When you are starting something new, guidance can be essential. For example, climbing a mountain for the first time in difficult conditions is potentially dangerous. A guide to help you navigate the climb, alert you to dangers and bring your attention to features which you can use to your advantage not only seems sensible but crucial. However, guidance, as with all things in life contains a paradox, which will be explored in this article
The OED defines guidance as
“…help or advice that is given to somebody, especially by somebody older or with more experience”
We could separate guidance into two broad types. The first type is where guidance is given by someone who is physically present. The second type is where guidance is codified into a document. Guidance of the first type involves an interaction between, for example, two people. One person is the guide, they are older andor more experienced. The second person is younger andor less experienced. Our guide draws attention to what is relevant in the environment. The guide can inform the second person what to notice and how to attend to what they notice.
Let us place the above in the context of the mountain climbing example. The guide helps the second person develop a salience landscape of relevance (Vervaeke et al, 2012, Anderson et al, 2022). This allows features of the environment to be foregrounded while other features can be ignored and backgrounded. Gibson (1966, 1977) referred to this cognitive process as affordance, certain features of the environment stand out as objects which you can use to participate with the environment more effectively to achieve a goal. The guide demonstrates how this is done. The mountain and the second person now have a more intimate relationship with each other facilitated by the guide.
The guide has given the second person knowledge across four types of knowing (Drawn from Vervaeke, 2022)
Propositional knowing-facts about the mountain such as its size and difficulty level
Procedural knowing-how to technically climb certain features of the mountain
Perspectival knowing-how to identify relevant features while climbing the mountain
Participatory knowing-how to fit knowledge of the self-most effectively into the task of climbing the mountain
The second person can ask the guide for clarification, direct questions of curiosity, have actions corrected or identified as moving in the right direction. The relationship is organic, with both parties dedicated to exploring how the second person can take who they are and make the most of this to effectively climb the mountain by coming to know the mountain better.
Let us now examine the second form of guidance applied to the same climbing example, that which is codified and presented as a document. This creates a relationship between a document and a person. The person could learn facts about the mountain, they could also learn certain procedures about how to climb parts and features of the mountain. However, they could not gain the perspective of what it is like to climb the mountain, to physically interact with the mountain which our physical guide could. The document cannot be engaged with organically, and so it is far more difficult to tailor the individual to mountain. In other words, as the climb is attempted, the document cannot make suggestions, and identify the customisation of technique in the same way the physical guide could.
We could say that the document can only really provide propositional knowledge. Yes, it could provide details of procedures, but not how it feels to enact these procedures, what the limits of these procedures are in real life. This would equate to knowledge separated from practice.
Therefore, written guidance either needs to be encountered with caution or rather serve as support to a physical guide. But what happens if the physical guide becomes unaware of what they consider relevant and how they attend to relevance to produce outcomes? Klein et al (1989) uncovered something similar in their pioneering work into expertise and natural decision making.
Klein et al (1989) investigating Firefighter Commander decision making discovered that the experts, the high performers, could not explain how or why they did what they did. In other words, they could not provide an account of the four types of knowing. The knowledge was tacit, intuitive, and instinctual. However, because the elite could not share what they tacitly knew, novices were trained using guidance which did not identify the affordances (Gibson, 1977) the elite were using to produce their results.
And hear lies a paradox in guidance. Can the older and more experienced person access their essential knowledge? What is written guidance built on, the lessons extracted from experience or a form of statistical analysis which bears little resemblance to how the four types of knowing are applied to tasks in practice? An acknowledgement needs to be made about guidance. Has the guidance come from a guide who is able to reflect on their intuition and provide insight across the four types of knowing which people can apply to shifting and changing contexts? Or is the guidance something which is abstracted and exists only as a series of propositions which a novice must muddle their way through? Experience and seniority do not always make someone a guide. And an official document may only contain propositions, not guidance on how to participate more effectively.
Reading
J. J. Gibson (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Allen and Unwin, London.
Vervaeke, J. & Lillicrap, T. & Richards, B. (2012). Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science. J. Log. Comput.. 22. 79-99. 10.1093/logcom/exp067.
Andersen, Brett & Miller, Mark & Vervaeke, John. (2022). Predictive processing and relevance realization: exploring convergent solutions to the frame problem. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 10.1007/s11097-022-09850-6.
Gibson, J.J., 1977. The theory of affordances. Hilldale, USA, 1(2), pp.67-82.
Vervaeke (2022) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHwrV96bv84
