Pure and Objective Thinking: Interest and Desire

Abstract

Jonas indicated that educators interpret/apply concepts of interest differently. Dewey, following the different ways that teachers apply concepts of student interest, categorized teachers as advocates of efforts and as advocates of autonomy. Renninger and Heidi claimed that the greatest defect in the psychology of learning is the lack of an adequate theory of interest. Together, Dewey, Jonas, and Renninger and Heidi claim that a scientific theory of interest has yet to be developed. Despite the importance of and the need to understand the place of student interest in teaching practices, a theory on students’ interest is still unclear because many articles ask the wrong research questions. Specifically, Krapp and Renninger and Heidi emphasized that research on interest does not reflect a shared view of interest. Educational researchers and practitioners define and apply concepts of interest differently; they do not develop or operate with shared views of students’ interest or engage one another in learning about students’ interest or in learning to help students develop interest in learning. Using the phenomenological method, the purpose of this study is to evaluate the leading theories of student interest and develop a theory that explains how concepts of student interest relate to performance. Findings from this study are intended to help teachers develop an increased understanding of the concepts of student interest and to help students learn optimally.

Introduction

Dewey (1934) defined interest as “influence of object upon personal advantage” (p. 7). In analyzing this definition, Dewey (1934), Krapp (2013), Jonas (2014), and Deci and Ryan (2008) showed that a person who is influenced by an object might manifest one of two types of tendencies. However, Dewey, Krapp, and Deci and Ryan represented these tendencies differently. Tendencies of interest for Krapp relate to situational and personal interest, whereas for Deci and Ryan they relate to developmental and theoretical interest. On the contrary, Dewey and Jonas asked or answered a more strategic question—What factor of an occurrence motivates a person; is it the appearance or the object that motivates? Specifically, Jonas did not simply ask what the tendencies of interest are or what the tendencies expressed when motivated are; for, this could be answered by simply listing the tendencies and thus, like Krapp (2013) and Deci and Ryan (2008), run the risk of conflating the tendencies of interest and desire. For, the tendencies of interest and the tendencies of desire are almost if not the same (Dewey, 1934).

Rather, Dewey, and recently Jonas, framed the question regarding “what is interest” differently and they seemed to have developed a more pertinent answer. Dewey and Jonas focused on these following questions: What are the tendencies displayed when a person is amid uncertain elements (undetermined objects)? And, how might tendencies of interest compare with tendencies of desire (or tendencies of a person who determines vs. tendencies of a person who secures an object/advantage)? To answer these questions, Jonas, as well as Linnenbrink-Garcia et al., and Durik et al. and especially Dewey indicated that in interest, one is amid elements, striving to extricate self from them. In other words, a person amid elements would be striving to determine the natures of the elements, and thus to obtain the related advantage. One is without the advantage that one seeks; so, one determines the uncertain advantage by clarifying related elements to represent a more clarified advantage prior to securing it (Dewey, 1934). Or otherwise, one strives to secure a determined object as determined and to meet a somatic need (Mack, Zhang, Paulozzi, & Jones, 2015), and one is said to express a desire. The tendencies related to the interest and/or desire are not the same; the tendencies might appear as the same, but they are results of differing thinking processes, and they produce differing outcomes (Dewey, 1934).

Take, for example, a man who works daily to sustain his family; to achieve success, the man would not simply dive headlong to engage tasks and expects to gain advantage and/or sustain his family; rather, he painstakingly thinks about what he must do and how to achieve the sought advantage. In other words, prior to having a determined advantage, the advantage had to be determined. With a man who works to sustain his family, his undetermined advantage may be a need to be honored by his family (his ideal). However, with any uncertainty surrounding the advantage, the ideal, the undetermined/unknown advantage, the man must first determine the advantage he seeks before investing his efforts to achieve it. This man’s undetermined advantage or perception of his ideal condition would differ from his determined advantage to be honored by his family. An advantage and/or what a person must be doing to achieve an advantage is undetermined when a person only has an ideal or appearance. To get to a point where a person must be doing something to achieve an advantage, the person would have determined and represented the advantage.

To say that a man is interested in his job (in working 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily), what is meant is not that the man is interested in toiling; rather, that the man understands the connections between the job and his purpose, of how the job helps to achieve his determined advantage. Specifically, the man had thought, had been amid undetermined elements (problem), and has had to determine the elements to represent an advantage (Dewey, 1934). To say that a man is interested in his job, this means that the man has had a consciousness of (1) self, (2) the events, and (3) his purpose. First, the man must have been conscious of a self, to perceive self as being amid objects and/or as different from the other elements or events that he must figure out to achieve an advantage (Dewey, 1934); second, the man must be conscious of the nature of an element (object or event) to connect with or engage it (Fay, 1996; Merton, 1996; Reidun, 2008); and third, the man must be conscious of an ideal to seek it, where an ideal is a perception/focus in relation to which one determines the elements/events and expect to produce a result (Allison, 2012).

Items 1 through 3 above are different perspectives of the thinking process when one responds to an ideal/appearance that must be determined and achieved. Therefore, when the man encounters an obstacle in the process of securing an advantage (of getting the means to sustain his family), rather than giving up the task, the man might go through Steps 1 through 3 to examine and reassert himself or abandon his determined advantage. Thus, a person is said to determine a best option and reinforce for task or for an alternative option. Accordingly, the person is said to return again amid the events or elements and to determine (think) the elements and/or to express interest (tendencies that propel the person to achieve advantage). Tendencies of interest intended to determine elements of an advantage were often conflated with tendencies of desire intended to secure a determined object (object determined as pleasant or task with a fixed value). These tendencies are not the same.

In other words, prior to being amid elements/problem, one would have been engaged with objects, seeking to secure a determined advantage, to obtain the means to sustain one’s family. Or, otherwise, the man would have been amid elements determining their natures. Thus, a person is said to differentiate oneself from the elements or be self-conscious. Without this distinction, interest and desire may be conflated, and tendencies of interest may be conceived as tendencies due to pleasant objects. In fact, the assumption has been that when faced with a difficult task, a person does not remain engaged with such tasks; rather, the person would simply become averse to the task and move on to something else (Dewey, 1934). The result of this presumption is that teachers do not get the expected results when they help to develop students’ interest (Durik, Hulleman, & Harackiewicz, 2015; Renninger & Heidi, 2013). Therefore, they rarely consider concepts of interest when they teach. They simply focus on content teaching, and they do not help student to learn at their best. In this study, the focus is to answer the following question: What interest is there when a person perseveres with or despite the unpleasantness of tasks?

Furthermore, there is a difference in the results of an investigation when the subject matter is well defined or poorly defined, or presupposed (Wisnewski, 2013). A scientific investigation of a subject implies that a correct conception of the subject being investigated exists (Wisnewski, 2013). When subject matter is presupposed, one may be studying inexistent problems. In other words, the definition of interest as it is today might be a presupposition; therefore, there is a need to understand what interest is, before the rush to investigate what one does who has an interest. The presupposition with interest, for example, is that in interest, one is responding to a pleasant object, satisfying a somatic need. Nevertheless, when a person who has interest faces difficulties with the object of interest, and pleasantness of the object is reversed, it is found that rather than give the up the object and to continue to satisfy a somatic need for pleasure, one continues to engage the object of interest. For example, people continue to work from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. daily throughout their lives not because they have such desire, but because they have interest in doing so, in distinguishing their lives.

Statement of the Problem

Many students, especially students from poor families, take school learning for granted; therefore, they do not perform at their best efforts. Many poor children underperform especially because many teachers conflate the students’ interest with desire (Dewey, 1934). To motivate the students, many teachers often cater to the students’ external, but neglect students’ inner needs, and they inadvertently engage the students to not deliberately develop interest in learning (Høgheima & Reber, 2015; Renninger & Heidi, 2013). Dewey (1934) pointed out that the bent to interpret interest casually, and to say that interest is caused by an external object, is informed by the layman’s notion of interest. Many teachers follow this casual view of interest; when they must help students to develop interest in learning, teachers mostly focus upon students’ external and not internal objects (Jonas, 2014); they appeal to objective tasks but not the advantage that students represent in tasks (Durik et al., 2015), and many students do not learn well.

Purpose of the Study

The purpose of this phenomenological study is to evaluate leading theories of interest and develop a theory that explains how student interest differs from desire. Differentiating tendencies of interest from desire is important; tendencies of interest are related to student’s need to understand an object, but tendencies of desire are related to student’s need to obtain a determined object. When interest and desire are conflated, their tendencies are treated as the same: A teacher might stimulate tendencies of desire instead of tendencies of interest. The result has been that many teachers do not help, especially students from poor economic background to learn at their best (Dewey, 1934; Høgheima & Reber, 2015). Krapp (2013) and Renninger, Heidi, and Krapp (2015) emphasized that there is a need to develop a theory of interest that can explain how student interest concepts relate to performance and simplify application of the concepts for teachers.

In this Grounded Theory Research, the abductive process is used. There are three phases of this study: Phase 1: generating the data—(a) comparing theories advanced by Dewey (1934), Deci (1992), and Krapp (1998); (b) generating theories to examine the data—identifying interest and desire. Phase 2: generating data—(a) analyzing views of interest and desire; (b) generating theories to examine the data—determining relationship between interest and desire. Phase 3: generating the data—(a) analyzing tendencies of interest and desire; (b) generating theories to examine the data—determining the tendencies related to interest and desire. Data are repeatedly generated and examined until a more efficient theory of interest emerges.

Interest and Desire

John Dewey (1934) defined interest as “influence of objects upon personal advantage” (p. 7). In analyzing this definition, it is found that a person influenced by an object may manifest one of the following two tendencies: A person who is influenced by an object may perceive and/or represent the object either as predetermined or as undetermined. Therefore, a person does one of two things: a person who perceives and/or represents an object is either striving to secure the object or striving to determine a nature of the objects. In other words, the advantage of an object may be represented as a certainty or as an uncertainty. When influenced by an object, and one represents advantage of the object as a certainty, one seeks to secure such a determined advantage and/or object; one fixes attention upon such an advantage, and one is said to express a desire for such an advantage. In some cases, fixing attention upon a seeming advantage may be conflated with interest. For example, a student who is diligent and perseveres with a task (at the expense of other more important tasks) is said to express a desire but not interest.

Dewey (1934) also indicated that a person influenced by objects may seek an advantage by determining and/or clarifying an uncertainty; thus, one is said to express interest. Here, one generates elements related to an appearance of an advantage, one seeks to determine advantage of the appearance, and one is said to express interest. Dewey (1934) indicated that with interest, one is amid a problem, striving to determine optimum advantage; this implies that with interest, one cannot be doing anything else unrelated to extricating self from the elements of a problem. In other words, the evidence of interest is that one displays tendencies of unified (in-school and out-of-school) experiences. One who is amid a problem but engages activities that are headed in different directions cannot be said to achieve unified experiences or express interest. Dewey (1934) indicated that when interest is true, one is concerned with unified experiences, and one’s actions are under the watchful eyes of thinking.

Contrary Views of Interest

Contrarily, Deci (1992) and Krapp (1998) believe that interest is due to external objects. Deci (1998) and Krapp (1998) believe a person responds to object only in accordance with a nature of an external object. According to this view, interest is due to the agreeableness or pleasantness of an external object. In other words, one would not express an interest for an object if the object were not pleasant, agreeable, and/or pleasurable. Deci and Krapp also believe that an interest one expresses for or in response to an ongoing/external object is not the same as an interest expressed as a result of the individual’s past experiences. An interest which is a result of the individual’s past experiences is expressed when one is said to express an interest but without an object. In other words, there is no interest that is independent of an object. Before, developing and representing an object as interesting, the person would have first experienced, developed, and represented the object as agreeable and pleasant, and therefore as interesting. A necessary conclusion from this is that an object is interesting only when it is agreeable, pleasant, and/or enjoyable.

Krapp (1998) might have defined interest as being of two perspectives, that is, personal and situational interests. However, by claiming that situational interest is what grows into personal interest, Krapp (1998) may be defining both personal and situational interests as arising from the same external objects in one instance but claiming they differ in another instance. Deci (1992) also differentiated between theoretical and developmental interests. Theoretical interest is the interest that a person expresses for an object, but developmental interest is the interest a person expresses independent of external objects. Deci (1992) further indicated that developmental interest cannot be located anywhere; therefore, it is inexistent. Thus, contemporary theorists of interest are said to interpret interest as due to external objects. They conflate interest with desire; they conflate a person who is determining with a person who is securing an object.

Deci (1992) and Krapp’s (1998) views of interest are opposed to Dewey’s (1934) definition of interest, according to which, in interest, one is amid objects or problem; thus, interest is due to cognition of self amid objects. With Dewey’s view of interest, however, self is not an object; for, in the need to gain advantage or extricate self from objects, Dewey (1934) also indicated that self must exert certain nonobjective powers over object, one thinks. Otherwise, one would remain an object, and science could have been impossible. The same idea is expressed by the 17th century French Philosopher, Rene Descartes in the phrase, “I think therefore, I am.” According to Dewey (1934), in interest, one is amid objects/problem; interest is due to cognition of self amid objects, and the tendencies expressed are of a need to gain advantage or extricate self from the objects (Dewey, 1934). This view of interest by Dewey (1934) emphasizes a function of cognition of self without which one cannot properly be said to see self as amid undetermined element, seek to determine the natures of the elements, and thus be said to express an interest.

To further corroborate his view of interest, Dewey (1934) indicated that the etymology of the word “interest” indicates its origins in Latin or old French. In French, the original word is interesse, indicating interest or to be amid objects, events, or problems. The point that Dewey (1934) made is that with interest a person is amid elements and uncertain. The uncertainty here is because the elements are undetermined or appearances (Allison, 2012; Millikan, 2012). The undetermined occurrences or experiences are examples of problem situations; they are situations in which a person is uncertain about the way to go. In other words, a person with interest is amid elements and aware, but uncertain about the natures of the elements one strives to determine (Allison, 2012), and one is said to express interest (Dewey, 1934).

The implication here is that with thinking, a person differentiates oneself as an entity that exists independent of an object. Put differently, a person expresses his or her basic self (interest) among objects; but, independent of them, one is not. Here, however, one may conflate objective thinking with pure thinking; they differ (Allison, 2012; Millikan, 2012; Quine, 1990). In objective thinking, one does not get access into the inner core or elements of an object and science is impossible. Without pure thinking, one is without the capacity to get amid objects or problems, and one does not get beyond the direct objective propositions or the initial need to gratify the senses, one does not add value to objects, and thinking does not help to extricate oneself from objects or problems (Dewey, 1934).

Simply put, in thinking, a person is either generating attributes in virtue of which one may characterize objects of appearance and thus to identify others and differentiate oneself from them or, otherwise, re-identifying objects and determining how they relate to one another. Thinking to generate attributes and characterize an object of occurrences is essentially thinking to differentiate oneself from objects; otherwise, one is not. Thinking here is pure, and it is properly called so, for it is without an object. In the objective thinking or thinking to determine relationships among objects, one seeks to determine what and how objects must be placed to secure it, to secure advantage. Thinking here is objective, and it is properly called so because thinking answers to the demands of objects. Pure thinking differs from objective thinking: In the former, one seeks to determine an object or advantage, but in the latter, one seeks to secure an advantage. Pure thinking seeks to determine advantage through concepts, but objective thinking seeks to secure advantage through objects.

Pure and Objective Thinking

Where an appearance has been determined and identified, one applies the determined object to achieve an advantage (Dewey, 1934). Here, thinking is thoroughgoing; one has a determined object and one does not continue to determine the determined objects; one does not have the need or benefit to continue to determine the object that is already determined (Millikan, 2012). Rather, thinking is disengaged from determining the nature of an appearance. Here, thinking is focused on the determined objects, and on determining what and how the objects best relate to one another to yield the advantage determined (Allison, 2012). A person is certain about his or her determined object; therefore, the person does not revert to pure thinking or continue to determine the nature of the elements or appearance. One does not perceive his or her object or occurrence as an appearance or as uncertain until the object proves to be otherwise. Rather, when one is certain about one’s determined objects, one thinks objectively. Put another way, when one thinks purely, one determines elements to remove uncertainty, but, when one thinks objectively, one determines relationships among determined objects.

In a task situation, the person would have thought of or determined the situation and the objects of the situation (Jonas, 2014). Thus, all that the person would be doing in the situation is apply or think about how to best apply what he or she has determined prior to the situation, accomplish the determined tasks, and/or achieve the determined advantage of the situation (Dewey, 1934). For example, a student who comes to school to learn would have determined that to achieve his or her goal, he or she must listen to the teacher; listening to the teacher may include following the teacher’s instructions—buying and using the required text books and other learning materials. Here, however, buying and using the required text books and other learning materials may not exhaust all that may be required for him or her to learn optimally. In learning situations, the student may discover other requirements that help him or her to learn more efficiently and effectively. In task situations, the students may encounter an obstacle; rather than giving up the task, the students may hesitate to evaluate task plan, skill, and/or situations and to discover a way forward, return to task. Otherwise, the students may give up tasks and do something else.

Thinking through which one discovers the means to break obstacles and move forward thinking through which a person applies his or her determined strategies to achieve his or her determined objective are not the same. Thinking through which one discovers the means and moves forward is pure thinking, but thinking through which a person achieves a determined advantage/object is objective thinking. Furthermore, one’s determined object or advantage may be strong or weak. In this case, one is said to have a clearly or an unclearly determined object. With a clearly determined object, one is said to be resolved or have a strong or unshakable determination (Dewey, 1934). With an unclearly determined object, on the contrary, one is said to have a weak determination; one is unresolved or shakable. Any little obstacle/hindrance would rattle such a person and send him or her seeking other alternative or running to differing directions; usually, one reverts to pure thinking to stabilize the efforts.

When determining an advantage or securing a determined advantage, one thinks. In the former, where one determines an advantage, one does not have an advantage, and one is said to seek it (Miller, Galanter, & Pribram, 1960; Norman, Heywood, & Kentridge, 2013). Where one is without an advantage, thinking is said to be independent of an advantage/object or pure (Allison, 2012; Cao, Nosofsky, & Shiffrin, 2016). To address appearance (an obstacle), a person does not rely upon the objects or empirical knowledge; rather, the person generates attributes of appearance in relations to oneself, to understanding, through which one determines a nature of the appearance, and thinking is said to be pure. In pure thinking, one does not rely upon an object to determine another (Allison, 2012). Otherwise, a determined object would have an undetermined object; an object that does not rise to a state of oneness with the initial elements being determined and the object would not be true to itself. In pure thinking, a determination of appearance is guided by self-consciousness, not by objects (Allison, 2012); thus, one is said to determine an object or advantage in relation to self or pure thinking (Allison, 2012; Dewey, 1934).

Switching to/From Pure and Objective Thinking

In whichever mode of thinking one operates, however, one does not tarry with pure or objective thinking for too long. Although engaged with pure thinking to determine the nature of an object, one may feel satisfied that the determined object is good enough for oneself, and one may thus revert to securing the object to gratify oneself. Similarly, in objective thinking, one may feel uncertain or dissatisfied with a determined object; a determined object may become uncertain; therefore, one may be moved to address the uncertainty (Millikan, 2012). In a task situation, a person who had been operating in accordance with predetermined objects might experience an obstacle, review skills, or task plans and, accordingly, change task plans or even change a previously determined advantage or both (Van de Koppel & Crain, 2006). Here, however, the person might remain with the tasks because of an easily accessible advantage/object of the task. When one encounters a minor obstacle in a task situation and uncertainty occurs, one might review or apply the plans or skills as determined and, if possible, continue the task. However, when an obstacle is overwhelming, and the task plan or skills do not help to continue task, one does not return to the task after the initial hesitation (Dewey, 1934). Here, one does not merely review task plans or skills and continue the task; rather, one must separate oneself from the task to determine the object/advantage. Thus, one might have to spend more time in pure thinking and in determining an object or advantage.

Simply put, one who is faced with a hindrance may recall and review the options but fail to find a required means to return to the task. Where one has not developed the required skills, and where a determined object of effort is weak, task often outweighs advantage, and one will often find tasks to have little or no advantage. Therefore, one may easily give up the task or the advantage and seek another. However, where one has strong skills or objects, one easily finds a solution and can quickly return to the task. Thus, one is said to run into an obstacle, recall and/or review the options, and to change from securing to determining the object, and then back again, under the same breath. That is, one goes back and forth abductively between pure and objective thinking, between virtual and actual task thinking without the slightest evidence of doing so, and one is said to go from pure to objective thinking and back again, virtually unconsciously and unproblematically.

Views of Pure and Objective Thinking

Quine (1990) and Allison (2012) also explained pure thinking, indicating that prior to an objective experience where a person represents objects, one must first have experiences where one generates attributes (material) through which or with which one determines the nature of an object. Quine specifically found that every representation is represented as meaningful through a theory behind it. When a representation agrees with its theory, the theory is affirmed, and by extension, the subject’s self-theory is also affirmed (Thomasson, 2015). On the contrary, an experience without a theory would not affirm any representation and by extension a self-theory of self. Put another way, the frequency of agreement between a theory of self and experiences is related to the frequency of success of self-theory (Quine, 1990). With increased success of the theories of a person’s experiences and by extension the increased success in a person’s self-theory, one also achieves increased success in his or her representations of others and/or engagement (Jonas, 2014; Moore, 2012).

Conditional and Observation Statements

Quine (1990) indicated that a person with interest is theorizing, thinking and generating conditional or observation statements (elements) that may or may not be verbal. An observation statement is a theory, such as “this is a bag; it will help me carry books to school.” These are statements related to observed events in a situation (Quine, 1990). Conditional statements, on the contrary, are statements about the initial experiences of which a person may not be conscious, but which a person may call up and through them represents an event or occurrence as meaningful (Quine, 1990). When a person makes observational statements, the conditional statements may be unnoticeable (Quine, 1990), but Quine insisted that they are still there. Conditional categorical statements are unconnected; they are disparate representations, such as there is a strap, a zipper, a handle, a side-pocket made at different times, and therefore without the conclusive statement “it is a bag.” Without generating these initial experiences (or elements), however, Quine indicated that a person would not have the elements, means, or materials through which to represent an object as a bag or make the statement “it is a bag.”

Quine (1990) indicated that observation categorical statements and conditionals are comparable with pure and objecting thinking. For example, in conditional statements, a person may generate and store disparate but unconscious (or subconscious) experiences. Conditional statements are in turn regenerated in time of need and are used to characterize, identify, represent, or construct an observation statement, “this is a bag” (Quine, 1990). Allison (2012) made the same claim when analyzing Kant’s theory of knowledge, indicating that with appearance, a person generates attributes (or conditionals) through which the person characterizes and represents an object. In observation statements, the elements generated are pulled from obscurity (Quine, 1990), just as Allison’s manifold of intuition or attributes through which one synthesizes a representation of an object are also pulled from obscurity or pure thought actions (Allison, 2012).

A person generates thought elements through which he or she determines the appearance and represents an object; thus, he or she is said to think appearance (Allison, 2012; Wisnewski, 2013) or think purely (Allison, 2012). Pure thinking is the thinking through which attributes or basic thought elements may be generated (Allison, 2012). Pure thinking occurs at a level where a person recalls a conceptual object to reformulate and rename them (Millikan, 2012). For example, if one has Conditional Statements 1, 2, 3, 4, where 1 = a strap, 2 = a zipper, 3 = side pockets, 4 = a handle, and so on, and 1, 2, 3, 4 are consistent with one’s representation of a bag “A,” then the appearance is represented as a bag “A.” This is equivalent to saying that Conditionals 1, 2, 3, 4 culminate in identifying an appearance as a bag that would hold books. The difference is that observation statement or the identification of an appearance as a bag occurs at an objective level of thinking, but conditional statement or representations, 1 = a strap, 2 = a zipper, 3 = side pockets, 4 = a handle, occur at a pure level of thinking, at a point in which thinking generates element but without an object (Allison, 2012; Millikan, 2012; Quine, 1990).

Quine (1990) showed that the thinking through which a person understands relationships among objects occurs at the objective level of thinking, whereas the thinking through which a person determines and understands the nature of an object relates to a pure level of thinking or the only kind of thinking under which a person develops meaningful representations of elements. For example, a representation of a bag occurs at an objective thinking level. Left alone, a bag would not change from being a bag into a wallet. To change from being a bag into something else—say a bag without a strap or zipper—something violent would have to happen to it and destroy it. However, with pure thinking, a person may change a bag into a wallet. Here, the person would have to be creative (think purely or pull attributes from obscurity), that is, visualize the bag and put the tools and materials together to make the bag a reality (Quine, 1990). Only a person who thinks purely could recall the concept (bag) to rework/rename it (Millikan, 2012). A pure thinker changes objects by generating necessary conceptual attributes, for example, by first figuring out how to carefully remove Conditional Statement 1 or 2, or adding Conditional Statement 3, 4, or 5, and so on.

Fundamentally, Quine’s (1990) theory indicates that when a person first encounters an unfamiliar language (a novel occurrence or an appearance), the person might ascribe personal but not shared meanings to the sound and thus perceive the sounds as sounds, not as meaningful words. He or she may continue to hear or perceive the sounds and respond accordingly. For example, in a village where people speak an unfamiliar language, a person with the capacity to learn might first perceive the sounds as appearances, but he or she would go beyond the appearance or initial occurrence to think and determine the nature of the sounds, of the appearance or develop the perceptions of the sounds into meaningful words, and of the appearances into objective (Allison, 2012). Developing a sound into a meaningful word does not happen automatically. To understand the meanings of a sound, to attain a scientific understanding of them, one must not only consider things one already knows or has been affected by, but must also have the capacity to develop perceived occurrences, that is, a capacity to sustain an appearance, recall related elements, and follow through the process of renaming the elements (Millikan, 2012). Thus, one is said to follow through the process of saying Items 1, 2, 3, 4 are related in identifying an object as uniquely “A,” to say that an appearance is “A” despite its initial appearance because it consists of 1, 2, 3, 4, and one is said to be scientific/sentient.

In appearances, perception which, according to Allison (2012), involves developments of intuitions through imagination also involves thinking. This thinking expressed through imagination is of a novel occurrence (appearance); it is without an object; thus, the thinking is said to be pure. Pure thinking is not the same as thinking expressed through an object (objective or empirical thinking). It helps to determine a novel object of occurrence by generating related attributes, but, on the contrary, empirical thinking helps to determine how one object relates to another by referencing empirical objects or past experiences (Allison, 2012). The former is pure thinking, but the latter is objective thinking. In interest, the capacity to be amid undetermined objects, that is, the capacity to perceive an appearance and represent it as an object, is exemplified when one is said to perceive appearance, develop related attributes, and understand how the attributes are related in representing/synthesizing an object (Allison, 2012). Similarly, in interest, the capacity to be amid (connect to) undetermined elements and represent an object is exemplified when one perceives an appearance, generates attribute, and represents an object (Allison, 2012). The point here is that the thinking through which one determines an appearance, in so far as it is without an object, is guided by self-consciousness: It is thus pure. Activities that are mediated by self-consciousness are independent of objects. Pure thinking conditions are the only circumstances under which one can be said to be amid appearances (Allison, 2012); therefore, they are said to relate to interest, but not desire.

Interest and Desire

Accordingly, there are two possible directions for the efforts that one displays in a task situation: either expressing an interest (determining object or advantage) or expressing a desire (securing a determined object or advantage). Like Dewey (1934) and Jonas (2014), Odudukudu also pointed out that a person expresses interest not because his or her senses are titillated by objects or occurrences, but because the person perceives oneself amid undetermined elements/problem and seeks to gain advantage, to extricate self from the elements or problems. In an objective situation, where one focuses on an object, for example, thinking is objective because the person’s focus is upon a determined object, using determined objects to accomplish determined tasks and to achieve/secure determined advantages. Therefore, the person could not be extricating oneself from the objects or expressing interest. Also, when an obstacle arises in an objective situation, one must first think objectively (Millikan, 2012). Even prior to giving up a task or changing a determined/intended advantage, one thinks objectively; one reviews the determined task or plan and search for the next best option, but one does not generate novel attributes to determine or engage in reviewing newly determined options. Therefore, one is said to focus on objects and/or to think objectively in a task situation.

However, a person faced with overwhelming obstacles may call up and or review options and still fail to return to the task (Angello, Jangawe, & Matovelo, 2016; Kalusopa, 2005). To achieve further progress, a person with an overwhelming obstacle might revert from seeing self as a recipient of a determined advantage to seeing oneself as amid undetermined and uncertain elements, from securing a determined object to determining appearance, and from the objective to pure thinking to determine and obtain a new object and related advantages. For, only with pure thinking does a person develop a clear view of what he or she intends to achieve and pursue the object with any conviction. A person who determines objects or rules for objects must first see oneself amid objects (Tangen, 2009) to engage and accomplish such activities (Dewey, 1934); thus, a person is said to revert to pure thinking or express interest. In other words, when a person gives up tasks easily perhaps because he or she lacks skills, the person must be mired in determining appearances, striving to reinforce his or her pure thinking processes. When a person can easily find a way forward, he or she reverts to task and to thinking objectively (Angello et al., 2016; Dewey, 1934); thus, the person is said to briefly engage in pure thinking, to recover what is missing, and to revert to thinking objectively.

Evaluation and Report

Contemporary researchers of interest such as Krapp (2013) and Deci (1992) defined interest from the standpoint of the casual use of the term rather than from the scientific standpoint. From the casual standpoint, interest refers to tendencies expressed when a person encounters a pleasant or an agreeable object. This view of interest is reflected in the assumption that when a person faces an unpleasant, disagreeable, or a difficult task, object, or situation, he or she does not remain engaged with them. Rather, he or she would simply become averse to the object or task, give up, and move on to something else. When interest is not defined from the standpoint of this casual and most popular use of the word, many educational researchers and practitioners still define interest as because of the qualities of an external object. Thus, for example, Krapp’s (2013) theory of interest emphasizes personal and situational interests, whereas Deci’s (1992) theory proposes that interest may only be studied from theoretical and developmental perspectives.

The result has been that educators develop and apply concepts of interest in differing ways (Jonas, 2014; Krapp, 2013; Renninger et al., 2015). Dewey (1934), according to the differing ways that teachers apply concepts of interest, categorized educators as advocates of effort and autonomy. This categorization still stands today; many teachers still interpret students’ interest in differing ways; they still interpret students’ interest as being a result of objective rather than the pure perceptions of an object. The result is that many teachers do not consider how students’ inner objects (their concerns or interests) affect their performance, and teachers do not adequately promote students’ learning (Krapp, 2013; Renninger et al., 2015). This results in students continuing to attend to tasks with divided attention and not learning optimally.

This project analyzes the tendencies that a student expresses when he or she perceives an undetermined, and thus uncertain, advantage/object or an appearance. It is found that, in perceiving an appearance, a person seeks either to determine or secure (and spend) a determined advantage/object. Irrespective of the chosen option, one must first perceive appearance to determine a related advantage or object. Tendencies related to determining or securing a determined advantage/object are important; in other words, when a teacher understands these options and how students may opt for one but not the other, it is found that the teacher would be better prepared to help students learn optimally (Jonas, 2014).

Suggestion for Future Studies

Deci (1992) indicated that developmental interest cannot be traced to any instance in time and space of the student. To explain developmental interest, Deci suggested that a reader considers a fetus through which a human being is produced. Here, Deci’s view is that a fetus is first moved by a blind, and not a determined, purpose to ebb, to seek nutrients, and to sustain itself. Thus, Deci indicated that developmental interest is difficult, if not impossible, to explain, and that at the fetus stage of development, interest could not be located in any place, and its representation becomes relative. Beyond a certain stage of development, Deci indicated, interest differs from what is usually interpreted as interest. Therefore, to study developmental interest, it would be necessary to consider what interest is. Deci suggested that there is a need to explore the psychological process that regulates a child’s self-structure in its relations with the structure of an object in the field. According to Deci, these processes are necessarily time-linked and are thus sequentially organized units of a child’s actions that reflect his or her “interest.”

Otherwise, Deci indicated that once interest has been determined to be in place, the opportunity to study its emergence and its real nature would already have been missed. The emergence is important, not only because that then one might know what constitutes the basic elements of interest and how to build it, but also to determine whether what is called interest answers to its name. In other words, by using fetus to illustrate a possible nature of interest, Deci indicated there is no evidence to show that, with interest, a person is intentional. A fetus might have started out not knowing “what object is the best for it” and therefore to pay attention to achieve it. Thus, the conclusion that human experiences might not have started out intending to produce a sentient human being but ended up doing so. Therefore, the events culminating in producing a human being might not have been contingent.

Furthermore, Deci also indicated that the result of the groping, in so far as it culminated in intelligent manifestation, reflects the existence of intelligence. Deci might be suggesting that there is no proof of intelligence behind objective interactions, just as there is also no proof that nature is not intelligible. At first, however, a fetus might feel hunger, but it might not know that it is hunger. However, this is only regarding having a feeling named “hunger,” followed by a decision to seek food. In other words, a fetus moves in response to hunger; the fetus might have not formally named or characterized hunger as hunger, but it nevertheless moves in accordance (in response) to hunger and, accordingly, its movements culminate in intelligent expressions; thus, a fetus is said to be intelligent. Therefore, it might be speculated that a fetus is an intelligent expression, and that it has a capacity to know whether it should move when it moves.

In other words, the first move of a fetus might be thought to be indeliberate. However, a fetus that responds to the pain of hunger by moving is expressing intelligence. A movement of a fetus, together with the help of its environmental elements, often produces subsequent and unique outcomes; these motions may produce further interactions and initiate other things that follow. A fetus may be said to be intelligent; for, otherwise, it would not respond to hunger in such a way as to culminate in what it becomes. Its movements may be represented as a process of being aware of what or where it moves to; of being aware of hunger, and thus, the usefulness of the movements that might relieve it.

However, a fetus’ movements culminating in intelligent expressions may or may not mean that related objects are intelligent or display evidence of intelligence. Neither Deci nor Krapp has claimed that nature is or not intelligible. In this research, the assumption is that one achieves higher levels of performance by developing an increased interest in a task. However, what needs to be further investigated is whether self-awareness is intelligible, that is, scientific. The idea that needs further investigation is if the interest or the capacity for science is due to self-awareness.

Summary and Conclusion

Dewey (1934), Krapp (2013), and Deci (1992) developed and presented contrary views of interest. Krapp (2013) and Deci (1992) developed their views based on casual interpretations of the term “interest” and they are mostly unscientific (Renninger et al., 2015). Also, Renninger et al. (2015) indicated that a great defect in the psychology of learning was the lack of an adequate theory of interest. Renninger, Dewey, Krapp and Heidi, and Jonas all indicated that researchers were yet to develop a scientific view of student interest. The result of defining interest from the layman’s view of it is that there is no clear understanding of its concepts—there is a lack of a clear theory of interest. Educational researchers and practitioners develop multifarious and differing views of interest (Krapp & Prenzel, 2011), and educators have had no basis to develop shared views of interest; rather, they develop and apply conflicting concepts and refer to them as concepts of interest (Jonas, 2014; Krapp, 2013; Renninger et al., 2015).

In this project, interest has been defined as the tendencies one expresses when one perceives an appearance (uncertain advantage) and seeks to determine the appearance and the undetermined object. The focus here is to identify and understand what tendencies relate to interest. In other words, Allison (2012) indicated that to determine an appearance, represent an object, and to gain an advantage, one must first perceive and represent the object/advantage. However, one may perceive appearance but not follow through the thinking process necessary to determine a meaningful representation. A teacher may say “if N + 1 = 3, N = 2,” but a student may not understand or care about what the teacher is talking about, especially if a student cannot see it as unimportant or see an advantage in it. This might be because the student was occupied with other more important concerns and had not gotten around to develop the means to consider, see, or understand the concepts as significant.

Thus, the student is said to supplant the object of appearance with a rogue or an undetermined object, an object that sneaks into one’s mind to pose/stand as a relevant object or object of the appearance. This may happen because one seeks to meet a physical/somatic need. A rogue object is said to be undetermined and unknown because it, in this instance, is an object that has been sneaked into being represented as substantial, may be less or not at all effective in addressing the person’s concerns or the student’s learning needs (Dewey, 1934). A rogue object is usually in place when students attend to tasks with divided attention. An undetermined (rogue) object is anything the student might opt for rather than staying focused on his or her task. For, although a rogue object might be opposed to a person’s efforts and progress, it often appears as the required object.

Nevertheless, a student might have learned to latch on to appearance and take the time to intentionally develop a more relevant, meaningful, or optimal representation of an appearance, in which case, one is said to intentionally strive and grow by conceptually extending or enhancing himself or herself in the unconscious determination of appearance (Allison, 2012). Millikan (2012) and Allison (2012) indicated that when appearance is determined, one represents an object, and one goes from determining to securing the determined object. When an appearance is indeterminable, and one must move on to something else, the appearance becomes a unicept (Millikan, 2012). Dewey (1934) also indicated that the capacity to develop appearance into a representation (an optimal object/advantage) increases with the practice of determining appearances, of pure thinking.

When one perceives an appearance, one may be swayed to accept it as an object and to engage in securing it. In such a case, one is said to shortchange the determination process, to accept appearance at face value, as an object (Donald, 1993). For example, the sheer force of seeing an occurrence that shares similarities with another might tempt a person to take such occurrences as the same and thus to engage and respond to the occurrences as the same. In this case, the output would be different and unintended (Dewey, 1934; Jonas, 2014). Objects that one represents are often done unintentionally when one yields to forces of occurrence or when one shortchanges the determination process. A short-changed representation where an appearance has not been fully determined is an unconscious and unscientific representation; it is an assumed object, forced upon a person usually because one has a pressing need to gratify a somatic self (Dupre, 2012) and a further determination becomes unnecessary.

However, when influenced by an appearance, one may fully and intentionally engage with it. One digs into and repeatedly recalls an appearance to determine it more meaningfully (Millikan, 2012); thus, one is said to express interest (Dewey, 1934). Here, when one engages an appearance, one does not accept an uncertain object as the object (Allison, 2012); rather, Dewey (1934) indicated that one sees the appearance and how it might be determined to yield advantage for oneself. To clarify this point, Dewey (1934) gave an illustration of a person going from uptown to downtown Manhattan for an important job interview; he indicated that the person would consider differing options of getting downtown and choose the best one. The chosen option might not be the absolute best; but to the individual and at a given time and space, he or she would have exhausted all the pure thought elements, exploring the object in its pure form (Bechtel, 2013). Here, efforts are deliberate; concepts are generated, analyzed, and synthesized intentionally, and one represents the best option, an object that best meets a person’s need (Allison, 2012), and one is said to express interest.

When a person is thinking about a bus, bicycle, or a train, and the sweaty bodies of other passengers, he or she might be considered as thinking objectively. However, among these objective thoughts, there are other indeterminable objects such as the speed the bus might choose to go on, the cars and people to negotiate if one should use a bicycle, the number of sweaty bodies one might encounter in a train if one opted for such transportation. With objectives, one thinks objectively; a person who thinks about a predetermined object (train, bicycle, bus, etc.) might opt for one or the other, but regarding an indeterminable object like a train’s speed or the possibility of a terrorist in the train, one is without the means for an option (Greco & Groff, 2013). One might rather imagine objects and one must think purely, if at all, to gain a perspective. Here, one generates pure thought elements or pure concepts, referred to by Millikan (2012) as unicepts, or by Quine (1990) as conditionals. Allison, Millikan, and Quine indicated that these thought elements are necessary to represent appearance as meaningful.