Michael Smith wrote: > > On Fri, 2007-10-26 at 18:06 -0700, Jim Devine wrote: > > > Please _tell me_ why you think that theories of cognition are as bad > > as phlogiston theory. Why, specifically, do you reject the idea of > > multiple intelligences? > > Cart before the horse. I'm not "rejecting" anything -- just > taking the Missourian stance: I gotta be shown. > > IIRC you originally asserted that it was > pedagogically helpful to have this sevenfold way of defining > intelligence. I wanted to know how. I'm open > to conviction, though admittedly skeptical.
This is a tangled area, but I think I'm mostly with Michael in this exchange. Anecdote: My mother, an elementary school teacher, once mentioned that over the years she had had one experience repeated several times. In the break room another teacher would ask, how are you getting along with so & so, who gives so much trouble. Fine, she would say: probable cause was that she _never_ looked at the student records from past years, hence never had her eye fixed on any given student as a potential cause of trouble. I think the burden of proof is on anyone who claims it is of pedagogical utility to know the past record of students, including records of their intelligence(s). Such information is more apt to mislead than to guide. On limits of theory. Any obvious case: theory would not help me or anyone else understand the distribution of papers, books, coffee cups, etc about my residence. Pure empirical guessing would be best here. REALLY MAJOR CASE IF TRUE: I don't think there can be a theory of revolution. Capitalism is capitalism is capitalism in very profound ways: i.e., there is a fundamental identity between the capitalism of 1750 and the capitalism of 2007, and that is why at a deep level of abstraction Volume I of Capital needs no alterations to describe the capitalism of 2007. But Lenin's "theory" of revolution was not a theory of revolution; it was a process of shrewd thought in response to the concrete conditions of Russia 1895-1917. That can't be treated like the theory of relativity, the theory of evolution, or the theory of surplus value. Conditions _at the relevant level of abstraction_ change too profoundly for any "theory of revolution" (aside from mere tautologies or rules of thumb) to hold as the world changes. The Chinese were getting at this when they distinguished between "Marxism-Leninism" and "Mao-THOUGHT (not theory). They were wrong that M-L was a theory good for the whole capitalist order, but they had begun to grasp the limits of theory. Carrol
