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Chrysalis Memories of being held In Honor of My Parents’ Golden Wedding Anniversary |
“That is a chrysalis”, she said, when I showed her that funny-looking thing on the leaf. In that moment I, the thing, and the word were one. I learned a word, I wrapped it around a new-found thing, and I listened in wonder to my mother’s story of what it was and what it would be.
Re: Richard Hake • Experiment by Argentinian Neuroscientists Suggests “Socratic” (i.e. “Platonic”) Dialogue Is An Educational Failure
I would not have imagined it possible to read Plato’s Meno quite so literally as those inquirers did — but now I do not have to imagine it, and so, in a way, I have learned something.
But taken more liberally than literally, Plato’s dialogue raises important questions about the nature of learning and teaching, of communication and creativity, and ultimately about the nature of inquiry itself.
What does it mean to learn? to teach? What does it mean to gain information? to transfer it from a place where it is to a place where it isn’t? What are the conditions for the possibility of all those things — learning and teaching, acquiring and transferring information?
After all this time, those questions remain open …
cc: Academia.edu
Re: Peirce List • Kirsti Määttänen
Aristotle’s approach to rhetoric is one of the bridges to Peirce’s pragmatism. It treats forms of argument that “consider the audience”, in effect, that take the nature and condition of the interpreter into account, and it deals with enthymemes, syllogisms some of whose premisses are “held in mind”, implicit in the state of belief or knowledge base of the interpreter.
Here are two threads of previous discussion in which the subjects of enthymeme and Aristotle’s Rhetoric came up:
Re: Stephen Rose
There are reasons why I felt compelled to stand back from the picture that others were painting — of opposing personal styles in the creative process and also in the wider intellectual landscape — and to seek a Peircean perspective on the tensions that were being portrayed between the contrasting alternatives. I broke off with words that were roughly to this effect:
On third thought, “transcend” is not exactly the right word, as I’d never want to suggest that the tensions are not real, or that it pays to resolve them too prematurely. Still, it is hardly ever the case that the lost chord is lost forever.
Re: Kirsti Määttänen
You give a good description of the encounter with uncertainty, that unsettled state of mind that irks a person to inquire after new grounds of belief. Viewed in biological perspective, it is only natural that evolution associates the affects it does with states of doubt. Animal fear befits the animal that does not know which way to turn in a situation of peril — and what situation is not potentially a situation of peril if a creature does not know what it ought to do next?
But one of the marks of a more evolved creature is a greater tolerance for uncertainty, a greater capacity for reflection on doubtful situations, not necessarily in the middle of the fray — that can be paralyzing — but in the cool of the afterthoughts that a creature can turn to good use in trying to anticipate similar situations in the future.
That greater capacity for reflection on one’s ongoing situation requires a greater ability to generate alternative descriptions and courses of action. That amounts to a capacity for creating or constructing a larger conceptual “search space” than the one assumed at the start — in the idiom, “thinking outside the box”.
I often wonder that more people do not avail themselves of the power of Peirce’s thought. “What are they afraid of?” I ask myself. I find myself asking it that way because there really does seem to be a persistent obstruction or a positive refusal to take that extra step up to the level of 3-adic thinking.
In pursuing that question I have found a few sources that seem to help with the answer. First and foremost would have to be Dewey’s Quest for Certainty. The next source that comes to mind would be the work of Sorrentino and Roney on individual differences in orientations to uncertainty.
Earlier this summer, Ayşe Mermutlu posted a notice of Nathan Houser’s review of Paul Forster’s Peirce and the Threat of Nominalism to the Facebook page of the Charles S. Peirce Society and a brief discussion ensued.
My initial comment was this —
On being asked what I meant by “essentialism”, I explained it as follows —
On further interrogation, I added this —
I think it fair to say that most of the Peirce crew is handy enough when it comes to steering clear of nominalism’s rock-monster, but not so well-drilled in navigating safely by essentialism’s whirly places. At any rate, I keep seeing a drift in that direction pulling the good ship Pragmatism into the eddy of a most likely futile sea battle, and I thought it incumbent on the duty of my watch to report what I see.
I shared the above thoughts in a post to the Peirce List. Responding to comments by Aaron Massecar, I elaborated as follows —
Two ideals are struggling for supremacy in American life today: one the industrial ideal, dominating thru the supremacy of commercialism, which subordinates the worker to the product and the machine; the other, the ideal of democracy, the ideal of the educators, which places humanity above all machines, and demands that all activity shall be the expression of life. If this ideal of the educators cannot be carried over into the industrial field, then the ideal of industrialism will be carried over into the school. Those two ideals can no more continue to exist in American life than our nation could have continued half slave and half free. If the school cannot bring joy to the work of the world, the joy must go out of its own life, and work in the school as in the factory will become drudgery.
Margaret Haley • “Why Teachers Should Organize” (1901)
∗ Diane Ravitch • “Advice from Margaret Haley, Leader of Teacher Unionism”
You see, even though back then Barack was a Senator and a presidential candidate … to me, he was still the guy who’d picked me up for our dates in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by through a hole in the passenger side door … he was the guy whose proudest possession was a coffee table he’d found in a dumpster, and whose only pair of decent shoes was half a size too small.
First Lady Michelle Obama • Charlotte NC • September 4, 2012
And understand this: If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America. Because workers deserve to know that somebody is standing in their corner.
Senator Barack Obama • Spartanburg SC • November 3, 2007
O Speech Divine —
You touched our hearts,
You stirred our minds.
But when we brush the tears away
And turn our faces toward the day,
We beg of you but one thing just:
Look Homeward, Angel, Look Home —
Behold Its Wake, Our Ship Of State.
