My Word's Worth: a weekly column by Marylaine Block

vol. 4, #32, March 8, 1999

GUESSING GAME

There was a wonderful cartoon in the Chronicle of Higher Education recently that showed a booth labeled "Information" side by side with a booth labeled "Conjecture." As one who sits every working day at a desk labeled "Information," I thought it a useful reminder that at least half of what I'm doing with my users is not dealing out facts, but helping people make intelligent guesses about the meaning of the facts, and helping them phrase search questions that will retrieve the specific information they want.

My official position as a librarian is that "zero results are not possible." This, of course, is not always true, but proceeding on that assumption increases your perseverance, and thus the likelihood that you will eventually find your answers. Unofficially, I am perfectly aware that not all questions have answers, and other questions have answers that are unknowable because the only people who know for sure aren't talking, or they're telling different stories: what WAS O.J. Simpson doing, minute by minute, the night Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were murdered?

Librarians and researchers and faculty sometimes appear to believe that someday all will be known if we can only gather enough data. To be sure, science and knowledge proceed by accumulating data, and now that we have massive computing power on our side, it's even possible to tell machines to sort through enormous quantities of random data--say, every bit of data about us gathered by the Census Bureau over the last 100 years--and then ask them what patterns they find there.

But our minds have limited storage capacity. Since we cannot deal with EVERY bit of information, we gather data after asking a question that limits the universe of data we select from. Starting from the proposition that it's harder for us to remember things as we get older, we might speculate that age either makes it harder for us to form new memories in the first place, or makes it harder to retrieve the memories. Our guesses allow us to design experiments to test each possibility. We analyze the results, speculate about their meaning, and go on to ask still other questions, test them with yet other experiments.

Which is to say, our conjecture booth is every bit as important as our information booth. Our questions and theories actually lead to the creation of knowledge.

Our ability to observe, ask questions, and play around with the things we see and know, also allows us to deal with novel situations. I was just reading about the siege of Peking, in 1900. When rescuers arrived, they found that every bit of metal--candlesticks, kitchen utensils, ornamental sculptures--had been melted down and made into bullets. Boards and bricks and earth had been turned into barriers , and women's gowns and undergarments had been cut up, sewed into bags and filled with sand to protect against the Boxers' artillery. When our lives are threatened, we can see the objects of everyday life freshly, and re-cast them as weapons or barriers.

So, what do we offer our kids in the way of training on how to ask questions and speculate about their answers? Parents and schools. Parents are the first, the ones who get that unending stream of questions: "Why is the sky blue?" "How does thunder make noise?" "Why is that teacher so mean?"

I've got to tell you, parents are hideously unprepared for this. For one thing, we mostly don't know the answers. When my son asked science questions, I'd have to tell him "I don't know. Next time we go to the library, let's get some books about it."

But because I didn't know the answers to his questions about why people do the things they do, or why history came out the way it did, my answers always started with "maybe because...or maybe...". And then I would suggest one or two possible explanations, and provide some evidence that might support each of them.

Sometimes I would try to clarify the issue by asking him some questions: "Is the teacher mean to ALL the kids?" If not, "Is she mean to YOU?" Or, "What can you tell me about the kids she IS mean to?" "What are the kids doing when she gets mean?" By asking him to think about what he had observed, I was showing him how to construct a hypothesis from it.

In short, BECAUSE I couldn't answer his questions, I taught him how to conjecture about what he knew, to make deductions from it, and how to gather information. This means our ignorance can be a blessing in disguise, because through it we can teach our kids how we go about asking good questions, making good guesses, and looking for answers.

That's what our schools and colleges should be doing as well. They should be teaching kids how to find out, by field observation or experiment or research, but I'm not convinced they are. Do we ask kids to simply accept as dogma that the earth revolves around the sun, when the evidence of their eyes suggests otherwise? Or do we teach them how scientists came to that conclusion after centuries of human conviction that the sun and stars revolved around us?

Neil Postman, in an essay called "Columbusity," says teachers who resist demands to teach creationism side by side with evolution are missing a splendid opportunity to show students how science asks questions and answers them. He notes that in order for a theory to be useful, it must be stated in such a way that it can be shown to be false. A usable theory should also be able to generate reliable predictions. If creationism and evolution are examined side by side on these grounds, students could see for themselves how theories are formulated, how data is analyzed, and how scientists deal with evidence that doesn't fit the theory. They would, says Postman, come to see that what we know is always a work in progress, always subject to change with the discovery of new information, new theories.

That would be useful education for a world that is becoming ever more ambiguous. The world we thought we knew keeps changing on us. Even what we knew for certain has turned out to be wrong or incomplete--when we first learned that 2 plus 2 doesn't always equal 4, the earth seemed to shift beneath our feet.

Absence of certainty is a frightening thing, and often the way we deal with it is to retreat to hard data, to the glorification of "Just the facts, ma'am." (I think that's what some of the "back to basics" schools are doing.) Or we turn to closed logical systems, like communism or fundamentalism, that either deny the existence of things that do not fit, or declare them to be sin or error.

But if we can keep the conjecture booth up and running, we have a grand opportunity. We need not just be seekers of information, passive receivers of knowledge. We can create it. If we are in the habit of making intelligent guesses, we can take the world around us, re-shape it, re-envision it.

I may be working in the information booth. But I'm also teaching kids to say, like Bobby Kennedy, "Some people look at the world the way it is and say "Why?" I dream a world that never was and say "Why not?"

NOTE: My thinking is always a work in progress. You could mentally insert all my columns in between these two sentences: "This is something I've been thinking about," and "Does this make any sense to you?" I welcome your thoughts. Please send your comments about these columns to: marylaine at netexpress.net. Since I've written a lot of these, some of them many years ago, help me out by telling me which column you're referring to.

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