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Re: bird-names, star-names



At 13:57 -0400 5/29/02, John S. Denker wrote:

1) He said quite explicitly "In order to talk to each other,
we have to have words, and that's all right." And although he
didn't mention it, he was quite aware that knowing "only" the
name of a bird allows you to go home and look it up, whereupon
you know quite a bit more.

2) OTOH he was intentionally making a virtue of not knowing
the names. He made the same point on other occasions ("the
map of the cat"). I disagree with this, especially when it
is taken out of context and exaggerated, as it so often is.

If forced to choose between knowing the name and knowing the
physics, it is better to know the physics -- but this is a
goofy and vacuous statement, because we are _not_ forced to
choose.

I agree. But my take on what RPF had in mind by what he said, was
that one should not fool themselves into thinking that once they knew
the name of something that that was all they had to do--"knowing the
name of is not knowing something." Unfortunately, too often we stop
as soon as we know the name.

Too often when we ask a question in class, the answer will be
something like "Newton's First Law," or "Centrifugal Force" or some
other name they have heard of in context of the question, but a bit
of further probing makes it clear that all they have is a name and
they have no idea how the concept should be applied. I'm quite
confident that it was this situation the RPF was talking about.

Of course, he was not above using words to dazzle, but I doubt that
he ever did that without the underlying knowledge to back up whatever
he might have said.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto:haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto:hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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