Sun-hong’s online journal

It was the last day of the wednesday’s class.
I was kind of worried about our group project because we did not interact with each other enough to make a good presentation. As I was afraid, the instructor pointed out we did not read the whole abstract and but read one article only. Good thing is that I did not need to make a presentation because the instructor’s comment. Thanks God..

Now, I left Dr.Craig’s articles and the final essay for Wednesday.
Keep up the good work and do my best.  Sun hong. you can do it. 정말 다행이다.

What a lucky day.

지금부터라도 나는
내 생을 유심히 관찰하면서 살아갈 것이다.
되어 가는 대로 놓아 두지 않고 적절한 순간,
내 삶의 방향키를 과감하게 돌릴 것이다.
인생은 그냥 받아들이는 것이 아니라
전 생애를 걸고라도 탐구하면서
살아야 하는 무엇이다.

- 양귀자의《모순》중에서 -

Who knows the structures of the disciplines? Schwab’s answer is Nobody.

p246
If the investigator is free to take any number of properties (one,two,on up ot twenty)
as basis for his classification, the number of possible schemes, if I remeber my algebra correctly, is 20 exponent of 2.

p246
In this discussion I have tried to meet the problem of diversity by three devices. First, I
have made a definite (though not exclusive choice) between two major alternatives. These alternatives can be described very simply. On the other hand, structures of disciplines can be approached syntactically in terms of the logical structures they exhibit. In an investigative (scientific) discipline, for example, we would look for different methods of verification and justification of conclusions and describe these as constituting the structures of the discipline. I have illustrated this above, in the example of an automobile, the neutron, and the neutrino.

p248 “permissive eclecticism”
In so holding up both these criteria to clear view, “permissive eclecticism” is illustrated. For, by contrast to this procedure, there are many approaches to the structure of disciplines which take a strong position on what scientists should and should not do. There are approaches, for example, which assert that only reliability is a proper criterion for science. In such an approach, validity is ignored. Other approaches emphasize validity over reliability. And both such approaches tend to explain away or condemn what they do not espouse. In short, they are prescriptive, not descriptive.

A prescriptive attitude is not limited to the validity-reliability issue. For example, we would have no trouble at all finding some positivistic students of structure who would raise their hands in horror at Fermi’s invention of the neutrino. Such a person might well say, “No scientist has a right to develop a term which is not reducible to ‘thing-language.’ The neutrino is not. Therefore, the neutrino is not science.” Then, in any later discussion of the structure of physics, the case of the neutrino would not appear, would appear as a terrible example- or be relegated to a footnote.

Fermi (http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1938/fermi-bio.html)

One issue we have is that we did not listen carefully Dewey’s advice.
We refer to him, and quote him, but we did not take action on his words.
He already reconcilate between sociology and psychology, but psychology has been predominant over sciology in the past 100 years. Schwab chastise this phenomena and try to expose how psychology corrupt eduction.

Education and the structure of the Disciplines (p229 –

And as one ancient philosopher has remarked, We do not truly know unless we know the reason,” p238 

p237 

Ohm’s law E=IR (http://www.the12volt.com/ohm/ohmslaw.asp)
Pearson’s Coefficient of Correlation(http://syque.com/improvement/Correlation%20coefficient.htm)

 P237

The name “interpretation of data” suggests that the structure of enquiry is primarily a merely logical structure, a structure arising only from the rules and restrictions by which one makes defensible interpretations of data. Such a restricted view of enquiry is exemplified by the old “five-step” picture of scientific method, when it refers to “relevant” data as a starting point of enquiry but never digs into the question of what makes data relevant or how we tell relevant from irrelevant data.

p240
Hence, we see that interpretation of data must be preceded by a plan of experiment which will yield the desired data. The plan of experiment, in turn, is preceded by and determined by a commitment to the kind of question we think is appropriate. And the question of what question to ask is preceded and determined by some metaphysical, preferential, or heuristic commitment to a conception of the nature of our subject matter (for instance, whether to treat an organism in biological enquiry as a collection of causes, an organization of interactins, or a set of organs or instruments each serving a special function relative to the whole)

p242
We thus simplified the fruits of disciplines to the point where it appeared self-evident that they could be correctly understood without reference to the structure which produced them. With that done, there was nothing to give us pause when we felt inclined to incorporate the fruits of disciplines into other structures quite alien to them. Our science textbooks became catalogues of “fact,” for example, without regard to the possibility that these “fact” were merely tentative formulations – not facts but interpretations of facts.