Category Archives: Education

Creativity

June 6, 2022 – 6:26 am

Index to this series

In the Platonic dialogues, Socrates frequently mentions τέχνη (technê), which is art in the archaic sense: skill or craft. The concern of this post is how one develops a skill, and what it means to have one in the first place.

Books quoted or mentioned in the text, by Midgley, Weil, Thoreau, Tolstoy, Byrne, Wittgenstein, Arendt, and Alexander

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Euclid, Homer, Midgley, Pirsig, Plato, Principles of Art, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Mathematics and Logic

October 13, 2020 – 8:55 am

Large parts of this post are taken up with two subjects:

  1. The notion (due to Collingwood) of criteriological sciences, logic being one of them.

  2. Gödel’s theorems of completeness and incompleteness, as examples of results in the science of logic.

Like the most recent in the current spate of mathematics posts, the present one has arisen from material originally drafted for the first post in this series.

In that post, I defined mathematics as the science whose findings are proved by deduction. This definition does not say what mathematics is about. We can say however what logic is about: it is about mathematics quâ deduction, and more generally about reasoning as such. This makes logic a criteriological science, because logic seeks, examines, clarifies and limits the criteria whereby we can make deductions. As examples of this activity, Gödel’s theorems are, in a crude sense to be refined below, that

  • everything true in all possible mathematical worlds can be deduced;

  • some things true in the world of numbers can never be deduced;

  • the latter theorem is one of those things.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Euclid, Logic, Mathematics, Philosophy of Mathematics, Plato | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

Multiplicity of Mathematics

October 8, 2020 – 5:54 am

I continue with the recent posts about mathematics, which so far have been as follows.

  1. “What Mathematics Is”: As distinct from the natural sciences, mathematics is the science whose findings are proved by deduction. I say this myself, and I find it at least implicit in an address by Euphemia Lofton Haynes.

  2. “More of What It Is”: Some mathematicians do not distinguish mathematics from physics.

  3. “Knottedness”: Topologically speaking, there is a sphere whose outside is not that of a sphere. The example is Alexander’s Horned Sphere, but it cannot actually be physically constructed.

  4. “Why It Works”: Why there can be such a thing as the horned sphere.

When I first drafted the first post above, I said a lot more than I eventually posted. I saved it for later, and later is starting to come now.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Euclid, Mathematics, Philosophy of Mathematics | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

An Exercise in Analytic Geometry

August 5, 2020 – 6:26 pm

This past spring (of 2020), when my university in Istanbul was closed (like all others in Turkey) against the spread of the novel coronavirus, I created for my students an exercise, to serve at least as a distraction for those who could find distraction in learning.

Diagram from textbook page shows, centered at the origin of coordinates, a circle and an ellipse whose four points of intersection are traversed by two lines in red through the origin
From Weeks & Adkins, Second Course in Algebra, p. 395

Note added, April 17, 2023: An account of the mathematics involved in the exercise would ultimately be published as: Pierce, D. (2021). “Conics in Place.” Annales Universitatis Paedagogicae Cracoviensis | Studia Ad Didacticam Mathematicae Pertinentia, 13, 127–150.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Conic Sections, Descartes, Exposition, Mathematics | Tagged | Comments (4)

On Being Given to Know

August 24, 2019 – 5:40 pm
  1. What if we could upload books to our brains?
  2. What if a machine could tell us what was true?

We may speculate, and it is interesting that we do speculate, because I think the questions do not ultimately make sense—not the sense that seems to be intended anyway, whereby something can be got for nothing.

View from Şavşat

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Aristotle, Art, Causation, Collingwood, Homer, Philosophy | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (3)

NL XLV: The Germans

February 21, 2019 – 9:14 am

Index to this series

At the end of Collingwood’s New Leviathan (1942), we reach a chapter whose theme is that of my more recent articles on grammar.

By August Macke – The Yorck Project (2002) 10.000 Meisterwerke der Malerei (DVD-ROM), distributed by DIRECTMEDIA Publishing GmbH. ISBN: 3936122202., Public Domain, Link

As history, Collingwood’s last chapter is difficult, for the reasons that trouble Herbert Read at the beginning of his Concise History of Modern Painting (revised 1968, augmented 1974). Read opens his first chapter with a passage from Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis (1924):

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Grammar, New Leviathan | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

NL XXXVII: Civilization As Education

September 20, 2018 – 7:47 am

Index to this series

Knowing, from the previous chapter, what civilization is, we ask: How do we bring it about? Collingwood’s answer is to homeschool our children.

This is the New Leviathan’s first detailed piece of positive advice, and it may sound crazy. Rather than list reasons why, I want to see what sense can be made of the ideas.

Civility is respect (37. 15). To respect another person is to recognize their freedom (37. 14). To do this, one needs self-respect (37. 13).

Instead of respect, we may approach another person with servility, namely “the demeanour of a man lacking self-respect towards one whom he fears” (37. 17). The will to barbarism is just the will to servility (37. 19).


Mary Cassatt (American, 1844-1926)
The Boating Party, 1893/1894, oil on canvas
Chester Dale Collection, National Gallery of Art Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, New Leviathan, Pacifism, Philosophy, Plato | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (11)

Writing Rules

July 15, 2018 – 7:35 pm

Executive summary (added July 16, 2018): I have had enough of misrepresentation by experts of what other experts have to say about grammar.

An ongoing concern of this blog is the subject taught in school called grammar. See for example

  • the previous post, “Writing and Inversion,” about how a supposed rule against the passive voice might be better understood as a rule to avoid certain inversions of order (namely those inversions that add words and torpor);

  • the post before that, “A New Kind of Science,” presenting a theory that grammar is properly neither prescriptive nor descriptive, but “criteriological,” because it examines the criteria that we apply to our own speaking and writing;

  • an early expression (from six years ago) of some of those ideas: “Strunk and White.”

Grammar causes anxiety. Every aspect of school would seem to cause anxiety in somebody. Decades after they have left school, how many persons have nightmares of missing an examination? Quite a few, it would seem; see the evidence appended to this post. My mother and her brother were such persons, as I learned when growing up. I seem not to be such a person, though I once dreamt of missing a plane.

How much support of current US President Donald Trump is due to memories of belittlement by teachers at school? Similar questions may be raised about

  • UK government minister Michael Gove’s saying, “people in this country have had enough of experts …”;

  • the rise in Turkey of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has perceived a special threat from the Peace Academics.

On that last matter, see my blog essay of March, 2016, “Academic Freedom.”

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Fowler, Grammar, Language, Strunk and White | Tagged , , , , | Comments (11)

Writing and Inversion

July 14, 2018 – 7:55 am

Executive summary: The “voice” of a transitive verb may be active or passive. A piece of writing may be vigorous or torpid. There is not an exact correspondence between passive verbs and torpid writing. However, a passive verb is used to effect inversion of subject and object. One may also invert subject and auxiliary verb, subject and predicate, or two clauses, always adding new words. Each inversion may lead to torpid writing. This is what Strunk warned about in The Elements of Style, by issuing the command, “Use the active voice.” The command must be followed with discretion. Williams makes the same case, more elaborately, in Style: Towards Clarity and Grace. There is no foolproof executive summary of how to write well.

When E. B. White revised William Strunk’s original Elements of Style, he did not retain Strunk’s “Introductory,” whose first paragraph said of the book,

The experience of its writer has been that once past the essentials, students profit most by individual instruction based on the problems of their own work, and that each instructor has his own body of theory, which he may prefer to that offered by any textbook.

Perhaps many students today cannot receive individual instruction. They are just given textbooks that try to spell out everything. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Grammar, Maugham, Strunk and White | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

A New Kind of Science

July 10, 2018 – 5:51 pm

Executive summary. Some sciences are called descriptive, empirical, or natural; others, prescriptive or normative. We should recognize a third kind of science, which studies the criteria as such that a thinking being imposes on itself as it tries to achieve success. I propose linguistics as an example. Collingwood introduced the term criteriological for the third kind of science. This was in The Principles of Art (1938), though I find the germ of the concept in earlier work, even in Collingwood’s first book, Religion and Philosophy (1916), in the passage on psychology that the author would recall in An Autobiography (1939).

Collingwood’s examples of criteriological sciences are logic, ethics, aesthetics, and economics. Pirsig effectively (and independently) works out rhetoric as an example in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974). We may benefit from clarity here, given how people can have a strong reaction to being lectured by experts. For Collingwood, such a reaction is found in Nazi Germany; see the last chapter of The New Leviathan (1942). Reactions to grammar are the subject of my own two ensuing articles, “Writing and Inversion” and “Writing Rules.”

Some sciences are not recognized for what they are. The sciences themselves are not new, but a proper understanding of them may be new to some of us, including myself.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in “ceases to be a mind”, Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Grammar, Ontological Proof, Pirsig, Principles of Art, Science, Strunk and White | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (22)