[2 of 5] Detecting Growth in Language (pages 11-23) by James Moffett (1992)
Author: James Moffett Curated by Jonathan M. Marine and Paul Rogers
Moffett, James. “‘Abstracting,' 'Egocentricity' and 'Explicit and Implicit,’” Detecting Growth in Language, Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., Portsmouth, NH, 1992, p. 11-23.
Abstracting
Because the matching off of thought with the forms of language cannot be done on a one-to-one basis, an idea may be said many ways. The myriad options for matching thought with speech create, in fact, all the glories and problems of comprehension and composition. Working in the gap, then, between invisible thought and visible language, a teacher needs a concept applying equally to both. The concept of abstracting serves this purpose.
Abstracting is mentally mapping reality. It comprises two opposite processes, analysis and synthesis, working together simultaneously. By virtue of analysis, the mind is able to elaborate global wholes into their particulars. By virtue of synthesis, the mind is able to generalize otherwise disparate particulars into wholes. Elaboration emphasizes differences and leads into the world. From it we gain discrimination and detailed fidelity to reality. Generalization emphasizes similarity and leads into the mind. From it we gain increased scope and the power of mental relating. Neither can function without the other, for just as generalizing presupposes some prior breakdown into particulars from which generalities can be drawn, elaborating presupposes some prior generalities that can be broken down into particulars. Abstraction is a tension between the two processes. It binds mind to world.
This tension stretches across any effort to speak, listen, read, or write. In composition, teachers constantly urge students to be specific, to add concrete details to narrative and description or to give examples to illustrate their ideas in an essay. On the other hand, teachers push students to relate ideas to other ideas and to details, to give emphasis and unity, to “tie things together.” All of these are classic issues in relating generality to instance so as to convey meaning. For comprehension, a reader must relate authors’ little facts to their main points, draw conclusions from cues and clues, put examples and evidence in proper relation to statements they support, and ‘pull together” the various big and little things the author has said into an understanding that focuses on the general and subordinates the particular in the ratio an author intends.
Generalizing
I’m using the term abstract here in its original meaning—to draw off. Don’t be confused by the fact that the noun abstraction usually connotes only high-level generalization. I’m using the term here to denote the process of economically selecting and recasting traits of experience. When we speak of a trait, we mean that which is drawn off, again in accordance with the original meaning. The abstracter selects a trait that for one purpose or another he or she deems an important aspect of an object, event, scene, or experience.
Doing this presupposes some analysis: in order to select out spotted as a trait of some things, one first has to differentiate figures from backgrounds and spots from figures—that is, break down reality. A trait is drawn off to reduce and reorder the world. The speckles on fruit, the spots on some animals, the freckles on people, the dots on a blouse, the ground pattern of sunlight through leaves, knotholes in paneling, the dark and bright places in someone’s “checkered career”—all become mentally digested in such a way that the spottedness of each dissociates itself from the concrete context in which it was embedded. This stripping off of local and detailed circumstances isolates the trait. Then, once singled out, a trait is ordered in the mind. It joins with the spottedness of the others to form a concept based on a common denominator, a vaguer image that can include sets of spots of different contexts, origins, purposes, colors, regularity. What is drawn from different sources is distilled to make a new mental entity. In this way, synthesis accompanies analysis.
Generalizing is a process of putting mind over matter. People don’t draw off traits of things as they do broth from beef, of course, because both contains actual molecules of beef, whereas an abstraction can only symbolize—code from a physical to a mental medium—and hence must partake of mental qualities. The mind codes reality within its own medium of bioelectrical circuitry the way a television receiver recapitulates original action electronically on its screen—by forming itself to match the form it is simulating. Whereas the television receiver can recapitulate only temporal and spatial forms of matter in motion, the mind can make logical forms as well because it is a far more complex medium having ocular representation as only one of its submedia.
All that can be abstracted from something is form. The basic idea of informing is to put into form, and that’s exactly what happens in matching experience with thought. Form is not a something but a relation—succession in time, direction and position in space, conjunction of circumstances or conditions. Relations are intangible, like mind itself. So thought can consist only of relating. Concepts result from sorting things into classes, and sorting is relating different things according to a common trait like spottedness. The traits themselves have to be formal in order to be drawn off—either an aspect of physical form such as spottedness or a relation such as that of owing in the concept of duty.
Abstracting spottedness shows at work the logical faculty responsible for generalization—analogy. (Analogic is thinking of things as like.) This is the same faculty responsible for metaphor. (The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins drew off spottedness in “Pied Beauty,” which begins, “Glory be to God for dappled things…”) Generalizing is a form of thought that may take several language forms, as we shall show later; it is not just a class concept in noun or adjective form, as in the example above.
Elaborating
To elaborate means to work out. Nothing can be elaborated that is not already contained as germ in the whole or generality to be elaborated.
Elaboration is the flowering of an idea; seed differentiates into stem, root, leaves, and blossoms—all of which come from within. Elaboration is unfolding a given, whether the given is an object to be descriptively detailed, a summary of action to be filled in, a statement to be exemplified, or a premise from which corollaries are to be deduced. Buried in someone’s use of spotted are concrete, remembered instances—fruit, fabric, or face—that he or she “has in mind” and could summon for elaboration. Elaborating particulars makes explicit (“unfolded” the referents of word, whereas generalizing leaves instances implicit, assumed. When the referent of a word is not a physical thing but an idea itself, then elaborating brings out the ramifications (“branchings”), the hidden implications.
Whatever the level, elaborating works by reversing generalization. Generalizing achieves scope by extending the referent over time and space-over all spotted things anywhere, any time. Elaborating achieves discrimination by narrowing the compass of time and space covered—down to some spotted animals at some times and places, for example, or one freckled child at one time and place. Elaborating localizes, puts things back into time and the concrete circumstances from which generalizing drew them. This leads to multiplicity, of course, for as generalizing subsumes many instances into one concept or statement—”uses up” raw material at a great rate, so to speak—specifying particulars restores original quantity, as well as quality, of experience.
Elaborating also turns up instances one had not thought of before. It is a tool for finding out fully what one means. Once armed, for example, with the concept of a spectrum, one could look for instances other than the orderly arrays of color shades and musical tones by which one may have first come to understand the concept and thus think of scaling metals by their degree of tensile strength or scaling people by their degree of patience. Or one might check how broadly a statement like “opposites attract” applies by thinking of as many instances of it in different domains as one can. So it is that elaboration leads back from mind to world in a reversal of analogy.
Growth Sequence 1: Toward generalizing more broadly while elaborating more finely.
This formulation aims directly at heading off the mistaken notion that either generality alone or detail alone is good of itself. An overgeneralization is a statement based on too few instances and hence lacks underpinning. Endless inventory of details, on the other hand, comes to no more than laundry and grocery lists until organized under some generality that relates particulars to each other and to elements in a discourse.
The Dual function of abstracting
The function of abstracting is to enable individuals to match their minds to the world, on the one hand, and to fellow minds, on the other. Abstracting from experience makes information, to accommodate oneself to external realities. Abstracting for other people makes communication, to benefit from community. (One of the benefits is receiving other people’s information.) The dual functions of informing oneself and communicating to others interact with each other, because the same abstracting apparatus is serving both. The habit of communicating information influences how people inform themselves. Thought is private and speech public, but constantly matching thought with speech inevitably causes thinking to become somewhat public and stereotyped. This influence can be reciprocal; thought can cause speaking to become somewhat private and original. The first statement of growth, along the logical dimension of abstracting from, should be paired off with the following statement of growth along the rhetorical dimension of abstracting for.
Growth Sequence 2: Sending toward more general and more differentiated audiences.
Together, the two very general kinds of growth frame the more specific sorts formulated throughout this book. The second one cannot be fully explained, however, before “Growth in Kinds of Discourse” later in this book.
The Partialities of abstracting
The very function of abstracting biases it toward personal desire or public conventions (which represent communal desire). Mapping is always for a purpose, if only a playful one, and this purpose necessarily makes abstracting partial. Mental maps always specialize, like geographic maps, which may show mineral resources or air routes or ethnic distribution or temperature zones but never everything. No abstraction can render justice to all aspects of something, in its totality, because selective reduction is the point of abstracting. People can’t deal with all aspects of all things. They have to choose traits according to their values. This is why content is a factor of intent. One trades a loss of reality for a gain in control, to get a mental handle on reality toward certain ends. Abstracting is decision-making. This is necessary for survival, but the great and haunting danger of boomeranging always remains: people may exclude from their maps aspects of reality more vital to them than those their desires or their society’s conventions direct them to single out.
Abstractions can be true, then, only relative to some given value system and frame of reference guiding the selective reduction. They may be useful or beautiful but never true except in a partial way. Raw phenomena present themselves, and thought can only represent them in one or another biased way. This relativity unnerves many people, who simply cannot believe that the maps they and their fellows hold to be self-evident are not the maps. Or even if our own maps are not quite correct and complete, surely some maps somewhere are. But it is in the very nature and function of the abstracting process that it should fail to yield the absolute truth some part of a human being seems to hunger for.
Earlier eras made a distinction between human truth and divine truth. Religious beliefs aside, this distinction is necessary to remind us that no human being is desireless and unconditioned by society and that no human being has a vantage point of universal scope or impartiality. No matter how brilliant our mental faculties, our minds work in the service of mortals bound to a certain time and space and inheritance. This is why spiritual leaders have always said, “If you wish to know divine truths, you must link up with the divine, not seek to know in this way with the brain.” To claim that one’s utilitarian, scientific, and aesthetic statements about the world correctly and completely describe the world is to claim omniscience for reason.
Both mystics and scientists repudiate such intellectual arrogance. They agree that the world is too big for words, that if absolute knowledge comes, it comes by total illumination, not by putting back together with one faculty of reason what we have torn down with another, admirable as this dual process of synthesis and analysis is for its biological purpose. We cannot experience all of reality, cannot render all we experience into thought, and cannot render all we think into words. This may be why Hamlet tells Horatio that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy.
Growth Sequence 3: Toward increasing awareness that people create what they know and that this knowledge is partial.
Abstracting as composing and comprehending
Human beings are born composers. By drawing off traits of the world and rearranging them according to some mental order, people constantly compose reality, for composition literally means putting together, selecting, and arranging the elements of a medium. We put together our own world, more or less like other people’s because of social influences and similarities in basic equipment, more or less different because of individual variations in background and heredity. Our mental maps are compositions.
The root idea of comprehension resembles remarkably that of composition, despite the fact that they are supposed to be opposing sender and receiver viewpoints. To comprehend means to take together. The difference between “put together” and “take together” is the difference between composing and comprehending. Put suggests that one has wider choice of what to select than take, which suggests that one is given a previously selected set of things from which to abstract for some purpose. This is in fact exactly the case in reading, for example, where one must make sense of someone else’s writing. Writers have a similar problem, however; they have to make sense not of something someone else has abstracted, but of the matter they confront. If people run up against either a text or an experience that they cannot fit into their previous mental maps, they say they don’t know what “to make of it.” Similarly, we say of speakers or writers, “They don’t make sense.” The common idea that people make sense, create meaning, seems to acknowledge that whether composing something themselves or comprehending someone else’s composition, people are in the same basic position. Whether faced with physical events or a book, one has to interpret. Interpreting is one kind of abstracting. Within this similarity of making sense, then, composing and comprehending differ in whether one is abstracting from raw reality or from another’s abstraction of it. Listening or reading is digesting someone else’s digestion. This is a difference in the level at which one is abstracting.
Levels of abstraction
Actually, no reality is truly raw by the time people become conscious of it. All that the nervous system can do is simulate in the medium of the body those phenomena it registers. A retinal image, for example, is the body’s equivalent of the artist’s conception. So the sensory impressions from which people abstract concepts are themselves abstractions. There are higher and lower orders of abstraction within both perception and conception, as we will explain further on. Moreover, as we just said, people make some of their information by comprehending other people’s compositions in various media—that is, by abstracting from others’ abstractions. Any such successive abstracting creates higher levels from lower ones. People not only make the reality they know, they make it by abstracting higher abstractions from lower ones. Knowledge-making is hierarchical.
Processing matter into mind comprises several stages that relate to degrees of growth. The nervous system codes external reality from the outside in, first with the muscles or motor apparatus, then with the senses, then with memory, and finally with reason. Stages may be bypassed, as when we learn about something from pictures only or as when we read about something, but when we abstract for ourselves from the ground up, each of these four knowledge-making faculties abstracts from the abstractions created by the faculties below. Reason doesn’t go directly to work on raw external reality; it operates on what the senses represent to it of external reality, most of which has been filed away in the memory. And memory depends completely on sensory reports for the material it files away. Sensory perception abstracts information from external reality on the basis of body placement, position, movement, the quality of the sense organs, and interaction with environmental objects. What we see is limited to where the body takes the head and which way the head directs the eyes, so that abstracting begins with the organism’s own selective action. (Moreover, some sensors report what is going on just within the body itself.)
It is imperative, however, to understand the two-way nature of abstracting. The case is not that reason is the victim of wayward sensorimotor apparatus and memory. To a point it is fair to say that the muscles, the senses, and the memory have minds of their own, because each is a specialized part made to function in a certain way, and the information created by each is unique. But the overriding fact is that these components are told what to report on. The mind executes the orders of the will and the emotions by organizing all functions around these orders. Orders are to screen reality according to declared priorities. So the muscles, senses, memory, and reason all abstract under constraints imposed from above at the same time that they report upward. This compares to personnel at different echelons of a social organization sending reports to their superiors about what their superiors want to be informed of, not just about anything they might take it into their heads to say. Each echelon gives form to what it receives according to both its own form and the shaping directions it operates under.
The report at each echelon summarizes the reports submitted to it from echelons below, in pyramidal fashion, so that information becomes more reductive and further removed from original sources the higher it goes. The final report placed on the president’s desk or sent to trustees or shareholders has the virtue of being pertinent to what they want most to know about, but the successive abstractions risk loss of fidelity to the original external reality. More and more the organism or organization is processing previous processing. This is how the abstracting for cannot in practice be separated from abstracting from, and this principle of mind over matter reaches down to the very lowest level of abstracting.
Egocentricity
For undeveloped speakers, the way speech comes out seems to be the only way the ideas could have been cast into language. Indeed, they don’t really distinguish thought from speech at all and attribute to words a kind of magical absoluteness. Unable to envision alternatives, they cannot appreciate what is artful and cannot know how some utterance that does not work could have been better.
To be egocentric is to assume too much. Egocentricity is the main cause of communication difficulties in comprehending and composing. People assume at first that minds match, that other people see the world as they do, think about it the same way, mean the same thing when they use the same words, and fill in the gaps of language as they do. Thinking that something couldn’t be any other way is the very essence of egocentricity. Writers are sure that what they write can be taken only one way, and readers are sure they understand the text in the only way it can be understood. The assumptions, furthermore, are hidden. People don’t know what it is they don’t know. They overcome egocentricity only very slowly, and so it is developmental, a lifelong process requiring much verbal and social experience to discover that minds do not match as specifically as we thought but rather have to be matched in many particulars.
Examples of egocentricity in reading are omitting cues to meaning, skewing the selection of points or details, “reading in” what is not there, and failing to get in the author’s point of view to follow overexplaining or underexplaining, and “weak organization.” In other words, take almost any serious problem that teachers agree occurs universally in comprehension and composition and you will find, if you examine it closely, that it is caused by unawareness of one’s limited point of view. One way to put the matter is that successful readers must be able to role-play the author if they are to comprehend what the author is trying to say and how he or she is going about it. Conversely, authors must role-play (“allow for”) their audience.
Egocentricity is the smallest of several concentric circles that fence in our individual minds. We are also ethnocentric—inclined to view life from within a set of ethnic, racial, cultural, and linguistic assumptions that are hard for us to see because, like our private assumptions, they are taken for granted. We can “be subjective” collectively, sharing with some people a mental set not shared by people outside our group. Individuals differ in their thought and perception and values partly just as a result of being born into different groups. Every culture and every language are biased. Although some aspects of all languages are universal, the assumptions built into each language are not the same for all, and often the differences can be startling.
We are also geocentric, sexcentric, and so on. Most of humanity’s breakthroughs in thinking are removals of ideas—unthinking something that was not so or was partial. As children grow they become increasingly aware of cognitive options in how things can be thought about. More and more they unthink ideas they took for granted. This is the real meaning of open minded. It does not deprive thinkers of a position. The key, again, is awareness. They know where they stand. This awareness not only liberates their minds, it makes it possible for them to use language judiciously.
Growth Sequence 4: Toward increasing awareness that meaning resides in minds, not in words, and that different people may see the same things differently, verbalize the same ideas differently, and interpret the same words differently.
Explicit and Implicit
Listeners or readers who don’t understand a communication don’t know if the failure is theirs or the sender’s. If the communication is oral, however, sender and receiver can talk together and find out, in effect, whose hidden assumptions impede the message. But if the communication is written, the reader cannot let the author know what he doesn’t understand so that the author can cast her ideas another way or make more explicit her intent and content. Such a situation puts a premium on the sender’s judging right the first time around. She has to be aware enough of her possible egocentricity to predict the problems a reader may have in understanding what she’s trying to say. It puts a premium on the reader’s getting the meaning on one attempt by the author.
Both efforts require awareness of similarity and difference between sender and receiver. If the receiver knew everything the sender plans to tell him, the communication wouldn’t be needed in the first place. So some discrepancy must be assumed. Yet both have to assume they already share a great deal, or else the author would have to fill in a whole culture’s worth of background before she could begin to maKe he particular pit, ere the rue ex phie italiamunicating depends on how much they can assume a receiver shares with them certain factual knowledge, frameworks of understanding, and values. The less the difference between the speaker and listener, the less detail is needed. Tolstoy said that lovers talk in mumbled fragments because they know so well already what’s on each other’s mind that they need to convey very little.
One of the indications of maturity is the ability of a speaker to predict what different receivers will need to have made explicit for them and what they will understand without elaboration. The small child will expect you to know who Charlie is when he refers to him, whereas an older person will throw in an appositive like “Charlie, my wife’s brother,…” This is how sentence structure and other language forms grow as a result of growth in awareness of differences. For their part, receivers must anticipate that some parts of the communication are omitted and assumed, and they must be prepared to fill them in.
An eighteen-month-old child may have to use the single word “Juice” to say “Give me some juice,” “Is that my juice?” or “I’m drinking juice.” An adult too may employ “Juice” as a whole utterance, in response to the question, for example, “What are you going to serve to drink?” His answer is really, “I am going to serve juice.” For both infant and adult in these cases, the subject and the predicate of the unfinished sentence are implied and have to be “understood.” The adult’s “Juice” can indeed be understood from the context the conversation creates, but the context for the infants’ “Juice” resides only in his mind, and his utterance remains obscure or ambiguous unless the listener can infer his meaning from the context of the child’s action toward the juice as he speaks.
The adult could, if pressed, replace “Juice” with the whole statement it stands for, but the infant has no choice, because (1) he cannot yet sort out his global states of mind into parts that fit the parts of speech used to make sentences, (2) he has not yet figured out the different parts of speech and how to put them together to make statements, and (3) he is unaware of the ambiguity and of the listener’s need for elaboration. It is likely that all three grow along together, if unevenly, and that any differentiating of one sort—parts of thought, parts of speech, or speaker from listener—will bring along differentiating of another.
In verbalizing her experience for a listener, a speaker is making explicit for herself as well as her listener what until then was a cloudy impression made up of many details she had not singled out in her mind. In uttering the experience she differentiates it into aspects that fit language—subjects, actions, objects, time, place, manner, and so on. Eventually she becomes more expert at expressing similar experiences, because language breaks experience down into only so many classes and relations, but even as a very mature speaker later in life she will have trouble making some new experiences explicit because she has not yet tried to parcel them into language. Experience that is especially hard to shape into language may get ignored even by the experiencer, since not making it explicit for others in speech may cause her to remain unaware of it also. So growth in explicitness is relative to the nature of the experience—the less common, the harder to verbalize.
All this is not to say that making thought explicit is always and automatically a good thing. In the first place, as I said, it is impossible in any one communication situation to make everything explicit. Some things must be assumed—either some frameworks, on the one hand, or some details, on the other. The receivers have to draw some conclusions and supply some illustrations themselves. Furthermore, besides being unavoidable to some degree, implicitness is the main mode of the highest language expression—literature. So in an exact parallel to the simultaneous growth toward generalization and elaboration, people develop at once along the reversed directions of explicitness and implicitness.
Growth Sequence 5: Toward increasingly sensitive judgment about when explicitness or implicitness is more appropriate in composing and comprehending.
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I’m the Tech Liaison for the New York City Writing Project. I… (more)
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I’ve been engaged with two Habits of Mind: Engaging with Wonderment and Awe and Gathering Data with All Senses, and there is something here that fits with Moffett’s description of creating from what we know. I think it’s worth saying that writing starts with knowing something and knowing starts with wondering. So there something here. I don’t know… I’m still abstracting from this text.
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On the basis of your composed notes…
the problems Moffett points out could be turned into questions.
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75, gs 20
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52 and 54 voice on paper gs 21
137. GS 1 Gs 9 naming. Gs 1,
143 both tense and layers of abstraction gs 16
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