Should students have to learn mathematics in school? A parody of the answers various Miss USA contestants gave to the question: Should students have to learn evolution in school? I agree with many of the Miss USA contestants. We should teach students both sides of the homeopathy and chemistry debate, too. I mean, like, students should have the opportunity and stuff to decide for themselves if homeopathy is true for them. I mean, like, isn’t logic culturally determined anyways and stuff?
From the blog Logic and Rational Interaction: The new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy has initiated an iTunes channel with videocasts of lectures presented at the Center. Here is the description of the Munich Center from the iTunes channel:
Mathematical Philosophy – the application of logical and mathematical methods in philosophy – is about to experience a tremendous boom in various areas of philosophy. At the new Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, which is funded mostly by the German Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, philosophical research will be carried out mathematically, that is, by means of methods that are very close to those used by the scientists. The purpose of doing philosophy in this way is not to reduce philosophy to mathematics or to natural science in any sense; rather mathematics is applied in order to derive philosophical conclusions from philosophical assumptions, just as in physics mathematical methods are used to derive physical predictions from physical laws. Nor is the idea of mathematical philosophy to dismiss any of the ancient questions of philosophy as irrelevant or senseless: although modern mathematical philosophy owes a lot to the heritage of the Vienna and Berlin Circles of Logical Empiricism, unlike the Logical Empiricists most mathematical philosophers today are driven by the same traditional questions about truth, knowledge, rationality, the nature of objects, morality, and the like, which were driving the classical philosophers, and no area of traditional philosophy is taken to be intrinsically misguided or confused anymore. It is just that some of the traditional questions of philosophy can be made much clearer and much more precise in logical-mathematical terms, for some of these questions answers can be given by means of mathematical proofs or models, and on this basis new and more concrete philosophical questions emerge. This may then lead to philosophical progress, and ultimately that is the goal of the Center.
The ESL Tutor Handbook from which the photograph was obtained is, sadly, employed by the University of North Florida’s Academic Center for Excellence. I wonder what other interesting nonsense is to be found in education texts at not only UNF, but other universities?
Outstanding! Not only is (3) — in the photo — false; it is also grammatically incorrect.
Yes. Should read “… that the paper develops ‘logically’… .” But, you know, making sure your text develops ‘grammatical’ can be a daunting task.
Rico,
On a more serious note, the photograph reveals an unfortunate trend noticed by others (e.g. http://www.tpress.free-online.co.uk/postmodernism.html): Post-modernism is dominant in educational theory.
Think how intellectually irresponsible it is to write ‘[s]ince logic is culturally determined… .” The author(s) of the text certainly did not consult the mainstream literature on logic because 99.9% of mathematicians, logicians, philosophers of logic, and computer scientists do not hold that logic is culturally determined.
What the authors did was consult the post-modernist “literature” on logic. The problem is of course that post-modernists know next to nothing about logic and more or less ramble along, spitting out their obscurantism for 15 or so pages and pretend like they have contributed something worthwhile.
This may sound harsh, but I have determined that if in, say, 18 years post-modernism or something sufficiently similar is the orthodoxy in education, sociology, english and literary theory, etc., and Isabel wishes to obtain a degree in one of those fields, I will not assist her financially. Just look at the intellectually impoverished students coming out of those fields right now.
This was a funny find, but I do think that general criticism of post-modernism needs to clarify what it is and is not attacking. Post-modernism is an enormous camp and the term is poorly defined by many critics and adherents alike. Critics usually take it to be something like a universal relativism which ends up plainly undermining itself. Maybe some post-modernists fit this bill, but I think that tends to be a caricature more often than not. I would be inclined to say instead that postmodern research at its best looks behind claims of objectivity to try to uncover the values, power and discourse that shapes those claims.
In the case of math or logic this might be fruitless, but in a number of other disciplines, even natural sciences, this has yielded some interesting insights. So long as it isn’t reduced to a simplistic relativism or obscured in indecipherable jargon, I think there is value in approaches like discourse analysis and postcolonial theory. But then again my MA is in a field that is producing intellectually impoverished students.
Re: “I think there is value in approaches like discourse analysis and postcolonial theory.”
I do not.
Aaron, elsewhere you’ve said you do not dismiss all of Foucault and find much value in Nietzsche. I associate those two with ‘discourse analysis’ more so than pretty much anyone else. But maybe that’s just me? Thoughts, Jeff?
Foucault’s analyses on the history of mental illness and the discipline of psychiatry in ‘The Birth of the Clinic’ and ‘Madness and Civilization’ have their merit. However, in large part, I found Foucault to be imprecise in his analyses, given to hasty generalizations, and sloppy in his historical method (see his legerdemain in ‘Discipline and Punish’). I have no use for his work in ‘The Archaeology of Knowledge,’ the work which we might identify as addressing discourse analysis.
As for Nietzsche, again, many of his insights have merit, but there is much of his work for which I have no patience (his perspectivism, notably).
The point is simple, though: I really have no patience for broadly continental philosophy and I really do not care to enter into a discussion on the minutiae you may glean from this or that continental thinker which you think may or may not have merit.
As I am sure you are aware, my approach to philosophy is very much Quinean in that, in a sense, the philosophy of science- broadly construed as logic (deductive and inductive), scientific methodology, epistemology, decision, rational choice, and game theory on one end of the continuum to formal ontology to on the other- is philosophy enough.
Even my approach to political philosophy and ethics is very much self-contained within the formal disciplines of decision, rational choice, and game theory, economics, and formal logic.
Apologies if the above comes across as discourteous.
I see your simple point. My simple point is that you sometimes speak from a very strange place that fails to take into account the hallowed tenets your own philosophical predilections. In other words, it looks to me that you’ve contradicted yourself. Nothing more, nothing less, no wish to discuss the French and German authors…
…and I am missing an obvious “of”. Oops.
Re: “In other words, it looks to me that you’ve contradicted yourself.”
How so?
Perhaps you haven’t contradicted yourself; maybe, Aaron, you can just explain to me the difference between your understanding of ‘value’ and of ‘merit’, as I assume the difference permits you to ostensibly undermine your own prior words.
I wonder if I should also say just one thing concerning minutiae: if you really believe that ‘The Birth of the Clinic’ is not discourse analysis, I suggest you either re-read it, or maybe just review Foucault’s understanding, derived from Nietzsche, of conceptual genealogy.
Maybe it’s more lucid as follows:
You like some of Foucault (just go with my loose usage of ‘like’ or change it out for what you favor). You like some of Nietzsche.
You do not see value in discourse analyses.
So, either the works that you like are not discourse analyses (and I argue that at least one of them is in my above posting), or they are, and you thereby contradict yourself.
The problem, now, is that you do not wish to discuss the minutiae of the French and Germans, and I really don’t either, since we never get any utility out of it, but without so doing, you are able to continue to demarcate some works of the above as constituting discourse analyses, while others do no such thing.
Re: “Aaron, you can just explain to me the difference between your understanding of ‘value’ and of ‘merit’, as I assume the difference permits you to ostensibly undermine your own prior words.”
I am still unclear as to your meaning. Please clarify.
Regarding, Foucault, I find his work as an historian valuable in clarifying the history and origins of mental illness and psychiatry. As a philosopher, I have little use for Foucault.
Okay so it sounds like what you want to say is that the study of and discussion of the concepts of humankind does not constitute philosophy. Is this close enough? If that is your position we do not have to engage in further debate.
I am not clear what you mean by: “… the study of and discussion of the concepts of humankind… .” Could you provide an example of what you mean?
Definitely. One such example would be the concept of the ‘medical gaze’ and the extent to which its activity could We might as well look straight to the introduction to ‘The Birth of the Clinic’ itself. I am transcribing the following from the ’03 English translation by Sheridan (whose work I sometimes see errors within but that is presently peripheral):
[Speaking of the "endless task of absorbing experience in its entirety, and of mastering it" -- charged to the clinique and 'medical gaze'....]
“The task lay with this language of things, and perhaps with it alone, to authorize a knowledge of the individual that was not simply of a historic or aesthetic order. That the definition of the individual should be an endless labour was no longer an obstacle to an experience, which, by accepting its own limits, extended its task into the infinite. By acquiring the status of object, its particular quality, its impalpable colour, its unique, transitory form took on weight and solidity. No light could now dissolve them in ideal truths; but the gaze directed upon them would, in turn, awaken them and make them stand out against a background of objectivity. The gaze is no longer reductive, it is, rather, that which establishes the individual in his irreducible quality. And thus it bcomes possible to organize a rational language around it. The object (italicized) of discourse may equally well be a subject (also italicized), without the figures of objectivity being in any way altered. It is this formal (it.) reorganization, in depth (it.) rather than the abandonment of theories and old systems, that made clinical experience (it.) possible; it lifted the old Aristotelian prohibition: one could at last hold a scientifically structured discourse about an individual.”
See page xv. I typed that quickly so please ignore obvious errors. Please also disregard whether you agree or disagree with the author…I’m just citing an example of what I describe above.
Left an incomplete thought in the beginning, there; I meant to finish and write:
“…the extent to which its activity could mark the subject as a object of science’s study.” I think the passage makes this clear any way though.
What I should say is that much of what Foucault does isn’t terribly different, in principle/goal, from Kant.
Paul, yes, I primarily associate those two with discourse analysis. But I also have in mind much of the scholarship by “lesser” names that has been inspired by them. In the course of working on my thesis, for example, I read some post-colonial/post-modern authors and anthropologists who made some interesting and fruitful analyses of the discourses that surround international development. (International development studies was the focus of my MA.) By “interesting and fruitful” I mean that they convincingly explained how discursive assumptions and constructs created or contributed to certain problems (namely failures to consider the international political context of aid projects and failures to consider the perspective of local people in recipient countries) and offered concrete solutions.
Here is one of the books: http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/F/ferguson_anti-politics.html
Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho
Lest anyone think Ferguson’s impact is limited to Humanities departments, it does get cited (positively!) by development economists, including William Easterly, a famously hard-nosed, empirically-minded economist.
To dismiss such work as relativism is to construct a strawman. The claim that it has no value needs to be strongly argued for. This is what I mean in my point about criticism of post-modernism being in need of clarification. A lot of people equate post-modernism with a (simplistic?) moral and cultural relativism, apply the easy arguments against moral and epistemic relativism that we all learned in our intro classes, and then think that they have proven a major intellectual trend wrong.
Po-mo does get supporters who do more harm than good (some people on here have used examples of overly-enthusiastic morally relative undergrads as foils for their arguments). But we should argue against the strongest instantiations of views we disagree with, not the weakest.
Aaron, your points about Foucault are limited criticisms of Foucault as a writer or historian, rather than the methodology of discourse analysis. The value of discourse analysis doesn’t stand or fall based on whether Foucault was sloppy or hasty any more than the scientific method stands or falls on the merits of Bacon as a scientist.
I should clarify that I don’t self-identify as post-modern. I think it is a useful tool, as are positivist methods. I would be disagreeing just as much if you had gone entirely in the other direction and asserted that all positivist methods in social science were wrong. From the post-modern writers I have read or studied in my courses, I find that their works contribute to understanding. If I were researching a particular topic (like international development) I certainly wouldn’t refuse to read any post-modern writers on the assumption that they could tell me nothing useful or new. I also don’t know how anybody could make that assumption without either a) having undertaken an exhaustive study of the many camps of post-modern scholarship or b) having developed a powerful a priori argument about why the various methods employed by post-modern scholars cannot work. All attempts at b that I know of are strawmen, and most people who undertake a are postmodern scholars.
Aaron,
This post is comical but scary as well.
I will mention that I was surprised that none of the skeptical contesters of evolution didn’t say something along the lines of…”if evolution were true, why are apes still here?”
…One contestant did mention that evolution is only a theory, which continues to be one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard.
Agreed. But I would wager that some of the contestants *do* believe the existence of other primates falsifies evolution.
Evolution via natural selection *is* a theory; of course, when a philosopher or scientist says ‘theory’ they mean something entirely different than when the term is used colloquially.
To conflate the two uses is to invite confusion and absurdity. The theory of gravity, the atomic theory of matter, the theory of plate tectonics, kinetic theory of gases, the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and the general theory of relativity, e.g., are all ‘theories.’ Should we therefore not teach them either? If we should, should we teach competing alternative theories as well?
In my opinion, I fault not only the poverty of primary and secondary science education in American schools, but also- if not more so- the poverty of primary and secondary critical thinking and philosophy education in American schools. What students should learn is not only the findings of modern science but also scientific methodology itself.
We ought to make compulsory in *every* year of education, to include in freshman and sophomore years of college, classes in logic, formal and informal, scientific methodology, and hands-on scientific practice (e.g. recreate experiments, have students do field work in botany and have them produce scientific reports for review by their teachers and peers, etc.).
Four things…
I: The parody was very amusing. Its creators did very well, I think.
II: I see an unfortunate but… predictable…pattern, in the original Miss USA link, which concerns the i) location of contestant’s state and ii) nature of contestant’s response to the “should evolution be taught?” question. I imagine others noticed this as well. Very sad.
III: This is going to draw some critics, but some parts of the discussion thus far look mostly well-meaning and well-informed, yet are nevertheless off-base. The university’s ESL tutor handbook is making, even with its grammatical ills and nebulousness, what I see to be a valid (albeit implicit) point. It is as follows: When tutoring an ESL student, one should keep in mind that other cultures understand logic in different ways. Keeping this in mind, a tutor should remember that what seems (or, if you wish, ‘is’) logical to an ESL student might not mesh with what seems (or ‘is’) logical to her tutor. In other words, I see these words as being a sensitivity reminder to tutors about different perspectives. I DO NOT MEAN TO SUGGEST THAT I THINK THE LOGIC OF PROGRAMMERS, MATHEMATICIANS, LOGICIANS, ETC., IS CULTURALLY DETERMINED. I would merely suggest the passage be changed to: “since some forms of logic are culturally determined…”. Maybe the response for some of you would then be: “that’s rhetoric, then, and NOT logic” — and with that I perhaps would not disagree. So let’s finish this point with an example: I do NOT think that an ESL tutor can ignore issues with a pupil’s ill usage of predicate logic because of ‘culturally determined differences’.
IV: Specifically for Aaron — post-modernism is already very much out of vogue in lit departments (cannot comment on sociology or Ed.) pretty much everywhere in the States save for Irvine and Buffalo, and a small handful of others. Comp. Lit might be another story, but if it is, it should not come as surprise.
I do not see post-modernism enjoying a revival any time soon, although I do think that it’s…’easier’…to point out problems with some religious worldviews by way of a post-modernist toolbox, after which things like evolution can be intelligently discussed
Re: (II.)
Yes, I did notice the correlation between geographical region and the contestants’ responses. To be fair, we must remember that the Miss USA contestant contingent does not constitute an accurate, representative sample of the U.S. population (I suspect most people would be able to express themselves more articulately than the contestants), but it is worrisome that something like 45% to 55% (choose your source) of the U.S. population believes the universe is less than 10,000 years old and that the transmutation of species via natural selection is a less coherent explanation of life on earth than a literal interpretation of the (contradictory) Genesis creation myth.
Of course
Paul, those are excellent points, but I would go even a little bit further on III. The term “logic” has lay meanings as well, and I do not think it is wrong (in a non-philosophical document) to use “logic” to mean something like “style of thinking.” This seems to be in accordance with accepted non-technical ways of using the word. Yes, it is inappropriate in a philosophically rigorous text, but an ESL book probably isn’t such a document.
Yes, I think that I agree given the context. Good point.
As I think about this a bit more, I definitely think that the ESL tutor handbook should read “since rhetorical strategies are culturally determined” — that would be a lot better, I think, while still pointing out to tutors that they might need to cross a cultural divide to really reach/help their pupils most effectively. I imagine that is what they really meant in the first place…I don’t think we are looking at a nefarious po-mo plot.
Shall we sign a petition and send it to A.C.E., or whatever entity of UNF it is that contains the ESL tutor department? We don’t have to ask that it be changed to my suggested words, but I do suggest that we ask that they don’t continue to use their current wording. Imagine how many have likely already read the current wording, and then imagine the trickle-down/word of mouth spread that results…
Two things. First, you are correct that the ESL Tutor Handbook ought to read: “Since rhetorical strategies are culturally determined… .” Rhetorical strategies differ much per culture. I can recollect many instances in which I had to introduce foreign- usually continental European and South American- students to the austere Anglo-American style of concise argumentation and paper-construction.
Second, the claim is *not* that there is a ‘nefarious’ post-modernist plot but rather that, unfortunately, post-modernism has attained to something like an orthodoxy in education theory (and other humanities) which, in turn, results in such sentence constructions as found in (3.) in the ESL Tutor Handbook.
Hi Aaron. Didn’t mean to suggest that any prior claim had been made. I was facetiously offering my own claim, viz, that the writers of the document meant something else than what their chosen words suggested, and that I doubt they really meant to suggest that logic is a social construct. So, I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek there.
I do wonder about extent of widespread po-mo orthodoxy (or near-orthodoxy) in sociology and Ed. I think that, above, you mentioned seeing a lot of this in the current literature. Sociology does not surprise me, but Ed. does, somewhat. In any case I will do some reading of my own on these matters. Very interesting.
Lastly, I’m quite serious about pushing for a change in the wording of the handbook, especially now that I see you are either a previous or current employee. Maybe we, as a group, can draft some sort of proposal and send it to the department? No offense taken if you are not interested, but I will be proceeding either way.
I am a previous employee. I have since graduated, so I am not sure it is my place to initiate a proposal for change. I would support an effort to produce a change in the wording of the textbook, however.
I’m an alum as well but I have no reservation in sending them a letter. I’ll draft something up.
This video demonstrates how most anti-evolutionists *think* evolution occurs. If this video were accurate, then I would share their skepticism.
Loved that video Tim. Thanks for putting that up.
No problem Paul. I still laugh every time I watch it.
We also must mention that, per creationists, evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics. Apparently, despite the almost institutionalized fear of and disdain for science education, creationists are experts on thermodynamics and evolutionary science
(I also love when creationists, when asked if they believe in evolution, fabricate distinctions for their purposes and say: ‘Well, that depends on what you mean by “evolution”: micro or macro evolution? You know, there are six or seven different types of evolution!’)
As a former beauty pagent girl, I “like” resent your “like” comments….we’re not all stupid….
I know *you* are not stupid and I never said *all* beauty contestants are stupid; I would never make such a facile generalization. I suspect that, on balance, Miss USA contestants are less articulate than the average person.
That’s an unfair suspicion you have, Aaron! Your youtube clip was kinda funny, I’ll admit, but not a true representation of the pageant world. I know you narrowed it to Miss USA contestants during brief question and answer time…(sigh) But it is unfair to say that they “are less articulate than the average person”… You are very frustrating!
I mean, “like” pageant… (smile, wink).
Hi there! This is my first comment here so I just wanted to give a quick shout out and tell you I
genuinely enjoy reading through your posts. Can you suggest any other blogs/websites/forums that deal with the same
topics? Thanks a lot!