The Grand Teaching Experiment (4)

I mentioned a couple posts back that we are scheduled to read Dummett's paper "Truth" this Wednesday. As many of you will know, this paper is legendarily hard and is often said to contain every major idea Dummett would spend the rest of his career developing. That is a slight overstatement, but it does indicate the rather frightening density of the paper.
Terrified by this prospect, I decided that what I needed to do was to give the students a whole lot of guidance about how to read Dummett's paper. The result can be found on the course website. We'll see how much it helps.
More generally, I realized when thinking about this that it isn't just Dummett's paper that's hard. All philosophy papers are hard. For many of my more philosophical "survey" courses, I've therefore often provided students with a handful of questions that might help structure their reading, and those sorts of questions are already on the website for this course. When I was lecturing on this material, those sorts of brief questions might have been adequate. But if I'm not lecturing, if I'm essentially expecting the students to do more of the work for themselves, then they're probably not adequate.
So, yesterday, even though we were scheduled to talk about Tarski's "Semantic Conception of Truth" today, I went to the course website and put up a similar reading guide for that paper.
To see the contrast, the original questions were:

What does Tarski think the Liar Paradox shows about our intuitive notion of truth? How is Convention T supposed to be related to our intuitive notion of truth? What are an object-language and a meta-language? How does distinguishing between them help us solve the liar paradox?

What's there now is:

• Tarksi insists that a definition of truth must be "materially adequate" and "formally correct". What are these two notions?
• If a definition of truth satisfies convention T, that is supposed to imply that it is in some sense correct. In what sense? and why? Note here the difference between extensional and intensional correctness that Tarski himself discusses.
• What does Tarski mean by saying that truth is a "semantic" concept?
• What is Tarski's diagnosis of the Liar Paradox? That is: To what exactly do his conditions (I), (II), and (III) come? To answer this question, analyze the informal presentation of the Liar on pp. 347-8. Where exactly do the three conditions play a role? Is there anything else that plays a role that Tarski is not mentioning?
• Why exactly does Tarski mean when he says that he will not "use any language which is semantically closed"? Why, if we do that, are we then forced to distingish object-language from meta-language?
• Tarski says that the meta-language must be "essentially richer" than the object-language if we are going to be able to define truth for the object-language. How exactly must the meta-language differ from the object-language?

And I will plan to structure today's class around these same questions.

The Grand Teaching Experiment (3)

Friday, we had our first "discussion" class. I still call them that, although now every class is a discussion class. But these ones are meant to be more wide-ranging and, more specifically, devoted more to criticism and evaluation than to exposition and understanding.
When I've taught courses with this same sort of structure before—lectures Monday and Wednesday, discussion on Friday—the discussion sessions have rarely flowed well. They had a tendency to turn into question and answer sessions, with not a whole lot of actual discussion. This one was much better, amazingly better given that it was the first one, so early in the semester. So perhaps that is a good sign.
It doesn't hurt, of course, that the class is full of students with a lot of philosophical experience, and that many of them have taken at least one course with me before, some of them many more than that. But still.

Ayer on Truth

On a more substantive note: Ayer's 1953 paper "Truth" is really under-rated, in my opinion. Did anyone make the now familiar points about the ineliminability of "true" before him? The paper is not often cited, and when it is it is almost always cited wrongly: Volume 25, 1953. It was in issue 25, but volume 7, which makes me kind of suspect that a lot of people who cite it haven't actually read it.
I'm all the more suspicious since Ayer is so often claimed for the deflationist side, when in fact his view is much more nuanced. The crucial remarks come at the transition between two very different parts of the paper:

Let it be granted then that we must forego any general definition of truth, and let it also be granted that there are certain contexts in which the words 'true' and 'false'...are ineliminable. It does not follow that there is any mystery about their meaning. On the contrary, their function is quite clear. ...To speak of a sentence, or a statement, as true is tantamount to asserting it, and to speak of it as false is tantamount to denying it. ...[I]t is hard to see what further explanation of [truth] is required.
Can we say then that we have solved the philosophical problem of truth? What is disturbing about our solution is its simplicity. If that is all there is to it, it is hard to see how anybody, even a philosopher, can ever have been supposed that the question 'What is truth?' presented any difficulty at all. ...All the same they must have known well enough how the word 'true' was actually used. Such information as that it is true that the sky is blue if and only if the sky is blue could hardly be expected to come upon them as a revelation. ...What they would say...is that the provision of these partial definitions did not meet their problem. It remains, therefore, for us to see what this problem can have been and if possible to solve it.

Ayer then goes on to do exactly that. His understanding of what the problem is, of course, is shaped by his verificationism, but he does think there is another problem that goes by the name "the problem of truth", just as Strawson does.
Ayer's paper is pretty hard to find. Feel free to ask me for a copy if you need one. Oh, and beware! Ayer also published a paper titled "Truth" in 1963, in his collection The Concept of a Person and Other Essays. There is a fair bit of overlap between the two papers, but they are different papers.

The Grand Teaching Experiment (2)

Shortly after I made my first post about how I'm trying something different with teaching this year, I went off to my Wednesday class. The paper for the day was Ayer's "Truth", published in Revue Internationale de Philosophie in 1953.
This particular class seemed to go pretty well. I laid out the topics I thought we should cover: Ayer's discussions of whether "true" is eliminable, of whether convention (T) can be understood as a definition of truth, and of the metaphysical and epistemological status of instances of (T).
Most students seemed as if they'd understood the main outlines of Ayer's discussion, so it was easy to get the class to put Ayer's basic claims on the table. We were then able to work through some questions about them pretty effectively. At certain points, I felt it worthwhile to jump in and talk for a bit, but it seems unsurprising that I should need to do that from time to time, especially at the beginning of the semester.
It helps, of course, that Ayer's paper is, as one would expect with him, extremely clear. Indeed, several students remarked how much they'd appreciated Ayer's straightforward prose after having slogged through Austin and Strawson.
One lesson here may well turn out to be, then, that if you're going to try to teach a course without lecturing, you have (for the most part, at least) to choose papers that are relatively easy to understand. The ultimate test of that theory will come next Wednesday, when we read Dummett's paper "Truth".

EBookDroid

For a while now, I've been trying not to print out copies of papers I'm using for class. I had a Kindle DX a while back, and I tried loading PDFs of papers into it. But the page rendering was so slow it was painful, and a real problem in class itself, since finding a particular passage would simply take too long.
More recently, I've acquired a Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, which makes for an excellent e-reader. It has a nice, bright screen, good resolution (1280x800), and lots of memory. Plus, I can access my course web site, or JSTOR, or whatever, directly from it (and with tools like AndFTP, I can even access my servers using SFTP and public key authentication).
But as I've mentioned elsewhere, a lot of the material I've scanned for my own use is in DjVu format, so I recently found myself needing to find a DjVu reader for Android.
It turns out (unsurprisingly, really) that there are several options, but the one on which I've settled for now is EBookDroid, a free and open source (GPL'd) ereader. Not only does it handle DjVu, it's got a lot of other nice features, such as the ability to set lots of named bookmarks (making particular passages easy to find). But one of the nicest things about it is that it will automatically split pages, if the file you are reading happens to have facing pages on a single page, like a photocopy. And it will automatically scale pages to the content area, not to mention wash your laundry and make your dinner. An excellent tool.
I've seen some people mention that EBookDroid "hijacks" PDF links from the browser, but I have not seen this issue myself. It does register itself as one possible PDF reader, but that is all.

Scan Tailor

For quite some time now, I've been putting all the readings (except books) for my various classes online, on my course websites (such as here or here). In the good cases, this just means downloading stuff from JSTOR or some equivalent, or linking directly to it, though I very often convert the PDFs I get that way to DjVu files, since (a) the DjVu files are often a lot smaller (like one tenth the size), and (b) I prefer to have files where two pages appear on a single page, so that when they are printed you don't waste so much paper.
I've developed a number of tools to make this easier to do. I'll blog about them later. (Some of them are already available here.) What I wanted to mention today is a really, really cool program I found last weekend, called "Scan Tailor". It's "free and open source" (GPLv3) and available for Linux, OSX, and Windoze.
I've found that the easiest way to scan stuff I need from books (e.g., Dummett's "Frege's Myth of the Third Realm", from Frege and Other Philosophers) is first to make a photocopy of the paper and then to scan that. (This is easiest with a sheet-fed scanner, such as the HP Scanjet 5590, which works fine with Linux.) You can simply make a PDF or DjVu from the result, but, if you just do that, it will usually look like crap. For one thing, you get big black marks along the sides and, often, down the middle (where the spine of the book is). And the pages can be hard to read on screen, since they are often not quite square. Even half a degree's rotation is easy to see, and very annoying.
So, in the past, I'd load the pages one by one into Gimp (an open source image editor) and fix them up. But this was time consuming, and hard to get right. That is where Scan Tailor comes to the rescue.
Here's how it works. You put all the page images into some directory, and then you open Scan Tailor and create a new "project", pointing the program at that directory. All the pages then get loaded up. You can then rotate them, if need be. But the really useful bit is that the program will then automatically (i) split the pages in half (which you need to do for the next step), (ii) deskew them (i.e., correct for rotation of the text), (iii) put a bounding box around the actual text (thus eliminating the black marks), (iv) put clean new margins around that text, (v) despeckle the images (remove stray black dots), and then (iv) output the resulting page images to a directory of your choosing, so you can assemble them into a PDF or a DjVu.
And at every one of those steps, you can intervene to make manual corrections, if need be. It totally, totally rocks.

The Grand Teaching Experiment

Over the last couple years, I've become very dissatisfied with the way I've always taught my non-logic classes, e.g., classes on philosophy of language. These tend to be fairly small classes, with enrolment in the range of 10-15, and the basic model has been this: I've lectured on Mondays and Wednesdays, and we have had discussion on Fridays, led by me.
But I've read several things recently suggesting that lecturing is not a very effective way to get students to learn things. So this semester, in my course on Theories of Truth (Phil 1890D), I'm trying something different. I propose to blog about it from time to time.
The first thing I'm doing is trying to make use of Brown's new online teaching framework, called "Canvas". It does quite a lot. For example, there is an integrated conferencing system that I may try to use later. And it has simpler stuff, like the ability to schedule assignments, which are then automatically entered into a "grade book". But the main thing I'm using is the discussion board. For each of the readings, I've set up a discussion thread, and I'm requiring everyone in the class to post to it prior to class.
Obviously, this is just taking the place of the "response papers" that lots of people use, anyway, but it has a few advantages.

1. It's easy for me to comment on people's responses simply by replying in the discussion thread. As a result, they can get feedback before we meet for class. 
2. The students' responses, and my comments, are visible to the other students, so there is some opportunity for them to learn from each other. So far, there has only been a little discussion among the students, but I'm hopeful that, as we get into the semester, and as we all adjust to this new system, there will be more. (I've set it up so they have to post before they can see what other people wrote, for the obvious sort of reason.)
3. Since contributing to discussion is an "assignment", it is linked to the grade book, and I can enter grades (not much more than "did" or "didn't") very easily.

Much of this, of course, could be done with a Google Group, but the way Canvas automatically generates a syllabus from my discussion assignments is very nice. And I can add the other course assignments, too, so a calendar for the semester is automatically created.
The second thing I'm doing differently is I'm not lecturing. At all. I told the students this at the first meeting, and when I walked into the first "real" class, I had no lecture notes. I'm trying to run the entire class as discussion.
The days that would previously have been devoted to lecture are now devoted to discussion that is aimed at understanding the readings. The day that was previously devoted to discussion is now devoted to discussion aimed at evaluating and criticising the readings. We've had two of the former so far (on Austin's and Strawson's famous papers on truth), and I'm not sure yet how they are going. My strategy has been to identify topics from the papers that we should talk about. So, in the case of Strawson's paper, for example, these were: His criticisms of Austin's account of (i) statements, (ii) facts, and (iii) correspondence, and (iv) his own positive account of the use of "true". The first class seemed to go pretty well. The second one, a bit less so, and I ended up talking more. But that may simply have been because Strawson's paper is quite hard, and maybe that is a sign that I should do something else.