The Logic Vortex or "Hey Mark Stevens, A is not A!"

Another idea blown away. For some reason Dakota started screaming, "I've got monkeys in my head."

"Dakota, Don't think about Monkeys!" I commanded, fully expecting that Dakota would experience the joy of futility in the tradition of Don't think about elephants

But her Kung-fu is proving to be better than mine. Immediately, she smiled and said "Ok! I'm thinking about lions!"

Just to test, I asked, "What were you thinking about?"

"I don't know... lions?"

Then it hit me: my three-year old daughter is a natural master of what my peers ridiculously have called "The Logic Vortex."

I thought to earlier in the evening as we were driving through Chick-Fil-a at 6PM and Dakota asked "Daddy, is it day time?"

"Dakota, what do you think?"

"It's day time."

"Is the the sun out?"

"Yes"

"No, the sun is not out," I said firmly, "Do you see Ray?"

"I don't see Luna, so Ray must be out."

I thought about this for a moment. For the last several days, she has been working on this construction. Against all fact, and against all that was apparent, she was trying to assert that night is day using sheer argument. For you formalists, what she had constructed was a weak form of a Refutative Enthymeme.

"Okay, Dakota, you win. It must surely be day time."

The disjoint between the world as she observes it and the facts as adults force upon her (all kids, not just her) is both real and vibrant. It is also the source of her instinct that statements of facts are epistemological constructs and therefore based on persuasion, consent, and coercion.

Or course, all kids seem to get this. For those of you who need some examples: telling non-sleepy kids that its naptime, or my favorite example is food and play food ("See that food, don't play with that" "but it looks like something fun to play with" "See that toy that looks like food, don't eat it." "but it looks good to eat" this isn't just mere contradiction, kids food often looks like a fun toy but is, in fact, quite inedible [try eating it yourself some time] while play food is totally boring [it just sits there after all] but can often look delicious [especially meat and fruit]) Some kids have trouble with the disconnect between apparent truth and stated fact resulting in stuff like: can't distinguish their imaginary friends from real people, fibs, contrariness. What is less clear is that (from time to time) every adult continues to do these things and, in particular, will tend do do it a lot when dealing with kids.

Its neat to see kids working out their cognitive dissonance, to me anyway. I think that most parents and teachers dread this liminal state and hope for the point where kids become "normal" and display the "correct" behavior: having no imagination, believing everything they are told by people in authority as gospel, mistaking rhetoric for logic, and mistaking simple deduction for original thought. I have a bigger rant that starts "Why is the point of childhood to encourage imagination only to have the point of adolescence be to crush that imaginativeness?" but I'll save that for a time when I am angry, this is a happy post.

For years, I felt as if the arbitrary nature of epistemological assertion was best summed up by something Andy Chen once observed, "I love arguments about Aesthetics. They all basically go like this: I think that is ugly. No it isn't"

But Dakota Jane has done better in two steps:

First she asserts that night is day, then she really changes her mind and thinks about lions instead.