Set Theory (#511)

"Stella car! Miss Green red car look like Stella car."

Stella, one of Charlie's first ABA therapists drove a big red SUV that Charlie used to keep a lookout for from the front window of our duplex in St. Paul when he was 2 1/2 years old; Miss Greene was a speech therapy graduate student whom Charlie became very fond of, and when he found out that she had a big red SUV too he concluded......... Miss Greene had Stella's car!

Not exactly, we told Charlie. "Miss Greene has a red car and it looks like Stella's car but it's not. It's not Stella's car." I must have said that over and over to Charlie when he was six and he thought it the height of comedy to sight Miss Greene driving up, proclaim "Stella's car!", laugh with studied hysteria, and say "issnot, 'nah Stella car Miss Greene car Miss Greene havvuh red car!"

We have not seen either owners of either red car in quite awhile. The therapist whose name Charlie most often calls out is that of the one male teacher in his classroom. I have often thought that Charlie's back and forth referencing of Stella, Miss Greene, and their red cars was a way for him to categorize people, to understand how some new person was supposed to relate to him, and he to them.

Charlie could be said to think in sets. If it's a big red car and a therapist coming to our house, it must be someone of an unflappably cheerful nature who he likes a lot. If he is at school (as he was this morning after a long weekend) and he eats both of his apples, it must be time for the rest of what is in his lunchbox. This indeed happened at school today and, when Charlie was told that it was not just time for lunch (it was still mid-morning), he got upset and had to be calmed down, after which his day went well, with the rest of his lunch eaten at the usual time, order restored.

I only thought about Charlie's "set theory" as we were driving home on a rain-slick road from his favorite grocery store. Charlie started to talk about Stella's car and Miss Greene and to giggle and I, sensing he might do something startingly silly (such as remove his seat belt and dart around the car), said a very casual "Oh yeah?"

"Stella car, not woo wah Stel' car, Miss Greene red car."

And then he said the name of his main ABA therapist, who taught in an autism school for several years and has of late been taking extra time to work with him on his reading and playing and more. He said her name perfectly clearly, slowly, cleanly.

And, having talked about three people of certain and similar importance in his life, Charlie settled back into his seat and listened to Little Wing as played by Derek and the Dominoes.

Sometimes things just add up.

Comments

[David N. Andrews MEd (12-2006)]

"Charlie could be said to think in sets."

According to George Kelly's Personal Construct Psychology, we all could; but there's a sort of fuzzy logic attached to the non-autistic set-thinking, compared to that of the autistic person.

This is one of my areas of real interest, since - before I became an educational psychologist - I was a remedial mathematical sciences teacher (major- applied psychology; minor- mathematical sciences; subsidiary- British archaeology; language- Finnish). I perceive a lot of areas of overlap between mathematics, physics and psychology.

[Kristina Chew]

Fuzzy logic sounds precisely like my own, such as it is-----Finnish? (I would love to learn it.)

[David N. Andrews MEd (12-2006)]

Heh :)

Actually, fuzzy logic is an attempt to capture formally the sort of logic that has little 'get out' clauses in it... you know the sort of thing: 'don't know', 'don't care', 'could be anything but I'm buggered if I know' ... that sort of thing.

Essentially, it operates the same way as typical Boolean algebra-based logic does (on-off, true-false and so on), with this additional consideration of what the electronics bods call 'an intermediate state of high impedence'. The idea is to be able to design algorithms for working when the outcome of an event is deterministic (in terms of how it is arrived at) but unpredictable (in terms of likelihood of occurrence).

This looks like being a good intro... I should probably refresh my memory too, since it's about 15 yrs since I dealt with logics of any kind on a formal basis:
http://www.doc.ic.ac.uk/~nd/surprise_96/journal/vol4/sbaa/report.html

You'll be glad to know that it isn't a Finnish thing :) - but the language does set up some interesting applications of fuzzy logic (because of the psycho- and socio-linguistic issues of what word is used to define what object/event... as you could well imagine, the mapping between descriptor and described is not necessarily one-to-one).

A good book for learning Finnish... the one I used, by Terttu Leney (Teach Yourself Finnish, a Hodder & Stoughton paperback) is one I'd definitely recommend.