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.

iraq war analysis

I left this comment on this North Star thread (10 Years After The Iraq War: The Inevitability of Failure — and of Success):

After the first Iraq war (Kuwait), Christopher Hitchens visited Kurdistan and was embarrassed to see pictures of then President George H Bush ("wearing a jogging suit of all things") displayed prominently on the windshield of the jeep he was travelling in. When he asked the Pesh Merga soldier drivers why they did this they replied that they would be dead – murdered by Saddam's forces – without the protection of the no fly zone which was put in place by the first President Bush.

This forced him to rethink the whole issue. There was nothing like being on the ground, in the locality, for having a life and death reality check.

Let us translate this reality to the second Iraq war, initiated by George W Bush. Given the strength and brutality of Saddam’s dictatorship it turns out that the only chance for the elimination of that fascism was an imperfect one (the US invasion, which did create democracy, accompanied by a series of fuck ups) or a continuation of that particularly brutal fascism.

Insofar as I can project myself into that reality I think the imperfect external imposition of democracy from US imperialism was preferable. Rather than continuing to grovel to Saddam it would be better to risk freedom even at the tremendous cost that it led to. Easy for me to say from a distance but I think we all have to make that judgement call. Just as Hitchens had to make it when confronted by the Kurds. The only slogan about which I can be particularly clear these days is “Death to Fascism”.

To paraphrase:

“If it wasn’t for the imperialists we would be dead”.
“If it wasn’t for the imperialist we would still be living under the exceptionally brutal yoke of Saddam’s fascism”.

We have here on this thread an inability of some intellectuals to face reality in these simple terms – the terms under which the people of Iraq have lived and died.

If George W Bush and team hadn’t made so many mistakes – quite a few of which he admits in his account Decision Points – then not so many would have died and the war would have been shorter.

What mistakes does George W admit to?

• intelligence failure (268) 
• “Mission Accomplished” banner (257) 
• failure to secure Baghdad and stop the looting (258) 
• not enough troops sent in (258) 
• Brenner’s order to disband the Baath army - not necessarily but needed to be discussed more (259)
• “Bring ‘em on” statement (260) 

There were other mistakes too. Mistakes built into the imperialist apparatus so to speak, such as torture.

One of the great things Hitchens did was to expose water boarding as torture in a very personal way, by subjecting himself to it. Some arguments are more powerful than other arguments. On the ground arguments are more powerful than deep strategic analysis. Both are necessary but some are more powerful and actually more real. This is one reason why George W Bush’s account is more plausible to me than some of the comments on this thread.

I do accept – as arthur argues – that there was a strategic and very significant reversal of previous US policy, that the US came to support democracy in Iraq and the Middle East in general to be in their best imperialist interests. This was repeatedly stated by Bush and Condi and not believed and strangely, still not believed, even though it did eventuate.

However, Israel continues to be the albatross around the neck of US imperialism. Their continuing inability to deal with the Israel-Palestine “problem” means that the swamp which breeds the terrorists who continue to attack the US and modernity is not being drained in a way that is perceived as a genuine US desire. I think that reality somewhat undermines arthur’s grand narrative:

Following 9/11 ruling circles in the US recognized that the middle eastern status quo of stagnant autocratic swamps that they had encouraged in the interests of cheap oil, anti-communism, contention with the Soviet Union and support for Israel no longer served their interests (my emphasis) - comment above

I believe George W Bush when he says he was shocked, angry and sickened when WMDs were not discovered (p. 262) I also believe him when he says he planned for democracy in Iraq from the beginning. (p. 232).

But when the WMDs weren’t discovered it did mean that the two point rationale for the invasion became a one point rationale which in retrospect (from George W Bush’s perspective) may not have been a strong enough rationale for the invasion. The post 9/11 two points being:

1.  Saddam has WMDs and will hand them to al Qaeda who will use them against the US Homeland
2.  Democracy in the Middle East is the best option for the future prospering of US imperialism (post 9/11, post end of the threat from the USSR etc.)

I’m suggesting that Bush was neither particularly dumb (as the “left” argues) nor particularly smart (as arthur implies). I accept most of what Bush says on face value rather than peering into it for deeper interpretation simply because what he says is adequate based on my understanding of the conflict. In short, Bush muddled through.

recent Noel Pearson interview covers much ground

Need to embrace Aboriginal success

This interview with Noel Pearson covers some good ground -- his recovery from cancer, the limitations of the Northern Territory intervention, how welfare can be poison, indigenous home ownership, the emerging black middle class (resulting from the mining boom as covered by Marcia Langton in her recent Boyer Lectures) and how we need to do more than throw money at disadvantaged education.

Extract:

EMMA ALBERICI: What do you think of Julia Gillard's education reforms announced on the weekend?

NOEL PEARSON: Well, I think there's a lot of opportunity for getting Indigenous education right, but the story the world over - I've thought a lot about education policy and the story the world over is that - and the story in Australia of the last seven years is one of increased investment without an increase in success. And what I would say to the Government is that, you know, I think the lesson from the world over is that if you don't - if you don't get the instruction right, if Australia doesn't get quality instruction coming from teachers to every child, we're missing the whole point of the increased investment. Teacher performance equals effective instruction. They must impart effective instruction to each and every child, and ...

EMMA ALBERICI: Do you get a sense that this new money being allocated by the Government, being earmarked, are you confident that the Government knows how to spend that well to improve teacher quality?

NOEL PEARSON: Um, no, I'm not. I think that there's a missing - you know, a lot of the things that we have done have simply not translated into more effective instruction in classrooms. I've seen that if you get the instruction right - with Aurukun School, for example, one of our academy schools, the most marginal school in the state of Queensland. It would be the contender when we took it over for being the worst school in Queensland. And yet today, children are reading, children are counting, children are writing. And it's because, you know, at the end of the day you can do everything - parental engagement, the whole show, but if you don't have teachers who are imparting effective instruction to the children, then you have nothing. And my concern is that I don't discern in current Federal Government policies a strong understanding of what should drive school reform. And this is absolutely critical for remote communities.

studying philosophy

RIP Andrew Saint (chess community)

The Australian chess community is in shock following the death of Andrew Saint in a car accident on the way back from the Doeberl Cup chess tournament late on Easter Monday. Hannibal Swartz, who I never met, was also killed and a couple more were seriously injured.

Of those in the vehicle I knew Andrew and I know James Morris, who fortunately is now out of intensive care and being a young person, only 19yo, (and incidentally an exceptionally brilliant chess player) hopefully will make a full recovery (broken ribs, punctured lungs).

Everyone who knew Andrew has fond memories of him. There has been an outpouring of grief at chess chat on this thread: RIP Andrew Saint. Due to the fact that I have dropped in and out of chess like a yo-yo I didn't know Andrew well but from my own experience I can confirm what everyone else says, that he was friendly, warm and affirming.

I'll republish this tribute from Andrew's brother, Alex, which reveals how very sad this loss is to those who did know him well. Chess is a competitive game played in silence at a competition level so what is refreshing here is that someone with such an egalitarian and social spirit devoted a considerable portion of their life to the development of the chess community, with ingenuity and flair.

A Dedication to my Brother (by Alex Saint)

What a tragedy. All would agree this was such a horrible end to a short life but what a life it was. Andrew lived life to the full - never wasting a moment. Andrew has no enemies. He was such a powerful force of good. Andrew I thank you most for your love, your character and your enthusiasm for life. Dad and I wish to thank the Australian Chess Community, and more recently to the Melbourne Chess Club, for such wonderful tributes to Andrew. He obviously made a big impact on many people.

I would like to write some things about Andrew - my brother and best friend:
If you want to really understand my dear brother you need to look back a decade ago when the Australian Chess Championships came to Adelaide. This was his finest hour. Andrew, the Wedding family and I were already involved in the University Open tournaments. After a few years, we made a bid for and were able to hold, with SACA, the Australian Chess Championships in Adelaide at the end of 2003 and start of 2004. We were all looking forward to this event, none more than Andrew. Others may look forward to going to an AFL grand final live watching their team, well this event was his grand final. As many know, Andrew loved to organise, he loved chess, and he loved to help people - and these three things came together in 2003. Robin Wedding and I were there as willing helpers but Andrew was the leading force. He was the driver, we were in the back seat. Without him, the event would not go down in many peoples eyes as one of the most memorable tournaments as stated by people including Grandmaster Ian Rogers.

It was Andrew who organised the most extravagant snack bar in the history of Australian chess!! He joked with me that we needed to 'go gourmet'. Well we certainly did! Most chess events supply foam cups, a big tin of Blend 43 coffee and a packet of out-of-date dry Arnotts biscuits. Well Andrew would have none of that. He arranged different coffee blends, herbal teas, fancy cordials, chocolate biscuits, a cheese platter, pate, dips, fruit, everything. I remember many people seeing it and saying, "wow". Andrew paid for stuff like the snack bar out of his own pocket - a lot of money for a uni student. He didn't want SACA to have to pay for that, which I think was a good thing for SACA! Why did he do it I hear you ask? He did it so you, the chess public could have a great time. The tournament was so well organised. Behind closed doors was someone who was living that tournament 100% from the moment he woke up to the moment he went to sleep for 14 days. It always brought a smile to his face to see so many people enjoying the tournament. This event wasn't an attempt to puff up Andrew's pride or stroke his ego. Andrew humbly and quietly sought to please all. Andrew even said, "we need to go to a special newsagent which has all the interstate newspapers". He thought it would be a nice thing to do for all the interstate players.

He spent two days in the Chemical Engineering department before the event designing a poster describing the chess event and its history. He organised for there to be a blind simul with GM Ian Rogers on Boxing Day, followed by other simuls and opportunities for chess players to play top players. He organised for top players to give lectures in a special room. He arranged for a BBQ dinner night ensuring there was enough food for everyone. He was always checking that people were enjoying themselves. On top of all of this, Andrew and Robin were writing the newsletter for the tournament. They had to create one each day. He and Robin put everything into that, as many do. It took hours. Andrew always made sure it was a good read. He had all games listed, annotations, chess puzzles, even a joke of the day. Andrew also had a wicked sense of humour, as many people know. I remember Robin, Andrew and I laughing about an argument that broke out on a chess chat forum. He decided to publish it and it brought a smile to many faces especially to those who live on chess chat.

Just to go back to the University Opens, I remember the attention to detail he had. He organised a Saturday night transfer tournament with prizes. He made sure with each University Open that there were prizes for players of all standards. We had $50 prizes for players with different ratings e.g. Under 1000, under 1200, etc. That was all Andrew. Yes he loved seeing top players come along and win, but he also loved the everyday people in chess too and wanted them to have something to aim for. The tournament started off being about 27 people and in its final year it had 99. Andrew being the perfectionist, jokingly of course, wished we had cracked triple figures!! The Saturday night dinner became one of the most enjoyable social events in the chess calendar. Alan Goldsmith noted in his weekly column, that the Saturday dinner event had such a friendly, warm atmosphere. The dinners reached the stage of having 4 bain-maries with many dishes to choose from. If it was up to me I would have given everyone a Chicken Parmi. All of this was because of Andrew. He even had Trevor Tao, a brilliant chess player and pianist, playing the piano at one stage. I remember Andrew getting a bit emotional when he saw Evelyn Koshnitsky (a SA chess stalwart) enjoying the company, the food and the classical music.

SACA ran team chess tournaments on Tuesday nights throughout the year. We had four teams from Uni and each year Andrew told me he thought the traditional chess team names were so boring! There were teams like 'Adelaide Red' or 'Norwood Blue'. Andrew thought it would be better to create some names to remember. So each semester had a theme. One time it was cheeses. He didn't pick Swiss or anything simple, instead he picked one called 'Queso Blanco'. Another time it was wine and he picked names like 'Merlot'. He and the whole team had a huge laugh when they'd announce which teams were on top and Bill (Anderson-Smith) would announce, "Norwood Blue is on top ahead by two points from Queso Blanco". I have never laughed so much and in the chess hall you're meant to be quiet!! I will always remember those days at Adelaide Uni as the greatest time in my life - I forget about us studying for our degrees there :).

For the chess community, it would be nice for people to remember that Andrew was a State Junior Chess Champion. His biggest win was claiming the Under 18 Junior Title in what was thought to be one of the strongest fields for a long time. Andrew also performed extremely well in Istanbul and as we all know, he won the tournament on the weekend. As many have said though, he was also a gracious loser. Andrew was not about wins and losses though, which meant he truly had won in the game of life.

Rest in peace Andrew XXX.
(Andrew Saint: 26/12/1981 - 1/4/2013)

birds of paradise video

Another amazing and beautiful example of evolution. Best to watch full screen.

indigenous welfare reform will continue in Queensland

As reported a couple of days ago Queensland's Campbell Newman government, through the Indigenous Affairs Minister Glen Elmes, was planning to withdraw its share of the funding from the indigenous Family Responsibility Commission (FRC).

The role of the FRC is to help achieve these goals for indigenous people:

• Send your kids to school 
• Protect your children from abuse and neglect 
• Obey the law 
• Look after your house

After widespread protests from people such as Jenny Macklin, Noel Pearson and Tony Abbott this decision has now been reversed and so the funding will now go ahead.

Noel Pearson has pointed out that the two core indigenous nose on the face issues facing the two new governments in the Top End (Country Liberal in the Northern Territory and Liberal National Party in Queensland) are alcohol abuse and welfare dependency. (Noel Pearson's Cape York trial 'changing lives')

The Liberal brand in those Top End state governments is wavering on these issues whilst Federal Labour (through Jenny Macklin), at this point in time, is being far more consistent.

These moves indicate how fragile indigenous reform remains. Noel Pearson has said that we are half way up climbing a difficult mountain and suddenly against compelling evidence a "cowboy" Glen Elmes arrives on the scene and attempts to pull the plug.

MONEY

Is the money being well spent and what are the alternatives? There was an implied suggestion from Queensland Indigenous Affairs Minister Glen Elmes that the goals of the FRC such as improved school attendance could be achieved at less monetary cost.

Glen Elmes:

" ... in places like Cherbourg and Mornington Island, they are getting kids to school in other ways that don't cost as much"
- Noel Pearson's Cape York trial 'changing lives'

(the alternative policies of Chris Sarra probably lie behind this assertion)

THE EVALUATION REPORT

I'd like to see the yet to be publicly released independent evaluation report of the Cape York Welfare Reform trial that has been referred to by both sides of this latest argument about funding. Watch this space: Cape York Welfare Reform

Here are some pointers about the contents of the current report from a report in The Australian:

An independent evaluation report into the trial, obtained by The Australian, says individuals and families are beginning to gain respite from daily living problems and people feel that life is "on the way up". It finds that, since the trial began in July 2008, the Cape York communities of Aurukun, Coen, Hopevale and Mossman Gorge in far north Queensland have experienced improved school attendance, care and protection of children, and community safety.

It says people in the four communities are taking on greater personal responsibility and raising expectations, "particularly in areas such as sending kids to school, caring for children and families and their needs, and accessing supported self-help measures to deal with problems". After only three years of the trial, the report says there has been a "level of progress that has rarely been evident in previous reform programs in Queensland's remote indigenous communities".
- Noel Pearson's Cape York trial 'changing lives'

For further perspectives from Noel Pearson see this recent ABC interview: Noel Pearson confused by Minister's 'pre-emptive strike' (7 minutes)

bad news from Cape York

There was a report in today's Australian (Campbell Newman axes Noel Pearson's funding) that the Campbell Newman government in Queensland is planning to withdraw their share of the funding (it is jointly funded by Federal and State governments) from Noel Pearson's Cape York Direct Instruction education programme and Family Responsibilities Commission which supports that programme. The four communities involved are Aurukun, Hopevale, Mossman Gorge and Coen.

There is a pattern involved here which I have seen before. An innovative and successful programme is created by someone with passion and intelligence. Then a bureaucrat or bureaucracy who doesn't understand the issues shuts it down.

Lets hope that this can be turned around.

Russell Skelton on the Northern Territory leadership coup

Russell Skelton tweets about Adam Giles replacing Terry Mills as the new Chief Minister of the Northern Territory (CL stands for Country Liberal Party):

Don't write off Adam Giles as CLs leader, he is a cut above Mills (12th March)

Adam Giles most capable CL leader since Jodeèn Carney, not to be under estimated (13th March)

Adam Giles makes history, will also make a difference in NT. Smarter than Mills (13th March)

I have a very high opinion of Russell Skelton since reading his amazing book The Betrayal of Papunya

education reality check from Dean Ashenden

Dean outlines some of the things we have to think about before we think about actually improving the learning of Australians

1. The outrageous behaviours of the 3 sectors: Private, Catholic, government
2. More competition is not a magic bullet
3. Throwing money at the problem won't work
4. Productivity talk misses the main point: education is an important human right
5. The technological revolution needs to be incorporated (somehow)
6. Improve quality for all, not just teachers
7. Gonski is already eviscerated
8. Reality check: ED is a mess

Rules of engagement to survive schools debate
Dean Ashenden, The Australian March 16, 2013

IF Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have done nothing else, they have certainly got us talking about schools. Everyone wants to have their say about what's wrong with schools and how to fix them, not just the politicians but grandees of print journalism, stars of national radio and television, leader writers, economic commentators and whole fleets of bloggers, enough in total to drown out the familiar drone of the interest groups and old education hands like me.

Those of us who have been writing about or agitating in schooling forever have our own well-worn ways of getting it wrong, not by what is said so much as by what isn't. Unfortunately these selective habits are often recycled and amplified by the arrivistes.

There are still six long months to go before we can all stop talking about schools, so here are some dos and don't's for the meantime.

First, do not talk about the outrageous conduct of the independent schools (the rich ones especially) or the Catholics (the bishops especially) or of the government sector (unions especially) without saying why they are behaving outrageously. They are doing only as they are encouraged, required or allowed to by the world's worst-practice Australian system of sectors: three funding sources mixed in three ways for three groups of schools governed in three ways.

The sector system is guaranteed to produce adversarial conduct on all sides and hence chronic special pleading, misleading "facts" and a culture of complaint.

Second, do not suggest that more competition between schools or sectors will improve the situation unless you are prepared to talk also about how to make it a competition that everyone, or just about everyone, reckons they can win (as in the AFL, for instance). That would mean, among other things, setting ceilings to spending by schools as well as floors of the Gonski kind, and common rules on things such as cherry-picking students and booting them out.

Third, do not talk about the (manifest) need for more or more fairly distributed public money unless you also are prepared to talk about how to make better use of them.

In particular, have a good answer to the question of what it is that the public got by increasing per pupil expenditure on schools by 2 1/2 times (in real terms) in the 50 years to 2004 (without any improvement in the salaries and status of teachers).

Fourth, do not justify more spending on schooling on the grounds of its productivity.

It's a half-truth anyway (schooling is more about scrambling for a share of a growing cake than about growing the cake) but, even if it weren't, the argument for more and better schooling isn't that it's good for the economy. The central point is that it's better to understand how the world and its numbers and words work than not, and that if you don't, you're legless.

Fifth, don't talk about the virtues of tried and true methods in the classroom unless you can also suggest how they will accommodate the coming technological revolution in teaching and learning. Machines are capable of substituting for the labour of teaching, and will soon be more so. Think of schooling, think of the waterfront, or dead country towns, or Fairfax, and then tell us how teachers should teach.

Sixth, for these and other reasons, please do not talk about teacher quality unless you talk also about the quality of the workplace and the work process of the teacher's 25 or so co-workers. The classroom and the lesson are inherently hard to manage ways of organising time, people and work.

So, if you must talk about teacher quality, please attend also to the quality of students' and teachers' working lives and the need for work process and workplace reform. (And be ready to say where you will find the money to give teachers a very substantial pay rise.)

Seventh: if you must talk about Gonski (and we must) please note the following. Gonski is already eviscerated: by his riding instructions (no school will be worse off), by the Prime Minister's upgrade (every independent school will be better off), by the states' refusal to wear Gonski's proposed national schools funding body, by the Catholics' insistence that money for need should be spread across half of all schools, not Gonski's quarter, and by the government's idea of phasing it all in by 2019.

An eighth and last suggestion: whenever you write about Gonski, or equity, or productivity, or funding, or competition, or anything else to do with Australian schooling, please take a sentence or two to explain that we're in no shape to do anything much about any of these things.

For the first time, Australian schooling faces the common external challenge of international performance comparisons but it has no capacity for a common response.

The system is divided into three sectors in each of eight states and territories, subject to the close involvement of nine governments and their electoral timetables and annual budgetary games.

As Gonski's fate sadly demonstrates, the system is incompetent. It's the system that's letting the side down, not the schools. So, when you write about fixing schools, please remember to mention the idea of fixing the machinery that is supposed to fix the schools.

Dean Ashenden has been a consultant to many state and national education agencies.

Quotes About Open Mindedness

Quotes About Open Mindedness

Here are the quotes from the above site that I liked the most.

“Vulnerability is the only authentic state. Being vulnerable means being open, for wounding, but also for pleasure. Being open to the wounds of life means also being open to the bounty and beauty. Don’t mask or deny your vulnerability: it is your greatest asset. Be vulnerable: quake and shake in your boots with it. The new goodness that is coming to you, in the form of people, situations, and things can only come to you when you are vulnerable, i.e. open.”
― Stephen Russell, Barefoot Doctor's Guide to the Tao: A Spiritual Handbook for the Urban Warrior

“It's a fact—everyone is ignorant in some way or another.

Ignorance is our deepest secret.

And it is one of the scariest things out there, because those of us who are most ignorant are also the ones who often don't know it or don't want to admit it.

Here is a quick test:

If you have never changed your mind about some fundamental tenet of your belief, if you have never questioned the basics, and if you have no wish to do so, then you are likely ignorant.

Before it is too late, go out there and find someone who, in your opinion, believes, assumes, or considers certain things very strongly and very differently from you, and just have a basic honest conversation.

It will do both of you good.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or a truth.”
― Milan Kundera, Encounter

“Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader

“Nine times out of ten a man’s broad-mindedness is necessarily the narrowest thing about him. This is not particularly paradoxical; it is, when we come to think of it, quite inevitable. His vision of his own village may really be full of varieties; and even his vision of his own nation may have a rough resemblance to the reality. But his vision of the world is probably smaller than the world…hence he is never so inadequate as when he is universal; he is never so limited as when he generalizes. This is the fallacy in the many modern attempts at a creedless creed, at something variously described as...undenominational religion or a world faith to embrace all the faiths in the world...When a philosophy embraces everything it generally squeezes everything, and squeezes it out of shape; when it digests it necessarily assimilates.”
― G.K. Chesterton, What I Saw in America

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.

sympathy, power, art and science fused

What is required is a blending, a fusing of the sympathetic tendencies with all the other impulses and habitual traits of the self. When interest in power is permeated with an affectionate impulse, it is protected from being a tendency to dominate and tyrannize; it becomes an interest in effectiveness of regard for common ends. When an interest in artistic or scientific objects is similarly fused, it loses the indifferent and coldly impersonal character which marks the specialist as such, and becomes an interest in the adequate aesthetic and intellectual development of the conditions of a common life. Sympathy does not merely associate one of these tendencies with another; still less does it make one a means to the other’s ends. It so intimately permeates them as to transform both into a new and moral interest.
- John Dewey. Ethics. 1908

In quoting Dewey, Hilary Putnam argues (in Ethics without Ontology), pp 8-9, that it is impossible to understand him without understanding the profound links he makes between aesthetics, ethics (moral philosophy) and epistemology (the nature of knowledge)

How does this fusion (of sympathy, power, art and science) work in practice? As distinct from the compartmentalisation that uses science to tackle one problem, power to tackle another problem, sympathy to address a third problem and aesthetics to solve yet another problem. Dewey and Putnam provide some overarching guidelines here which distinguish good leadership and practice from just following a formulae or algorithm. It is the fusion that makes the difference.

can the digital natives write?

This video has a clever lead in with a surprising Mothers Day theme.

Then he (Mitch Resnik) goes onto say that those who describe kids as "digital natives" haven't got it quite right. Using computers and phones fluently is like them learning how to read but not to write. They miss out on creating new things on their computers and phones. They are locked in to whatever is available in the apps store.

Along the way, a variety of Scratch projects are displayed.

It's fairly persuasive the way Mitch argues the case.

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.

summary of Peter Sutton's chapter on cultural relativism

This focuses on the legal aspects of strong cultural relativism. I hope to do another piece on the identity factors, based on an essay by Noel Pearson.

Peter Sutton. Ch 6 Customs Not in Common. In: The Politics of Suffering (2009)

The strong form of cultural relativism fails because aboriginal law is not compatible with white law. The details, once known, offend our civilised sensibilities – sexual assaults on women, child mutilation and violent punishment for crimes

A robust cultural relativism requires overcoming feelings of repugnance of the practices of the other culture, or, acceptance of a sanitised or politically correct version. Sanitised versions are easily lampooned.

If you are an urban liberal living a comfortable distance from experiencing the repugnant reality of some aspects of remote indigenous lifestyle then it is possible to maintain a rose coloured idealism and see legal pluralism as an act of decolonisation. This is non indigenous self-redemptive feel-goodism.

Historically cultural relativism played a positive role in combatting ideas or ideologies such as social Darwinism, eugenics and racial / ethnic prejudice.

Today, the strong form of cultural relativism is in decline since those ideologies just listed are in decline.

Some people still promote aboriginal law as politically restorative but those views do not hold up well under close examination.

In the past some aspects of indigenous law were tolerated and supervised by police, eg. public leg spearings. But eventually other aspects such as carnal knowledge / sexual assault on underage promised wives by aboriginal men, or, subincision of males who were still legally children, were not tolerated. This led to charges of inconsistency by aboriginals.

As the intercultural / interethic shared social space increases between whites and aboriginals then tolerance of a dual legal system decreases.

Until the 1950s a blind eye was turned to black on black homicide provided traditional weapons were used (strangulation, clubbing, spearing). It was regarded as “blackfella business”. This broke down in the 1934 case of the killing of Kai-Umen because he was shot with a rifle and the bullet was still in his head.

Most modern people see some rights as universal rights and not just whitefella rights, eg. the equality of women, the protection of children

One aspect of the indigenous legal process is to restore equilibrium amongst the kinship group. For example, rather than hold a murderer responsible it may be blamed on a spirit inflicted by another tribe. This is different from our modern law with its focus on perpetrator and victim. There may be consequences of not allowing the indigenous process to happen, leading to further violence down the track.

However, the reasons for revisiting customary law as a political restorative are usually bad reasons or originate from ignorance:

• persistent idealism
• grasping at straws to solve high levels of disorder and crime in indigenous communities
• building the aboriginal industry
• legal cleanskins who are reinventing the wheel

As integration continues, which is irreversible in practice, then homogenisation increases and the hold of traditional law recedes. In modern times elders who have the knowledge of traditional law may not practice it themselves and so their advice is suspect.

The voice and language of strong cultural relativism is moralistic focusing on issues such as the evils of colonialism, Western power, racism of whites, police violence, the oppression of minorities. There is often little investigation of the on the ground realities. Also these critiques of western culture are not matched by critiques of indigenous culture.

Support for cultural relativism ebbs and flows with the NIMBY factor. When factors of repugnance, personal safety and destruction of the social fabric come to the fore then support for strong cultural relativism declines.

Peter Sutton's 2009 book launch

"There are simplistic, bourgeois ideas about what causes rage in such (remote) communities - simplistic, naive, self-serving, urban, bourgeois view(s).. The jig is up."

I'd forgotten how brilliant Peter Sutton's The Politics of Suffering book launch was. Marcia Langton is asking the questions and Peter Sutton providing the answers.

 If you haven't seen it go here. Both Part 1 and 2 of the video are excellent.

 I have read this book and have been rereading it recently. It is a hard book to read and I did stop reading in some places (first time around) because it discouraged me that anything could be achieved. Noel Pearson leaves out some of the more difficult issues and so is more encouraging. In the end I picked it up again and kept reading. Truth is a difficult word of course but insofar as there is such a thing as truth this book speaks it.

three choices for indigenous people

The three choices for indigenous people in welfare state countries such as Australia are:

• passive welfare, which leads to destruction 
• go back to the past, which is impossible 
• go forward to a bicultural and multicultural future 

The correct choice seems obvious but some people just don't get it. See this article: Marxism and the Aboriginal Question: The Tragedy of Progress

I found a Noel Pearson article (2004) which is directly relevant to the themes in the above linked article by David Bedford. It’s an essay from his Selected Writings, Up From the Mission. I did find a version (pdf) of this article on line, although it’s not exactly the same as the one in his book.

Economic context is important. Pearson makes some preliminary remarks that aboriginals in countries like Canada and Australia (he calls these First World) do receive significant welfare, unlike aboriginals in poorer countries like PNG (such as Papua New Guinea, which he calls Third World).

This changes everything because the connection between traditional economy and culture is ruptured in these “First World” countries, which have welfare states. He goes onto say:

In my view this distinction, between the indigenous peoples living in a First World welfare state context and those who do not – is decisive, and is not properly comprehended when people think about “the survival of indigenous cultures and societies in a globalised world”. It may not be properly comprehended by Indigenous leaders contemplating the prospects of their people being able to retain their cultures in a changed and changing world.

He then makes some remarks the “cultural vibrancy” he has observed in Third World countries such as PNG and contrasts this with the cultural disintegration he has observed in Australia. This latter aspect is not stressed in this essay but is a very strong theme in many of Pearson’s other essays, eg. Dr Charles Perkins Memorial Oration, ON THE HUMAN RIGHT TO MISERY, MASS INCARCERATION AND EARLY DEATH Delivered By NOEL PEARSON, October 2001

Pearson then outlines three choices for aboriginal people in welfare states. I would argue these choices are very relevant to the theme of the above "marxist" (not true marxism IMO) essay of which I am critical. I’ll quote this section from Pearson's essay in full (from the online version):

One choice is “to remain where we are”: attempting to retain our traditions and cultures whilst dependent upon passive welfare for our predominant livelihood. For the reasons advanced earlier, I would say this is not a choice at all. If we do, the social and cultural pauperisation of Indigenous society in Australia will continue unabated, and we will not establish the foundations necessary for cultural vitality and transmission to future generations. We therefore need to confront and demolish the mistaken policy that passive welfare can subsidise the pursuit of traditional lifestyles in remote communities.

The second choice is to “go back”: to maintain our cultural and linguistic diversity in the same way as the peoples of PNG are able to, or other such indigenous peoples throughout the Third World. But this is hardly possible. Indigenous Australians are now engulfed by the Australian economy and society, and it is impossible to see how territories could be established where the welfare state no longer reached, and traditional economies could be revived (this is not to say we cannot reform the welfare state within Indigenous regions). For one thing, my people would simply refuse this course in practice.

The third choice is to “go forward” and find solutions to a bicultural and bi- and multilingual future. That is Indigenous Australians must face the challenge that comes with culture and traditions no longer being linked with our economy in a relationship of coincidental necessity, but rather one of conscious choice. This is what I have in mind when I suggest a First World Indigenous people, rather than a Fourth World (1) people. Some of the elements and requirements are as follows. Firstly, it is about being able to retain distinct cultures, traditions and identity, whilst engaging in the wider world. Secondly, Indigenous Australians will need to ensure that the economic structure underpinning my people’s society is “real”. This will require fundamental reform to the welfare system affecting my people so that we are rid of passive welfare. It will also mean that our people gain their livelihood through a combination of all available forms of “real” economic activities – traditional, subsistence, modern – and this will include the need to be mobile through “orbits” into the wider world and perhaps back to home base again. Thirdly, education will be key to enable bicultural and multilingual facility and maintenance – as well as to enable economic mobility. Fourthly, we will need to deliberately and decisively shift our cultural knowledge from its oral foundations to written and digitised foundations. We will need fundamental traditionalists to be learned in our languages and cultures to fight for cultural scholarship and maintenance that can withstand whatever social and economic changes we will confront.

This is a bare sketch of the kinds of policies we will need if we are to survive as an indigenous people within a First World nation.

The programme I outlined is obviously not a separatist programme. I advocate restoration of social order and a real economy, education and proficiency in English that make my people socially and economically completely integrated, national unity and geographic mobility. There should be much common ground for Indigenous people who agree with me and conservative and economically liberal people.

(1) I wasn't clear about Pearson's "Fourth World" terminology. However I found an article by Nicolas Rothwell which clarified the meaning:

But crafting a future for Aboriginal remote communities requires above all else a clear sight of what they are now. The communities are a welfare state and, thanks to Cape York activist Noel Pearson, the rotting effects of passive welfare provision in the Aboriginal realm are plain, and the virtues of work-for-welfare programs are accepted across the board. But the communities form a welfare zone with unusual, complicating characteristics. They have Third World living conditions but they are not in the Third World.

Rather, they are in a much stranger place: a place quite hard to see and understand. We might call it the Fourth World: a deeply deprived space contained within the borders of a modern, prosperous First World state. Absolute poverty is not the limiting economic problem: a controlled, regular, yet inadequate supply of transferred money is, along with its inevitable outcome, relative poverty - a fate both grinding and comforting for those locked out of the productive economy. Capital formation is impossible under such circumstances, unless land use can be traded.

The inhabitants of this zone are welfare pensioners, who have subsisted for decades without strong incentives to acquire skills or seek jobs. In this Fourth World of the communities, there is a strong awareness of positional disadvantage: the men, women and children there know they are at the bottom of the social pyramid of Australian life, but they have no idea of how to change their status. The younger generation's members are encouraged to share the expectations of the wider society but geography and the lack of educational pathways prevent them from taking part in the outside world on even terms.
- Our fourth world

Do Pearson’s three choices represent the real options available? I think they do. Which of the three choices do you support? Argue your case. Obviously I’m with Pearson – choice three.

I would add that Noel Pearson’s practice has gone far beyond outlining these choices. He has influenced governments in Australia to implement his option 3 in Cape York Peninsula. This I regard as a remarkable achievement of truly progressive practical politics starting from a reality so grim that people can’t imagine and seem to continually want to forget about once they have heard.

Aaron Swartz

Information still wants to be free. It's sad that there are tragedies along that road. Such a waste.

Beautiful tribute from Tim Berners-Lee:

Aaron is dead.

Wanderers in this crazy world,
we have lost a mentor, a wise elder.


Hackers for right, we are one down,
we have lost one of our own.


Nurtures, careers, listeners, feeders,
parents all,
we have lost a child.


Let us all weep.

timbl - source

Aaron Swartz bio
Corey Doctorow: RIP, Aaron Swartz
Lawrence Lessig: Prosecuter as Bully

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.

Bess Price: "We need to support those who tell the truth"

from Quadrant Online
Bess Price's forward to Stephanie Jarrett's new book, Liberating Aboriginal People from Violence:

I have lived with violence all of my life. Many of my relatives have been either the victims or perpetrators of what is called grievous bodily harm, some of homicide. My own body is scarred by domestic violence. Some of this violence comes from our traditional way of life. When we lived in the desert we had no armies, police forces or courts. Every family had to defend itself. Everybody, male and female.

Men had the right to beat their wives. Young women had very few rights. Men had the right to kill those who they thought had broken the law. We all know this but won’t talk about it.

Things are now much worse because the good things about the old law are dying with the old wise ones who were born and raised in the desert and knew how the old law should work to make sure it was just. Now we have alcohol and drugs and our young people are confused and frightened. When they follow our old law they break the new, when they follow the new law they break the old. That is why the jails are full of our young men, and more and more, our young women.

We Aboriginal people have to acknowledge the truth. We can’t blame all of our problems on the white man. The best thing about acknowledging that we have our own traditional forms of violence is that this our problem which we can fix ourselves. We don't need to be told what to do by the white man.

In Alice Springs the courageous Aboriginal men of the Ingkintja Male Health Unit in Alice Springs admitted that there was too much violence and apologised to their women and children for the violence and decent enough to apologise.

Governments and human rights activists have ignored them. They are heroes who should be supported. I know Stephanie Jarrett to be decent, caring and hard working. I commend her work to you. We need to support those who tell the truth, acknowledge it and start solving our own problems.

Lysenko Affair analysis by Helena Sheehan

I've always had difficulty understanding the varying histories or recommendations about the history of the USSR. "Stalin good"; "Stalin bad, Trotsky good"; Koestler's "Darkness at Noon"; George Orwell's "Animal Farm"; "a Stalin led USSR defeated the Nazis"; "Stalin 70/30"; "Read more recent post archive opening histories"; "History is written by the winners" etc. Call me naive. You might think you understand it but I never have.

The author's or recommender's POV (Stalinist, Trotskyist, anti-marxists, liberals, humanists) always seem to overwhelm the complexity of the data. For many years I have put these questions into the too hard basket and remained a "doubtist".

So, what appeals to me about a scientific history is that the data and hence the interpretation is relatively harder. Science has clearly progressed a lot in the past 150 years (going back to Marx and Engels) whereas "progress" in economics and politics, it could be argued, is more like heading off in tangents or going around in circles. Progress in science can't be denied (even though the philosophy of science remains a difficult area) whereas progress in economic and politics is debatable eg. standard of living has gone up but the gap b/w rich and poor has widened.

Helena Sheehan has been strongly influenced by marxism and also remains open minded to different interpretations. As argued above I think her general framing of how to assess the history of marxism and the philosophy of science is a good one.

I'd strongly recommend Chapter 4, The October Revolution: Marxism in Power (the book is here). [So far I've read Chapters 1 (Engels) and 3 (Lenin's Materialism and Empirio Criticism) as well,which are also good]. In Chapter 4 she traces the evolution of the various currents that eventually led to Soviet State support for Lysenko's phoney science. Briefly, Lysenko promoted Lamarkism and opposed Genetics. After 1935 in the USSR ideological demogoguery progressively replaced useful, scientific, vigorous debate - at great and tragic cost.

It does make for grim reading in parts. It has helped me assess a part of history I've always felt uncertain about. It reveals the sorts of arguments and thinking behind them, used by both sides of the science debate, before the crude politics of power took over. I plan to delve into the style of discussion more: arguments that sound good at the time but turn out to be wrong (not finished yet). My motivation is an interest in what it means to have a scientific understanding of the world in a broad sense - and how that sometimes or often becomes derailed.

Marxism and the Philosophy of Science by Helena Sheehan (introduction)

Marxism and the Philosophy of Science by Helena Sheehan

On page 10 (introduction) Helena outlines 5 different types of errors in interpreting the history of Marxism (I've rephrased it a bit since I found her words initially not clear)

1) unproblematic straight line correctness

2) it would have been an unproblematic straight line except for the Stalin "cult of the personality" problem

3) Certain heretical critics (eg. Lukacs) provide a reinterpretation of Marxism which is then accepted uncritically

4) Selected Marxist texts are given forced "readings" and then other interpretations are dismissed as "historicist". An Althusserian once said to the author, "There is no such thing as history; there are only books on shelves", which left her speechless.

5) The whole of Marxism is dismissed as the "illusion of the epoch" (reference to a book by HB Acton)

On page 12, in contrast, she outlines her approach to the history of Marxism:

1) It's essential to delve into the "difficult matters" and "the self inflicted tragedies of the communist movement" ... she disagrees totally with "the premises underlying the tradition of sacrificing truth to 'partisanship', in the name of which so many crimes against science and against humanity have been committed"

2) Even without Stalin the history of Marxism would not be an unproblematic straight line (obvious)

3) She disagrees with the tendency of those who draw a sharp line b/w "creative" Marxists - Marx, Lukacs, Korsch and Gramsci - on one side and "dogmatic" Marxists - Engels, Lenin, Stalin - on the other side. Good and bad philosophers can be found on both sides of this divide. She likes Gramsci and Caudwell.

4) She is an unrepentant historicist - we cannot separate human thought from the context of human thinking without thoroughly distorting what it is. She adds in a footnote that such interpretations are not in opposition to structural, logical or systematic explanations.

[ on page 16 she elaborates further on her historical perspective: "Most philosophers today are utterly oblivious to the fact that philosophy or science is historical, except in the most trivial and superficial sense. Even when they do look at the history of philosophy or science they do so in such a thoroughly ahistorical and noncontextual way, that anybody could virtually have said anything at any time. In philosophy, the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Descarte, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Carnap and Quine are treated as discrete and interchangeable units, virtually independent of time and place ..."]

5) Rather than an "illusion of the epoch" she believes that however problematic Marxism remains (quoting Sartre) the unsurpassed philosophy of our time because of such features as its comprehensiveness, coherence and orientation towards science.

My thoughts: There may be more than 5 ways to misunderstand the history of marxism. I don't know enough to say whether her judgements about Gramsci and Caudwell as "the good guys" are correct or whether she is even looking in the right places to find answers. However, I do very much like her general framing of how to approach the history of marxism:
- the need to look into the dark places, to assess negatives as well as positives
- those who make errors may also have redeeming features; those who are mainly correct have probably also made important mistakes; we need to avoid the tendency of making black and white evaluations; nevertheless, categories such as correct and incorrect, friend and enemy are still valid categories in history and politics
- there is something about marxism (not yet identified here) that makes it worth pursuing as a key method of thinking to both understanding history and solving current world problems; to confuse errors, even very significant errors, with a fundamentally flawed philosophy would be an even bigger mistake

Kevin Wheldall: very nearly all of our children can learn to read

The three-tier model will turn children into proficient readers
by Kevin Wheldall From: The Australian December 22, 2012 12:00AM

IF all children are to learn to read to a good level of proficiency in their first few years of schooling, we need a clear plan to ensure that no child falls through the net.

Such a plan must be both effective and cost-effective. It has become increasingly accepted in recent years that a three-tier, phased model of reading instruction, known as Response to Intervention (RtI), is the best means of achieving this.

The RtI model is predicated upon a first tier of exemplary initial instruction in reading for all students during their first year of schooling (kindergarten in NSW). This first tier of instruction should essentially comprise the best scientific evidence-based instruction.

To the layman this sounds obvious, but in many Australian schools a less effective implicit model of reading instruction has held sway for the past few decades. Much of this approach is highly desirable as a bedrock upon which to build, and it may even be enough for a minority of children, but most will need direct, explicit and systematic instruction in the five pillars of teaching reading: phonological awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension.

What is often lacking in initial reading instruction, in particular, is effective, specific instruction in what is known as synthetic phonics; how to relate letters to sounds and to blend letter sounds into words.

Even when afforded such exemplary instruction, there will always be some children who take longer than others to catch on. It is important to identify these low-progress readers as early as possible so that they do not fall too far behind their peers as their difficulties compound.

Children who do not learn to read in the first few years of schooling are typically destined to a school career of educational failure, because reading underpins almost all subsequent learning. A safe strategy is to target students who fall into the bottom 25 per cent of the population for remedial reading intervention, as soon as their difficulties become apparent. Students' progress should be checked regularly, in order to provide intervention for those who need it from the beginning of Year 1, at the very latest.

The RtI model recommends that struggling readers, the low-progress readers who comprise the bottom 25 per cent, should be offered more intensive Tier-2 intervention in small groups of three to four students. Again the instruction provided to these students should be based on what the scientific research evidence has shown to be most effective: essentially the same five big ideas of reading instruction but more intensive and more individualised.

In small groups, teachers are able to be more responsive to the idiosyncratic needs of the students with whom they are working. Small group instruction can be just as effective as one-to-one instruction for children without severe reading difficulties.

Even with a solid Tier-2 small-group reading program in place, there will still be a very small number of students who "fail to thrive", perhaps about 3-5 per cent of all Year 1 students. These are the students for whom we should reserve Tier 3 one-to-one intensive reading instruction, preferably with a specialist reading teacher with a sound background in special education. The same five big ideas are still critical.

What is different, of course, is the intensity of instruction. Having successfully taught the vast majority of Year 1 students the basics of learning to read by Tier 1 and, where necessary, Tier 2 small-group teaching, it is a far more manageable proposition to provide these few remaining students with the individual reading support that they will need, for as long as they need it.

With this three-tier model in place, predicated upon scientific evidence-based reading instruction, almost all, if not all, children will become proficient readers. Of course, the RtI model does not stop at the end of Year 1; it is important to monitor reading progress closely for all students, especially for the first three years of schooling. But by employing these procedures rigorously and teaching scientifically, it is not too much to expect very nearly all of our children to learn to read.

Kevin Wheldall is chairman of MultiLit Pty Ltd and director of the MultiLit Research Unit.

• MultiLit = Making Up Lost Time In Literacy
• MUSEC = Macquarie University Special Education Centre

Some selected follow up links from MultiLit and MUSEC sites:

Media Publicity in 2012: Links to various hard hitting media articles on the perverse failure of our institutions to implement needed reforms, for example:

• Miranda Devine: We've failed to give kids education they need
• Universities 'refuse to accept the evidence' on reading
• Jennifer Buckingham: Why our kids still cannot read

Welcome to MUSEC: Special Education research opportunities
MUSEC Briefings: a community service to inform educators and other professionals about the evidence base for a variety of educational practices, some of which may be regarded as controversial
Research Publications: Links to books, academic journal articles, instructional materials, conference papers (copies of most available on request from MultiLit Pty Ltd)

some current reading by our politicians

Some of the reading our politicians claim to be doing over the holidays is interesting:

A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide by Samantha Power

During the three years (1993-1996) Samantha Power spent covering the grisly events in Bosnia and Srebrenica, she became increasingly frustrated with how little the United States was willing to do to counteract the genocide occurring there. After much research, she discovered a pattern: "The United States had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred," ... Debunking the notion that U.S. leaders were unaware of the horrors as they were occurring against Armenians, Jews, Cambodians, Iraqi Kurds, Rwandan Tutsis, and Bosnians during the past century, Power discusses how much was known and when, and argues that much human suffering could have been alleviated through a greater effort by the U.S. She does not claim that the U.S. alone could have prevented such horrors, but does make a convincing case that even a modest effort would have had significant impact. Based on declassified information, private papers, and interviews with more than 300 American policymakers, Power makes it clear that a lack of political will was the most significant factor for this failure to intervene. Some courageous U.S. leaders did work to combat and call attention to ethnic cleansing as it occurred, but the vast majority of politicians and diplomats ignored the issue, as did the American public, leading Power to note that "no U.S. president has ever suffered politically for his indifference to its occurrence. It is thus no coincidence that genocide rages on."

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Carro

The Passage of Power follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career — 1958 to 1964. It is a time that would see him trade the extraordinary power he had created for himself as Senate Majority Leader for what became the wretched powerlessness of a Vice President in an administration that disdained and distrusted him. Yet it was, as well, the time in which the presidency, the goal he had always pursued, would be thrust upon him in the moment it took an assassin’s bullet to reach its mark. For the first time, we see the Kennedy assassination through Lyndon Johnson’s eyes. We watch Johnson step into the presidency, inheriting a staff fiercely loyal to his slain predecessor; a Congress determined to retain its power over the executive branch; and a nation in shock and mourning. We see how within weeks — grasping the reins of the presidency with supreme mastery — he propels through Congress essential legislation that at the time of Kennedy’s death seemed hopelessly logjammed and seizes on a dormant Kennedy program to create the revolutionary War on Poverty. Caro makes clear how the political genius with which Johnson had ruled the Senate now enabled him to make the presidency wholly his own. This was without doubt Johnson’s finest hour, before his aspirations and accomplishments were overshadowed and eroded by the trap of Vietnam

Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Goodwin makes the case for Lincoln's political genius by examining his relationships with three men he selected for his cabinet, all of whom were opponents for the Republican nomination in 1860: William H. Seward, Salmon P. Chase, and Edward Bates. These men, all accomplished, nationally known, and presidential, originally disdained Lincoln for his backwoods upbringing and lack of experience, and were shocked and humiliated at losing to this relatively obscure Illinois lawyer. Yet Lincoln not only convinced them to join his administration--Seward as secretary of state, Chase as secretary of the treasury, and Bates as attorney general--he ultimately gained their admiration and respect as well. How he soothed egos, turned rivals into allies, and dealt with many challenges to his leadership, all for the sake of the greater good, is largely what Goodwin's fine book is about. Had he not possessed the wisdom and confidence to select and work with the best people, she argues, he could not have led the nation through one of its darkest periods.

The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don't by Nate Silver

People love statistics. Statistics, however, do not always love them back. The Signal and the Noise, Nate Silver's brilliant and elegant tour of the modern science-slash-art of forecasting, shows what happens when Big Data meets human nature. Baseball, weather forecasting, earthquake prediction, economics, and polling: In all of these areas, Silver finds predictions gone bad thanks to biases, vested interests, and overconfidence. But he also shows where sophisticated forecasters have gotten it right (and occasionally been ignored to boot). In today's metrics-saturated world, Silver's book is a timely and readable reminder that statistics are only as good as the people who wield them

The above are a few of the non fiction titles extracted from an article by Troy Bramston in today's Australian: Summer Reading Speaks Volumes

Of the above the one I'd be most likely to buy would be Joe Hockey's choice, The Signal and the Noise