Whitehead on Education and Information

Whitehead Alfred North Whitehead's The Aims of Education and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1929) begins with this paragraph:

Culture is activity of thought, and receptiveness to beauty and humane feeling. Scraps of information have nothing to do with it. A merely well-informed man is the most useless bore on God's earth. What we should aim at producing is men who possess both culture and expert knowledge in some special direction. Their expert knowledge will give them the ground to start from, and their culture will lead them as deep as philosophy and as high as art. We have to remember that the valuable intellectual development is self-development, and that it mostly takes place between the ages of sixteen and thirty. As to training, the most important part is given by mothers before the age of twelve. A saying due to Archbishop Temple illustrates my meaning. Surprise was expressed at the success in after-life of a man, who as a boy at Rugby had been somewhat undistinguished. He answered, "It is not what they are at eighteen, it is what they become afterwards that matters."

That few today understand what education is is betrayed by the readiness of all too many to use 'educate' in place of 'inform.'  Suppose you tell me about some petty fact. You have not 'educated' me, you have given me a scrap of information. The educated person is not the one whose head is stuffed with information, but the one whose experientially-honed judgment is capable of making sense of information. To become well-informed is not difficult; to become well-educated is a task of self-development for a lifetime.

Life Without Questioning

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Book One, Section Two (tr. Kaufmann):

. . . to stand in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [discordant concord of things: Horace, Epistles, I.12.19] and of this whole marvelous uncertainty and rich ambiguity of existence without questioning, without trembling with the craving and the rapture of such questioning, without at least hating the person who questions, perhaps even finding him faintly amusing — this is what I feel to be contemptible . . .

My sentiments exactly.

Saturday Night at the Oldies: Originals and Covers

Some covers are as good as if not better than the originals.  Some examples, with the original first.  Thanks to our old friend 'williamofockham' for uploading the Morissette number as well as for suggesting the McLachlan and Simon covers.

Beatles, Blackbird.  Sarah McLachlan cover.  Carly Simon cover.

Sam Cooke, Wonderful World.  Simon-Garfunkel-Taylor cover. 

Bob Dylan, Blowing' in the Wind.  Alanis Morissette cover.

Jimmy Jones, Handy Man.  James Taylor cover.

Chantays, Pipeline.  Dick Dale and Stevie Ray Vaughan cover.  Blows the original clean out of the water!

Shirelles, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?  This version is untouchable, though covered by many, including Carole King, its composer (with Gerry Goffin).

Chiffons, One Fine Day.  Another untouchable oldie from 1963 penned by Goffin-King.  Carole King does a better job with this one.

James Kalb on Illegal Immigration

Arizona Governor Jan Brewer has signed into law Arizona Senate Bill 1070.   Illegal aliens are of course up in arms over it.  But why do the ruling elites tend to tolerate mass illegal immigration?  Why are they not upholding the rule of law? James Kalb (The Tyranny of Liberalism, ISI Books, 2008, pp. 49-50) writes,

As to immigration, the people value the ties that make them a people and believe that the country should be run for their own benefit.  Ruling elites, by contrast, are concerned with the power and efficiency of  governing institutions, the status and security of those who run them, and maintenance of the liberal principles that support and justify their rule.  It is in their interest to expand the human resources available to them, even at the expense of those who are already citizens, and to weaken the mutual ties that make it possible for the people to resist rational management and to act somewhat independently.  In addition, any moderately self-seeking ruling class prefers cooperating with members of the ruling class in other countries to representing the interests of their constituents. The practical result of such influences has the suppression of immigration as an issue in the interest of an emerging borderless world order. Restrictionist arguments are scantily presented in the mainstream media, and concern with cultural coherence, national identity, or even the well-being of one's country's workers is routinely denigrated as ignorant and racist nativism.

Kalb's book is proving to be an insightful and stimulating read.

Mark Steyn on the Tea Party Bashers

Mark Steyn in his typical fine form:

Everybody knows that when you say "I'm becoming very concerned about unsustainable levels of federal spending" that that's old Jim Crow code for "Let's get up a lynching party and teach that uppity Negro a lesson." Frank Rich of The New York Times attempted to diversify the Tea Party racism into homophobia by arguing that Obamacare opponents were uncomfortable with Barney Frank's sexuality. I yield to no one in my discomfort with Barney Frank's sexuality but, with the best will in the world, I find it hard to blame it for more than the first four or five trillion dollars of federal overspending. Eschewing such cheap slurs, Time's Joe Klein said opposition to Obama was "seditious," because nothing says sedition like citing the U.S. Constitution and quoting Thomas Jefferson. Unfortunately for Klein, thanks to "educator" William Ayers' education reforms, nobody knows what "seditious" means anymore.

So enough with all the punch-pulling about seditious racist homophobes.

It was time to go for broke, and bring out Bill Clinton to explain why the Tea Party is the new front in the "war on terror." Don't worry about Iran's nuclear program, but , if you meet a Tea Party supporter waving some placard about the national debt, try not to catch his eye and back away slowly without making any sudden movements lest he put down his placard and light up his suicide belt.

The Truth Operator and the Truth Predicate

This is an addendum to our earlier discussion which I hope will advance it a step or two.  We heard Alan Rhoda claim that the following sentence is false: 'If nothing exists, then it is true that nothing exists.'  Let's think further about this.  We first note that 'If nothing exists, then it is true that nothing exists' can be parsed in two ways:

1. If nothing exists, then it is true that (nothing exists).

2. If nothing exists, then it is true (that nothing exists).

Call (1) the operator construal.  'It is true that ( )' is a sentential operator the operand of which is a sentence.  The result of the operation is itself a sentence.  If the operand is true, then the resulting sentence  is true.  If the operand is false, then the resulting sentence is false. Please note that prefixing 'It is true that' to a sentence cannot change the truth-value of the sentence.  In this respect, the truth operator 'It is true that ( )' is unlike the negation operator 'It is not the case that ( ).'  Assuming Bivalence — as I have been doing throughout — if you negate a true sentence you get a false one, and vice versa.

Call (2) the predicate construal.  The consequent of (2) is of course a sentence, but it is not the result or product of a sentential operator operating upon a sentence. For what is within the parentheses is not a sentence.  'That nothing exists' is not a sentence.  It does not have a truth-value.  If I assertively utter it I do not convey a complete thought to my audience.  'That nothing exists' is the name of a proposition.  It follows that 'it is true' in the consequent of (2) functions as a predicate as one can more clearly see from the equivalent

3.  If nothing exists, then that nothing exists is true.

In (2) and (3)  a predicate is attached to a name, whereas in (1) this is not the case: a sentential operator is attached to a sentence.

Not only are the parsings different, the ontological commitments are as well.  (2) commits us to propositions while (1) doesn't.  And (1) seems to commit us to operators while (2) doesn't. 

Here is the place to comment on my asterisks convention.  Putting asterisks around a declarative sentence forms a name of the proposition expressed by the sentence.  'The Moon is uninhabited' is a declarative sentence.  '*The Moon is uninhabited*' is not a sentence but a name.  It names an entity that has a truth-value, but it itself does not have a truth-value.  (2) and (3) can also be rendered as

4. If nothing exists, then *Nothing exists* is true.

With the operator/predicate distinction under our belts we may be in a position to see how one philosopher (Alan)  could reasonably reject 'If nothing exists, then it is true that nothing exists' while another accepts it.  The one philosopher gives the original sentence the predicate construal which is committed to propositions.  This philosopher then reasons that, if nothing exists, then no propositions exist either, and are therefore not available to instantiate the property of being true.  The other philosopher gives the original sentence the operator construal and finds it impossible to understand how anyone could reject the original sentence so construed.  This philosopher insists that if nothing exists, then it is true that nothing exists; that this truth is not nothing, and that therefore it is something, which implies that it cannot be the case that nothing exists.

 

If the Ionian Pre-Socratics Had Weblogs . . .

. . .what might they have been called?

* Thales of Miletus: View from the Bottom of a Well
* Anaximander of Miletus: Indeterminate Musings
* Anaximenes of Miletus: Just Another Airhead Gassing Off
* Xenophanes of Colophon: Tales of Wickedness in High Places
* Heraclitus of Ephesus: The Upload and the Download are the Same.

(MP originals)

Earth Day 2010

Maverick Philosopher doesn't celebrate anything as politically correct as Earth Day.  Maverick Philosopher celebrates critical thinking.  So I refer you to William Cronon's The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.  A rich and subtle essay.  Excerpt:

Many environmentalists who reject traditional notions of the Godhead and who regard themselves as agnostics or even atheists nonetheless express feelings tantamount to religious awe when in the presence of wilderness—a fact that testifies to the success of the romantic project. Those who have no difficulty seeing God as the expression of our human dreams and desires nonetheless have trouble recognizing that in a secular age Nature can offer precisely the same sort of mirror.

To put (roughly the same)  point with Maverickian aphoristic pithiness: Nature for the idolaters of the earth is just as much an unconscious anthropomorphic projection as the God of the Feuerbachians.

Thus it is that wilderness serves as the unexamined foundation on which so many of the quasi-religious values of modern environmentalism rest. The critique of modernity that is one of environmentalism’s most important contributions to the moral and political discourse of our time more often than not appeals, explicitly or implicitly, to wilderness as the standard against which to measure the failings of our human world. Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul. It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity. Combining the sacred grandeur of the sublime with the primitive simplicity of the frontier, it is the place where we can see the world as it really is, and so know ourselves as we really are—or ought to be.

 

A Counterexample to P –> It is True that P?

Alan Rhoda e-mails:

In a recent post you write:
 
The objector is inviting us to consider the possible situation in which beings like us do not exist and no truths either.  The claim that this situation is possible, however, is equivalent to the claim that it is true that this situation is possible.
 
I think there's a mistake here. In general, p does not entail it is true that p. The envisioned scenario is a case in point. The sense in which the situation is admitted to be possible is purely negative in that absent truths, no contradiction results. To say, however, that it is true that the situation is possible, where truths are supposed to depend on cognizers, requires that the situation be possible in a positive sense, i.e., it requires that something be the case, not merely that contradictions not be the case.

Thanks, Alan.  Let's rehearse the dialectic.  I argued in a standard self-referential way that *There are truths* is not just true, but necessarily true.  (For *There are no truths,* if true is false, and if false is false, hence is necessarily false, so its negation is necessarily true.)  I then asked whether the necessity of its truth is unconditional or rests on a condition such as the existence of thinking beings. (In other words: is the necessity of truth merely a transcendental presupposition without which we cannot operate as thinking beings, or is the necessity of there being truths metaphysically grounded in rerum natura?)  If the existence of truths is merely a transcendental presupposition, then it would seem that the following scenario is possible:  there are no thinking beings and no truths either.  If this scenario is possible, then the necessity of *There are truths* would be conditional.  I then tried to show that the scenario is not possible by invoking the principle Necessarily, for any p, p –> it is true that p.  My thought was that if it is possible that there be no thinking beings and no truths either, then it is true that this is possible.  But if it is true that this is possible, then it is true independently of what anyone thinks. But then truth as something more than a transcendental presupposition is being presupposed.

I am afraid I don't understand your criticism of the reasoning.  The principle p –> it is true that p strikes me as self-evident.  Its 'intellectual luminosity,' if you will, will trump any putative counterexample.  If snow is white, then it is true that snow is white; if grass is green, then it is true that grass is green; if it is possible that no thinkers and no truths exist, then it is true that it is possible that no truths and no thnkers exist.  Now the point is that this last truth says how things are in a situation in which no thinkers exist; therefore it is a truth that cannot exist only if thinkers exist.  It exists whether or not thinkers exist. 

You write, "The sense in which the situation is admitted to be possible is purely negative in that absent truths, no contradiction results."  I don't follow you.  The situation is possible assuming that truth is a mere transcendental presupposition.  Now suppose the possibility is actual.  Then it will be true both that it is possible and that it is actual.  So once again truth cannot be a mere transcendental presupposition.

You then say, " To say, however, that it is true that the situation is possible, where truths are supposed to depend on cognizers, requires that the situation be possible in a positive sense, i.e., it requires that something be the case, not merely that contradictions not be the case." But I am not claiming that truths are dependent on cognizers; I am refuting that view.  If the existence of truths depends on cognizers, and cognizers exist contingently, then it is possible that there be no truths.  But this is not possible since if, per impossibile, it were the case that there are no truths, then this  would be the case, i.e., would be true.

The ComBox is open if you want to discuss this further.