Chip’s journey

Three thoughts regarding reading and first-hand experience:

MUCH have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne:
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.
—John Keats, “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer”

No book or map is a substitute for personal experience; they cannot take the place of the actual journey. The mathematical formula for a falling body does not take the place of throwing stones or shaking apples from a tree.
—John Dewey, Schools of tomorrow

There are some who say that sitting at home reading is the equivalent of travel, because the experiences described in the book are more or less the same as the experiences one might have on a voyage, and there are those who say that there is no substitue for venturing out in the world. My own opinion is that it is best to travel extensively but to read the entire time, hardly glancing up to look out of the window of the airplane, train, or hired camel.
—Lemony Snicket, Horseradish: Bitter truths you can’t avoid

Whereas many Greek towns might be dusty and dry, Edhessa (Έδεσσα) is lush and wet. Much of it is free of cars as well. The reason is a river cascading down from the mountains to the north. It flows through the town, allowing park spaces along the banks and a complex array of paths and bridges crisscrossing the waters. Then, at the edge of the old town (Varossi), the river descends rapidly, culminating in two large waterfalls, which I came to see as fountains of knowledge.

Following the Networked Learning Conference earlier last week in Halkidiki, Greece, we had headed west through Thessaloniki to the region around Edessa. This is where Alexander the Great was born and where his father, Phillip II and Aristotle went to to school together. It includes what are now the major archaeological sites of Vergina, the site of the ancient Macedonian royal city of Aegae, and Pella, the later capital. Alexander, of course, was the one whose conquests spread Hellenistic culture throughout Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, and eventually the entire Persian Empire, going as far as India. Supposedly, he slept with a copy of the Iliad under his pillow throughout the campaign. His exploits might not represent the origin of the knowledge, but they certainly helped it flow and created an early version of a global culture.

The oracles of Delphi and other sites might allow Greeks to claim the fountain of knowledge. Towns with names like Grammatico make one feel that love of knowledge is intrinsic to daily life. Add in the beginnings of Western science and philosophy and the whole nation would seem to be a bubbling fountain of knowledge, if it just weren’t so sunny and dry!

I thought we might be approaching the fountain when we came to Meixa, the location of Aristotle’s school (from the Greek schole), where Alexander had studied. But it was just north of there in Edessa, that the fountain revealed itself.

The pleasure of experiencing the water town was only enhanced for me when we visited the wonderful town library. Staff there helped us access the internet and told us more about Edessa.

The library has a unique logo combining two of my favorite things, books and water. It suggests that the ideas of Plato, Sophocles, Hippocrates, Thucydidies, Heraclitus, and all the rest flow from the library, providing pleasure for the mind as the cataracts do for both body and mind. I like the way the logo incorporates the @ sign, too. Fortunately, knowledge is never owned by any one time, place, or people, but Edessa and its library make as good a claim as any to being its source.

On March 5, National College of Ireland hosted an event to consider the relations between third-level education and the communities around them. Emma Kytzia and Beatrice Cantalejo did a terrific job putting it all together.

Nick Rees (left) presided. I was asked to speak on “A Radical Vision for Third-Level Education Today: Re-Connecting with Community.” The lecture was followed by a panel discussion, guided by Paul Mooney, then questions from the audience, and finally, conversation over wine in the President’s office.

I drew from two examples in the Chicago area, Hull House and Paseo Boricua, to examine how educational institutions can re-connect with community. There was a little about current work with the College and the local schools in the Docklands community around widening participation in higher education.

The real focus of the evening was on how these experiences might inform education and community work in Dublin today. An excellent panel took up that topic:

• Mr Ken Duggan, School Principal, Westland Row CBS
• Prof Áine Hyland, former Professor of Education and Vice President (Academic), UCC
• Mr Seanie Lambe, Director, Inner City Renewal Group
• Ms Michele Ryan, Head, School of Community Studies, National College of Ireland

Further Information:

• View the presentation
• “Coffee cups, frogs, and lived experience” (background paper)
• More on Jane Addams and Hull House
• More on Paseo Boricua
• Integrative learning
• Camara

“Books are no substitute for living” (May Hill Arbuthnot), but “Life without books is empty” (Isaac Asimov)

“To feel the meaning of what one is doing, and to rejoice in that meaning; to unite in one concurrent fact the unfolding of the inner life and the ordered development of material conditions–that is art” (John Dewey)

“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers” (James Thurber), but “The best way to find things out .. is not to ask questions at all…if you sit quite still and pretend not to be looking, all the little facts will come and peck round your feet, situations will venture forth from thickets, and intentions will creep out and sun themselves on a stone” (Elspeth Huxley)

“One’s work should be a salute to life” (Pablo Casals, from “Salute to Life”)

I’m attaching a couple of photos from Romania, where we went in September. One is a wooden church in the Maramureş style. It’s part of the Barsana Monastery. Another was one of many hitchhikers we picked up. Our old Dacia wasn’t much as a car, but it beats walking or horse-drawn cart when you’re tired. We had learned enough Romanian to figure out that the man is 82, has 9 children, and knows the woman who works in the post office and runs our B&B. We also saw what may be the oldest, and is certainly the longest-running Unitarian Church (in Cluj-Napoca). I spent an hour with the pastor, learning about their history and the church building and furnishings.

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In Maramures, we saw Elie Wiesel’s home/museum. As you may know, Maramureş was one of the worst holocaust sites, with over 20,000 Jews from Sighetu-Marmaţiei alone sent to Auschwitz. Later, Communists in Romania sent tens of thousands of “Saxons” (ethnic Germans) to work and die on the Danube canal construction. Roma people managed to be persecuted throughout, and still suffer from prejudices today (although projects such as Şanse Egale are working to improve opportunities).

We also saw the museum sometimes called the “Museum of Suppressed Thought”, which made me aware that my imagination is limited in conceiving all the ways people can oppress one another, and all the different ethnic prejudices that can be realized. Maramureş and Transylvania in general have seen more than their fair share. That’s especially disturbing to think about in a country which is otherwise so beautiful, friendly, and welcoming.

I gave a talk on Dewey, Hull House, and Paseo Boricua at the Philosophy of Pragmatism: Salient Inquiries conference at Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca. I’d certainly value any comments or suggestions on the draft.

John Dewey Society Sponsored Off-Site Program

Date: Wednesday, April 11

Time 4:30 p.m. – 9:30 pm

Location: Puerto Rican Cultural Center, 2739-41 W. Division Street

Cost: $30 (includes bus transportation, program, and dinner)

Transportation: A bus will collect participants from the front of the Fairmont Chicago hotel at 4:30 p.m. and return there at 9:30 p.m.

Paseo Boricua, with its motto of ‘live and help others to live’ is renowned for its multigenerational and holistic community activism around human rights and social change and, in particular its model of learning in which ‘the community is the curriculum.’ With its many academic partnerships, Paseo Boricua also provides an outstanding example of university-community collaboration in research, teaching and public engagement.

The one-hour tour will visit the Puerto Rican Cultural Center and key organizations in the neighborhood, including the community library and media center, the Family Learning Center, Café Teatro Batey Urbano, and the Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School. The tour is followed by dinner and a program presented by the National Boricua Human Rights Network: “Political Repression and Human Rights in the Puerto Rican Context.” Special speakers at the program include Dr. Luis Nieves Falcon, noted sociologist and educator who has played a leading role in the campaign to free Paseo Boricua’s political prisoners.

Organizers: Bertram (Chip) Bruce, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chip@uiuc.edu; Laura Ruth Johnson, Northern Illinois University (lrjohnson@niu.edu); Alejandro Luis Molina, National Boricua Human Rights Network and Dr. Pedro Albizu Campos Puerto Rican High School (alejandro@prcc-chgo.org); and José E. López, Executive Director, Puerto Rican Cultural Center.

Please RSVP to Chip Bruce: chip@uiuc.edu; 217.244.3576

On September 26-29, 2007, the second international pragmatism conference will be held in Babes-Bolyai University, in Cluj-Napoca, Romania: The Philosophy of Pragmatism: Salient Inquiries. I’ve proposed speaking on the following:

From Hull House to Paseo Boricua: The Theory and Practice of Community Inquiry

The social settlement called Hull House provided services including kindergarten facilities, an employment bureau, an art gallery, libraries, a cooperative residence for working women, the first Little Theater in America, a Labor Museum, and a meeting place for trade unions. Hull House exemplified John Dewey’s version of pragmatism, requiring a faith in “the potentialities of human nature.” In our work on “community inquiry,” we have attempted to continue that spirit through social action projects in which a key question is “What happens when community members are not merely recipients of services, but as Dewey argues, become part of the process of authority?” The talk focuses on the theory of community inquiry and our work with Paseo Boricua (Chicago), a modern-day version of Hull House.

Map

I worked in the Curriculum & Instruction department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from 1990 to 2000. I taught courses such as

• Computer Assisted Instruction,
• Classroom Science,
• Inquiry Teaching and Learning,
• Evaluation of Information Technologies,
• Ethical & Policy Issues in Information Technology,
• Discourses of Science,
• Technologies for Learning,
• Reader Response Criticism,
• Children’s Composition,
• Social Contexts and Functions of Writing,
• Epistemology and Education,
• Teacher Communities, and
• Discourse Across the Disciplines.

The logical structure underlying temporal references in natural language, The University of Texas at Austin, Computer Sciences Department.

542
Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic
Volume XVII, Number 4, October 1976
NDJFAM

A LOGIC FOR UNKNOWN OUTCOMES

BERTRAM BRUCE

1 Introduction

In computer question answering and problem solving programs many of the questions of modal and tense logics appear as practical design problems. One problem of particular interest appears when we allow events to have the truth value “unknown”, a natural value to assign to some events which occur at other times than the present.

However, allowing a third value is not as simple as it seems. Suppose that statements P and Q each have the truth value “unknown”. What values should be assigned to {PΛQ)? If (PvQ) is necessary, it should have the value “true”, otherwise it has the value “unknown”. The “modal” composition of truth values cannot be achieved in a three (”true”, “unknown”, “false”) valued truth functional logic. In fact, as shown by Dugundji [l], no finite valued truth functional logic can be given the modal interpretation. Consequently, semantic analysis of most modal systems must be quasi-truth-functional or involve infinite matrices or both.

For example, Kripke [2] introduces the concept of a set of “possible worlds” with a model which assigns to each well formed formula (wff) a set of truth values, one for each world. If the set of worlds is infinite then each wff will have an infinite sequence for its value. Furthermore, the composition of truth values is not strictly truth-functional since it depends on the “possibility” relation between worlds. Another example is the infinite product logic, πC2, where C2 is the classical two-valued propositional calculus [5]. In this logic wffs again have sequence for their values. These sequences can be viewed as the value a wff takes over time [3] and thus provide a link between modal logic and tense logic. A final example, out of many others, is the probabilistic approach as discussed by Rescher [4], [5]. He shows that assigning a probability to each wff and applying certain minimal features of a probability calculus yields a set of tautologies equivalent to the theorems of S5. Here again the logic is infinite valued and quasi-truth-functional in the compositions.

With a concern for computer applications such as question answering it seems appropriate to discuss yet another approach, which appears to have a simpler (though non-truth functional) decision procedure while requiring…