Q&A: How Do Examples and Illustrations Create New Understanding?
How Do Examples and Illustrations Create New Understanding?
Question
A question I was thinking about today: how do examples and illustrations create new understanding?
And more specifically, one can think of two kinds of examples: (a) those that bridge details and gaps in knowledge that were not clarified in the body of the argument; (b) those that illustrate the argument itself. In what follows I mean the second type.
And I’ll give—how could I not—an example: suppose a child has trouble understanding that one plus one equals two, and the moment you illustrate it for him with an apple plus an apple equals two apples, he understands. What happened here? It is hard to say that he disagreed with the argument itself, because if so the example would not have helped with that either. So what did happen here? Why is it that through concretization we suddenly understand?
[The truth is that maybe one could say that this is what happened, similar to how you explain rhetoric, that it succeeds in “moving” a person from one point to another. But that is not exactly what I am talking about here, rather about more common situations.]
Another example: I was learning with a young man who could not understand the reasoning of migo, but the moment I told it to him as a story with an illustration—he understood. What happened there?
I have some possible directions for an explanation, but something here feels elusive to me and I can’t quite make it clear.
Answer
It seems that we have an ability to see the general abstraction through examples. It is like eidetic vision (contemplating ideas through tangible objects). Most of us have difficulty grasping abstract things. But when you see it concretely before your eyes, it is easier to abstract and generalize. This is one of the reasons for the casuistic approach in law, which prefers to build it from cases rather than from rules.
Discussion on Answer
I see the example with my eyes. The abstract principle is not something one sees. Obviously, seeing something before one’s eyes is preferable to abstract understanding. That is how we are built. Therefore, when teaching too, it is better to do it bottom-up rather than top-down. That is, not to begin with the rule and then move to applications, but to show examples of applications and from them extract the rule. That is also how the Talmud proceeds, focusing on examples rather than rules. We arrive at the rules from the examples.
As for your question about morality: there too, examples clarify a general principle. Someone who disagrees with the general principle does so because in his view morality is not binding, since it is not objective. I do not think this is connected to the question of the relationship between examples and the general law that underlies them. With regard to the examples as well, he would say that it is subjective and not objective.
Nice, I understand.
Thank you very much!
From one matter to another on the same matter:
I have a great deal of frustration with studying science in general.
And I’ll explain: I’m a fairly talented guy (that’s how it seems to me, and that’s the feedback I get from people around me).
At a young age I did not acquire any scientific education at all (the multiplication table doesn’t count 🙂). Now I’m interested in chemistry, and I don’t have the patience to build knowledge brick by brick, because the lower level bores me; but on the other hand, I also don’t manage to understand things in depth. For example, I open entries on Wikipedia and move from concept to concept—periodic table, polymer, isotope, and so on and so on—and it all becomes a complete mess in my head.
Do you have any practical recommendation, such as videos, books, and the like, that could address this issue? (I assume there are quite a few other people in my situation.)
Thank you very much.
I don’t have any shortcuts. If you want to know and understand something in depth, you have to study it in an orderly way.
Thank you very much. I understood.
And still I wonder—and maybe this is just nitpicking, and it is simply “just like that”—what is there in the example that succeeds in clarifying the abstract principle? On the face of it, we are supposed to understand the abstract principle by contemplating the abstract; the example is only an instantiation, a mere (crude?) realization, which should not really add anything. So why does it suddenly help precisely in that way? Or to put it differently: this very method of seeing something concrete and only then abstracting from it seems longer and more convoluted than simply speaking directly about the abstraction.
And maybe this really is the tendency of some people to attribute a subjective layer to moral principles. For according to them, examples do not really clarify something true; they merely play on emotion. In other words, there are those who remain only with my opening question.
But if so, I think at least there is an initial direction here for persuasion. Namely, to such a skeptic one could say: you, who in other contexts would agree that through an example you really did understand the principle behind it—for example through a case of migo, as mentioned—you can therefore understand that the model of a moral example clarifying a principle is a legitimate one.
Do you agree?