Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Postmodern Pedagogy 461
away. A deeper understanding of the word sharp awaits further training or experience. Gradually,
however, the necessary experience and training accumulates.
Finally, as an older child, Tommy might be taught to use the term sharp metaphorically. “Is
the pain sharp?” the doctor of nine-year-old Tommy asks—but Tommy does not understand the
question. Seeing a blank look on the child’s face, the doctor explains, “You know, a sharp feeling,
like when something sharp sticks you?” Tommy winces. He doesn’t remember his original lesson
in “sharpness” but he has acquired a number of unpleasant associations to the term. “Do you
have a pain like that,” the doctor continues, “or is it just uncomfortable like wearing clothes too
tight?” Suddenly, a look of comprehension washes across Tommy’s face. Tommy understands
that a “sharp pain” is like the pain of being stuck by something sharp. The primitive language
games of his past prepared a place for the growth of his understanding. The doctor’s explanation
would have gone over the head of a two-year-old Tommy. Can you imagine trying to explain
what a sharp pain is without such a metaphor?
Wittgenstein’s philosophy suggests that this kind of metaphorical extension of primitive language
is a key means for humans to develop introspective language, philosophical language, and
languages for observing nuance and aspect. These higher orders of language are rooted in the
places prepared for them by a training in primitive language games.
And while we seldom notice, ordinary adult language contains many metaphors sprinkled
through out. (Take the word contains and sprinkled, for example, in the last sentence.) Part of our
sense of understanding things in more depth comes from seeing metaphoric connections that we
cannot see without the mastery of the primitive language games. Sophisticated games build one on
top of each other, creating lattices of improved and enriched understanding by connecting topics
and exposing the wealth of their relationships, permitting us to talk much more meaningfully
than we could otherwise do.
Postmodernity has much to learn and to offer in this challenge of enriching the advanced
language games through more deliberate teaching. This brings us to the frontier of pedagogy for
maturing students, paralogy. And, since we have already talked about paralogy, we are now at
full circle.
THE PARALOGY OF POSTMODERN LANGUAGE GAMES
Paralogy is the concept discussed earlier in this chapter when talking about the way skeptical
postmodern teachers discover each other in conversation. Paralogy is the kind of conversation
they use that creates social bonding. Its parameters are still being discovered, except for the fact
that the conversationalists are not reaching for universal metanarratives. They are discussing more
specific situations and have tolerance for different points of view, considering ideas, not whole
theories.
Paralogy helps postmodern teachers, but is not just for teachers. Teachers can learn to facilitate
it in their student groups—once a place for doing paralogy has been prepared. Good seminar
leaders, for example, know how to initiate paralogical discussion by seeding the discussion
with interesting and meaningful remarks and questions. In such a discussion, new metaphors,
new associations, based on a common set of primitive language games, can emerge to enrich
everyone’s understanding. This is done in part by inventing new language games, language games
that the teacher could not have invented independently for the students, language games that grow
out of the creative interaction of the students themselves while engaged in their own paralogy.
This is a very advanced form of instruction. Infants have much to learn before they can enter
into paralogy. At the same time, the student who is not encouraged to engage in paralogy is
infantalized by being taught only through the mastery of primitive language games. That is
surely a stultifying form of education for most adolescents and adults, except, perhaps, in the