Epistemology for 1st Graders
+ Oscar predictions, curated essays
In this week’s edition of Thinking Aloud, I am sharing about a really cool moment in 1st grade math class wherein Dr. Fradkin helped the students think about how we learn.
First, a hearty congratulations to the Chiefs for their well-deserved Super Bowl win. Also congratulations to Shakira and J Lo who gave us one of the best halftime shows in years.
Second, the Oscars are tomorrow. My predictions: Best Picture: Parasite. / Best Director: Quentin Tarantino / Best Actor: Adam Driver. / Best Actress: Saoirse Ronan Supporting Actor: Joe Pesci / Supporting Actress: Kathy Bates / Cinematography: 1917 / Foreign Film: Corpus Christi / Adapted Screenplay: The Irishman / Original Screenplay: Marriage Story.
Third, I have been challenging myself to write more about my own experiences, particularly the painful ones. ISI published my recent essay on watching my Dad tell us he was laid off, with reflections on why relative poverty matters, and why GDP growth isn’t the end-all-be-all.
And then there’s that feeling of despair: if you do all the right things and it isn’t enough, then what’s the point? My dad would have worked there until retirement if he could have, and in my grandfather’s generation that would have been enough to secure him a comfortable retirement. But now? The point here is that we didn’t starve and we weren’t homeless and we still had a family Netflix account, but like I said, relative poverty hurts, too.
You can read the whole essay here.
Epistemology for 1st Graders
“Suppose an alien visited earth and you wanted to teach it how to recognize a dog…”
Dr. Fradkin stands in front of the whiteboard, looking out at her 1st grade students.
“How would you teach this alien what a dog is?”
Several hands shoot up into the air.
“I would show it pictures of dogs.”
Dr. Fradkin smiles.
“Now let’s suppose that the alien sees a cat, and thinks it is a dog. What do we do now?”
Fewer hands in the air. One student ventures a guess.
“You should show it pictures of cats too.”
The students soon begin to realize that our new alien friend would likely need to see lots of pictures of lots of different animals in order to be able to properly distinguish between them.
Dr. Fradkin reflects that we learn in much the same way as our alien friend. We begin to recognize patterns and that helps us make sense of the world. She notes that sometimes we do learn what something is through a definition: “a square is an enclosed figure made up of four equal sides and four right angles.” (that’s clunky, sorry.) And definitions and rules can be helpful. But patterns are helpful too, and are actually the main way we organize information and learn new material. She points out that this is how computers learn what dogs are too.
Our first-graders just got a crash course in epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with how we know, what it means to know, what counts as knowing, what can we know, etc.. Dr. Fradkin wants our students to think about the process of learning: how do we come to know what we know, and how do we help others to come to know what we know?
Epistemology is also about our mistakes, the ways we think we know but do not, the ways that we mistake the cat for a dog. Dr. Fradkin wants our students to recognize that our patterns are helpful but often insufficient or flawed. To be a good epistemic agent, we need to continually update our mental patterns (constructs) to better reflect reality. In philosophy-of-science, we talk about “paradigms" - a theoretical construct complete with all sorts of rules, patterns, and beliefs - and we talk about the significance of “paradigm shifts” - like when we shifted from the geocentric image of the cosmos to the heliocentric.
Paradigm shifts require three things: 1. a knowledge that the data does not completely square with the theory. 2. a new and better theory that better explains the data. 3. brave people who are willing to commit to the new theory even if that upends the whole dominant system and creates controversy.
But of course, what I’ve just done is to provide a definition to help us think about paradigm shifts. And I’ll lay my cards on the table: I am Wittgenstein-devotee, so I believe our knowledge is more reliable as a language-game where we build models based on family resemblances than models that rely on axiomatic statements and definitions. Consider: what constitutes a game? Keeping score…but then what about cops & robbers? Competing against other players….but then what about D&D? An interaction of play between two or more players…but then what about solitaire? No definition for a game will suffice, but just like the Supreme Court on pornography, we know it when we see it. Anyway, we didn’t go into all the theory with our 1st graders, but that’s fine. We gave them an example of paradigm-shifts: the alien sees all four-legged creatures as dogs, and then shifts to be able to differentiate between dogs and cats, and then shifts to have an even wider understanding of animals.
The students spent the rest of class identifying what shapes are polygons, based on looking at pictures labeled Polygons and pictures labeled Not Polygons.
“I don’t get it. What is a polygon?”
“Well, let’s look and see if we can notice any differences.”
One reason I love teaching children is because they are good philosophers. Plato says philosophy is born in wonder, and kids have not yet had their wonder squashed by cynicism, disillusionment, lust for power, fear of failure, etc.. Good philosophers also pay attention to the world around them, and children are often much more perceptive than most adults who are distracted by jobs, bills, the lawn that needs mowed.
Kids are also way less resistant to paradigm-shifts. I think this is in part for the same reasons that explain their wonder, but I think it is also because their early years are filled with non-stop paradigm shifts. Every new picture book, heck, every new stroll through the neighborhood is an occasion for updating their mental schemas/patterns/constructs/theories/paradigms. Can you imagine how frustrating this would be, how demoralizing, if this process wasn’t under-girded by love, joy, wonder?
Post-script: I also help in 5th grade math, and overheard one student talking to another about the finality of line segments versus lines. I broke in just to mention that both the line and the line segment are made up of an infinite number of points, just as there are an infinite number of numbers between 1 and 2. She pointed out that there is likely not an infinite number of atoms though. And then I asked, “are atoms more real than numbers?” And her brow furrowed. Not to project my wishes onto her, but I’d love to see her do a dual-major in mathematics and philosophy in college someday.
What I Am Reading Elsewhere:
AEI Fellow (and my summer professor) Adam White, in The Atlantic, writing about the need for civic virtue in our leaders: "to say that constitutional government does not need people to be angels is not to say that constitutional government requires no virtue at all. Madison himself warned against assuming otherwise."
In Commonweal, Eugene McCarraher considers Theodore Roszak as a guide out of the theoretical impoverishment of technocracy. My favorite part: “The left—even much of the Christian left—has grown shy and embarrassed about the language of love in political life, convinced that the only realistic dialect is that of power, interest, victory, and defeat.”
In The Baffler, a weighty critique of Wendell Berry. The crux of the argument: “In a face-to-face society, virtue is the right lever. Unfortunately, we live in a mass society, thoroughly bureaucratized and institutionalized, dense with complex systems, which only large aggregations of people (or money) can move. We need more, not fewer, plans, laws, and policies, but democratically formulated ones.
Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, is one of the more interesting voices in the world of higher ed. In this wide-ranging interview, Roth opines on the value of the liberal arts, the real threats to liberty and speech, and the need for economic solidarity: “"There is a great issue facing the “once and future liberal” today, and it’s not how to overcome identity politics. The great issue for liberals and conservatives alike is how to overcome inequality. It’s not today’s campus activists who make coalition building so difficult; it’s the dramatic increase of economic inequality that undermines the belief that the democratic process can be used to address deeply entrenched social ills. Solidarity and coalition building become more tenuous absent interactions with fellow citizens who don’t belong to your socioeconomic group."
In Tablet Magazine, a great analysis of two emerging factions in the new Right: “If Rubio has become the poster boy for the American Affairs platform—industrial policy, China hawkishness, and Catholic-inspired rhetoric about the “common good”—Hawley, along with media figures such as Tucker Carlson, represents a strain of the new right that is rowdier, Trumpier, and more invested in marrying economic heterodoxy to an anti-elite culture war. This latter strain is larger and more diffuse. The closest thing it has to an intellectual vanguard is the group of intellectuals gathered around the Claremont Institute..."
An article from The Institute for Family Studies on cities, zoning, family: “"The nation's biggest, most productive, and most economically vibrant areas have shut out lower-skill and sometimes even middle-class workers through various regulations, from density restrictions in urban cores to single-family zoning in the suburbs."
Nicholas Carr (The Shallows) is one of our most incisive cultural critics. In this new blog post, he considers how the internet displaced the our epistemological furniture: “It wasn’t just that the headlines, free-floating, decontextualized motes of journalism ginned up to trigger reflexive mouse clicks, had displaced the stories. It was that the whole organizing structure of the newspaper, its epistemological architecture, had been junked. The news section (with its local, national, and international subsections), the sports section, the arts section, the living section, the opinion pages: they’d all been fed through a shredder, then thrown into a wind tunnel. What appeared on the screen was a jumble, high mixed with low, silly with smart, tragic with trivial. The cacophony of the RSS feed, it’s now clear, heralded a sea change in the distribution and consumption of information. The new order would be disorder.”
In case you were wondering how CVS became a monopoly, Matt Stoller has the run-down here.
Bria Sandford is the editor on books like Chris Arnade’s Dignity and Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option. In this interview in University Bookman, Sandford talks about conservative publishing: “What is good news is that the breaking and reforming of ideological coalitions has provided a whisper’s breadth of more room for engaging with ideas on their merits. It’s less clear what’s a “conservative” or “liberal” position, so we’re able to slide some books that are neither Republican nor Democrat into spaces that wouldn’t have had them before.”