Things have sure been busy on Wittgenstein-On-Learning.Com. We are rapidly attempting to add all the notes to the topics section of the site. Once complete, it will free up time to explore the ideas more clearly in possible essays or presentations. In the meantime, here are the 10 sections that have been updated in the past week.

Key Principles

The key principles page presents core themes relating to language, literacy, (cultural) practices, knowledge and equity.

Commanding Language & Literacy

PI 25: Commanding, questioning, storytelling, chatting are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.

“[We are] the species that reads, records, and goes beyond what went before, and directs our attention to what is important to preserve.” (Wolf, 2008, p 4)

With An Emphasis on Acquisition

“We acquire our linguistic capacities and our ability to participate in human life rather by imitation and habituation, by drill and practice … [in] such simple things as learning to direct our attention, practicing the voicing of sounds so uttering them becomes easy, establishing associations between words and objects, etc.” (Sluga, 2011, pg 107)

Seeing language & literacy as patterned & meaningful

It is a marvel that speakers and readers can find meaning almost effortlessly in stimulus that would appear senseless to someone not familiar with a particular language or who is illiterate in that particular language. How is it that we come to adopt a way of seeing, and how is it that something that was once difficult to master has become second nature?

Language & Literacy as Discursive Practice

“What we do in learning language is neither reduced to, nor explained by, purely material processes ... What we do involves the development and exercise of an ability (based on a prior innate capacity) in actual practice. Nothing is hidden, one might say.” (Eldridge, 2010, pg 172)

Commanding Words

'Our experimental study proved that it is the functional use of the word, or any other sign, as means of focusing one's attention, selecting distinctive features and analyzing and synthesizing them, that plays a central role in concept formation... Words and other signs are those means that direct our mental operations, control their course, and channel them toward the solution to the problem confronting us' (Vygotsky, 1986, pp.106-7).

Commanding Sentences

“[Sentences] promise nothing less than lessons and practice in the organisation of the world. That is what language does: organise the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated. If you can write a sentence in which actors, actions and objects are related to one another in time, space, mood, desires, fears, causes, and effects, and if your specification of those relationships is delineated with a precision that communicates itself to your intended reader, you can by extrapolation and expansion, write anything. (Fish, 2011, pg 7 - 8)

Commanding Numeracy

“Mathematics is grounded, as it were, both in the biological and in the social. The rules of calculating and so on, established by human beings like ourselves with certain biological capabilities and limitations, are appealed to in judging the correctness of particular calculations and inferences.” (Phillips, 1979, pg 134 - 135)

The role of affect & emotional attachment in reading

“As every teacher knows, emotional engagement is the tipping point between leaping into the reading life ... An enormously important influence on the development of comprehension in childhood is what happens after we remember, predict, and infer: we feel, we identify, and in the the process we understand more fully and can’t wait to turn the page. The child ... often needs heartfelt encouragement from teachers, tutors and parents to make a stab at more difficult reading material.” (Wolf, 2008, p 132)

Construing the self through autobiography

“Murdoch wrote, “Re-thinking one’s past is a constant responsibility”: it should be constant because of new light shed by the ongoing recontextualisation of our past deeds, words, and thoughts ... And that ongoing work-in-progress then becomes a picture we come to resemble, in that it determines which experiences are salient and which are not, thus shaping, at least partially, our subsequent choices in response to the picture, the unfolding narrative.” (Hagberg, 2010, pg 118 - 119).

From "Land-based spells brings crisis" by Reuven Brenner in Asia Times Online.

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Note: The article explores the current economic instability. In doing so, it highlight how our description can have a funny way of confusion the facts. In other words, we can convince ourselves (though our language) that a unstable economic idea can and will work, even though experience and the facts would prove otherwise.

"Words matter. They are the vehicles of thinking: while they can shape accurate perceptions, they can shape misperceptions too. As it turns out, and not for the first time in history, there is not much "real" about this asset class. The question is, what do you do with it?

"John Law and followers, who come up with theories based on 'real' estate', or 'real' bills' doctrines (unconstrained by having a "unit of account" too), make implicit assumptions that they know what is 'real'. But as one can readily see, many things perceived "real" can melt into thin air in a flash. Perhaps we would be far better from now on using the French word for 'real estate' - 'immobilier'.

"... Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, was right when he stated that: 'Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language.' Indeed, 'real estate' 'QE,' 'bubbles' ( attributed to random variations in people's mood rather than any concrete laws and regulations), erecting statues to heroes of subsidized 'immobility' (unread, unwatched, not listened to statistical 'cultures' being a good example) have all 'bewitched' many for centuries, though 'bothered and bewildered' a few."

“We can also imagine a case where someone goes through a list of propositions and as he does so keeps asking “Do I know that or do I only believe it?” He wants to check the certainty of each individual proposition. It might be a question of making a statement as a witness before a court.”

— Wittgenstein, On Certainty, 486