QUEST, 2005, 57, 171-177
© 2005 National Association for Kinesiology and Physical Education in Higher Education
Jigsaw Puzzles and River Banks:
Two Ways of Picturing
Our Future
R. Scott Kretchmar
The papers presented at the 2004 Academy meetings can be thought of as pieces
from jigsaw puzzles. While the employment of this metaphor over the years has
been useful, we may be ready for a new image, one that is both more accurate
and inspiring. We can picture ourselves working at different locations along a
river bank. Some of us work upstream, near the headwaters, at the molecular
and genetic level. Others work on anatomy, physiology, culture, psychological
well-being, ethics, and even spirituality—all different places along the shore
as we move down the river toward the broad and deep waters by the bay. But
no matter what our location, we all work on water in one form or another.
This forces us to come to grips with our interdependence as researchers and
with far more complex notions of causation that have been popular heretofore.
The riverbank metaphor promises a kind of cooperation, unity, and mutual
appreciation that cannot be gained when we come to interdisciplinary meetings
carrying our independently produced and prized puzzle pieces.
When Dick Magill put together the 2004 Academy program, he followed
a time-honored tradition. He identified a timely theme and invited renowned
Fellows and guests from a variety of disciplines to address that singular topic. In
doing so, he reinforced what I would like to believe are three core values of the
Academy—unity, mutual respect, and intellectual humility. In unity, we speak to
common issues. Mutual respect is reflected in a balanced program. And humility
is reinforced each year as we see (or should see) the complexity of our problems
and the very partial or incomplete solutions any one of us can provide.
Academy Fellow # 27, C. H. McCloy, writing many years ago in The Research
Quarterly, was interested in the same things, namely—unity, mutual respect, and
intellectual humility.
Philosophizing upon physical education should illuminate many
problems concerning which there is no available scientific
The author is with the Department of Kinesiology at Pennsylvania State University,
University Park, PA 16802. E-mail: [email protected].
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KRETCHMAR
knowledge, but which are important to scientific progress . . . .
The scientist, the philosopher, and the man in the gymnasium
. . . must be united. They must not be allowed to grow hoary
whiskers of inert tradition. (McCloy, 1930, p. 63)
Interdisciplinary professions like ours have been working on unity, mutual
respect, and humility for a long time. It could be that the presence of very different
disciplines makes progress on these matters more difficult, but I have seen single
disciplinary fields and departments struggle with harmony as well. How we fit
together (or even whether or not we fit together) may well be a universal issue in
research and higher education.
I would like to think that we in the Academy have a leg up on this problem, in
part because we have worked so hard over the years to remain a unitary academy.
Indeed we have spent much time and energy on such difficult issues as our name,
our roots, our evolving identity, and as we have produced over and again, intelligent,
focused, well-balanced programs like this one. We gather each year as if to work
on a single puzzle of interest and concern to everyone alike, each bringing pieces
that no one else can produce, with each piece contributing (if only in modest ways)
to a whole picture.
I am not sure, however, that the jigsaw puzzle metaphor is the best one we can
find. And if I am right about us having a leg up on issues of unity, mutual respect, and
humility, we may be ready for better imagery. I would like to substitute river banks
for jigsaw puzzles and, with you as my witnesses and critics, see how well it works.
The question then, is this: Have we come together as an interdisciplinary group to
provide pieces of a complex puzzle in hopes of producing a more comprehensive
whole, one that would generate greater understanding and carry more predictive
power? Or have we joined forces to work at different places along the banks of a
river in hopes of understanding its flow, taming its energy, and perhaps altering
its course?
I like both metaphors and think that each one can be used to clarify where we
are as a profession and how our individual disciplines join forces. I have used the
puzzle image many times for undergraduate students, those aspiring professionals
who meet each one of us subdisciplinarians piece-meal and learn, as it were, which
parts of the overall movement puzzle we produce. There is a kind of friendly
democratic flavor to the jigsaw puzzle metaphor. In principle, no one piece is any
more important than another. And until we get the whole picture completed (or at
least the major portion of it), we will not be able to tell what we have. A degree of
humility is warranted as we try to add our piece to the whole and wait for its full
value to be realized.
But the more I dwell on this image, the more I think it is lacking. It would
have us working alone on our puzzle pieces and then coming together later to fit
them together. It encourages us to think of the whole as a composite of discreet,
potentially independent pieces—even though we agree, in principle, that they are
equally important. Enlightened dualists, for example, may claim that mind and
body are equally important, but they are still dualists for thinking that the person is
somehow a composite of two kinds of puzzle pieces—ideas and flesh. Likewise, we
might need to call ourselves enlightened interdisciplinary pluralists by thinking that
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independent puzzle pieces produced by philosophy, history, pedagogy, psychology,
medicine, physiology, chemistry, and physics might be brought together at meetings
like this one so that larger pictures can be constructed. While enlightened pluralism
is undoubtedly better than its unenlightened cousin (someone who refuses to
acknowledge the importance of cooperation and comparable worth), it still pictures
the whole as an accretion of more or less independent parts.
Might not the alternate image of working along the banks of a river allow
us to break through some of this inherited and constructed imagery and provide a
refreshing and liberating picture of what we do? Granted, working along an idyllic
river congers up more romantic images than constructing a puzzle on a cold, plain
table top under a bare light bulb. But I don’t want to persuade by subterfuge. The
river imagery, I think, gives us a more accurate portrayal of what is actually going
on and may well inspire us to move ahead even further.
As workers on the river, we are dealing with water no matter where we
are positioned along its banks—at the trickling headwaters upstream or near the
slow-flowing broad mouth of the river downstream. In contrast to the puzzle image
that has us working on separate pieces or things, our river metaphor indicates that
in an important sense, this is not possible. We are all dealing with matter, living
organisms, movement, and intelligence at one level or another. Consequently, those
who cherish their separate puzzle pieces, like certain philosophical rationalists who
believe in the independence of the mind, need to take a cold biological shower—a
shower that would bring them closer to the banks of the river. And likewise, certain
radical materialists who deny the reality of thought need to take a cold humanistic
shower—a shower that would bring them too closer to the banks of the river.
In his book entitled How the Mind Works, Steven Pinker refers to a tongue
in cheek conversation written by science fiction author Terry Bisson between the
leader of an interplanetary explorer fleet that has discovered human existence on
our earth and his boss (Pinker, 1997, p. 96):
They are made out of meat. [the explorer says]
Meat? . . . There’s no doubt about it. We picked several from
different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels,
probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.
That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages
to the stars?
They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from
them. The signals come from machines.
So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.
They made the machines. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.
Meat made the machines.
That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You’re asking
me to believe in sentient meat?
I’m not asking you, I’m telling you. These creatures are the only
sentient race in the sector and they’re made out of meat.
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Maybe they are like the Orolei. You know, a carbon-based
intelligence that goes through a meat stage.
Nope. They’re born meat and they die meat. We studied them
for several of their life spans, which didn’t take too long. Do you
have any idea [of] the life span of meat?
Spare me. Okay, maybe they’re only part meat. You know, like the
Weddilei. A meat head with an electron plasma brain inside.
Nope we thought of that, since they do have meat heads like the
Weddilei. But I told you, we probed them. They’re meat all the
way through.
No brain?
Oh, there is a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out
of meat.
So . . . what does the thinking?
You’re not understanding [me], are you? The brain does the
thinking. The meat.
Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!
Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming
meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you getting the picture?
As we gaze at the river, we acknowledge its ambiguous and paradoxical
composition: the particles and cells that are more visible upstream; the physiology
and homeostatic regulations that become more prominent as the river widens; the
ideas and social organizations that tend to show up in the rapids further downstream;
and ultimately, the hopes and dreams, the creative educational and therapeutic
interventions that live in the broader and deeper pools of water near the bay. The
intermingled water shows no pure machines and no independent ghosts that would
inhabit those machines. There are no separate puzzle pieces along the river. Just
water—ambiguous hopeful, meaning seeking meat—from its trickling headwaters
to its broad slow-moving mouth many miles away.
But there is more. River water, as we know, flows in one direction only,
from its barely discernable headwaters to the bay. This would suggest that all the
important action occurs upstream, that primary causes are found there, while effects
can be measured at multiple locations down river. This would place a premium
on genetics, on chemistry, and particle physics. This would have us search for
underlying mechanisms, for root causes, for chemical, cellular, and subcellular
mechanisms.
Yet, those who know rivers understand that this description is not entirely
accurate. While everything that happens downstream is affected by the flow of water
and its upstream laws, not everything downstream is determined by it. Tributaries
join a river. The dynamics water movement change as the river widens. The taste
and clarity of the water differs. Thus, new rules and laws keep cropping up, rules
that were not visible, let alone needed, upstream. The whole cannot always be
explained by its composite parts.
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And strange as it may seem, water downstream does affect activity further up
the river. When dams are built near the mouth of the river, when water is siphoned
off for irrigation, and when floods run over river banks, things change upstream
too. The flow of water can be modified; flora and fauna change; the quality of the
water might vary. In short, things change upstream.
Consequently, causes of the aquatic phenomena we happen to be studying
in our lab at our particular place on the river can come from either direction.
Underlying mechanisms lie upstream. Overlying mechanisms, if we can call them
that, affect the water from downstream.
None of us, therefore, has the luxury of working on our own river-related
problems as if they were independent or free standing. The water we study is colored
by factors working from two different directions at the same time. When we use
our disciplinary tools to measure what they are best at measuring, we invariably
capture factors that have their home some distance from our own site. Our part of
the river is, in a sense, forever affected by everyone else’s part of the river.
My own work on the philosophy of games, as I came to appreciate recently,
is colored by the workings of evolution and the needs of an increasingly intelligent
species. That is an upstream, underlying influence. And game intrigue is colored
from the other direction, by logic, by relationships of ideas, and by such ideals
as excellence and beauty. Those elements come from further downstream. No
philosophic distillation procedures prove helpful, as much as my training in the
subdiscipline would encourage me to use them that way.
The river metaphor also tells us that the water is different at diverse sites along
its banks. These distinctive locations help to justify the multiplicity of research
paradigms we use and the variety of water-testing tools that have been developed.
It could be that no paradigm is, in any absolute sense, better than any other. Rather,
paradigms are better or worse depending on the location one is occupying at the
river. Arguably, the vision of the individual as a mechanism or machine works
better upstream than downstream. Reductive research endeavors and the search
for linear relationships may work better some places than others (Midgley, 1994;
Pinker, 2002; Ridley, 2003). Obviously, the same holds true for different research
tools. A tool designed to measure water at the molecular level will not work very
well on such global events as silt collection near its mouth.
It is easy to see, then, that the previous science fiction dialogue about thinking
and meat would be misconstrued if one were to conclude that measuring meat, on
the one hand, and understanding thinking, on the other, is precisely the same thing.
In fact, the humor of the interchange works only if we do not conflate the two. Love,
hope, and dreams are ideas that are meat tethered; they are not meat identical—any
more than events near the bay are identical to events near the headwaters even
though both are a function of water.
In fact, if the river metaphor puts a premium of sorts on research that
occurs upstream—where the water comes from—it puts a comparable premium
on understanding that is produced downstream. That is where human beings live.
While the quality of living is never disconnection from the refreshing upstream
flow of water, our subjective lives—our stories, aspirations, friendships, ethics, and
joys—are studied most powerfully from locations where the river is wide and deep.
The electron microscopes that are so utterly essential where our life waters begin
to flow cannot measure either ethics or joy directly. In a sense, they are required
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to play second fiddle when we listen to the sound of the full orchestra near the
bay. But they still play. Ethics and joy are still tethered to physics, chemistry, and
genetics. And in turn, genetics and similar sciences are tethered to such intangibles
as meaning and joy. The water backs up from the dams of human intelligence and
culture that far.
But importantly, wherever we happen to be working along the river, our
attention must be occasionally directed downstream. We are all interested (or at
least should be so interested) in how our analysis of the water will help people live
better—real people in actual gym classes, real people who are too sedentary, who
are overweight, and who will unnecessarily live shorter lives and lives of lesser
quality. This annual gathering is based on that interest. Thus, while we can all be
captured by the beauty and majesty of our own work, it is, in the final analysis, not
a complete end in itself. As we study it, the water moves on from gene, to anatomy,
to physiology, to behavior, to culture, to subjective states, to ideal living—as we
observe it when we see a well-adjusted child captured by joy!
It turns out that the river metaphor stimulates a rather radical departure from a
vision of ourselves as enlightened, democratic contributors to the solutions of jigsaw
puzzles. It requires us to relinquish dualism, or independent pluralism. It forces
us to rethink the direction in which causation works. It thus has us acknowledge
that hard and fast distinctions—like those between tangibles and intangibles—may
not hold up. Intangibles (overarching mechanisms) can affect tangibles just as
tangibles (underlying mechanisms) can affect intangibles. It requires all of us to
admit that none of us has an independent piece of the action, let alone a superior
or all-encompassing field of study. The metaphor of the river suggests that we need
to communicate with one another and know what is happening at other sites along
the river bank if we are to do our own work well.
I am now finding myself reading as much outside the traditional boundaries
of philosophy as inside. Some of you will tell me that this is because I am in
philosophy, and I have finally seen the error of my ways. But I would like to think
that this is not unique to my discipline. No matter where we happen to be working
on issues related to movement and health—at the macro level, the meso level, or
the micro level—we need to be attentive to what is going on elsewhere because
we all stand in a reciprocally-dependent relationship to one another.
In the papers at this meeting, I heard a number of ideas that confirm my
judgment that we have moved closer to the river. We heard about multiple
locations for intervention; mediated relationships; cause and effect models that
have arrows going in a bewildering number of directions; multiple causes working
separately; multiple interactive causes; the ubiquity and importance of evolution
and evolutionary change; dynamical and chaotic systems; the significance
of nature and nurture—not one apart from or at the expense of the other; the
intermingled importance of motives, attitudes, and ideas with cellular and subcellular influences.
In the 1970s when many of our subdisciplines were young, we had to be
good at building puzzle pieces. In philosophy, we had to focus on being good
philosophers, in being able to go toe to toe with those from the parent discipline.
Nearby areas of study like history and psychology were bothersome distractions,
as was anything that had to do with practicality. We made a break from pedagogy,
and we were card-carrying philosophers, or at least so we hoped to be.
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In hindsight, this seems a little overdone. Isolation as a philosopher or a
physiologist or a pedagogist can be stifling, and just at importantly can give us a
false sense of independence and perhaps too, importance.
McCloy may not have envisioned the kind and quality of unity, mutual respect,
and intellectual humility that can develop along the banks of a river. But I think
he would have liked it. It is, after all, one thing to build puzzle pieces and then
cooperate by trying to fit them together in some kind of coherent whole. But it is a
very different thing to be working at different locations on an integrated river and
trying to tease apart the tightly interrelated elements that make it what it is.
Here in Chicago, we may have witnessed an evolving AAKPE experience.
Some speakers showed less comfort with traditional disciplinary walls. Others
appear to be sneaking in reading that lies well outside their fields. A few would
seem to have bought mobile laboratories to better move up and down the river
bank themselves. And importantly, fewer individuals are coming to our meetings
with briefcases full of prized puzzle pieces.
It seems now, that when we listen to one another’s papers (even those
presentations that are two or three subdisciplines removed from our own), we
receive intellectual confirmation of our own work. We can see elements of our
own truths in the truths of others. In one sense, to be sure, we are confirming what
we have known all along—that we were studying very different things. In another
sense, however, we see what we have too often missed—that we are also studying
the same thing, only at a different level.
In looking back on the two metaphors, it seems to me that we are already in
the process of moving toward the river. I know that I want to spend my remaining
professional years on its banks, and I will be looking both upstream and downstream
to see what all of you are up to . . . and also to get ideas for my own future work.
References
McCloy, C. H. (1930). Professional progress through research. Research Quarterly, 1(Part
II), 63-73.
Midgley, M. (1994). The ethical primate: Humans, freedom and morality. London/New
York: Routledge.
Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. New York/London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Penguin
Putnam.
Ridley, M. (2003). Nature via nurture: Genes, experience, & what makes us human. New
York: Harper Collins.