philosophers timeline

FIRST ENLIGHTENMENT

Thales 625 BC - ?
Anaximander 610 BC - ?
Pythagoras 560 BC - ?
Heraclitus 535 BC-475 BC
Zeno of Elea 490-430 BC
Democritus 460 BC-?
Socrates 469-399 BC
Euclid ? - 366 BC
Plato 429-347 BC
Aristotle 384 BC-322 BC
Epicurus 341-271 BC
Archimedes 287 – 212 BC
Chrysippus 280-206 BC
Cicero 106-43 BC
Ovid 43 BC-17 AD
Seneca 1-65
Plutarch 45-120
Lucretius early to mid 1st C

NOT MUCH PROGRESS YEARS

Thomas Aquinas 1225-1274
William of Occam 1285-1347

SECOND ENLIGHTENMENT

Nicolaus Copernicus 1473-1543
Michel de Montaigne 1533-1592
Giordano Bruno 1548-1600 (burnt alive by the Church)
Francis Bacon 1561-1626
Galileo Galilei 1564-1642
Johannes Kepler 1571-1630
Thomas Hobbes 1588-1679
Rene Descarte 1596-1650
Gerrard Winstanley 1609-1676
Blaise Pascal 1623-1662
Robert Boyle 1627-1691
Christiaan Huygens 1629-1695
Baruch Spinoza 1632-1677
John Locke 1632-1704
Robert Hooke 1635-1703

ENGLISH REVOLUTION / CIVIL WAR 1642-1660

Isaac Newton 1642-1727
Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz 1646-1716
Jonathan Swift 1667-1745
Christian Wolff 1679-1754
George Berkeley 1685-1753
Montesquieu 1689-1755
Voltaire 1694-1778
Carl Linnaeus 1701-1778
Thomas Bayes 1702-1761
David Hume 1711-1776
John Jacques Rousseau 1712-1778
Étienne Bonnot de Condillac 1714-1780
Claude Adrien Helvetius 1715-1771
Baron d'Holbach 1723-1789
Adam Smith 1723-1790
Immanuel Kant 1724-1804
Georg Lichtenberg 1742-1799
Nicolas de Condorcet 1743-1794
Johann Gottfried Herder 1744-1803
Jeremy Bentham 1748-1832
Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749-1827
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749-1832
Joseph de Maistre 1753-1821
Henri de Saint-Simon 1760-1825
Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762-1814
Pierre Maine de Biran 1766-1824
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770-1831
Charles Fourier 1772-1837

FRENCH REVOLUTION 1787-1799

Arthur Schopenhauer 1788-1860
Richard Jones 1790-1855
Charles Babbage 1791-1871
John Herschel 1792-1871
William Whewell 1794-1866
Auguste Comte 1798-1857
John Stuart Mill 1806-73
Charles Darwin 1809-1882
Soren Kiekegaard 1813-1855
Karl Marx 1818-1883
Friedrich Engels 1820-1895
Ernst Mach 1838-1916
Charles Peirce 1839-1914
William James 1842-1910
Frederick Nietzsche 1844-1900
Georg Cantor 1845-1918
Gottlob Frege 1848-1925
Henri Poincaré 1854-1912
Emile Durkheim 1858-1917
Giuseppe Peano 1858-1932
Edmund Husserl 1859-1938
Henri Bergson 1859-1941
John Dewey 1859-1952
Rabindranath Tagore 1861-1941
Alfred North Whitehead 1861-1947
George Herbert Mead 1863-1931
Vladimir Lenin 1870-1924
Arthur Bentley 1870 - 1957
Marcel Proust 1871-1922
Bertrand Russell 1872-1970
GE Moore 1873-1958
Albert Einstein 1879-1955
Moritz Schlick 1882-1936
Otto Neurath 1882-1945
Aldous Huxley 1894-1963
Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889-1951
Martin Heidegger 1889-1976
Hans Reichenbach 1891-1953
Rudolf Carnap 1891-1970
Mao Zedong 1893-1976
Mikhail Bakhtin 1895 -1975
Lev Vygotsky 1896-1934
Gilbert Ryle 1900-1976
Aron Gurwitsch 1901-1973
Herbert Feigl 1902-1988
Karl Popper 1902-1994
Georges Politzer 1903-1942
George Orwell 1903-1950
Alexei Leontiev 1903-1979
Gregory Bateson 1904-1980
BF Skinner 1904-1990
Jean-Paul Sartre 1905-1980
Raymond Aron 1905-1983
Carl Gustav Hempel 1905-1997
Kurt Godel 1906-1978
Emmanuel Levinas 1906-1995
Nelson Goodman 1906-1998
Maurice Merleau-Ponty 1908-1961
Willard Van Ormon Quine 1908-2000
Isaiah Berlin 1909-1997
A. J. Ayer 1910-1989
John Langshaw Austin 1911-1960
Alan Turing 1912-1954
Wilfrid Sellers 1912-1989
Paul Ricoeur 1913-2005
Harold Garfinkel 1917-2011
Iris Murdoch 1919-1999
Elizabeth Anscombe 1919-2001
John Rawls 1921-2002
Imre Lakatos 1922-1974
Thomas Kuhn 1922-1996
Michel Henry 1922–2002
Evald Ilyenkov 1924-1979
Paul Feyerabend 1924-1994
Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995
Michel Foucault 1926-1984
Hilary Putnam 1926-2016
Klaus Holzkamp 1927-1995
Marvin Minsky 1927-2016
Seymour Papert 1928-2016
Bernard Williams 1929-2003
Merab Mamardashvili 1930-1990
Allan Bloom 1930-1992
Pierre Bourdieu 1930-2002
Jacques Derrida 1930-2004
Felix Mikhailov 1930-2006
Richard Rorty 1931-2007
Vladimir Bibikhim 1938-2004
Myles Burnyeat 1939-2019
Marshall Berman 1940-2013
Francisco Varela 1946-2001

STILL ALIVE

Noam Chomsky 1928-
Humberto Maturana 1929-
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone 1930-
Amartya Sen 1933-
Jerry Fodor 1935-
Ian Hacking 1936 -
Michael J Crowe 1936 -
Helene Cixous 1937-
Ronald Giere 1938 -
Mike Cole 1938-
Jean-Luc Nancy 1940-
Bas van Fraasen 1941-
Larry Laudan 1941-
Paul Churchland 1942-
Daniel Dennett 1942-
Marcello Pera 1943-
Donald Gillies 1944 -
Douglas Hofstadter 1945-
Hartry Field 1946 -
Martha Nussbaum 1947-
Camille Paglia 1947-
Bruno Latour 1947-
Richard Yeo 1948-
Yrjo Engestrom 1948 -
Andrew Pickering 1948-
David Weinberger 1950-
Rebecca Goldstein 1950-
Luc Ferry 1951-
Wolff-Michael Roth 1953-
Kwame Anthony Appiah 1954-
Paul Boghossian 1957 -
Andy Clark 1957-
Michele Moody-Adams 1956-
Laura Snyder 1964-
Vanessa Wills ? -
Lucy Suchman ? -

I have been adding to this from time to time.

books I've been reading in 2016

This turns out to be a mixture of indigenous issues, philosophical thinking, Australian history, science, maths instruction and other oddities.

Bennett, Ronan. Zugzwang (2007)
Blanchard, Ken. The One Minute Manager Meets the Monkey (1990)
Brooks, Geraldine. Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague (2001)
Canada, Geoffrey. Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun: A Personal History of Violence (1995)
Cohen-Solal. Sartre: A Life (2005)
Dawes, Glenn; Northfield, Peter; Wallace, Ken. Astronomy 2016 Australia: Your Guide to the Night Sky (2015)
Dixon, Robert. Words of our Country: Yidiny – The Aboriginal Language of the Cairns – Yarrabah Region (2015)
Farkota, Rhonda. Elementary Maths Mastery (2000)
FitzSimons Peter. Batavia (2011)
Gaita, Raimond. Romulus, My Father (1998)
Gaita, Raimond. The Philosopher's Dog: Friendships with Animals (2002)
Goodwin, Doris Kearns. Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (2005)
Hooper, Chloe. The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island (2009)
Hooper, Judith. Of Moths and Men: Intrigue, Tragedy and the Peppered Moth (2002)
Jarrett, Stephanie. Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence (2013)
Jordan, Mary Ellen. Balanda: My Year in Arnhem Land (2005)
Kehlmann, Daniel. Measuring the World (2007)
Langton, Marcia. Well, I Heard It on the Radio and I Saw It on the Television… (1993)
Le Guin, Ursula. The Lathe of Heaven (1971)
McIntosh, Dennis. The Tunnel (2014)
McIntosh, Dennis. Volume One, Creative Work: Tunnelling (PhD thesis, 2013)
Michaels, Walter Benn. The Trouble with Diversity: How we Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006)
Mighton, John. Nurturing Mathematical Talent in Every Child (2003)
Monteath, Peter and Munt, Valerie. Red Professor: The Cold War Life of Fred Rose (2015)
Nakata, Martin. Disciplining the Savages, Savaging the Disciplines (2007)
Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (2001)
Osborne, Barry, and Osborne, Elizabeth (2013) A Serious Dialogue with Noel Pearson's Radical Hope: education and equality in Australia.
Pascoe, Bruce. Dark Emu Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident? (2014)
Pearson, Noel. Radical Hope: Education and Equality in Australia (2012). Get the version which has replies to the author and the authors replies to those replies, better than the original Quarterly Essay version.
Petraitis, Vicky. The Dog Squad (2015)
Porter, Liz. Written on the Skin: An Australian Forensic Casebook (2007)
Porter, Liz. Unnatural Order (1995)
Reynolds, Henry. Why Weren't We Told? (1999)
Reynolds, Henry. North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of the People of Australia's North (2003)
Sutton, Peter. The Politics of Suffering: Indigenous Australia and the end of the liberal consensus (2009)
Trudgen, Richard. Why Warriors Lie Down and Die (2000)
Yunkaporta, Tyson. Aboriginal Pedagogies at the Cultural Interface (2009)

Some books I read in 2015

I've been too busy to blog because of my new job. However, after 6 months, the pressure is beginning to lift a little and so I might be able to manage a blog or two.

I want to list the books I read (or reread) last year (2015) since good books play such an important part in my life and consciousness. This acts as a reminder of some of the places my mind has visited not so long ago, as a wandering wonderer.

NON FICTION
Berlin, Isiah. Freedom and its Betrayal: Six Enemies of Human Liberty (2002)
Berlin, Isiah. The Roots of Romanticism (1999)
Berman, Marshall. Everything Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (1982)
Berman, Marshall. The Politics of Authenticity: Radical Individualism and the Emergence of Modern Society (1970)
Dennett, Daniel. Consciousness Explained (1991)
Eagleton, Terry. Why Marx was Right (2011)
Greenwald, Glen. No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State (2015)
Harris, Sam. Free Will (2012)
Hill, Christopher. The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution (1972)
Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011)
Hofstadter, Douglas. I am a Strange Loop (2007)
Murdoch, Iris. Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (1997)
Murray, Patrick. Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge (1998)
Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971)
Ollman, Bertell. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method (2003)
Putnam, Hilary. Philosophy in an Age of Science: Physics, Mathematics and Skepticism (2012)
Strong, Anna Louise. The Stalin Era (1957)
Wills, Vanessa. Marx and Morality (2011)
Yalom, Irvin. Love’s Executioner (1968)

FICTION
Hamid, Mohsin. The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007)
Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed. (1974)
Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (1995)
Sobel, Dava. A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos (2011)
Sobel, Dava. Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love (1999)
Yalom, Irvin. The Schopenhauer Cure (2005)
Yalom, Irvin. The Spinoza Problem (2012)

The picture writes the concepts which are then used to describe the picture

The picture writes the concepts which are then used to describe the picture. The categories used to describe society are a dynamic part of a concrete, organic, living whole.

The categories (forms, manifestations, aspects) of bourgeois society are not neutral definitions but are determined by that society dynamically. The story (big picture) dynamically informs the concepts that make up the narrative.

Start with society. That is given from a materialist perspective. The society determines the categories. But society is enormously complex so with which aspects of society do we start? The dictionary gives us words and meanings but doesn't give us a starting point.

Human minds have struggled over the years to formulate categories which describe society. This requires research, study, practice.

We then use those categories to perceive society and describe it to ourselves and others. Perception is not neutral, we perceive through our categories which influence or condition our senses, we see what our minds tell us to see. Inevitably those categories, despite our best intentions, are one sided, incomplete. We are brainwashed by our environment, our upbringing, our parents, our media etc. as to what we perceive, what is important and what is less important.

Society is more complicated and nuanced than our ability to describe it. The best we can do is approach a comprehensive description from our particular point of view. The way a modern atheist perceives society is vastly different from a religious person from the Middle Ages who believed that the Earth was the centre of the universe and those who challenged that view ought to be burnt at the stake.

It would be a mistake to think we have finished this process. Furthermore, society keeps changing so the categories have to be modified as we go along. We have to change too in order to catch up and keep up with social change. The whole process of formulating categories and using them to perceive and describe society is dynamic, changing, not static.

Different humans come to widely different understandings of our society and how it should function and develop: libertarians, social contract, dictatorship, liberal democracy, socialists, communists, Islamic State, Green politics. These labels demonstrate a variety of possible trajectories of different human understandings.

Hence, I am very interested in Marx's method since from my current perspective his method did result in an insightful understanding of the internal dynamics of capitalism, how it works, its problems and its limited future.

Current reading:
Marx, Karl. The Method of Political Economy

Ollman, Bertell. Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method (2003)

Ollman, Bertell. Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1971)

dark morality: an argument in favour of moral uncertainty

Lecture 3: Equality and Our Moral Image of the World. In Putnam, Hilary (1987) The Many Faces of Realism.

I think this lecture resonates so strongly with me because it explains an issue that has worried me below the surface, without being able to articulate it clearly. The issue was wanting to be certain but not being certain about a variety of personal, political and cultural questions.

Putnam begins by saying that Kant kept a double set of books, one for a world we experience, our world, and the other, a world behind a veil (the Noumenal world), that we don't know about. Putnam, along with Lenin etc (Marxist critics of Kant) finds this dualism repulsive.

But unlike the marxist critics, who sometimes dismiss Kant contemptuously with one liners ("thing in itself", rubbish), Putnam finds much about Kant that is worthy and extraordinary.

Kant was the first philosopher to reject the idea of truth as correspondence to a pre-structured Reality (see Reason, Truth and History, pp. 56-7, 60-64 for more detail here)

Putnam evolved his idea of internal realism around about 1980. On the one side he rejected Big R Realism as being too algorithmic. On the other side he rejected Cultural Relativism as being too divorced from reality. Internal realism was a way to drive the philosophical chariot up the middle. This description is far too brief a summary of course, Putnam has written at length on this subject.

The fundamental idea of Kant's “critical philosophy” — especially in his three Critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781, 1787), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) — is human autonomy

One version of empiricism (there are many versions) says that all we know for sure is sense data. Kant rejects this in his first critique. When we experience the outer world with our senses the actual experience is inner, not outer. Sensations, the "objects of inner sense", are caught within the web of belief and conceptualisation. They do not represent an uncorrupted given that anchors our knowledge. Kant was the first internal realist. Our conceptual contribution can't be factored out. The "makers-true" and "makers-verified" of our beliefs lie within and not outside our conceptual system

Each of Kant's critique presents a different kind of reason and a different image of the world to go with each kind of reason: scientific reason, ethical reason, aesthetic reason, juridical reason. So even though Kant thinks we have exactly one scientific version of the world, for Putnam these different kinds of reasons hint at the conceptual relativity that he supports (eg. see pp. 17-19 of The Many Faces of Realism for more detail on conceptual relativity).

Putnam's aim in this book is to sketch the outline of internal realism in moral philosophy

Kant inherited from Rousseau and the ideals of the French revolution, in particular, the value of Equality. Equality comes from the Jewish religion. All humans are created in the image of God. Greek ethics (Plato, Aristotle, Hellenistic period) had no notion of universal human equality.

Note for further study: Compare this with Hannah Arendt's critique of the French revolution, that compassion for the most disadvantaged projected as the supreme virtue contributed to the destruction of Robespierre (On Revolution)

The idea of equality, when it is detached from it's religious roots becomes somewhat mysterious and exposed to scoffing. How many people really, deeply believe in human equality, beyond a politically correct platitude?

The idea of secular equality might be based on notions of something morally mysterious about humans (which is left undefined), respect, happiness, suffering or rights. It is not based on talents, achievements, social contribution etc. Nietzsche attacked the idea that we should respect the untalented. His moral elitism is perhaps still shared by many, for example, those working next to the untalented receiving the same pay, to take one example. Unions tend to oppose merit pay, is that a correct stance? Our belief in equality needs to be put under the microscope. This is one value of Putnam's essay, he is developing a more robust philosophical defence of equality.

In traditional formulations of equality (religious and secular) the notion of equality did not relate to freedom.

Kant offers a new approach that links liberty or freedom to equality. Kant's central distinction is between autonomy and heteronomy. Heteronomy is acceptance of the domination of an outside authority, human or divine. One accepts a moral system unthinkingly. It never occurs to one to "think for oneself", the great maxim of the Enlightenment. Totalitarians try to produce heteronomous people (sheep)

But what is autonomy? What is a positive characterisation of autonomy (as distinct from it being the opposite of heteronomy?)

An autonomous person asks: What should I do? How should I live?

An autonomous person uses free will and reason (rationality) to choose ethical principles. This approach is compatible with medieval (the Middle Ages, 5th - 15th C) thinking, for instance that of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274).

Putnam praises Kant because he transcends this medieval approach.

The medievals thought we had the capacity to know human essence, to know what Happiness or Eudaemonia (human flourishing) is, in the "thick" Aristotelian sense, the inclusive human end. We use our free will and rationality to discover what one should do and then do it. Eudaemonia becomes an engineering problem.

Kant rejects this, is sceptical. Happiness can be interpreted in too many different ways to be reduced to an engineering problem.

More than this, Kant welcomes and celebrates this uncertainty about the human condition. If there was a revealed nature of Eudaemonia then that would lead to heteronomy. An objective, inclusive human end is repulsive to Kant and Putnam.

It would be a bad thing if the truths of religion could be deduced by reason because that would produce fanaticism, intense hostility to others thinking for themselves. The logical fanatic is the most dangerous type of fanatic! Fanaticism is undesirable in itself. As far as I can tell this seems to be a foundational truth for Putnam but one that I share. The problematic nature of moral truth (religious truth for Kant) is a good thing.

Being certain about our beliefs is sometimes a bad thing. We should always be open to the need to sometimes revise our beliefs (fallibilism). Scepticism, doubt and uncertainty have their place. Putnam's broader outlook is that both belief and doubt require justification. In this essay he puts the case against certainty in moral belief.

This is where Kant breaks with the medievals, that to know human essence can be reduced to an engineering problem!

At the other end, fideism maintains that faith is independent of reason or that reason and faith are hostile to each other and faith is superior at arriving at particular truths. Kant attacks fideism too, basing religion of faith, since that also leads to fanaticism.

Kant says let us recognise that we have a religious need but let us not be fanatical about the way in which we satisfy that need. Neither Reason nor Fundamentalism (leap of faith, blind faith) can tell us with certainty how to satisfy that need.

In our secular age this message is still relevant since people embrace non religious causes with religious fervour (Environmentalism, Marxism, Libertarianism etc.) and, of course, religious fundamentalism is still a huge problem in the world (eg. al Qaeda). All of these causes contain truths but the danger that those truths will turn into dogma is real.

The respect in which we are all equals is that we all face this same dilemma, we can choose to think for ourselves without a clear guide. We are free, we can reason but there is no certainty in the outcome. That is the most valuable fact about our lives, our Eudaemonia. Putnam is arguing that this insight, linking equality to freedom originates with Kant.

Kant's ideal community is one of beings who think for themselves without knowing what the human essence is, without knowing what Eudaemonia is, and who respect one another for doing that. This is a valuable corrective to the danger of those who embrace causes with religious, fanatical fervour.

Kant, although he admired Rousseau, is very far from Rousseau's notion of submission to the general will.

This exercise in philosophical anthropology leads to the emergence of a moral image of the world. Putnam takes this phrase from Dieter Henrich.

A moral image of the world is more than a checklist of virtues or what one ought to do (rights, responsibilities etc.), rather it is a picture of how our virtues and ideals hang together with each other. It may be as vague as sisterhood or brotherhood. Putnam asserts that we need a moral image of the world, or, since he is a pluralist, a number of complementary moral images of the world.

For the medievals metaphysical realism was unproblematically correct since rational intuition gave us direct access to things in themselves.

Kant's advance on this was to celebrate the loss of essences without turning back to Humean empiricism

The core issue for me is do we really believe in human equality in a deep sense and has Putnam, interpreting Kant in this way, produced a stronger argument for equality, by linking it to freedom. That the result of believing we have free will and using our rationality as best we can is not moral certainty but instead uncertainty or pluralism, many paths open, there is not One True Way as advocated by fanatics of different stripes (religious fundamentalists, environmental alarmists, marxist dictatorships etc.). Moreover, his moral image of the world, that we start out as free, rational individuals who despite our best efforts can't achieve certainty on many big issues is far more powerful than some check list of virtues or the way we ought to be. This appears to me to be an original contribution or a deepening of our knowledge about the human condition. Putnam's argument is strong in part because it is informed by a deep knowledge of the philosophers who came before him (Hume, Rousseau, Kant).

hilary putnam philosophy study programme

Hilary Putnam's philosophical writings has challenged my long held views about the nature of the world and how it works in a very significant manner. Without going into personal detail he has both exposed and pointed to a healing of a long existent schism in my thinking between the scientific or "objective" aspect and the psychological or emotional aspect.

I am probably not alone here since the objective-subjective or fact-value dichotomy is strongly embedded in our culture.

Here is an outline of a study programme I am currently undertaking based on his readings.

World view:
Putnam's work represents a critique on various levels of the entrenched ("ideological") dichotomy between the "objective" (truth) and "subjective" (values).

The big R - Realism approach is that we can make scientific statements that accurately represent a mind independent reality. For example, Newton's Laws enable us to accurately send a rocket to the moon. However, the subsequent development of science reveals reality to be far more complex. Einstein's theories are conceptually quite different and Newton's maths turns out to apply only under limiting conditions.

The opposite approach to big R Realism is that all schemes of thought or points of view are hopelessly subjective. Cultural relativism holds that what we think depends on our culture, which is continually in flux.

Putnam has played a leading role in developing a third way which rejects both of the above extremes. It may be called internal realism or pragmatic realism. To describe it with a Hegelian metaphor: the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world.

The mind does not simply copy the world described by One True Theory. There is no Gods Eye View. It is time to recognise that the project of trying to define the furniture of the world (ontology) has failed.

Putnam has developed a similar treatment of epistemology or knowledge claims. It would be a mistake to demarcate "objective" science from "subjective" ethics. Neither scientific nor moral truth is either objective nor subjective (culturally relative). Rather, there are better or worse versions.

Scientific reductionism, although useful in some respects, comes up against limits which cannot be overcome.

Some of the key reasons for this world view are as follows:

Conceptual relativity:
Even at a simple level different ways of describing the world are equivalent but non compatible. What exists depends on which conventions we adopt. One simple example provided is mereological sums (details not provided here). The world does not dictate a unique "true" way of dividing the world into objects, situations, properties etc.

The nature of science:
Science is a diverse enterprise and just one good way to reason about the world. It is not a master philosophy.

A cut and dried description of the world - physics envy - has not eventuated, including in physics. The cut between the observer and experiment in Quantum physics means that a Gods Eye View is not possible.

Scientific epistemic values such as coherence, plausibility, reasonableness and simplicity are values too, just as are ethical values such as courage, kindness, honesty and goodness.

Science encompasses a broader notion of rationality than any formal scientific method which resembles an algorithm.

For example, we accept Darwin's theories because they provide a plausible explanation of the evolution of life. Not because they conform to any clearly defined scientific method.

Real scientists rely on their intuition and imagination extensively in developing their innovative theories. In their theory formation scientists postulate unobservable causes for observable events. If humans had a firm prejudice against the speculative and unobservable then we would not be good scientists.

Putnam has completed cases studies of the work of particular philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.

Intentionality:
Emergent properties of thought (mental states) such as loving, hating, desiring, believing, judging, perceiving, hoping can't be reduced to the physical. We are stuck with this dualism. (Brentano's problem).

"I am, then, a dualist, or, better, a pluralist. Truth, reference, justification - these are emergent, non-reducible properties of terms and statements in certain contexts. I do not mean they are not supervenient on the physical; of course they are. My dualism is one not of minds and bodies, but of physical properties and intentional properties. It does not even yield an interesting metaphysics."
(Three Kinds of Scientific Realism, In Word and Life, 493)

The vanishing a priori:
All the candidates for fundamental or foundational knowledge have progressively disappeared over time. eg. Euclidean geometry changed from the one true way to just one way amongst other ways of perceiving spatial relations.

update July 8th, 2013: Since there are no firm foundations in epistemology then we are stuck with better (more fruitful, coherent) or worse representations of reality as the best we can do, not true or false version in an absolute or "true scientific" sense. See "Pragmatic principles" below.

Breakdown of the fact / value or objective / subjective dichotomy:
The idea that value judgements are "subjective" and that statements of fact are "objective" is often regarded as common sense in our current culture. The purpose of Putnam's various arguments are to challenge that "common sense"

Human flourishing (the purpose of philosophy):
Scientism as a monistic world view represents an emotional craving for clear answers. Rather than a one sided reliance on problem solving, philosophy should help us acquire better metaphors and habits for looking at the world such as adjudication and reading and interpreting good literature. Facts and values become a distinction rather than a dichotomy.

Literature and philosophy "may be rich or impoverished, sophisticated or naive, broad or one sided, inspired or pedestrian, reasonable or perverse and if perverse, brilliantly perverse or merely perverse" (from Realism with a Human Face, p. 183)

Pragmatic principles from the heritage of Peirce, James and Dewey:
(i) antiskepticism: doubt requires justification just as much as belief
(ii) fallibilism: there is never a metaphysical guarantee to be had that such and such a belief will never need revision
(iii) there is no fundamental dichotomy b/w “facts” and “values”
(iv) practice is primary in philosophy

MAJOR WORKS OF HILARY PUTNAM:
Mathematics, Matter and Method. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (1975)
Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2 (1975)
Meaning and the Moral Sciences (1978)
Reason, Truth and History (1981)
Realism and Reason. Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (1983)
The Many Faces of Realism (1987)
Representation and Reality (1988)
Realism with a Human Face (1990)
Renewing Philosophy (1992)
Words and Life (1994)
Pragmatism: An Open Question (1995)
The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and other essays (2002)
Ethics without Ontology (2004)

Many of Putnam's books can be downloaded from here.

studying philosophy

the holism of facts, conventions and values

Two Dogmas of Empiricism by Willard Van Orman Quine (1951)

Read Quine's Two Dogmas of Empiricism for the most eloquent rebuttal of reductionism. By reductionism I mean the attempt to break down complex issues progressively into simpler statements. I'm not suggesting that all reductionism is bad but that it can be and has been overdone.

Before I read Quine's article I had regarded the term holism as little more than a buzz word used by woolly thinkers. Richard Dawkins is alleged to have once said in his militant atheistic style, “By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” (included in some very good quotes about open mindedness). Of course, such a general statement is correct. In fact, it is irrefutable unless the context is provided.

But Quine explains, in part, why we need to think holistically even though that is more difficult than a monistic or One True Way type of outlook.

The dogma of reductionism survives in the supposition that each statement, taken in isolation from its fellows, can admit of confirmation or infirmation at all. My countersuggestion ... is that our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body.

So, our knowledge and beliefs stand as a corporate body and attempts to break them down or to not allow the different specialised compartments to communicate with each other can be dangerous. This is what worries me about my own practice. I drift from one favoured way of working or doing to another, from immature marxism, to constructionism, to a more mature marxism, to Direct Instruction and there is little coherence left in the overall meaning of it all. I think trying out new approaches is good but it also needs to be evaluated. As Socrates suggested, "An unexamined life is not worth living".

Here is part of what Quine says about the connection between theory and practice:

The totality of our so-called knowledge or beliefs, from the most casual matters of geography and history to the profoundest laws of atomic physics or even of pure mathematics and logic, is a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only along the edges. Or, to change the figure, total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience. A conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field. Truth values have to be redistributed over some of our statements. Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections -- the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field. Having re-evaluated one statement we must re-evaluate some others, whether they be statements logically connected with the first or whether they be the statements of logical connections themselves. But the total field is so undetermined by its boundary conditions, experience, that there is much latitude of choice as to what statements to re-evaluate in the light of any single contrary experience. No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.

This is a different emphasis to the way I have thought about theory and practice previously.

Previously, I have favoured a marxist approach of a theory to practice spiral which ascends to the concrete (needs more explanation). Quine's approach is more along the lines that our knowledge is a dynamic jigsaw with fuzzy edges that interacts with senses experience. I think the difference is that Quine's approach is more open to the legitimacy of different viewpoints that fit the same body of information.

Another philosophy I have been studying recently, due to my interest in Direct Instruction, is logical positivism and / or logical empiricism.

These two different approaches (marxism and logical empiricism) tend to loudly proclaim their "correctness", as the One True Way. My feeling is that these approaches are sometimes correct about specifics but it is dangerous to see them as correct about everything. In practice, One True Way thinking has led to disaster.

Quine's approach is potentially more pluralistic. Quine may not have taken that step himself (according to Putnam, this requires more study) but his analysis opens that door.

Along the same lines, Quine concludes his paper with:

Each man is given a scientific heritage plus a continuing barrage of sensory stimulation; and the considerations which guide him in warping his scientific heritage to fit his continuing sensory promptings are, where rational, pragmatic.

In another essay, (Carnap and Logical Truth), Quine presents a doctrine that fact and convention interpenetrate without there ever being any sentences that are true by virtue of fact alone or true by virtue of convention alone:

The lore of our fathers is a fabric of sentences. In our hands it develops and changes, through more or less arbitrary and deliberate revisions and additions of our own, more or less directly occasioned by the continuing stimulation of our sense organs. It is a pale gray lore, black with fact and white with convention. But I have found no substantial reasons for concluding that there are any quite black threads in it, or any white ones. - source

This last quote is included in Hilary Putnam's The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy (2002), p. 138. Once again the details of the argument that fact and convention cannot be separated need to be investigated by me. Quine's rhetoric is brilliant but is he correct? My study of these issues is far from finished.

Putnam takes the whole discussion further in the above collection of essays. In essay 8, The Philosophers of Science's Evasion of Values he argues that science includes value judgments, not only "moral" or "ethical" judgments but also judgments of "coherence", "plausibility", "reasonableness", simplicity" and "elegance" (epistemic values).

Where this leads us requires far more discussion of Putnam's work. So, I'll just conclude with this quote from Vivian Walsh referenced by Putnam as an extension of Quine's doctrine:

To borrow and adapt Quine's vivid image, if a theory may be black with fact and white with convention, it might well (as far as logical empiricism could tell) be red with values. Since for them confirmation or falsification had to be a property of a theory as a whole , they had no way of unravelling this whole cloth.

Reason, Truth and History by Hilary Putnam

I'm still studying Hilary Putnam and related works and don't expect to reach any firm conclusions for some time. Some of Putnam's essays are quite difficult. There is an interesting and (for me) hard to define tension between Putnam's philosophy and the marxist philosophy of ascending from the abstract to the concrete (link to a 2006 blog about that).

Here is a very rough summary:
- the copy theory of truth is not valid (the idea that our minds and hence our words represent some sort of mirror copy of the real world is not valid)
- Subjective or relativist views are not valid (eg. post modernist and / or Kuhnian views that what we regard as "truth" depends on the perspective of the observer)
- We approach the truth through being rational
- Rationality includes both facts and values (eg. beauty is rational and that is factual)
- let the Hegelian metaphor be: the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world
- it's important to break down the socially ingrained fact / value dichotomy
- the "scientific idea" of One True Theory does not hold up

Reason, Truth and History by Hilary Putnam (the link is to a full copy available from Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive)

Preface

In the present work, the aim which I have in mind is to break the strangle hold which a number of dichotomies appear to have on the thinking of both philosophers and laymen. Chief among these is the dichotomy between objective and subjective views of truth and reason. The phenomenon I am thinking of is this: once such a dichotomy as the dichotomy between 'objective' and 'subjective' has become accepted, accepted not as a mere pair of categories but as a characterization of types of views and styles of thought, thinkers begin to view the terms of the dichotomy almost as ideological labels. Many, perhaps most, philosophers hold some version of the 'copy' theory of truth today, the conception according to which a statement is true just in case it 'corresponds to the (mind independent) facts'; and the philosophers in this faction see the only alternative as the denial of the objectivity of truth and a capitulation to the idea that all schemes of thought and all points of view are hopelessly subjective. Inevitably a bold minority (Kuhn, in some of his moods at least; Feyerabend, and such distinguished continental philosophers as Foucault) range themselves under the opposite label. They agree that the alternative to a naive copy conception of truth is to see systems of thought, ideologies, even (in the case of Kuhn and Feyerabend) scientific theories, as subjective, and they proceed to put forward a relativist and subjective view with vigor.

That philosophical dispute assumes somewhat the character of ideological dispute is not, of itself, necessarily bad: new ideas, even in the most exact sciences, are frequently both espoused and attacked with partisan vigor. Even in politics, polarization and ideological fervor are sometimes necessary to bring moral seriousness to an issue. But in time, both in philosophy and politics, new ideas become old ideas; what was once challenging, becomes predictable and boring; and what once served to focus attention where it should be focussed, later keeps discussion from considering new alternatives. This has now happened in the debate between the correspondence views of truth and subjectivist views. In the first three chapters of this book I shall try to explain a conception of truth which unites objective and subjective components. This view, in spirit at least, goes back to ideas of Immanuel Kant; and it holds that we can reject a naive 'copy' conception of truth without having to hold that it's all a matter of the Zeitgeist, or a matter of 'gestalt switches', or all a matter of ideology.

The view which I shall defend holds, to put it very roughly, that there is an extremely close connection between the notions of truth and rationality; that, to put it even more crudely, the only criterion for what is a fact is what it is rational to accept. (I mean this quite literally and across the board; thus if it can be rational to accept that a picture is beautiful, then it can be a fact that the picture is beautiful.) There can be value facts on this conception. But the relation between rational acceptability and truth is a relation between two distinct notions. A statement can be rationally acceptable at a time but not true; and this realist intuition will be preserved in my account.

I do not believe, however, that rationality is defined by a set of unchanging 'canons' or 'principles'; methodological principles are connected with our view of the world, including our view of ourselves as part of the world, and change with time. Thus I agree with the subjectivist philosophers that there is no fixed, ahistorical organon which defines what it is to be rational; but I don't conclude from the fact that our conceptions of reason evolve in history, that reason itself can be (or evolve into) anything, nor do I end up in some fancy mixture of cultural relativism and 'structuralism' like the French philosophers. The dichotomy: either ahistorical unchanging canons of rationality or cultural relativism is a dichotomy that I regard as outdated.

Another feature of the view is that rationality is not restricted to laboratory science, nor different in a fundamental way in laboratory science and outside of it. The conception that it is seems to me a hangover from positivism; from the idea that the scientific world is in some way constructed out of 'sense data' and the idea that terms in the laboratory sciences are 'operationally defined'. I shall not devote much space to criticizing operationalist and positivist views of science; these have been thoroughly criticized in the last twenty-odd years. But the empiricist idea that 'sense data' constitute some sort of objective 'ground floor' for at least a part of our knowledge will be reexamined in the light of what we have to say about truth and rationality (in Chapter 3).

In short, I shall advance a view in which the mind does not simply 'copy' a world which admits of description by One True Theory. But my view is not a view in which the mind makes up the world, either (or makes it up subject to constraints imposed by 'methodological canons' and mind-independent 'sense-data'). If one must use metaphorical language, then let the metaphor be this: the mind and the world jointly make up the mind and the world. (Or, to make the metaphor even more Hegelian, the Universe makes up the Universe - with minds - collectively - playing a special role in the making up.)

A final feature of my account of rationality is this: I shall try to show that our notion of rationality is, at bottom, just one part of our conception of human flourishing, our idea of the good. Truth is deeply dependent on what have been recently called 'values' (Chapter 6). And what we said above about rationality and history also applies to value and history; there is no given, ahistorical, set of 'moral principles' which define once and for all what human flourishing consists in; but that doesn't mean that it's all merely cultural and relative. Since the current state in the theory of truth - the current dichotomy between copy theories of truth and subjective accounts of truth - is at least partly responsible, in my view, for the notorious 'fact/value' dichotomy, it is only by going to a very deep level and correcting our accounts of truth and rationality themselves that we can get beyond the fact/value dichotomy. (A dichotomy which, as it is conventionally understood, virtually commits one to some sort of relativism.) The current views of truth are alienated views; they cause one to lose one part or another of one's self and the world, to see the world as simply consisting of elementary particles swerving in the void (the 'physicalist' view, which sees the scientific description as converging to the One True Theory), or to see the world as simply consisting of 'actual and possible sense-data' (the older empiricist view), or to deny that there is a world at all, as opposed to a bunch of stories that we make up for various (mainly unconscious) reasons. And my purpose in this work is to sketch the leading ideas of a non- alienated view.

reinventing myself

We are like sailors who on the open sea must reconstruct their ship but are never able to start afresh from the bottom. Where a beam is taken away a new one must at once be put there, and for this the rest of the ship is used as support. In this way, by using the old beams and driftwood the ship can be shaped entirely anew, but only by gradual reconstruction
- Otto Neurath

I love the practice of Zig Engelmann's Direct Instruction but am not happy with his philosophical underpinnings as expressed in sections of Could John Stuart Mill Have Saved Our Schools? Engelmann and Carnine just seem to take extracts from a variety of philosophers and throw them together in a grab bag: some James, JS Mill, Peirce, Plato, Skinner, etc. In other places serious thinkers such as Dewey and Piaget are dismissed without a full consideration of their contribution.

Nevertheless, the practice of Direct Instruction is very impressive, for disadvantaged learners, and I have to embrace it.

Since I like to think of myself as a philosophical person this creates a dilemma. I think of Direct Instruction as excellent in practice but insufficiently theorised.

It has led me to study philosophy again. I have some general background knowledge in the works of Karl Marx, Seymour Papert, the evolution debate between Stephen J Gould and Richard Dawkins, Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel Dennett, Marvin Minsky, Alan Kay and Noel Pearson. These thinkers have seriously influenced my thinking.

But they haven't yet provided me with the comprehensive thinking tools I need to evaluate Direct Instruction.

So, I've began a review of the history of the philosophy of science. Since Engelmann has at times described his method as "Logico-Empirical" (p. 125 of the JS Mill book mentioned above) then I needed to understand why logical empiricism as well as logical positivism had been decisively rejected by modern philosophers. A reasonable introduction (but it's only an overview with good references) to this question is provided by Peter Godfrey-Smith in Theory and Reality.

Arising from this study I've now discovered a seriously profound contemporary philosopher, Hilary Putnam, who forces me to think in new ways, who challenges my ideas in ways which I can't ignore. What this means is developing a toolkit of philosophical ideas which inform my world outlook and current practice in trying to help indigenous kids, who are behind in their learning, to learn more effectively.

Perhaps I'll write a few blogs outlining some of these new thoughts in the near future. Thinking aloud and having a conversation or debate on these issues does help.

how many of your teachers made you think?

Critical thinking critical to teaching by Damon Young

This article examines teaching from a philosophical perspective. Read the whole thing.

A teacher: "I don't want to think"

Gilbert Ryle, in The Concept of Mind, distinguished between 'knowing that' and 'knowing how'. The first is factual or abstract knowledge. The second is a skilled disposition. For example, one can know that Hume was an empiricist and sceptic, simply by reading a sentence in a first-year textbook. This is very different to knowing how to think empirically and sceptically.

And to develop this disposition, it is not enough to memorise rules about fallacies and syllogisms. "We learn how by practice, schooled indeed by criticism and example," writes Ryle, "but often quite unaided by any lessons in the theory." One must actually read, think, formulate arguments, listen, reply, and so on. It is an achievement developed within a very specific community, and requires as much collaboration as conflict.

A secondary teacher who does not "want to think" will not provide these conditions. Students might know that Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49BC, that mitochondrial DNA is maternal, and that Socrates spoke negatively of the life without examination. But they will not know how to think about these; how to do historiography, biology or philosophy.

And because the teacher is not an exemplar - perhaps the most powerful way to communicate intellectual virtues - the students might never recognise that they missed out. They might graduate without having witnessed critical thinking in teachers or one another. And then the onus is on TAFE, university or the workplace to provide the conditions - sadly, not always a certainty.

At one stage in my life I thought that by promoting philosophical thinking amongst teachers then the quality might improve. Eventually I realised that if government allows input into the profession from those with rather low TER scores, some of whom chose teaching because other "more attractive" career doors in business, engineering law and medicine have closed, then the prospect of philosophy turning things around became incredibly low.

In turn this becomes part of a good argument for scripted lessons, since most teachers as well as not having the time also don't have the inclination or ability to research a subject domain thoroughly and then develop their own high quality curriculum.

Marx: ego is not a dirty word

What did marx say about human nature?

This issue came up in a recent discussion here but it also comes up all the time whenever you mention communism or socialism. Someone I spoke to recently said:

Even if the whole world was socialist or communist then it would eventually revert back to capitalism because that is human nature

And in a comment on this blog Mark Miller said:

The problem I see with Marxism is it assumes that human nature can be molded and changed. Where Marxism has been tried it runs into what I'd call "the wall of human nature". It doesn't achieve its stated goals, because imperfect people are involved in the enterprise. Inevitably the same qualities that Marxism tries to overthrow: greed, the hunger for power over others, end up controlling the enterprise. I think Lord Acton's maxim holds true no matter what structure is tried: "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Such efforts to create a society where everything is parceled out equally and no one has more power than anyone else is continually frustrated, because human nature keeps getting in the way.

I recognise these opinions as "popular wisdom" but wasn't actually sure what Marx did say about human nature, so I looked it up and here is part of what I found, part of a polemic against Max Stirner:

"Communism is simply incomprehensible to our saint because the communists do not put egoism against self-sacrifice or self-sacrifice against egoism nor do they express this contradiction theoretically either in its sentimental or in its high-flown ideological form; on the contrary, they demonstrate the material basis engendering it, with which it disappears of itself. The communists do not preach morality at all, such as Stirner preaches so extensively. They do not put to the people the moral demand: love one another, do not be egoists, etc.; on the contrary, they are well aware that egoism, just as much as self-sacrifice, is in definite circumstances a necessary form of the self-assertion of individuals. Hence, the communists by no means want,... to do away with the "private individual" for the sake of the "general," self-sacrificing man....

Communist theoreticians, the only ones who have time to devote to the study of history, are distinguished precisely because they alone have discovered that throughout history the "general interest" is created by individuals who are defined as "private persons." They know that this contradiction is only a seeming one because one side of it, the so-called "general," is constantly being produced by the other side, private interest, and by no means opposes the latter as an independent force with an independent history - so that this contradiction is in practice always being destroyed and reproduced. Hence it is not a question of the Hegelian "negative unity" of two sides of a contradiction, but of the materially determined destruction of the preceding materially determined mode of life of individuals, with the disappearance of which this contradiction, together with its unity, also disappear."
- Personal, versus General Interest, from Selections from the remaining parts of The German Ideology by Marx and Engels

living with offence

Kindly Inquisitors: The new attacks on free thought (1993) by Jonathan Rauch

Frances Widdowson (Offended by Offence) has recently reviewed this book on her blog. I liked her review and also the Kirkus review at amazon books. I haven't read the book. These brief notes are based on the reviews.

In our civilised democratic society (not Iran, China, etc.), the modern day equivalent of the Inquisition are the philosophies of egalitarianism and humanitarianism

ie. the principle of the Inquisition was that people with wrong or hurtful opinions ought to be punished for the good of society

egalitarianism - the beliefs of all sincere people deserve equal respect
humanitarianism - one must never offend

Taken separately and in particular when combined these outlooks undermine the pursuit of scientific truth by introducing a variety of mental and ideological barriers to free and open discussion. This is explained more in the reviews.

It is essential to learn the hard discipline of living with offence that will inevitably follow from this approach rather than fudging the quest for truth out of fear of offending others or being offended ourselves. Words might offend but as long it remains just words then we need to accept it and either argue back or move on, not try to censor it and to reject philosophies which attempt to censure open, vigorous discussion

Previous: This book reminds me of Frank Furedi's book, "Where have all the intellectuals gone?" which I did read and review
truth slips from view in the sea of post modern knowledge
how the left became conservative

the vision is more important than the mouse

During the dot.com boom at the dawn of the 21st century, bits and pieces of his framework emerged in interesting and unintended ways. Blogs, wikis, hypermedia, and networked communities of practice using dynamic knowledge repositories, such as the Center for Disease Control website, the Human Genome project, and Wikipedia proliferated. But the haphazard, market-driven diffusion of technology lacks Engelbart's foundational philosophical framework for augmenting human intellect for solving complex problems. These writings by Engelbart and his colleagues place his well-known technology achievements in the context of his grand vision for a paradigm shift in our thinking. We believe that Engelbart s philosophy is at least as significant as his inventions

The Engelbart Hypothesis: dialogs with Douglas Engelbart by Valerie Landau (Author) and Eileen Clegg (Author, Illustrator)

Much of this book also seems to be available online at the engelbartbookdialogues blog

Very smart people like Doug Engelbart ("a man who has always had ideas before words caught up to him") need popularisers

Related: kay-and-van-dam-discuss-engelbarts-ideas

question 22

walter bender's question 22:

(22) What “shoulders of giants” should we stand on? What is it that children should learn? Are there any universals? How do children decide whom and what to believe?

I've been providing what I think is a good answer to these questions for some time now (since December 2006: what should schools teach?) but often the response is muted and contradictory. It's not my original answer, it originates from alan kay and his analysis originates from anthropologists.

The answer is not that children should learn the universals but what Kay has called the "non universals". From anthropological research of over 3000 human cultures, Kay presented two lists, the first were universals, the things that all human cultures have in common. This list included things like:

• language
• communication
• fantasies
• stories
• tools and art
• superstition
• religion and magic
• play and games
• differences over similarities
• quick reactions to patterns
• vendetta, and more

He then presented a list of non universals, the things that humans find harder to learn. This list was shorter and included:

• reading and writing
• deductive abstract mathematics
• model based science
• equal rights
• democracy
• perspective drawing
• theory of harmony
• similarities over differences
• slow deep thinking
• agriculture
• legal systems

The non universals have not arisen spontaneously, they have been discovered by the smartest humans after hundreds or thousands of years of civilisation. Hence, it follows that children need guidance in learning them, they will not be discovered by open ended discovery learning. There is an objective need for some version of “school” - where advanced knowledge is somehow communicated from those who know it to those who don't.

The resolution of the tension (between how children learn and the complex, non spontaneous nature of the development of advanced scientific or Enlightenment ideas) is to develop an honest children's version of the advanced ideas. For some of these ideas (not all) the computer can aid this process. Which ones? The list would include the laws of motion, turtle geometry, calculus by vectors, exponential growth, feedback and system ecologies. I think this should be the starting point or at least one of the starting points for thinking about how computers should be used in schools.

Part of the discussion here is establishing that computers are not currently used to their full potential in schools. IMO once the above vision of how computers could be used in schools is understood then it becomes obvious that they are currently poorly used in schools.

I've been wondering why this particular idea, the non universals, is not spreading more. I think it's because it goes against the culture of pseudo progressiveness which advocates that process is more important than content, that discovery is more important than knowledge and/or that education should be entertaining or at least laid back, that we shouldn't put too much pressure on children. The problem is how to teach the non universals without sounding like a "back to basics" fundamentalist. But that is a real problem that needs to be faced and resolved.

Is this an example of the unsane, the mental state where our ideas don't fit reality, the map doesn't represent the territory. We like to think of ourselves as mostly "sane" and contrast that with a few "insane" personal moments or the more permanent state of a few unfortunates. But the "unsane" idea makes room for a different self perception. What if more often than not we are unsane?

reference:
powerful ideas discourse (follow the links there for a fuller discussion)
in general programmers are not creatures of the Enlightenment (or why I quit teaching year 9 computing skills and went back to teaching maths and science)
our human condition "from space" (sources the unsane idea)
alan kay's educational vision (summary of a presentation I gave about alan kay's ideas)

I now see colour differently

Daniel Dennett:

"... the color of objects: they have indeed coevolved with the color-vision systems of the organisms that perceive them"
- Review of Varela

I hadn't thought about this before. Colour is so personal and vivid, it affects our moods and emotions so strongly. It is still real - just as the oxygen in the atmosphere that was put in there by photosynthesis and which preceded animal evolution is real. But it's harder to intellectually detach ourselves from our perceptual systems.

Organisms act on their environment and contribute to their environment - they do not just adapt to their environment. At some level everyone knows this but I hadn't realised how deep it went. That in the process of our evolution we created colour itself, as distinct from the particular wavelength of certain radiations.

I have to think about this more. I had more of an OMG than an AHA response.

It might be similar to the idea that we coevolve with our language, that language is a mind tool that grows with us. As we learn language we grow a little, which enables us to learn more language in an ongoing spiral.

how the left became conservative

Frank Furedi:

In the nineteenth century, the project of relativising knowledge was designed to shield tradition against the claims of universalism. Cultural relativism sought to protect religion and traditional morality and values against what was perceived as the threat posed by science, objective truth and universal values. According to opponents of the Enlightenment, different communities had a particular way of making sense of the world, and their values were the product of their own specific circumstances. It was claimed that each of these particular perspectives was of equal validity and provided far more insight into the ways of the world than the so-called abstract universalism of the Enlightenment.

Since the 1960s, cultural relativism has succeeded in becoming a powerful intellectual force. Disenchantment with the Enlightenment tradition has encouraged many thinkers and sections of the public to make sense of their lives through particularistic perspectives. The caricatured version of universalism upheld by the institutions of Western society proved to be no match to the powerful spirit of disenchantment that prevailed in the second half of the twentieth century. One consequence of this process was to put the authority of objective truth on the defensive - and thereby putting to question all truth claims.

Whereas in the past the most systematic critique of universalism was mounted by the right, today, by contrast, the cultural left is its most aggressive opponent. Since the late eighteenth century, concepts such as reason, progress and universalism have generally been associated with the left. But since the 1960s, the New Left has begun a systematic demolition of those values, by questioning the claims of reason, progress and universalism. The new philosophical posture was reflected in the political approach that acclaimed diversity and opposed universalistic values. Unlike the nineteenth-century critics of the Enlightenment, the New Left was not, in its origin, motivated by a conservative impulse to defend tradition. But because Western capitalism presented its values as universal, the New Left unthinkingly became opposed to it. The New Left not only rejected universalism in general, it adopted a particularistic world view linked to the politics of identity. Unconsciously, the New Left reaction to postwar Western capitalism internalised the methods and arguments of the conservative reaction to the Enlightenment.

During the 1960s, the left's love affair with relativism was hesitant and semi-conscious, but by the late 1970s, radical intellectuals and, more often, ex-radicals were speaking the language of Nietzsche. In a process aptly described by Alan Bloom as the 'Nietzscheanisation of the Left', the left, repelled by modernism, took a cultural turn towards particularism, heterogeneity and difference. It is worth recalling that the original methodological orientation towards difference began as the defence of aristocratic and ruling class privilege. Differences in moral and mental capacities were advanced to account for and legitimise the social hierarchy. By the mid-nineteenth century, this perspective attached itself to racial differences and helped to legitimise the notion that there was a global hierarchy of people. The cultural left did not set out, as the Social Darwinist did, to provide intellectual sustenance to racial superiority. But the conservative potential of the particularistic doctrine has crystallised into the cultural left's suspicion of cosmopolitan and global trends. As the rebellion against the rhetoric of universalism turned into a celebration of difference, the process of intellectual de-radicalisation became inescapable. The outcome has been the ascendancy of what is called postmodernism and its systematic repudiation of objective knowledge.
- Where have all the intellectuals gone? (pp. 60-62)

web2.0 extension: My individual rights are important, I will insert my voice into conversations whenever I can - rather than study history or actually understand anything deeper than my immediate knowledge. If anyone asks me to think too hard I will just move onto the next conversation.

I like the way in which Furedi does identify and take a stand for truth and the Enlightenment, that progress can be identified and how he explains that the spoilers baton passed from the Right to the (pseudo) Left and this latest attack on truth is done in the name of the freedom of the individual and the evils of capitalism.

from never mind, to structured mind, to messy mind

At learning evolves wiki, I am abandoning traditional classifications of learning theories in favour of this approach: from never mind, to structured mind, to messy mind

There is a problem with the conventional categories (such as cognitivism, instructionism / behaviourism, constructivism, connectionist / connectivism, neuroscience) because some (many?) learning theorists bridge more than one category

Example one: cognitivist / constructivist overlap
On this page Bruner is categorised as a cognitivist but moving toward cognitive constructivism - reacting against the mind as "information processor", which obscures the mind as a creator of meanings (Acts of Meaning)

Example two: behaviourist / connectionist overlap:
"Much contemporary work in cognitive science on the set of models known as connectionist or parallel distributed processing (PDP) models seems to share behaviorism's anti-nativism about learning. PDP takes an approach to learning which is response oriented rather than rule-governed and this is because, like behaviorism, it has roots in associationism" (standford uni behaviourist page)

Example three: behaviourist / cognitivist overlap:
Daniel Dennett argues that the law of effect (stimuli which are rewarded tend to be repeated) is fundamental and can be extended to the inner environment, eg. Popperian creatures can preselect from possible behaviours / actions weeding out the truly stupid options before risking them in the harsh world. Dennett calls them Popperian because Popper said this design enhancement "permits our hypotheses to die in our stead". This is Dennett's enhancement of behaviourism. Popperian creatures have an inner environment that can preview and select amongst possible actions. For this to work the inner environment must contain lots of information about the outer environment and its regularities. Not only humans can do this. Mammals, birds, reptiles and fish can all presort behavioural options before acting.

Example four: Response to the challenges to cognitive science
"Thagard (2005) argues that all these challenges can best be met by expanding and supplementing the computational-representational approach, not by abandoning it." (critique of cog science - stanford philosophy page)

MY NEW APPROACH (briefly)

from never mind, to structured mind, to messy mind

• never mind = behaviourism
• structured mind = hard edged representation and computation model (think of the mind as a concept map)
• messy mind = the modern synthesis which includes some messy partly contradictory ideas such as distributed mind (the mind is distributed from the brain to the environment eg. enactivism), multi modal (kinesthenic, visual are important as well as abstractions, eg. Bruner "doing with images makes symbols"), parallel processing / connectionism / pattern recognition (Churchland's eliminative materialism), neuroscience (the details do matter), behavioural AI (Brooks, behaviourism is not dead), serial processing virtual machine built on top of parallel processing (dennett), evolutionary mind (Pinker, Dennett), anthropological mind (alan kay's non universals)

I need to go through the other learning theories on this page to see if this approach works for all

Later steps in this evolution do not preclude earlier steps, that is part of the mess. Behaviourism is still very valid (responses that are reward tend to be repeated) but limited in its Skinnerian form. Cognitive science remains valid (the mind has structure but its hard to define clearly and a literal serial computing model is a gross oversimplification). The new ideas are best seen as a conservative revolution or a reform of cognitivism, not an overthrow.

There is no clear cut modern synthesis of mind. It is messy. Appreciating the messiness is important in a practical sense because if you just focus on one learning approach then that will not work for everyone (eg. the idea of controlling the transactions of meanings through the use of concept maps is good but may not work for learners who are twitchy, kinesthenic)

See learning evolves for more detail as it develops

the yin and yang of dichotomies

There are many useful dichotomies available to describe culture (ying - yang), organisation (hierarchy - heterarchy or ad-hocracy), cognition (abstract - concrete), emotion (impersonal - personal), ethics (judgement - narrative), anthropology (universals - non universals), futurology (cyborgs - human) and vocations (scientist - artist)

These dichotomies are even more useful if we look at ways to bridge them, examine their connection and interrelation and understand that in some circumstances one transforms into the other

In the education debate / culture wars some argue for "back to basics" or some sort of traditional curriculum knowledge and others argue for social constructivism, process skills and discovery learning. People create web sites that are against things and wage wars on government. PLATO = people lobbying against teaching outcomes.

My feeling is that we are stuck because we don't listen to the other side and don't take the best from both worlds and integrate them.

what is maths? reality confronts inspiration

I thought this anonymous comment on my Simplicio-Salviato blog said quite a lot:

... The students I teach are quite difficult at most times, and are generally quite behind in maths. They can often remember ways of doing things by rote, but have troubles generalising and get completely stuck if they find themselves in an unexpected situation. Probably for this reason, they really like worksheets and textbooks. They can get the answers (one way or another) - in fact there _is_ an answer. They have no idea of what this answer means, or, for that matter what the question means or why the hell they're doing it. But that doesn't really matter if they can get the answer. On the other hand, whenever I have tried more open, exploratory or play based activities, the students tend to revolt (in a manner of speaking). Not always, but often. There's no clear end in sight, and they have difficulties working independently, so things start going awry. A lot of this, no doubt, comes from their lives outside of school, and earlier schooling.

It's a conundrum - I can work through the state's curriculum via a textbook and tick all the boxes, and the administrators will be happy and so will the students (though they won't actually have learnt anything useful), or I can tear my hair out trying something different where the students get confused, I don't cover the expected material, and the outcome might not be much better. I'm tending towards the latter option, in the hope that over time the students will become more responsive...

All this is true and says a lot succinctly, written by a real teacher in a real school - and that counts for something.

(In saying that I'm not forgetting that Paul Lockhart is also a real teacher in a real school and an inspirational maths teacher and polemicist)

The dialogue between reality and inspiration needs to continue, both sides of this discussion need to be listened to.

Anonymous points out there is tremendous and real institutional inertia on both teachers and students to perpetuate an uninspiring "plug and chug" pseudo maths methodology. This inertia is fueled by uninspiring textbooks (devoid of maths history and open ended challenges) and that many students actual prefer to do maths that way than face the discomfort and struggle of real thought and effort. It is also true that some open ended discovery learning or inquiry approaches achieve even worse results than simple old fashioned plug and chug.

These traditional approaches exist and are perpetuated for real reasons - even though they are rotten, boring and deserve to die.

There is risk involved in new innovative approaches. They can work but they have to be well thought out, based on sound theories and implemented in a flexible, not dogmatic manner.

Hegel: all that is real is rational; all that is rational is real
Engels: reality proves to be necessity; all that exists deserves to perish