Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

Wikipedia defines learning as “acquiring new knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, preferences or understanding, and may involve synthesizing different types of information. ” 

One wonders what pattern the list of things following the word “new” are supposed to form; is there a particular connection? Could one insert any concept after ‘acquiring new…’ and still have a valid definition?  

Well, one probably needs to be wary of any definition on Wikipedia, and despite this one contains reference to the synthesis of information, I would be reluctant to accept that learning is really about “acquiring” a list, or, in fact, about “acquiring” at all. ‘Acquiring’ suggests possession and ownership, and a greediness – ‘the more the merrier’.

Other definitions one might find in any online search mention ideas such as ‘change’, ‘behaviour’ and ‘cognition’.  For many researchers in this area it would appear that the adoption of any one (or all) of these definitions has resulted in an inevitable process of breaking something whole down to its constituent parts. There, for me, may be the error and the reason why learning remains so difficult to define, and yet so widely understood.

Our understanding of any phenomena or thing, be it the physical universe, or emotional relation with a fellow human being, can never be the thing itself. The thing and the name of the thing are what Bateson would, I think, describe as being of different logical types. You can only map a phenomena onto a receiving surface, which necessarily contains its own distortions and limitations.

For one thing, our senses confine for us our maps of the world. And for another, whilst not possible to know things ‘as they are’, it is possible to know how you interact with that thing. The discovery that this is so is a higher level of learning.

The differentiated world, or the world of differentiation (of news), is what we experience via those senses. Without differentiation there is no possible way to experience anything and all description consists of making distinction. Epistemology is the systematic classification of differentiation. We are inseparable from and exist within this state of differentiation and distinction – it is life.