Recently, I’ve been exploring the notion of explanation and understanding. I was (partly implicitly) relying on the notion of ‘mental representations’ as built through deliberate practice. My plan was to write next about how I think we can reconceptualize deliberate practice in such a way that it draws on a richer conception of ‘mental representations’. But that is turning out to be a much longer project.
Meanwhile, in a recent conversation about teaching practitioners, somebody mentioned reading Kahneman’s ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ as being relevant to the problem and we discussed maybe starting a reading group. This got me thinking about what should such a reading group have on its reading list.
The literature on expertise is vast (just look at the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance). In my proposed reading list, I would focus on identifying different perspectives on how our mental representations of the world are structured, how we develop them (or how we can help others develop them), how we solve problems with them, and how they are embedded in the social environment in which we function.
1. Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (2011)
Kahneman’s famous book is not really focused on experts but rather on the limitations of our thought – summarised under the heuristics and biases banner. But Kahneman’s notion of ‘System 1’ (fast) and ‘System 2’ (slow) thinking is directly relevant to the question of expertise. Expertise means that one can think about complex issues quickly but also that one can analyze that same issue with deliberate attention to detail. Exactly how this applies to the question of educating experts is a matter of discussion that I think the other books on my list can help elucidate.
2. Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise by Anders Ericsson with Robert Pool (2016)
In this book, Ericsson (helped by journalist Pool) provides an outline of a cognitive mechanism by which fast thinking is acquired without the sacrifice of deliberation in the concept of ‘delibrate practice’. I propose that the key to understanding deliberate practice is not the process of practice but rather on Ericsson’s rethinking of the target that the practice should help us achieve. According to Ercisson, what delibrate practice leads is not knowledge or skill but rather ‘mental representations’. Mental representations are best thought of as chunks of knowledge (frames, scripts, schemas, etc. – which makes this approach overlap with Kahneman and Tversky’s work even though Ericsson does not mention this). This allows experts to perform complex mental operations on very rich subject domains which would be beyond the computational powers of anyone’s pure raw intelligence. The best analogy is being able to play chess or speaking a language – this is impossible by simply knowing the rules – we need a rich complex of mental representations to compete at chess or to speak with any fluency.
3. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner (2002)
Where Kahneman provides the framework and Ericsson the mechanism of acquisition, Fauconnier and Turner offer us a much more detailed description of the actual structure of ‘mental representation’ and how it is used during live processing of information. Building on work in cognitive linguistics and semantics, they develop the notion of ‘conceptual integration’ (or ‘blending’ as it’s more popularly referred to in the field) that explains how multiple ‘mental spaces’ or ‘domains’ can be merged seemingly without any conscious effort into new domains (blends) that we can then build further understanding on.
In this context, I’d also recommend reading the parts of Lakoff’s ‘Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things’ that describe what he then called ‘Idealized Cognitive Models’ and now calls ‘frames’. The book is quite vast and not all of it relevant to this question, which is why I wrote a guide to it.
4. Rethinking Expertise by Harry Collins and Robert Evans (2008)
What’s missing in all the works I’ve looked at so far is any awareness of the social embeddedness of expert performance. There is little discussion of types or levels of expertise and barely any mention of how experts interact with one another. In ‘Rethinking Expertise‘, Collins and Evans propose what they call a ‘periodic table of expertise’ (which happens to overlap quite nicely with my 5 types of understanding). They think not just about the specialist expert knowledge but also about what they call ‘ubiquitous expertise’ – all the underlying skills and knowledge required to even get started (such as languages, basic social skills, metacognition, etc.). Most importantly, they also pay attention to ‘meta-expertise’, i.e. how non-experts evaluate experts and experts judge other experts.
Their notion of expertise relies on the concept of ‘tacit knowledge’ (later developed by Collins in a separate book) which is reminiscent of Ericsson’s ‘mental representations’ and echoes Kahneman, as well.
5. Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action by Donald A. Schön (1983)
While Schön’s book has had a profound impact in terms of citation and ways of thinking, I suggest that it has been largely under-appreciated for its depth of epistemological insight. Despite being more than 2 decades older than any of the other books on this list, it is very much still relevant. It considers the very nature of ‘practical knowledge’ as opposed to ‘academic knowledge’. Schön, more than any of the others thinks about the practical needs of a person needing to achieve practical tasks with their knowledge in a complex situation. He highlights the tensions between the technical preparation of experts that focuses on knowledge about a subject and the practical needs of a practitioner who needs to act in such a way that simply recalling information would not be sufficient. His concept of ‘reflection-in-action’ could be seen as a precursor or better still a companion to the notion of ‘deliberate practice’.
Schön followed this up with Educating The Reflective Practitioner which focuses on the practical question of structuring a training course. Another reason to include Schön on this list is that he focuses more directly on ‘professional’ expertise.
Bringing it all together
What these books have in common is an underlying conception of knowledge and its processing. But what they lack is almost any awareness of each other. This makes them add up to more than just the sum of their parts.
Kahneman mentions Ericsson in a footnote and Ericsson and Collins appear jointly in the Cambridge Handbook I mentioned at the start. But they largely travel in separate spheres. Bizarrely, none of them refers to Schön. And all of them are completely unaware of Fauconnier and Turner, who in turn ignore the work done outside their field of cognition (even though we can trace the lineage of their work on cognitive domains directly to Schön’s earlier work on metaphor).
All these approaches are clearly converging on the same thing but they don’t do it using the same terminology, methods or even a shared conceptual framework. Which is why reading just any one of them would probably not be enough to get at the full scope of the issues involved.
I’m not certain that this selection is the most representative of the field. It is certainly not exhaustive and it is definitely shaped by my idiosyncratic intellectual journey and personal interests. But my hope is that it does triangulate the problem domain in a way that a more narrowly focused selection would not.