Action, Context and Thought

Meadows' claim that "action is the highest form of thought" essentially implies a converse statement – that action is a higher form of thought than mere thought. What he suggests by his statement is that as humans we learn best (or to paraphrase we think most deeply) when we are engaged as tactile learners, when we are engaged in some manner of activity. Much research has indeed demonstrated that people tend to learn best when they can "do" whatever it is that they are attempting to learn. And in many cases this is true. But are there instances in which action cannot be applied because the thought to be learned is entirely cerebral or theoretical and so the action attached to such an instance is the act of thought itself? Does Meadows' statement imply a sort of circular logic in this instance?

In many way, this conversation parallels discussions that we are having in my other course this semester – Classical Rhetoric. In discussing the differences between Plato and the Sophists, we've looked directly at how knowledge and truth are created. Plato believed that an absolute Truth existed with which we were once familiar prior to our existence, and it is the philosopher king's role to reconnect us with this absolute Truth. The Sophists, on the other hand, believe in contingent or contextual truth – no absolute truth exists. As the postmodernists similarly explained, there are many truths, which are best defined through individual's discourse communities. I see some value in this for Meadows' discussion of how action results in the highest form of thought. It's a bit of a referential stretch, but Meadows' emphasis on action suggests to me the idea that action, in essence, contextualizes our thought in the same way that the Sophists (and later the postmodernists) believed truth could be contextualized. Action makes more real the thoughts we consider and how we invoke or enact such actions imbues our thoughts with various meanings and values. Because action is not instigated in an absolute manner among different individuals, we cannot assume that action, by itself, results in absolute thoughts. This is interesting to me and I think has considerable bearing on how we operate as professional communicators and faculty members.

Within these roles, we set out either as communicators or teachers with an end result in mind – we often hope to instill a particular understanding in our audience or in the classroom we hope to lead our students towards specific learning outcomes. But how do we navigate the uncertain waters or the ways in which our audiences or students will initiate the actions through which they arrive at comprehension? In communicating, we consider closely our audiences – their wants and needs and value systems, what they are looking for in the communicative interaction, and what they bring with them to that interaction. With our students, we consider what they already know, their learning styles, their level of prior achievement, etc., and in many cases, we introduce structured action exercises to help guide this learning or communication. But at best we can only approximate the outcomes we desire because the context with which each of our students or audience members comes at the instance is quite individualized. My question for the class then is this: whether you work as a professional communicator or a faculty member, how do you personally use action to create thought and how do you mediate the uncertainty that arises out of the differential context in which both action and thought occur?