[FRIAM] New Mexican's Sunday's story on education proficiency

[Eric Smith]

This feels incomplete to me in a fundamental way.  I am sure I will say the next thing badly, so will stay short.

I understand what “truth” is as a Boolean value propagated by rules within a formal system.  

For me to participate in the use of the tokens and rules of the formal system — including “participate in” in the sense of taking on its habits to organize where my attention or internal deliberations go — seems to involve another class of events that I would call “choices” for lack of an obviously better term.

The formal system (whether syntactic, a la Hilbert, or more constructivist in its semantics) is relatively sparse, which is one of the reasons we can scan it for consistency.

Meanwhile, the program of living, including all its events of choosing, is not contained within the formal system.  Alongside the formal system, the program of living as it is realized is yet-another thing in the world, of a different kind.

Truth as something formally propagated within the machinery of the formal system is not something I recognize as being transportable across the bridge that is built from choices.  Whatever we want to ratify those choices, or commend them to others, seems to need other terms.  Not that we couldn’t have used “truth” for that (though it would be way overloaded); only that if we want to use “truth” in the narrower formal sense, we would do ourselves a favor not to adopt exactly the same word to refer to some other value that is wildly different in its nature.

For some empiricist applications, “validity” seems an appropriate word.  But then validation also turns on choices, of how the “cookbook” aspects of our formal language get agreed upon to look at things in a certain way, or to build machines and read readings from them and consent to what moves those readings pick out in the next applications of the formal system.

For a “way of looking” that is communicated to me (a slave boy) to allow me to complete certain thoughts on my own (about Pythagorean theorem proofs) in the same ways as others would complete them, seems to be a way my choices of activity can be scaffolded through language that others use to point out things they have discovered it is possible to do.  The formal system, I, and the teacher are things in the world, and the teacher can coordinate experiences with me by way of the formal system.


I have found Dave’s last couple of posts very helpful.  I have a colleague, whom I often-not-so-affectionately refer to as The Mystic, who I think is trying to relay or reflect many of the same systems of thought that Dave does.  But The Mystic enjoys being obscure for its own sake so much that I have not succeeded in making head or tail of much of what he has said for quite some time.  Dave’s willingness to use manners of speaking from the analytic world, while emphasizing that they are deliberately not the native vernacular of the system from which he is speaking, is helpful.

There’s a kind of interesting article, here:
https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/2023%20Sellars/Sellars%20texts/The_Pragmatist_Enlightenment_and_its_Pro.pdf <https://sites.pitt.edu/~rbrandom/Courses/2023%20Sellars/Sellars%20texts/The_Pragmatist_Enlightenment_and_its_Pro.pdf>

I think that the lessons of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, limited as they are, should be helpful guides in turning Pragmatism onto itself as its target.  One could revisit the exchanges between Quine and Carnap, but from a perspective decades on, and try to be at the same time cautious but also responsible about the thick layer of experience where they seemed to just walk off the field and go home.  Maybe Putnam did it better.  I haven’t looked much into him.

Eric



> On Jul 23, 2024, at 12:32 PM, Nicholas Thompson <thompnickson2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi   Jon,
> 
> As a Peircean, I neverdoubted it for a minute.  A true ;roposition is one upon which we will agree in the very long run.  A real thing is any concept about which a true proposition can be uttered.   I think that makes numbers, and right triangles real given that 3^2 + 4^2 = 5^2 and  that the squire upon the hippopotamus is equal to the son of the squires on the other two hides. So they are real even though we will neverever touch one. 
> 
> Weird.
> 
> Nick
> From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com <mailto:friam-bounces at redfish.com>> on behalf of Jon Zingale <jonzingale at gmail.com <mailto:jonzingale at gmail.com>>
> Sent: Monday, July 22, 2024 6:22 PM
> To: friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com> <friam at redfish.com <mailto:friam at redfish.com>>
> Subject: Re: [FRIAM] New Mexican's Sunday's story on education proficiency
>  
> Numbers are real things. The more one explores them, the more experiences one has of them, the more confidently one comes to rely on them.
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