Believe it or not, I spent a lot of time on this subject in the 1980s (and one of my earliest published works was on the logic of conditional variability). This article takes me back to those days; skip the bit about three-valued conditionals and go right to the heart of the matter by looking at counterfactuals, possible world models, probabilistic interpretations, relevance and speech acts. Obscure, you say? Maybe. But it is difficult to understand the different and subtly distinct ways of looking at actions, intentions and causality without understanding conditionals. So much of our work, whether in writing software or designing learning theories, is based on the way we think things are connected together, on how we create outcomes, and how we explain the outcomes we've already created. You don't need to internalize all this discussion the way I did, but if you are in education and technology, you should at least be aware it exists.
Today: 4 Total: 162 [Direct link] [Share]
