"Thomas Dalton" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > 2009/5/5 FT2 <[email protected]>: >> It raises the interesting philosophical question, when is the meaning in >> the >> message, and when is it in the decoder? And what if it's in neither or >> both? > > See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room (...)
[[Socratic method]] teaching has more relevance to the question. In the method, students are led to conclusions in their own words, from questions that a teacher raises. Those questions can be binary, open or closed. If I read Isaac Asimov in "The Edge of Tomorrow" correctly, Socrates entertained a slave with Euclid's fifth postulate, which is a definition of parallel, and one that mathematicians do not always use. Naturally, the difficulty in escaping your initial conclusions is of use to a lawyer in persuasion. It hard to use the socratic method outside of a small classroom in real time (without paper). It is relatively easy to use it in mail, which has no real-time requirements, nor any penalty for delays or the null response. In short, you learn more about mathematics from exercises than anything a teacher will say. _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list [email protected] To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
