Ethnosphere

10
Feb
2021

Mistake Mystique in Learning and in Life

Comprehensivity is our inclination to integrate all our sources of learning so as to better comprehend the world and how it works. To effectively guide our newfound comprehensivity we require newfound epistemic virtues, new criteria for good knowledge. In previous resources, we have explored two such proposed epistemic virtues: the inductive attitude and the method of multiple working hypotheses.

This resource will investigate mistake mystique as a third proposed epistemic virtue for our comprehensivity. Our primary guide for this exploration is R. Buckminster Fuller’s essay Mistake Mystique. It was published in the now defunct periodical East/West Journal, you can find a copy in some anthologies including “Your Private Sky: Discourse: Buckminster Fuller” edited by Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (2001) and Education Automation: Comprehensive Learning for Emergent Humanity published by Lars Muller Publishers (2010). We will also consider some ideas of Stuart Firestein from the 2012 book “Ignorance: How It Drives Science”.

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Posted by CJ Fearnley in Resource Center, 0 comments
06
Jan
2021

The Inductive Attitude: A Moral Basis for Science and Comprehensivism

Comprehensivism is an emerging practice that takes seriously Buckminster Fuller’s observation that we want “to understand all and put everything together”. In this practice, we value learning from other traditions of inquiry and action, all our communicated experiences, and the Ethnosphere, our all-encompassing cultural zone. To assess this learning, we value accumulating and comparing many working hypotheses, conjectures, guesses, theories, and explanations so we can evaluate our vast inventory of knowledge comprehensively.

With these aspirations and values in mind, this resource will consider inductive reasoning as a moral basis for science as examined by George Pólya (1887–1985) in his 1954 public domain book “Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning: Volume I: Induction and Analogy in Mathematics”. We will also explore the implications of Pólya’s ideas for our comprehensivity, our efforts at learning that are broad in scope and deeply incisive or cutting. For diligent readers who want to assess the relevant parts of Pólya’s book on their own, at the end there is a section with links to its most important and most accessible sections on inductive reasoning.

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Posted by CJ Fearnley in Resource Center, 1 comment
07
Dec
2020

The Value of Multiple Working Hypotheses

This resource summarizes and interprets a short essay published in 1890 by T. C. Chamberlin to exemplify how we can engage primary resources from scholarly periodicals for the learning of collaborative comprehensivism, learning in groups to comprehensively comprehend our worlds and its peoples. We will see that Chamberlin’s paper expounds the benefits and drawbacks of an important moral reform for our lives, namely, the value of multiple working hypotheses. We will then assess the implications of this moral reform for comprehensivist learning.

You can read Chamberlin’s paper in a six-page 1965 reprint at http://webhome.auburn.edu/~tds0009/Articles/Chamberlain%201965.pdf or on JSTOR (requires a free account) at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1716334 or you can read the original five-page 1890 version on JSTOR at https://www.jstor.org/stable/1764336.

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Posted by CJ Fearnley in Resource Center, 2 comments
23
Nov
2020

November 2020 Update on Comprehensivist Wednesdays

Since the October 26th update, Comprehensivist Wednesdays has organized seven events. This update documents five forthcoming events and collects resources including event descriptions, video, and essays from the seven most recent past events.

Five Forthcoming Events

In order to RSVP to attend these events, you must join either the 52 Living Ideas meetup or the Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society meetup. Joining either group will require joining Meetup.com which is a free on-line service with strong privacy controls. Once you are a member, you can RSVP to join the event from the link to its Event Page.

The Seven Most Recent Past Events including video links and essays

About Comprehensivist Wednesdays

Comprehensivist Wednesdays is an on-going series of weekly events designed to foster the art of comprehensivity, the state or quality of considering with ever increasing depth and breadth more and more of Humanity’s great traditions of inquiry, more and more of Humanity’s communicated experiences that comprise Buckminster Fuller’s notion of Universe, and more and more of the Ethnosphere (Wade Davis’ cultural analogue of the biosphere). Buckminster Fuller described the approach as “macro-comprehensive and micro-incisive”.

The series is being organized by emcee Shrikant Rangnekar of 52 Living Ideas in collaboration with CJ Fearnley of Collaborating for Comprehensivism and the Greater Philadelphia Thinking Society. There is a YouTube playlist with all videos from the “Comprehensivist Wednesdays” series (click here).

Collaborating for Comprehensivism is an emerging initiative to energize humanity’s collective intelligence through collaborations that facilitate incrementally the formation of ever broader and deeper understandings of our worlds and its peoples.

Mailing List

To receive a weekly update about forthcoming events, please submit a request to join the “Collaborating for Comprehensivism” announcements-only mailing list.

Other Comprehensivist Wednesday's Series News Releases

Posted by CJ Fearnley in News, 0 comments
09
Nov
2020

The Value of The Ethnosphere

This resource condenses, contextualizes, and explores a nearly two hour video featuring Wade Davis to exemplify a way to open the world of video lectures to people pursuing collaborative comprehensivism, learning in groups to understand the world ever more extensively and ever more intensively. It examines a poignant topic that reveals an important source of learning for comprehensivists. It further illuminates fundamental issues involved in establishing the new tradition of comprehensivism.

This enthralling Wade Davis presentation is itself a condensation of five 2009 Massey Lectures which were published as the book “The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World”.

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Posted by CJ Fearnley in Resource Center, 1 comment