timelets

What Nagel has discovered is a fascinating architectural feature of the human mind: We are beings who can representationally distance ourselves from ourselves and make this fact globally avail- able through conscious experience.

-- Thomas Metzinger, Being No One. 2004

There is no absolutely pure rational knowledge except the four principles to which I have attributed metalogical truth; the principles of identity, contradiction, excluded middle, and sufficient reason of knowledge. For even the rest of logic is not absolutely pure rational knowledge.
...
§ 11. In this regard the direct opposite of rational knowledge is feeling, and therefore we must insert the explanation of feeling here. The concept which the word feeling denotes has merely a negative content, which is this, that something which is present in consciousness, is not a concept, is not abstract rational knowledge. Except this, whatever it may be, it comes under the concept of feeling. Thus the immeasurably wide sphere of the concept of feeling includes the most different kinds of objects, and no one can ever understand how they come together until he has recognised that they all agree in this negative respect, that they are not abstract concepts. For the most diverse and even antagonistic elements lie quietly side by side in this concept; for example, religious feeling, feeling of sensual pleasure, moral feeling, bodily feeling, as touch, pain, sense of colour, of sounds and their harmonies and discords, feeling of hate, of disgust, of self-satisfaction, of honour, of disgrace, of right, of wrong, sense of truth, æsthetic feeling, feeling of power, weakness, health, friendship, love, &c. &c. There is absolutely nothing in common among them except the negative quality that they are not abstract rational knowledge.

--- Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will And Idea.

This paper considers some of the reasons why motivated students in suitable learning environments may fail to learn from competent teachers.

...the constructivist perspective that learning is a process of knowledge
construction in the mind of the learner (Pope 1982; von Glaserfeld 1989, Fensham, Gunstone &
White 1994), and assumes that we are concerned with ‘meaningful’ rather than ‘rote’ learning
(Ausubel 1961).



The primary distinction is between situations when the intended learning does not take place
because
(a) the learner can not make sense of the presented material in terms of existing ideas; or
(b) the learner interprets the new material in terms of existing, but alternative, ideas.
( Read more... )

Keith S. Taber, Homerton College, University of Cambridge, U.K. 2000.
https://science-education-research.com/downloads/publications/2001/Taber-2001-TheMismatchBetweenAssumedPriorKnowledge-AMV.pdf

2.2.5 We may be understood, that is

surrounded,
diverted,
betrayed,
displaced,
transmitted,

but we are never understood well.

If a message is transported, then it is transformed.
We never get a message that is simply spread.

--- Bruno Latour. TPoF, 1993.

“Any complex activity,” Clausewitz writes, “if it is to be carried on with any degree of virtuosity, calls for appropriate gifts of intellect and temperament. If they are outstanding and reveal themselves in exceptional achievements, their possessor is called a ‘genius.’”

“Temperament functions similarly [to long poles for tightrope walkers -- ], I think, in strategy. It’s not a compass—that’s intellect. But it is a gyroscope: an inner ear complementing Clausewitz’s “inward eye.” Like poles on tightropes, temperament makes the difference between slips and safe arrivals.”
( Read more... )

-- John Lewis Gaddis. “On Grand Strategy.”