Pask's Conversation Theory & P- and M-Individuals

A p-individual is a psychological individual and an m-individual is a mechanical individual. So an m-individual is a body and a p-individual is a mind. Comment: Instead of a mind, a P-individual is a better described as a worldview or a stable conceptual system (SCS). But it’s saying that one person, one body, one brain even, does not have just one person in it, one p-individual – one persona, to use that dramatic term. What it says is that we can take on different roles, which clearly we can. So as someone who draws and as someone who listens I am not the same persona, I’m [employing] a different p-individual in Pask’s terms but in one m-individual, but I can also have – incidentally for instance in a group action I can have a lot of m-individuals that become one p-individual. So this is one of Gordon’s clever inventions: The distinction between the m-individual and the p-individual. What that allows is that if I have a room with seven people in it, all busy working at something together, you know, and just lost in that thing where we’re working together, you have seven m-individuals forming one p-individual – one psychological individual that is getting on with the work. And that’s the experience that we have. ... So, m-individuals and p-individuals, they’re bodies and minds. M is body, P is mind. They stand for ‘mechanical individual’ and ‘psychological individual’.

The basic tenet of the theory is that the minimal, psychologically realistic organisation which is susceptible to sharp valued measurement is a conversation in a language L between participants A and B. Sharp valued observations are made of L conversational events. Quite often A and B can be safely (but loosely) identified with people. They are actually specified (in the theory) as coherent and stable conceptual systems (SCSs). So, for example, if it is possible to isolate distinct perspectives adopted by one person (and it is, using proper means to exteriorise a normally hidden conceptual process), then Conversation Theory deals with ’Conversations’ that are normally ‘internal to one person’s brain’, between perspectives A and B. At the other end of the spectrum, stable conceptual systems not uncommonly exist in several, maybe many, brains over which they are distributed, (cultures, schools of thought, traditions, social institutions). Hence, cultures A and B may ’converse’, or people may converse with cultures, and so on.

Conversation Theory, when considered in depth, offers a critical transformative challenge to educational technology by deconstructing the conventionally understood psychology of the individual. The supposedly continuously present stable autonomous integrated individual learner is reunderstood rather as a collection of psychological individuals (P-individuals) whose presence is variable and heterarchical. CT asserts that what it is we are mainly helping educate and self-construct is not simply one person but rather a wide variety of interwoven competitive P-individuals, some of whom execute in distributed fashion across many bodies and machines.

... [CT and IAT (Interaction of Actors Theory)] propose that, when employing the appropriate relational operators, a Strict Conversation, eventuating in appropriate agreements among its originating P-individual participants, can bifurcate and result in the emergence of a new Psychological individual (one able to engage in further broader and/or deeper conversations with others) and so on and on, constructing ever more complex extensive local and distributed P-individuals.

Pask’s CT and IAT are, I believe, founded on a larger and deeper view of humanity than are many cognitive science theories. The underlying question is this: How do we together generate creatively complex psychological participant individuals that can interact to have plausible intimations of cultural immortality?

Conversation theory is a really radical psychological theory in that it places the understanding-constructing P-individuals and their world-reconstructing discourse in first place, ontologically. The biological individual persons are not the primary concern.

According to CT, much of our really important learning is made possible because we do each embody different personae (P-individuals) with different intentions, and have to reconcile (or bracket) their conflicts within ourselves by internal dialog.

New P-individuals can be brought into being when agreements in complex conversations result in a new coherent bundle of procedures capable of engaging in further conversations with other such P-individuals.

P-individuals is what Pask called ‘psychological’ individuals, which are understood to be autopropagative discursive participant procedure-bundles, running (being executed) in one or among two or more M-individuals.

A CT conversation is a parallel and synchronous evolving interaction between or among P-individuals, which if successful generates stable concepts agreed upon as being equivalent by the participants. Optionally, it also may generate new P-individuals at higher emergent levels.

Although constructivists usually also accept some form of a coherence view of truth, few people have proposed concrete mechanisms that show how the dynamic process of construction (variation) can result in the static requirement of coherence (selective retention). The originality of Pask's Conversation Theory is that it provides a detailed formal model of such mechanisms. The metaphor of conversation is aptly chosen to describe such a process of cognitive interaction, in which concepts are exchanged, combined and recombined (the construction phase), with the aim of achieving agreement about shared meanings (the coherence phase).

A key concept in understanding how conversation theory is constructed is the distinction between a cognitive process and the processor in which the process is executed. Typical processors are one or more embodied brains or parts of them. In man-machine interaction, processes are distrubuted between man and machine. In human communication (conversation), processes are distributed between persons. In general, processors are embodied brains within a particular environmental niche or setting.

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In contrast to processors, processes are programme-like entities; they are symbolic, they can be described in a processor-independent manner. This is the key idea that separates Gordon's therorising from that of Humberto Maturana.

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Gordon, in contrast to Maturana, distinguishes and characterises a class of processes that are both symbolic and self-replicating. He distinguishes a psychological, conversational, social autonomy that is distinct from the biological or mechanical.

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Having established the distinction between process and processor, conversation theory goes on to distinguish twp types of self-replicating individuals: mechanical (or M-) individuals and psychological (or P-) individuals... P-individuals are a particular class of self-reproducing and self-referential system that, although executed or embodied in M-individuals, are not necessarily in a one-to-one correspondence with them. They are symbolic, language-oriented systems. To observe them and find out about them, the observer is necessarily a participant observer, he converses with them.

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In order to examine and analyse a P-individual, it is necessary to make two further distinctions: a distinction between participants and a distinction between levels in a hierarchy of control or production. The distinction between participants is necessary to retain a sense of person-hood, personal knowing, and consciousness. In conversation theory, consciousness is irreducible. It is "knowing with another;" as noted, this may be interaction of two participants or perspectives in one brain or the interaction between participants in a conversation. Put succinctly, P-individuals can always be analysed into two or more participants; participants, with rare exception, are also P-individuals... At the hear of all P-individuation is the "I-Thou" relationship, which, as Gordon has noted on many occasions, is the primary analogy (I and Thou are similar but distinct) upon which all knowing is based. As observers, we construct analogies, share understandings, and agree to agree or disagree about their verisimilitude or usefulness. It is critical to recognise that the interaction between participants is not mechanical and causal as might be described by a behaviourist observer. It is provocative (Gordon's term), arising from an awareness of the other's awareness. Conversation theory deploys a protologic or, equisignificantly, a protolanguage, to describe the interactions between participants, in terms of which shared understandings are characterised as a form of reproductive process in which, minimally, one participant learns about the other.

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In conversation theory, base level processes are distinguished and called concepts. Concepts are processes that recall, recognise, bring about, or maintain a relation. Higher level processes are called memories. Memories are processes that recall, recognise, bring about, or maintain a concept. Recursively, higher levels of process may be invoked. Recall that a P-individual as being a self-reproducing totality has already been recognised; as such it is a self-reproducing class (in the sense of a named collection) of concepts and memories. A succinct way of closing the self-referential loop in this elegant set of definitioins is to recognise that insofar as a concept is memorable, it is self-reproductive and is, ipso facto, a P-individual, that is, all concepts are P-individuals, that is, all concepts are P-individualsand all P-individuals are concepts. At the hear of any P-individual, there is a description of what he or she or it thinks he or she is.

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Conversation theory includes an evolving theory of conversational domains: ways of characterising and describing the knowings and doings of P-individuals, those knows and doings that are permissible if the integrity of participants is to be maintained. One application of this theory is the characterisation of "knowable" domains as those in which all named concepts are related together, unambiguously, as a logically and pragmatically coherent totality, referred to in the theory as an entailment mesh... A hierarchical or "pruned" form of an entailment structure hides or ignores the heterarchical, cyclic organisation that makes a system of concepts productive and self-reproductive.

“Accumulating evidence indicates that memory, reasoning, decision-making and other higher-level functions take place across people,” the researchers wrote in a review in the journal Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. “Cognition extends into the physical world and the brains of others.”

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“In cognitive neuroscience, the standard approach is essentially to assume that knowledge is represented in the individual brain and transferred between individuals,” Barbey said. “But there are, we think, important cases where those assumptions begin to break down.”

Take, for instance, the fact that people often “outsource” the task of understanding or coming to conclusions about complex subject matter, using other people’s expertise to guide their own decision-making.

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Several fields of research are ahead of neuroscience in understanding and embracing the collective, collaborative nature of knowledge, Patterson said. For example, “social epistemology” recognizes that knowledge is a social phenomenon that depends on community norms, a shared language and a reliable method for testing the trustworthiness of potential sources.

“Philosophers studying natural language also illustrate how knowledge relies on the community,” Patterson said. “For example, according to ‘externalism,’ the meaning of words depends on how they are used and represented within a social context. Thus, the meaning of the word and its correct use depends on collective knowledge that extends beyond the individual.”

We have, then (in the first instance), a “self” that has been “freed” from the category of unity and dissolved into the multiplicity of drives or centers of force: “The assumption of one single subject is perhaps unnecessary; perhaps it is just as permissible to assume a multiplicity of subjects, whose interaction and struggle is the basis of our thought and our consciousness in general? . . . My hypothesis: The subject as multiplicity” (Nietzsche, Will to Power par. 490). This is echoed in his comment that “our body is but a social structure composed of many souls” (Good and Evil par. 19) But we are nowhere near the end of the process at this point, for, as Nietzsche adds in Beyond Good and Evil:

All there is or has been on earth of freedom, subtlety, boldness, dance, and masterly sureness, whether in thought itself or in government, or in rhetoric and persuasion, in the arts just as in ethics, has developed only owing to the “tyranny of such capricious laws”; . . . Every artist knows how far from any feeling of letting himself go his “most natural” state is—the free ordering, placing, disposing, giving form in the moment of “inspiration”—and how strictly and subtly he obeys the thousandfold laws precisely then, laws that precisely on account of their hardness and determination defy all formulation through concepts (even the firmest concept is, compared with them, not free of fluctuation, multiplicity, and ambiguity). (par. 188)

Although many postmodern readers—over-reliant on the Nachlass—have claimed otherwise,10 there is in Nietzsche (at least after The Birth of Tragedy) no sense that the chaotic ontological multiplicity that one is should simply be left that way, with a host of different desires all pulling the “subject” in competing directions. That would be a kind of Dionysian laissez faire that would, in the end, accomplish nothing great or meaningful. As Thiele notes, “frequent regime changes [in the soul, just as with societies] should not be invitations to anarchy. Struggle begets strength, but anarchy, in the soul and society, signifies powerlessness, a regression to barbarism. A tensioned order is the goal, and to this end leadership is found indispensable” (63). He quotes Nietzsche to this effect: “To become master of the chaos one is; to compel one’s chaos to become form: to become logical, simple, unambiguous, math- ematics, law—that is the grand ambition here” (Thiele 63, citing Will to Power par. 842). Nietzsche is clearly indicating that for there to be any real greatness there must be an Apollinian structuring, a giving of order to bind the chaos that one is. Graham Parkes compares the Nietzschean chaotic multiplicity to Hegel’s bad infinity: “The phenomenon of multiplicity . . . cannot be taken simply as ‘a good thing’: it can issue, depending on the circumstances and on how it is handled, more easily in degeneracy than in fulfillment” (445). Ken Gemes also gives a particularly compelling argument against the (Deleuzean) Nietzsche who is a pure affirmer of multiplicity. So while Nietzsche held that unity of the self is composed of multiple interacting drives, he expresses that greatness comes from imposing order on the chaos of the multiplicty. Does he allow for "conversation" or "interaction" between the drives under such order?