological, and syntactic relationships between them . . . I will call this configuration the utterance. Finally, in the third stage, the utterance is converted into perceptible behavior—actual speech. Sound waves (or visible motions) are produced for the interlocutor (listener, viewer) to experience.
Since we spend so much time in this symbolic space, wouldn't it have an effect on the private-experiential plane as well? The question has certainly been asked before—does language influence (or determine) thought? This is where the author takes us next.
For many researchers today, a reasonable compromise seems to revolve around Slobin's suggestion, inspired by Boas, to take a step back and distinguish between two possible types of influence: that of language on thinking in general, and that of language on thinking-for-speaking. We may never know to what extent language influences general thought, says Slobin, but we may be quite confident that, at the very least, the obligatory grammatical components of language force speakers to attend to particular aspects of experience, in order to be able to fit what they wish to say into an utterance. . . .
Slobin's point, then, is that the speakers of the different languages would not necessarily see . . . scenes differently as long as they were only looking, but once asked to describe them they had to obey their grammars and thus pay attention to those properties of the experience highlighted by them.
The floating virtual blackboard, in other words—the social space we use to convert our private intents into publicly communicable instructions for imagination—can't really have much of an effect, in general (it varies among people), on private experiences or ideas. But of course it does have an effect on our thinking like any technology does: when we learn to think with it, our thinking—when we are using it—is altered from our fuzzier private intents.
Most importantly, the new perspective [the author's theory of language as "instructions for imagination"] turns Slobin's thinking-for-speaking—re-formulated as experiencing-for-instructing—from a compromise position into the most important key to the entire question. Every technology ever invented forces its users to experience in specific ways in order to make the technology work properly. When we drive, we have to direct our visual and auditory attention to aspects of the physical environment that the person sitting next to us may safely ignore. When we play a musical instrument, we have to develop that mysterious capacity of experiencing with our ears and fingers together, which we seldom need anywhere else. Experiencing-for-instructing is exactly the same phenomenon. Speakers must be able to pay attention to those components and properties of their experiences that are required by their language's norms, those elements that were highlighted and signified by their communities as experiential commonalities, for use in instructive communication. Learning to experience-for-instructing is simply learning to use the technology of language.
What happens, then—based on the above analysis—when we ask our students to explain their reasoning and then try to evaluate their responses? From the vantage point of the author's theory, what is happening when students explain their reasoning is that they are transferring "meaning from the private realm to the realm of the social." Thus, explain-your-reasoning prompts are saying, "Don't tell me what your reasoning is (e.g., 'I did it in my head'). Instead, give me a reasoning statement that your social-linguistic community would approve of."
This is likely a good thing in moderation. Students need practice navigating the social-semantic space and converting their private-experiential thoughts into publicly communicable ideas. And the theory we are looking at here makes no claims—and can't really—as to the individual cognitive benefits of producing public explanations.
What should be emphasized is that those students who can better navigate the social-semantic space—not necessarily those who know more or can reason better—will be able to produce better explanations. To the extent that we evaluate explanations of reasoning given by a student, we should be aware that we may be mostly evaluating facility with communal social-semantic practices rather than the level of private understanding the student has.
