I take it you all noticed the cameo appearance of Meno's Paradox in the final question of tonight's Presidential debate. What don't you know and how will you learn it?
Tom Brokaw referred to the question as "zen-like." What an illiterate moron.
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4 comments:
Zen is known for its paradoxes and so Brokaw at least recognized the statement as paradoxical, if not what paradox it was...
Gotta give props to Peggy in Amherst, NH for asking that one! It was really refreshing to see that someone might have seen such a great opportunity to deploy the Learning Paradox.
Obama's first off-the-cuff response to the question was really interesting: Other people will help (in this case, Michelle). Anamnesis isn't the only way to dissolve the paradox (or some nativist position). As they say, "when you don't know, ask somebody." The Learning Paradox gets traction because it isolates the learner and learning context. (You might confront something you don't know, but it doesn't follow that other people (a well-chosen staff, for instance) don't know it. I thought that his instinct on target, despite it being said off-hand.
729 is on the right track, I think. You get the paradox only under conditions of having restricted informational access -- i.e., the only criterion for the right answer to the question is only knowledge of what the answer is. Surely one has other knowledge that can be brought to bear on the matter at hand. In the case of Meno's slave boy, it's his familiarity with basic addition facts and his capacity to see different ways to divide squares in half. In other cases, as 729 rightly points out (and Obama goes to immediately), it's knowledge of who is in better epistemic positions with regard to the question. Other resources are: experiments, proofs, inference to the best explanation, gathering further evidence, and all of the above.
One negative thing to say, though. It's all very reminiscent of Rumsfeld's taxonomy of: known knowns, known unknowns, and the dreaded unknown unknowns. That last category is the most dangerous, but the one you can't plan for.... Of course the fact that he classified civil unrest after the fall of Saddam's Bathist party as an unknown unknown is the most baffling.
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