"Thomas Dalton" thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote in message news:a4359dff0905051244n460c6bfap24e8eb8262985906@mail.gmail.com...
2009/5/5 FT2 ft2.wiki@gmail.com:
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?
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[[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.