"Thomas Dalton" <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote in message
news:a4359dff0905051244n460c6bfap24e8eb8262985906@mail.gmail.com...
2009/5/5 FT2 <ft2.wiki(a)gmail.com>om>:
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.