Gary, List
It's actually quite amusing to see how people are speaking of a `papradigm shift' in the universities, when the very concept of a `paradigm' is rooted in the question of what exemplars (i.e. paradigms) to employ in
teaching the public about science. My take on this topic comes from understanding TS Kuhn (or more likely, the bandwagoners who liked to assume the label `Kuhnians') as not taking account of the distinction between teaching, research, and inquiry: Peirce definitely distinguishes between teaching and inquiry (the settlement of real doubt,
learning) in the passage you followed up (okay, I got the mired bit wrong but it's the passage I had in mind: thanks) whereas the paradigm model doesn't. There is also a draft in the 1902 Carnegie Proposal where Peirce explicates on this in relation to the Economy of Research, that is worth looking up.
In some respects, establishing universities as teaching institutions actually does a major disfavour to the institutions that are supposed to teach, the schools. My experience here has been that more and more of the responsibility for teaching the basics of intellectual life is being left to universities, while the schools become more and more focused on `life skills' and `vocational training'. The ability,
and discipline required, to write clearly, which naturally entails a comparable ability and discipline to read clearly, is all but absent amongst the annual intake of freshers. Ever greater slices of the budget are being poured into Bridging Programmes and the like so that new students can at least begin to follow what their lecturers are showing them. We become a sort of follow-up school that tries to tidy up the mess left behind by a public schooling system that just does not seem to accomplish its mission.
In this light, one can appreciate Peirce's ongoing attempts to get some public form of logic learning going, both in his trials at correspondence learning and through his association with the Lowell Institute. Teaching is based in
logica utens; learning requires both a familiarity with, and the ability to extend, the logica docens of the subject-matter about which our doubts have arisen. By all means let the universities take on the paradigm model: long may the resistance flourish!! But to talk of this as a `paradigm shift' is, to me, already to hand the victory to one's opponents before the battle lines have even been drawn.
Cheers
Arnold
On 1/23/06, Gary Richmond <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Arnold,
Thanks for the reference. It reminded me that I wanted to look up exactly where Peirce had made the distinction between 'institutions of learning' and 'institutions for teaching' and found it here.
CP 5.5833. . . . [I]t is necessary to note what is essentially involved in the Will to Learn. The first thing that the Will to Learn supposes is a dissatisfaction with one's present state of opinion. There lies the secret of why it is that our American universities are so miserably insignificant. What have they done for the advance of civilization? What is the great idea or where is [the] single great man who can truly be said to be the product of an American university? The English universities, rotting with sloth as they always have, have nevertheless in the past given birth to Locke and to Newton, and in our time to Cayley, Sylvester, and Clifford. The German universities have been the light of the whole world. The medieval University of Bologna gave Europe its system of law. The University of Paris and that despised scholasticism took Abelard and made him into Descartes. The reason was that they were institutions of learning while ours are institutions for teaching. In order that a man's whole heart may be in teaching he must be thoroughly imbued with the vital importance and absolute truth of what he has to teach; while in order that he may have any measure of success in learning he must be penetrated with a sense of the unsatisfactoriness of his present condition of knowledge. The two attitudes are almost irreconcilable [emphasis added]I assume this is the same passage you had in mind (you wrote "mired in sloth" whereas the above has it as "rotting with sloth" but it seems to refer to the same matter). So this shows Peirce once again to have analyzed an issue which is only now beginning to get adequate attention. As Richard Hake wrote a few days ago:
In their [Barr and Tagg (1995)] landmark wake-up call to higher education "From Teaching to Learning: A New Paradigm for Undergraduate Education," they wrote: "A paradigm shift is occurring in American higher education. Under the traditional, dominant 'Instruction Paradigm' colleges are institutions that exist to *provide instruction." Subtly but profoundly, however, a 'Learning Paradigm' is taking hold, whereby colleges are institutions that exist to *produce learning*. This shift is both needed and wanted, and it changes everything."If only the President of Harvard, or the trustees of the Carnegie Foundation, or etc , etc. been able to see the vast potential value of Peirce's research, how much further along semeiotic, etc. might be today.
(I'm also reminded that Hake took me to task for copying the material below my signature and am trying to remember to delete earlier copied posts in the interest of not encumbering the Gmane archive.)
Gary
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