Flex and Spex in a Mid-October Frame of Mind
Reflections on a Shimer College class called “Bits and Bins”
2 min read
- I noted in class how I thought that my troubles with math stemmed primarily from how little context was provided for the material that we were being asked to master. Given the response I received, I was taken aback by our first legit assignment, “Bits and Bins,” which truly harked back to earlier negative experiences with respect to math. Once again, exercises were thrown at me--minus context. The “why” of what we were doing was not presented. The handouts were of little assistance; class discussions only seemed to complicate matters. By weekend’s close, while I felt a little more confident about what I was being asked to do, something was still lacking and apprehension set in.
- I assume that the purpose of the first weekend’s work was to point us in the direction of being able to or at least being open to the prospect of questioning our own individual logic (or lack thereof). We are at least thus far implicitly being asked to be aware of other logical models that might be out there--that may not be theoretically “better,” per se, but may have just as much explanatory value.
- Thus far, if I can point to one element of the Shimer philosophy that I find the most fault with it is this notion that context--historical or whatever--is not a necessary requirement for the task of interpreting texts. This seems to be a relatively contentious issue at Shimer, or at least I hope it is. If not, I would certainly like to see that is, because it certainly troubles me. I think the issue gets especially tricky when dealing with the subject of math. This is so, it seems to me, because, like any science (or art, for that matter), math is practiced, applied or studied in the real world, not in a proverbial vacuum. I think math is generally presented to us as an area of human thought least prone to contamination — i.e., it is regarded as the purest form of conceptualization and thus the most objective. But precisely because it is the practice of humans, math’s practitioners and applicators are embedded in a set of social relations much akin to our own. So just as science and art are tainted by the social, and just as each individual is, so goes mathematics. Numbers can be manipulated. Ask any pollster. Or politician.
- “Natural science as a form of thought exists and always has existed in a context of history, and depends on historical thought for its existence…no one can understand natural science unless he understands history.” — Collingwood
- The same must be said of mathematics. Or so we shall see….
