Development at Work with French Fries

Once a while back at a restaurant I happened to catch this child eating french fries. But she was engrossed in something else besides eating. I was interested in her intensity as she studied the french fries in frame 1. She has two and both have ketchup but something interests her. In frame 2 she dips one that already has ketchup on it into the ketchup and then seems to be comparing the two in frame 3 but it is more than comparison. The close up in frame 4 suggests she is attempting to transfer ketchup from one to the other. Why?

She could, and later does, add ketchup by dipping the french fry once again but it is not adding ketchup than seems of interest; she seems intent on the transfer process itself. In frame 5 she continues they attempt to transfer. What is she trying to understand?

Obviously she is about to eat the french fry but clearly even though she is eating, it is the process of ketchup transfer that seems to fascinate her. Is is trivial to we adults but there is more to transfer than is obvious. Every transfer or transformation from one state to another produces a new observable property. The transfer of ketchup to the french fry produces an obvious change in the french fry to the child but not so with all dipping. Putting hands in water produces very little observable change, at least in color. But with the french fries there is a marked change in appearance. Now how can that transformation in the objects be understood?

Many times the child has dipped her hands in water and transferred the water to a towel effectively undoing the wetting caused by dipping. Here it may be the use of the same schema, the wiping of the french fry to undo the ketchuping. We don't know what the amorphous intent of the child might be. Doing and undoing some change is a fundamental process in developing an understanding of the world, and it seems to be the case here. If she can markedly change the appearance of the french fry by dipping it in ketchup, how can she undo this change. How can she do the same thing in the opposite direction—from dipping and changing the french into one with a red glob on the end, then back again to one without a red glob?

There is another clue. When children try to think about transformations and they cannot yet effect the action in thought, this lack of representation develops by abstraction from the physical, sensory-motor activity. It is the coordinations of behavioral activity that come to be reconstructed on the higher plane as mental activity and therefore representation. The object cannot be represented in its absence without a cognitive mechanism that can reconstruct the absent object and its transformations in the mind's eye.

The clue lies in the child's mouth. Often when children attempt to put challenging things together or take them apart (and actually we even find adults making facial contortions in difficult tasks), they reflect the transformations with facial gestures. The opening of her mouth could be the reflection of the physical nature of the task. It might appear to be an anticipatory action before eating the french fry but she is not yet going to eat it. She finds she cannot transfer the ketchup from one french fry to the other in frame 5 (all photos didn't upload), and so after having completed the transfer experiment, in the last frame she dips each french fry once again and eats each.


I want to make a point by this perhaps tedious analysis of a simple act of eating french fries, and it goes beyond the simplistic platitude that digesting cognitive aliment is as important to children as the biological digestion of the physical aliment. It is about the relationship between parenting and the development of intelligence. Imagine how different parents might react to this child's activity. One might say, "Don't play with your food. Finish eating and then you can go play." Another might say, "Are you running out of ketchup? Here, I'll give you some more." Others might say nothing but fleetingly think about how cute that is for the child to dip her french fries so carefully in ketchup. Extremely rarely would a parent see in the child's activity a careful process of investigation and the construction and refinement of schemas of transfer and change objects physical objects.

Norms and Government

By norms, I mean the patterns of thought and action that by their compelling nature are repeated and generalized in similar situations. Every instance of thought and human action has in its operation a form or norm that is the organizational aspect of the activity as it is applied to a situation or a content. In the arena of social thought and action, norms include moral principles and ‘shoulds’ that indicate intentions for human activity. We say couples should get married before having children or polygamy is wrong.

Norms tend toward a process of grouping together to form larger systems. This process of building larger systems brings with it increasing coherence, wider extension, and removal of contradictions. systems. When various individual norms clash, the process of development consists in overcoming contradictions by re-organizing previously disconnected norms into larger systems. The normative aspect of thought enlarges and extends its forms to more elements and situations. In short, we can observe the normative systems of the human species developing over time.

This development is, of course, uneven, and we find the norms of society vary widely across groups and individuals. Liberals and conservatives hold different and often mutually incompatible norms—pro-life versus pro-choice. The norms of society vary widely across groups and individuals. Liberals and conservatives hold different and often mutually incompatible norms—pro-life versus pro-choice. Thus, there are many normative systems; there is not one normative system of society.

Some normative systems are weaker in that they are more limited and appear contradictory when extended to other areas whereas others have achieved the integration of many subsystems of norms. The values of weak undeveloped norms appear more as egocentric wants and desires such as the desire for free health care or a living wage whereas advanced systems produce abstract values such as love, tolerance, voluntarism. The systems thus vary from those more centered on particular subjective notions to those that are de-centered from egocentric viewpoints to a more universal framework that incorporates and reorganizes the weaker, earlier forms.

The norms and values of society form the basis and justification for law. Morality and norms of all kinds do not derive from law but produce law. They are the source of law which only incompletely formalizes some norms, and not always the best norms. And, of course, there are competing norms that challenge the validity of other norms whether expressed in law or not. The difficulty is that we can’t make law the source of the normative principles that guide human actions either as a practical matter or as a explanatory framework for the source of human norms. And government cannot establish their own validity. Somewhere in their history is their establishment and imposition by force. Voluntary government wouldn’t be government since it would be replaced by multiple forms of inter-individual cooperations. Government functions only as people intend to use force with reprisal to them.

Furthermore, there are multiple norms and normative systems with no one set that is a finished product, non-contradictory, all encompassing, and definitive. Even if there was, we have no access to such an ideal, we have no way to recognize the ideal, we have no way into the Platonic heavens. We certainly can’t rely on popular opinion, religious leaders, politicians, presidents to be the source either in practice or as an explanation of the source of norms, nor can we rely on our intuitions or to things in our thought we think are obvious and necessary. The intuitively obvious is notoriously at the whim of subjective biases, and it cannot be the source of normatively enlightened.

Obviously, human norms develop over time both from childhood to adult as well as historically from pre-cognitive humans down to present day. Admittedly given all this, the problem of norms seems almost unsolvable but since norms develop we can find a vector to their history, a direction toward which normative systems tend to develop. It should be non-controversial to posit from fact and theory a general direction of one-way authoritarian and coercive relationships organizing groups and inter=individual activities toward cooperative and voluntary relationships. Development replaces coercive obedience with choice and cooperation. We move from various forms of human enslavement to voluntary and mutually beneficial systems of exchange.

As to normative systems of moral and social activity, it would seem that to attempt to use law as a coercive tool by which to control and enforce various forms of ‘enslavement’ (by which we mean compelling confinement in a certain form of relationship that disproportionately serves an overlord at the expense of the subjugated people) expresses a very primitive level of normative development. Such systems demand and enforce obedience directed against the will and choices of some people. We would have to say of those people who would subject gays and lesbians to such a system of legally forced compliance with non-universal norms, norms idiosyncratic to their subjective preferences, that these people are relatively primitive in their normative development.

While the problem of non-tolerance of primitive normative systems might seem to be a legal one—let’s use the law to fix this problem—the law is not the source of norms, and it is not the cure. Democratic action is not a source of moral development because the law is only a tool, an expression of normative thought. It is the development of the normative systems that constitutes fundamental advance of a society. Keeping government out of the problem is necessary since government and law creates a rigidity and a fundamental impediment to human development, in this case of the development of normative reasoning and morality.

Bigotry and intolerance are not a problem unless they are enacted in law or if they use government to force compliance with their primitive notions of right and wrong. If government prevents harm from the attempts by bigots and intolerant people to force their norms and values on others, we can then have every faith that the vector of human development of societies’ moral and normative systems will continue. Government can’t cause progress; it can only block and impede progress.

Within human activity, indeed within all living systems, is that form-creative process that produces development and evolution of living systems, and this is true not only for biological and social/psychological systems but for ethical and all other normative systems. Life is form creative, and it is transcendent of its condition except when a force outside it blocks its constructive activities. Force, in any form whether private, organized, or government, is evil for it harms the development and transcendence of life.

Life is good.