[Found in Maestro Victor ’s quotes:] A problem for understanding intellectual development is that we have no adequate metaphors for it. You will perhaps recall Jonathan Miller’s claim that it became possible to understand the function of the heart and the circulation of the blood only after the invention of pumps to clear mines of water. Everyone since the beginning of our species has felt that regular thump in the chest and has seen blood spurt when arteries are cut. Thinking of the heart as a pump enabled us to understand its function.

But we have no similarly useful metaphor to help us understand intellectual or cultural or educational development. The nearest processes are biological… Piaget’s is perhaps the best known elaboration of a biology-based metaphor of development, and John Dewey elaborated a conception of education drawing on “growth”.

I have tried to adhere to a nonbiological and rather vague use of “development”. These kinds of understanding are only “somewhat” distinctive in that they are not wholly different forms of thought, mutually incomprehensible; they are not so much like different computer programs as like modules of a well-integrated program, focusing on different tasks but each able to comprehend the others. Well, that’s not a great metaphor either; tempting though computer metaphors are for mental operations, they always seem to confuse as much as they clarify.