Dissent

There are various views I hold with which I know some other folk disagree.

Objectivity

I view subjective truth as primal: the notion of objectivity is a construct built out of the (important) discovery of similarities between different individuals' subjective realities. Classical thought views objective truth as primal, with subjective reality being subordinate to it.

Orthodoxy

Given that I've (somewhat willfully, though with care to construct pretexts) rejected orthodox approaches, I feel I have a duty to the adherents of the orthodoxies (who taught me) to be utterly clear from the ground up. (If a total novice to the maths/logic can make sense of what I'm saying, the experts can't complain about not being able to understand it … without admitting to not having understood their own jargon. Mathematics, at least, is formally supposed to mean the same thing no matter how one writes it.)

(I have some prejudices against academia, experts and the use of jargon: these crystallised during the year I spent teaching. My students were having an even harder time than I'd had, until I took the trouble to discover what terms they would understand and build the subject up from those, so I had to conclude that the lecturers really weren't doing their job well – where previously I had tended to blame myself for not having worked hard enough. Part of the problem, though, is that students tend to be shy of admitting to not having understood what they're being told, so lecturers tend not to know when they go astray.)

One of the problems with fields which have a highly-developed jargon for use among those familiar with the field is that many folk in such fields don't know how to express the subject-matter other than by use of the jargon … and their students won't be able to understand the jargon until they've grasped the subject-matter, so there is no working channel of communication between student and teacher. This situation has a propensity for generating a new generation of teachers who were only taught how to recite the liturgy of the field, with only a shaky grasp of what it all means.

quiet rebellion


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