Ludicrous Ignorance of Each Other
A quotation: From the movie My Dinner with Andre ANDRE: Well, I think that’s right! You know, it may be, Wally, that one of the reasons that we don’t know what’s going on is that when we’re there at a...
View ArticleFrom Cognition in Practice by Jean Lave
Cognition in Practice, by Jean Lave, 1998 “So far I have described a series of dichotomously polarized issues that have sustained limitations on debate between paradigms and disciplines over a...
View ArticleJohn Dewey and Responsible Technology
From John Dewey’s Pragmatic Technology by Larry A. Hickman “What, in Dewey’s view, constitutes responsible technology? This book is an attempt to suggest some answers to that question. By way of review...
View ArticleDoes Camus Speak to Us Now?
I just finished re-reading The Myth of Sisyphus for my philosophy book club. It has been almost twenty years since I last read it. When I read it before I thought it was brilliant, a cri de coeur for...
View ArticleArt, Despair, and Virginia Woolf
I’ve been reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf this summer. It is a wonderful and brilliant piece of art, part of the high modernist literary flowering from the first half of the twentieth...
View ArticleStephen Gardiner On Climate Policy in a Perfect Moral Storm
Stephen M. Gardiner from the University of Washington visited UTK today to speak about climate change and environmental ethics. He identified three major “storms” that we face when trying to deal with...
View ArticleThe Value of Information – Freedom and Inquiry
I often hear people talk about the value of information being available in a very general sense. These kind of claims seem to arise during discussions about freedom of speech or the marketplace of...
View ArticleApproaching the limits of our understanding
Joi Ito posted about the cognitive limits of organizations at the MIT Media Lab blog. Ito posts a thought provoking slide by Cesar Hidalgo. The slide shows the interaction between the total stock of...
View ArticleTheory and practices of the soul
I’ve been reading some Habermas the last few days and am particularly struck by the appendix of Knowledge and Human Interests. The appendix is called “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General...
View ArticleHow did you become interested in social science?
We were talking in class yesterday about how each of us became interested in social science, specifically sociology. What kind of articles did we admire or remember? A few people mentioned some...
View ArticleWhy is Popper so popular?
There is a disconnect between the philosophy of science as it is practiced by philosophers and the philosophy of science as it is interpreted by scientists. I think this difference is the main reason...
View ArticleThe Social Sciences and Scale
The following are some preliminary thoughts on scale, epistemology, the social/human sciences, and philosophy spurred by some recent reading on the web. A recent article raised the question about the...
View ArticleEducation and cognitive domination
A brief excerpt in Today’s Professor newsletter from a book edited by Chad Hanson. In the past 20 years, scholars and practitioners have committed to measuring the cognitive outcomes of education. In...
View ArticleZen and the Art of Science Popularization
I remember reading a stack of popular physics books back in the 1980s and 1990s that proposed a connection between quantum physics and Eastern philosophy. For example, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof...
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