Some links

Here are some items I have bumped into recently:

Ways to look at data. How does it affect the way we read it? http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/

Some thoughts tied to emotion as a way of knowing: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphors/

When we get to the point of needing computers to explain to us what the other computers are doing, will our understanding be knowledge- or faith-based? Or will it be something else? http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/09/science/20111109_next_feature.html

Morality Test

A fun online quiz.

But in taking it, I really felt like most of the questions were of an ethical nature. And in considering how we come to know ethical answers, it helps to have a starting point.

Here is the quiz. Let the games begin.

Time-Out

One of the main beauties of the TOK course, I think, is that it gives us training in taking time to pause and consider the suppositions posed as fact that bombard us in our media-rich culture. Every opinion seems to have very capable adherents ready to pass generally-acceptable talking points enriched with faulty logic off to the masses. Some who know me might think that in writing this I have a particular political persuasion in mind, but I don't really: I have shredded more than one magazine offer pandering to the side with which I regularly vote because the publications in question advertised with much too much pride that their contents offered counter-claims to foil any argumentative opponent. I am not interested in regurgitated talking points. I am, however, interested in really examining where our ideas fall in relation to justice, fairness, truth, and right.

So I was extremely pleased to find today on AskPhilosophers a wonderful description of what it takes to find rationality in a world full of arguments. Kudos to the questioner and to the respondent.

Wouldn't it be lovely if all of the talking heads took a day off and let us look for some answers in peace. Wouldn't it be a lovely thing to have a global day of TOK.

Scintillating Read

Ok, I know I have posted a lot of articles lately, but this one made my brain pop. Again, from the New York Times op-ed series, The Stone: on the nature of happiness, and the ways it may be similar to knowledge. (If we can agree on what knowledge is...)

AskPhilosophers: Must Art be Judged Morally?

Error

Reading IB Theory of Knowledge by Anthony Stewart, the textbook for TOK used at my school. Please note that on p. 397 the artist of Adoration of the Magi is listed as Uffizi. No. The artist is Gentile da Fabriano. The painting can be seen at the Uffizi gallery in Firenze.

Thanks.

Calvin on Experimentation

LINK: AskPhilosophers, re: Meaning of Truth

In addition, this response clarifies the idea of a truth-maker.

Knowledge in the Arts: Helvetica

Today I watched the documentary Helvetica. The first half was very interesting: it examined the history of the font, including the events and general environment of type design before Helvetica came into being. But most interesting was seeing the wide divide among professional industrial designers about the layers of meaning that the Helvetica font carries. What do letters in that form say? What messages does the font carry?

The one idea that everyone seemed to agree with was that Helvetica is the touchstone of modern typeface. As such, the symbolic layers that the font evoked with each individual designer reflected plainly each designer's overall reaction to clean, minimalist, Ikea-style modernism.

(Ikea never used Helvetica as its font. It used to use a variant of Futura, and the company caused a bit of an uproar a year ago when the switched to Verdana. I wonder what Verdana said that Futura didn't. Is Ikea getting more fru fru?)

Anyway. The search for meaning in fonts shouldn't be surprising. Look at the extent to which stylized, formalized, or just plain artistic writing is the canonical art form in the Muslim world, especially as evidenced in the Arabic of the original Qua'ran. (I wonder if there is a Helvetica in the Arabic typeface world?) Thinking about holy writing, I am pretty sure my copy of the Bible is not printed in Helvetica, nor is the English translation in my copy of the Qua'ran. Apparently the one thing Helvetica does not convey is a strong sense of established tradition.

Heidegger's Chalk

Once upon a time I was a humanities major.

There is a lot of discussion about whether one acts responsibly when one selects this major. To the detractors: I couldn't have done anything else.

Anyway, the School of Humanities at the university I attended sends out a little magazine a few times a year. And the magazine I received yesterday had an interesting anecdote about Heidegger:

During a 1935 lecture course at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger held a piece of chalk in his hand and noted its properties. It was "an extended, relatively hard, gray-white thing with a definite form." As a thing, he further observed, it exists in space and time, at least that is our initial impression and way of talking. But this attitude incorrectly assumes that "space and time are in some sense 'external' to things," Heidegger added. Space does not end where the chalk begins; rather space informs the chalk and is filled by it. By this time his students were wondering about the inside of the piece of chalk, and to satisfy their curosity, Heidegger broke the piece of chalk. He then asked, "Are we now at the inside?" Most people would probably say yes - we are now looking at the inside of the chalk. But Heidegger insisted that we are again looking at an outer surface, somewhat smaller and rougher than before, but an outer surface nontheless. We really didn't get inside because the moment we broke it in half to discover its inside, the chalk "closed itself off" by offering itself as an outer surface. We are still on the outside looking at an opaque piece of chalk, not experiencing chalk's inner space.

Heidegger then stated: "[We] were unable to find the space we were looking for inside the chalk, the space which belongs to the chalk itself. But perhaps we weren't quick enough. Let's try breaking the piece of chalk once again!" After snapping the chalk in half again with the same disappointing result, Heidegger asked, "So where on earth does the inside of the chalk begin, and where does the outside stop?"

-from David Grandy, "A Second Glance at Chalk in the Classroom," Humanities at BYU. Spring 2010, p. 8-12. Retelling an incident recounted in Graham Parkes, "Thoughts on the way: Being and Time via Lao-Chuang," Heidegger and Asian Thought, ed. Graham Parkes (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp. 105-44.

What an interesting look at perspective, and at how taking a step back from our expectations can lead us to a more precise conclusion.

Coming up (hopefully soon): Thoughts on Hegel. I'm reading Hegel: A Very Short Intoduction by Peter Singer. Oxford University has a huge series of Very Short Introductions, and I have several on my reading list. I feel a bit like I'm reading Cliff's Notes, but at the same time, there is no way I could read and digest enough Hegel to understand the basics in the time I have. Plus reading even this takes my full concentration and brain power, so I'm looking at it as the university lecture for the class I'm not actually taking. It also has me wanting to read more Kant.

I'm also starting to read one of the TOK texts. So hopefully I'll update about that soon as well.

First Contact and Language as a Way of Knowing

I caught the tail end of today's episode of This American Life, in which Ira Glass speaks to Paul Davies, who is the go-to guy for figuring out how to communicate with aliens. And his answer (you guessed it) is that we should communicate mathematics (quantum mechanics) via binary code.

So when we are thinking about knowledge, there is a question about the link between knowledge and language - if we can't express it, do we know it? Put it on an intergalactic scale, wherein the best minds figure the only way to communicate in a first-contact situation is a way I personally cannot communicate. In that sense, what do I as an individual human really know? Nothing?

So perhaps the link between language and knowledge is overblown. Learning new languages, we may find ourselves provided with better nuances we can use to express with precision the knowledge we have, but does this make language an actual way of knowing? Is language nothing more than a way of sharing context? A system of symbols for putting us on the same page?

Is the feeling of being unable to put your finger on an idea a lack of knowledge or a lack of language for expressing knowledge - thereby blocking the knowledge from actualization and utilization? Is it one and the same? Is intuition knowledge without language?

(In reading over this post, my dependence on metaphor and idiom to express my ideas strikes me as pertinent, insofar as metaphor and idiom are so language- and even culture-specific, and so difficult to translate.)

No, I haven't given up...

I've been reading the course guide. The first half of which explains the concepts to be covered, followed by many, many questions one might explore. The second half is about grading.

I'll follow up more when there is more to write - hopefully within the next week.

Getting Started

Full Disclosure: I'm cheating just a little. I've been getting started for several months now, so although this is the start of the blog, this is not the start of the process. The task, however, is immense enough in all directions that it's still early enough to start a blog and see where the journey goes.

So here we are. Not at the Big Bang moment. Just afterward.

The origin of all this?

The school where I teach participates in the IB Programme. The Theory of Knowledge (TOK) class is required for all students pursuing the IB diploma. In a nutshell, the class asks how we know what we know, how and by whom advances have been made in the various disciplines, and how we can become better thinkers ourselves. Education in a nutshell. The goals are ambitious and exhilarating.

I am lucky and thankful to be receiving help in preparing from our current TOK teacher. He really is an intellectual giant with the apt quote or source always at his command. A few months ago, he gave me a copy of his current syllabus, including the primary and reference texts he used to develop the course. While I had read some of the books, I hadn't read the lion's share, and over the next couple of months bought some crates, got on Amazon, and proceeded to fill said crates with what will be my reading list for the next while. I also consulted with my sister, the most avid reader I know, and added a few other books to the crates. I then raided my bookshelves and added to the crates books that I think will add to the discussion. I have a lot of reading and re-reading to do.

My goal in blogging about this enterprise is to keep myself on track. Here are the pitfalls:

1. Right now, the books are like a candy store, and it would be very easy to treat them as such, picking the flavor of the week and running with it. I need to be systematic about my reading. Case in point: Nineteen Eighty-Four came. It has been on my reading list since I read Animal Farm in eighth grade. I promptly picked it up and read it. Next in line on the candy list? A Brief History of Time. Wait. At this rate, I am never going to get to Cases in Bioethics. So I'm hoping that blogging will help me be responsible enough to start at a logical square one and follow through rationally.
2. The topic is big enough that it will be very easy to get tangential and paint myself into a corner unrelated to my larger goals. Again, let's use Nineteen Eighty-Four as an example. I encountered some great ideas about stupidity and ignorance while reading it. I spent some lovely time chasing some implications out in my brain. I don't know that these ideas will have anything to do with my larger goal, preparing to teach TOK. So I'm hoping the blog will keep me (somewhat) within the boundaries of my objective.

I will tell more about Nineteen Eighty-Four in another post, I am sure. But for now, let's set up some objectives.

1. I am bad at doing what I am supposed to do. So it will be important to finish reading the TOK guide from IB before I get much deeper. No later than the end of the month. Preferably within the next week or so.
2. Even though it's not as fun as the primary sources, I really need to read the textbook the students will be using as well. So let's make that step mandatory for any section I am studying.
3. The hardest goal of all: pick a section and stick with it. No more candy store raids. Hmph.

So here's to the (almost) start of the journey. Away we go.