Unmaking Sense

Episode 3.08: The terrible trio: the law of Contradiction; the law of Identity; the law of Necessity

There is no universal moral law that says we should not contradict ourselves; there is no reason why our names should forever refer to the same things or persons, including ourselves; and all it takes is the audacity to dare - for “everything must be ventured” as Plato taught (Theaetatus 196d) - to break the power of Necessity in ways it cannot resist.

Episode 3.07: More on the dangers of reducing incoherence rather than living with its contradictions

We name things but the totalities we name are not usually coherent, so we necessarily simplify and generalise. But when we go back the other way we should avoid thinking we are describing those totalities as they really are. There is nothing legitimately called “The French” or even “Socrates”; we each are large; we are each a multitude (from Walt Whitman, adapted).

Episode 3.06: Language grasps the infinite using the finite, but that power entails great dangers.

We render the ragbag of incoherencies that accumulate into coherent patterns by chopping off or stretching the concepts. We need to be careful how we use the power this gives us to simplify and generalise.

Episode 3.05: No-one is an Island; being a participant in society means we influence one another.

The totally autonomous individual is as big a fiction as the totally dictatorial society: we are interdependent and mutually defining, changing dynamic entities in a permanent state of flux, and so we should be.

Episode 3.04: Our self-doubts and shame as learned from social disapproval indirectly.

When we have doubts in private we bring to bear a range of socially-induced values in our self-criticism, but it may not always be right to adopt and endorse them. How can we tell the difference?

Episode 3.03: Shame as self-loathing induced by direct and indirect social disapproval.

How and when should we stick to our guns when assailed by social disapproval rather than allow our peers to persuade us to adopt their point of view?

Episode 3.02: Truth as what it is best for us to believe right now.

Truth as what society currently endorses and thinks reliable. As such it is revisable, temporary and fallible.

Episode 3.01: Unmaking Sense of Truth and abandoning Final Solutions.

We need to see life and all its features as experiments in existence. Whether it be philosophy or religion, science, mathematics, history, geography or anything else, all we are doing is a series of experiments in trying to find better ways to live our lives. Were we to devise an education system that taught children that, we would all learn to live together in more harmony and humility.

Episode 2.40: Ten characteristics of the genuinely free educated person indicated by unmaking sense.

A summary of some of the general characteristics that will accrue to someone who follows an educational trajectory such as we have been describing. Some of the ways the world tries to silence us, in particular by inducing shame.

Episode 2.39: Imagine all education as creating new knowledge whenever something is learned.

Because each individual unique learner learns everything and places it within the trajectory of their personal unique life, every learnt process, every new piece of learning, every newly-acquired piece of information generates new knowledge. Objections and implications.