OLDaily

What is reality? In a divided America, maybe philosophers can tell us
Jim Beckerman, northjersey.com, 2021/03/03

"Calling all philosophers!" says Jim Beckerman. "Light the bat-signal! Send up a flare! The superhero we need, in a divided America, is someone who can prove to us what's real and what isn't." But this, I think, is just to misunderstand the question, A oroof that this or that is 'real' won't solve the problem. The problem is that people aren't, or aren't willing, to be convinced. This isn't something you can argue your way through, or drown out with facts.

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In praise of cultural appropriation
Amod Lele, The Indian Philosophy Blog, 2021/03/03

I've seen the question of cultural appropriation come up from time to time in learning and education. In our field, it would be like a person from one culture using or teaching knowledge from another culture. There are certainly some legitimate concerns; for example, I should not simply start conducting research on, or teaching about, indigenous cultures, because to do so would be to treat the culture as an object or a commodity. This article, nonetheless, asks some tough questions. The definition from Susan Scafidi, is “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artefacts from someone else’s culture without permission,” writes Amod Lele, adding "The caveat is bizarre. How can 'a culture' give permission?" But more, "The very idea of treating cultural expressions as a culture’s property, which can be taken, seems to extend the capitalist logic of private property into ever further spheres." And also, "Cultures have always borrowed freely from one another, changing the meaning of objects in the process – without “permission” – and the process is never unidirectional.

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The Value of Truth
Michael Patrick Lynch, Boston Review, 2021/03/03

This article is essentially a response to Richard Rorty in particular and to sceptics about truth (with a capital T) in general. Rorty "declared it dead and bid it good riddance," writes Michael Patrick Lynch. But things have changed, he says, and the study of truth (or knowledge, as he slides easily between the two terms) is important again. Here's what I think. The idea of defining 'truth' as 'correspondence with reality' doesn't work, because nobody has a unique grip on what counts as reality. Rather, we should think of truth as an attitude we have toward a proposal (strictly: as a 'propositional attitude'). It is a part of language in particular (and maybe representations in general) and something we create and define into being. Our issues with 'fake news' and 'alternative facts' has nothing to do with the relativism of truth, and it has everything to do with our inability (or unwillingness) to get along with each other.

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Rethinking Education for the Digital Age
ZenTeach, 2021/03/03

The diagram is pretty cool, even if you can't read any of the text. The main point of the post is to refute the assertion that "Knowledge is best taught in a linear fashion." It proposes "a new technology could help us achieve a paradigm shift in education where students can learn complex topics independently and where teachers raise their teaching quality without burning out." Fair enough, and I'm on board with the thinking, but as I've said frequently, "education is not a search problem". Changing the way we select learning content fixes only one of many issues in online learning. Via Reddit.

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A Very Canadian Innovation Proposal
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2021/03/03

I think Alex Usher is generally on the mark with this assessment of the Business Council of Canada (BCC) recommendation that Canada create "a demand-side, mission-driven approach to innovation policy, setting clear national goals to translate scientific strengths into economic performance." This is very much what was tried under the Harper administration, including a reworking of the NRC into something resembling Germany's Fraunhofer. As Usher says, the evidence that this approach (in Canada at least) produced much of anything is, well, lacking. What it definitely did not create is business investment or innovation, and so the BCC's recommendation sounds like "a group ask for more government money in more government programs to solve a problem caused by their own inaction." What Usher does suggest - "a wholesale revamping of the nation’s graduate programs to orient them more towards industry" - is intriguing. Not that I endorse this solution specifically, but it does seem pointless to prepare so many people for academic jobs that simply don't exist, and never will.

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