Meno and negation

Jason suggested in a comment on the last post that my problem about how we learn to apply negation is related to the ‘Meno question’.

A couple of comments. First, there are two Meno questions or Meno problems. The first is to explain how knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, and that is the Meno problem as commonly understood. The second problem, which is clearly related to the first, is to explain how we learn anything at all. If knowledge is different from true belief, how can we possibly acquire knowledge by teaching? If teaching is the mere repetition of true propositions (‘The battle of Hastings was in 1066’), and if learning is the acceptance of those propositions as true, on account of the authority of the teacher, or for whatever reason, and if knowledge is more than simple acceptance of the truth, it logically follows that we can’t acquire knowledge from teaching, as so defined. So how do we acquire knowledge? Is it already there, and does teaching in the proper sense require uncovering what lay hidden?  – the Latin root of ‘educate’ means ‘drawing out’. Or does it come from without?

The second problem clearly underlies the difficulty about negation, but there is a further difficulty. The medieval philosophers, following Boethius*, divided discourse into three types, namely written, spoken and conceptual. Written discourse signifies spoken discourse, by convention. It is a convention, e.g., that the written word ‘dog’ signifies the noise that comes out of my mouth when I utter ‘dog’. In turn, spoken discourse signifies mental discourse, also by convention. It is by convention that the spoken word ‘dog’ signifies the idea of a dog. French people use the word ‘chien’ to signify that same idea, Germans use the word ‘Hund’ (I think). Ockham, though he was English, would have used the Latin word canis. However, mental discourse signifies not by convention, but ‘naturally’. The English and French and German and Latin words for dog all signify exactly the same thing, namely the idea of a dog. For otherwise we could not communicate, unless we could signify the same idea in another person’s mind as the one we want to convey. But we cannot teach the signification of the idea itself – we don’t have it available to match up with the thing signified, for ideas are private. So ideas or ‘mental terms’ signify naturally. Ockham explains this right at the beginning of his Summa Logicae.

Now the word ‘not’ is what Ockham would have called a syncategorematic term. He explains the distinction in chapter 4, although it does not originate with him. A syncategorematic term is one that does not signify on its own (in the way that the term ‘dog’ on its own signifies or ‘supposits for’ all dogs), but signifies by making other words signify. For example, ‘every’, ‘some’, ‘only’ and of course ‘not’.

If Ockham is right, there is a sense in which we cannot learn the meaning of the word ‘not’. Of course we learn that the English word ‘not’, the spoken word, corresponds to the mental ‘not’, and in that sense we learn the meaning. But in another sense we cannot learn or acquire the mental term itself. It must be already there.

Thus, if he is right, we don’t learn the meaning of negation. It is already there. But is he right?

*See his commentary on Aristotle’s Perihermenias ed. 2a, I, Patrologia Latina 64, col. 407B.

The price of knowledge

At least one commenter has spotted the problem about the application of Hayek's paper and Wikipedia. Hayek's central argument is that organisation is best made by people who are familiar with local circumstances, who know directly of the relevant change in circumstances and have the resources immediately available to meet them. No central planner can have this knowledge of circumstance. Thus organisation is best performed – and is being performed in many cases – by a decentralised price system.

Now if there were an analogy between price-based decentralisation and Wikipedia's decentralisation, there would have to be a way for consumers to signal demand for knowledge by paying for it, and a way for the 'miners' of that knowledge to be compensated by digging deep into the earth of information, trying to find veins of wisdom running through the slag of trivia, or by refining the crude ore containing knowledge thinly spread, into the pure metal of subtle and profound wisdom.

There is no such mechanism in Wikipedia. It is paid for by an annual fundraiser which appeals for donations to collect 'the sum of human knowledge', without any mechanism for donors to sponsor chosen articles containing parts of that sum. Even if such targeting were possible, there is no way of directing donations to individual 'knowledge miners'. All editors of Wikipedia are unpaid volunteers*. This fact has already been noted by Harvard researcher Andreea D. Gorbatai in 2011, who questioned whether collective production such as in Wikipedia creates social utility.

Now there is a sort of reward system on Wikipedia whereby editors can achieve non-financial status similar to kindergarten 'stars'. But follow-ups on Wikipedia to Gorbatai's study concluded that this reward system was perverse, with greater recognition being given to editors producing large numbers of low importance articles than to editors producing small numbers of high importance articles.  An article in the Wikipedia signpost concluded -

- It is interesting to compare the most prominent author of high importance articles at low production rates, Garrondo, with the most prominent author of low importance articles at high production rates, Ucucha. Garrondo has written one FA, Parkinson’s disease in 2011. Ucucha has produced 14 FAs on rare, Latin-named, mammal species. Garrondo has a lousy strategy for climbing up the WBFAN. However, when we look at the impact of the two editors' articles for the readers, there is little question. Because the single Parkinson’s disease article has 180 times the views as Ucucha’s average article, Garrondo achieved 13 times the total contribution to reader-viewed FA content. The problem is all our systems of rewards, all our tracking systems, all our unconscious assumptions, talk page remarks, and so on simply talk about number of stars…instead of the importance of them. We are incentivising the high production of low importance articles and discouraging the opposite. Yet the latter strategy is the more efficient way to serve the readers. [My emphasis]

This provoked fury from Wikipedia's established editors. The discussion is here - beware the heated and often incoherent ranting.

There is another, more subtle, question here. The 'market mechanism' assumes that what consumers want is what they actually need (or rather, it makes no distinction but wanting and needing). There is an older tradition, dating from at least Plato, that the ordinary mass of human beings don't really know what they need, or what is really good for them. The most recent proponent of this view was Lord Reith of the BBC, who believed that broadcasting should be 'an authoritarian system with a conscience', carrying to the greatest number of people everything that is 'best' in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement, and to avoid whatever is 'harmful'. He was criticised for not giving the public what it wanted but he replied that few people know what they want, and fewer still know what they need. I discuss that in an old post here.

*Except for paid editors, of course, who are employed by public relations agencies or rich individuals to embellish articles about their clients, or themselves. But that's another problem.

Adorno on popular music

I am working on the Wikipedia book, and starting with pre-1960s attitudes about high and low culture, i.e. those pre-contemporary prejudices to which the whole Web 2.0 world-view is utterly opposed.  I discussed Reith's view in an earlier post.

The Marxist sociologist Theodor Adorno (1903-1969) cannot be left out here. Adorno was passionate about music as a child, growing up in a wealthy and cultured family. He came to the United States in 1939 to join the Princeton University Radio Research Project as chief of the music division. The project was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, for understanding the effects of mass media on society.

Adorno was highly critical of the effects of popular music. One of his essays is here, where he tries to capture the difference between highbrow and lowbrow music.  There are two. The first is 'standardisation'.  He makes the interesting point that the difference between high and low is not simply a matter of complexity and simplicity.

All works of the earlier Viennese classicism are, without exception, rhythmically simpler than stock arrangements of jazz. Melodically, the wide intervals of a good many hits such as Deep purple* or Sunrise Serenade are more difficult to follow per se than most melodies of, for example, Haydn, which consist mainly of circumscriptions of tonic triads and second steps.

However, the complicated in popular music never functions as "itself" but only as a disguise or embellishment behind which the scheme can always be perceived. The whole structure of popular music is standardized, "even where the attempt is made to circumvent standardization".

Standardization extends from the most general features to the most specific ones. Best known is the rule that the chorus consists of thirty two bars and that the range is limited to one octave and one note. The general types of hits are also standardized: not only the dance types, the rigidity of whose pattern is understood, but also the "characters" such as mother songs, home songs, nonsense or "novelty" songs, pseudo-nursery rhymes, laments for a lost girl. Most important of all, the harmonic cornerstones of each hit — the beginning and the end of each part — must beat out the standard scheme. This scheme emphasizes the most primitive harmonic facts no matter what has harmonically intervened. Complications have no consequences. This inexorable device guarantees that regardless of what aberrations occur, the hit will lead back to the same familiar experience, and nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced.

'Serious' music, by contrast, is an organised whole in the context of which every detail must be understood, and which is never the simple enforcement of a musical schema. This cannot happen with popular music. No removal of detail affects its musical sense.

The second feature which distinguished the popular from the serious is pseudo-individualisation.  More later.

* The song from which the hideous rock group took their name.

The Politics of Knowledge

Any book about Wikipedia must confront the issue of what Larry Sanger has called The Politics of Knowledge.  There is a nice piece by him in The Edge which gives you the general flavour.  Should we be told what knowledge we need?  Or do we know what we need already?  It's  a difficult paradox, that Plato would have appreciated.

Sanger's view is clear:

In the Middle Ages, we were told what we knew by the Church; after the printing press and the Reformation, by state censors and the licensers of publishers; with the rise of liberalism in the 19th and 20th centuries, by publishers themselves, and later by broadcast media—in any case, by a small, elite group of professionals.  But we are now confronting a new politics of knowledge, with the rise of the Internet and particularly of the collaborative Web—the Blogosphere, Wikipedia, Digg, YouTube, and in short every website and type of aggregation that invites all comers to offer their knowledge and their opinions, and to rate content, products, places, and people. It is particularly the aggregation of public opinion that instituted this new politics of knowledge.

We should not be told what we know.  This whole approach to knowledge contrasts strikingly with the view of education that I grew up with, which I shall attempt to characterise, and which I shall try to defend.

When I grew up in 1950s Britain, when broadcasting was under the shadow of a man called John Reith.  Reith's whole philosophy of broadcasting was unashamedly anti-populist or 'elitist' (if you like).  His endeavour was to carry to the greatest number of people everything that was best in every department of human knowledge, endeavour and achievement, and to avoid whatever was harmful.  The arbitrators of 'best' and 'harmful', of course, were the elite group of producers who ran the BBC.  Reith was often criticised for setting out to give the public not what it wanted but what it needed, to which he replied "the answer was that few knew what they wanted, fewer what they needed".  As if to say, the public, the crowd, do not know what they need to know, and so must be told.

So, in the 1950s, there were only three BBC stations, all state-controlled.  There was the 'Light Programme', the most popular, devoted to what is now called 'British Light Music', of which Puffin' Billy and Barwick Green are archetypes (interesting how these tunes are engraved in the collective subconscious of my generation), as well as 'variety shows' and comedy. The "Home Service" was the channel for news, features, and slightly more demanding drama . Finally there was the "Third Programme" which was unashamedly highbrow and 'elitist', consisting of classical music concerts and recitals, and scientific and philosophical talks, poetry readings and classic or 'experimental' plays. Anna Kallin (who naturally has no Wikipedia biography) was responsible for much of the philosophical and cultural programming, of which this page gives you a strong sense.

It's easy to be critical of this approach now.  Yet it had a wonderful effect. It was on the radio, free for anyone to listen to, and brought directly into the living room the contrast between between 'high' and 'popular' culture. The very idea of 'high' culture, and the idea that some kinds of knowledge are better, was made manifest.  It must have inspired many young people to get an education.

If you believe in the distinction between high and popular culture, you cannot avoid the Reithian  approach to broadcasting, or something like it. It is a logical consequence.  Popular culture by definition is what the populace want, or think they want.  High culture by definition is higher and better.  It is what the populace needs, and is what they should want (even though they think they don't want it).  If you believe in the distinction at all, you cannot avoid an 'elitist' approach like this.  That is the Reithian politics of knowledge.

If you don't believe in it, you may as well get the general public to write down what they know, or what they think they know.  That is the Wikipedian politics of knowledge.

Which is right?  I welcome Larry Sanger's views.

The price and the value of knowledge

Following my earlier comments about the availability of Latin philosophical texts, I found that a version of Wadding’s 1639 edition is available from a Tokyo bookseller.

Here is all you need to know about this edition. It was originally published in 1639. It was reprinted in 1895 by Vives (with minor changes). The Vives was reprinted by Gregg International in 1969, and that is the one for sale here. That’s right, $12,421.83 for a reprint of a reprint. How wrong. There are two values to a material book. One is the value of the knowledge contained in it, and that – in financial terms – should be free. That’s because, to employ a cliché, knowledge – or rather the means of acquiring it - should be free. The other value is the rarity or commodity value of the material book. I don’t mind paying for the latter – the most recent addition to my collection is a 1555 edition of the works of Horace, all of which are available in digital form off the net, but not in a beautiful way that you can look at and touch, and which I am willing to pay for. But paying a large sum for a recent reprint of no real material value, is absurd.

Oddly enough, the Heythrop actually does have the original Wadding 1639, which must be priceless. It is mouldering away in a basement, which flooded a few years ago, causing damage to not a few books. Parts of the Vatican edition are there, also in a bad state, with loose leaves all over the place. Ironically some parts have never been read, still in their uncut state. It is truly absurd that in the information age, this valuable commodity is still being held in material form that cannot be indexed, and which can be easily damaged, lost or stolen. But we have no better system, yet.

Liberal education and the internet

Here is an essay by Larry Sanger* that you should read it in full. Sanger writes well, expresses his thought clearly, concisely and with great insight. Nonetheless (for this is the age of the internet where the “complex, dense and cathedral-like structure” of educated prose is a challenge) I shall summarise it here.

Sanger takes three common strands of thought about education and the Internet. The first is the idea that the instant availability of information online makes the memorization of facts unnecessary or less necessary. The second is that collaborative learning is superior, or to be preferred, to outmoded individual learning. The third is that lengthy, complex books are inferior to knowledge constructed by members of a group.

Against the first idea he argues as follows. A strong focus is necessary for true knowledge, but the internet – the instant availability of information online - is a distraction for people who find it difficult to focus, and hinders them acquiring true knowledge. Therefore the internet is a hindrance to true knowledge. Also, true knowledge requires fairly substantial background knowledge to interpret the answer. Background knowledge is more than amassing a lot of facts: it requires assimilation and understanding as well. But assimilation and understanding (by implication – Sanger does not spell it out) take longer than just looking something up.

If public intellectuals can say, without being laughed at and roundly condemned,
that the Internet makes learning ("memorizing") facts unnecessary because facts
can always be looked up, then I fear that we have come to a very low point in
our intellectual culture. I fear we have completely devalued or, perhaps worse,
forgotten about the deep importance of the sort of nuanced, rational, and
relatively unprejudiced understanding of issues that a liberal education
provides.

Sanger considers the objection that new information makes old information redundant, replying that new information does not replace old information. Reading, writing, mathematics and basic science has changed little in the last one hundred years.

The vast body of essential facts that undergird any sophisticated understanding
of the way the world works does not change rapidly … in most fields, there is
certainly a body of core knowledge.

Against the second idea, that collaborative learning is superior, or to be preferred, to outmoded individual learning, he argues that while online collaborative learning can be an excellent method of exchanging ideas between the interested and motivated and obtaining free public reviews of work on wikis, this is not a sufficient condition of the most important ingredient, namely interest and motivation. “There is no reason to think that online conversation will necessarily reproduce, in students, either the motivation to pursue interests or the resulting increase in knowledge”

Regarding review of work on wikis or online, the problem is that users of online forums and especially Wikipedia may have “some rather idiosyncratic ideas about the subject .. which arguably wastes the student's time”. Another problem is that a significant level of useful feedback cannot be guaranteed.

A further fundamental difficulty he raises is that true learning is an essentially solitary process. You can find the Decameron online, but you must mentally process it yourself. You may post an essay online but you must engage in “the essentially solitary act of writing” by yourself (I don’t agree entirely with this, but I will leave for now).

In his final point - ‘boring old books’ - Sanger addresses the familiar arguments that books are old-fashioned, not interactive, constitute a single, static, one-way conversation with an individual, and so on. This view declares the irrelevance of most of the thinkers throughout history. Can knowledge, “even the knowledge contained in great books, now something that can be adequately replaced by the collaborative creations of the students themselves?”

To be well educated, to be able to pass along the liberal and rational values
that undergird our civilization, we must as a culture retain our ability to
comprehend long, difficult texts written by individuals. Indeed, the single best
method of getting a basic education is to read increasingly difficult and
important books. To be sure, other tasks are essential, especially for training
in scientific and applied fields; there are some people who are very well
trained for various trades without reading many books. But when it comes to
getting a solid intellectual grounding — a foundational, liberal education —
nothing is less dispensable than getting acquainted with many books created by
the "complex, dense" minds of deep-thinking individuals.

There is much to think about here, in a solitary, Cartesian way, so I will leave this for now. I need to assimilate.

* “Individual Knowledge in the Internet Age” EDUCAUSE Review, vol. 45, no. 2 (March/April 2010): 14-24