Language and Logic

[Mark Sylvester <msylvest@spin.it>]

> 2.  Do we have _any_ justification for being so arrogant as to insist that
> we are so absolutely in the possession of Truth that we can take the
> responsibility of dictating language and "stamping" what we do not like
> out?  The history of physics certainly does not justify such a position.
>
> 3.  Do we have _any_ evidence that the insistence on using particular words
> has any significant effect on the thinking of any significant number of our
> students concerning the nature of the phenomena?  This has been advocated
> and practiced many times before, but one could argue that what we
> accomplish is turning people off to us and our profession more than
> instilling in them any of our 'Truth.'
>
> 4.  'We' seem to be talking as if by using the "Right' words, the correct
> and 'True' meaning will automatically be available to all who hear them.  I
> don't know of any evidence that supports this.
>
> Just my $0.02 worth.  Just trying to understand why physics teaching is
> such a spectacular failure when we try to look for conceptual change as a
> result of physics teaching.
>
> ;^)
>
> Dewey

Well, if teaching were a simple matter of pronouncing the right words we
could turn our jobs over to tape recorders, but in the sum of interactions
that constitutes teaching a class it is surely important to use language
that accurately conveys what we mean. Much of physics teaching is in any
case the process of refining concepts from everyday life in order to give
them a special, precise, "physics" meaning. This naturally includes
modifying the way the student uses language in relation to these concepts,
at whatever level we are teaching. This is not arrogance, it is teaching.

As for turning people off ourselves and our profession... while wondering
what Dewey had for breakfast, I must affirm the opposite. Students
appreciate linguistic precision in a physics class. The evidence I see
before me daily. Of course, if one is humourless about it one merely becomes
a pedant, and perhaps that's the image Dewey has in mind. 

An anecdote: two years ago I received a letter from a student who had just
graduated, thanking me "for being so rational". I appreciated that he was
expressing something important.

A speculation: I wonder if the general lack of explicit grammatical
structure in English as compared to many other languages affects English
speakers' ability to take in complicated sentences. It's very noticeable to
me that my Italian/German/Hungarian/Croatian... students (whose languages
are strongly inflected) seem better at digesting high register technical
English than their English-speaking peers. In fact, I sometimes have to
complicate what I'm saying in order to be understood! A difficult question
to research as one can think of so many auxiliary hypotheses, but
interesting to me.

Mark.

Mark Sylvester
UWCAd, Duino, Trieste, Italy.