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Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities
Remote Ready Biology Learning Activities has 50 remote-ready activities, which work for either your classroom or remote teaching.
Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)
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Beyond Wittgenstein (and Descartes?)
I've been reading this great graphic narrative, Logicomix, an autobiography of Bertrand Russell. Wittgenstein makes an extended appearance in these pages, and on one of then (288), he has an exchange w/ the members of the Vienna Circle (wish you could see the comics--the pipes, mustaches, beards and chandeliers...):
"To celebrate our first meeting, we offer you our 'manifesto of the scientific worldview.'"
"...written in the wake of your 'Tractatus'..."
"...inimitably encapsulated in its last line..."
"...'what we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence.'"
"Where 'speak,' naturally, means 'speak logically!'"
"Your work gave us the means to expel religion, metaphysics, ethics, etc. from rational discourse!"
"Since 'what cannot be spoken about logically' is, quite literally, non-sense..."
"...and obviously, beneath the dignity of serious minds!"
[Wittgenstein]: "Just wait a minute!
The meaning of the 'Tractatus' has completely escaped you!"
?
"Its point is the exact opposite: the things that cannot be talked about logically...
...are the only ones which are truly important!!!"
?
!
Later, in a summary lecture to a group of isolationists, demonstrating against U.S. involvement in Europe in 1939, Russell says, "Wittgenstein has a point, you see: 'All the facts of science are not enough to understand the world's meaning!'...taken my story as a cautionary tale, a narrative argument against ready-made solutions. It tells you that applying formulas is not good enough--not, that is, when you're faced with really hard problems!"
?
!
If I'm following what's going on 60 years later in the evolving systems circle, though, Paul seems to be nudging us past this standoff (sure, logical systems have limits...) to say that the range of what is inexpressible is never fixed, and so always explorable, via a variety of ever-moving systems of what is expressible. This puts me strongly in mind of a move made, years ago, to write and tell Descartes that he hadn't been skeptical enough. To say that formal systems are incomplete--that they don't express all that is--is not to limit (in fact, it is to enable?) our exploration of what lies beyond them....
"we can think, therefore we can change what we think"?