The Mind of the Bricoluer

I came across a reference to the idea of the bricoleur today while poking around looking for some thinking on the haphazard construction of the brain. It's all in preparation for an interview next week with Gary Marcus, the author of Kluge.

Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote Savage Thinking in 1963 and introduced the Bricoleur, a handyman or, maybe more period correct, a hacker. Here is how a Lévi-Strauss (translated by Professor Herve Varennes) explains it -

The 'bricoleur' is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks; but, unlike the engineer, he does not subordinate each of them to the availability of raw materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project.

His universe of instruments is closed and the rules of his game are always to make do with 'whatever is at hand', that is to say with a set of tools and materials which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or destructions.

How does this connect to our Root System and the proto-human? Well, what caught my eye was that Lévi-Strauss was opposing two kinds of scientific thinking. The western, "advanced" mind discovers the world using powerful rule-driven systems and by creating and using specialized tools.

The bricoleur-scientist, on the other hand:

"does not move abstractly and hierarchically from axiom to theorem to corollary. Bricoleurs construct theories by arranging and rearranging, by negotiating and renegotiating with a set of well-known materials.

What a neat distinction! Are children born bricoleurs and trained engineers? How early they can they develop as systematic scientists, or does the plastic, intuitive scientific exploration come second after the basic survival skills are rigidly put into place? How soon do they have the awareness to create theories about how the world is? How soon do they develop the long term memory necessary to test those theories in a systematic way?

And as a father, how do you encourage the blooming of both ways of thinking?