T. C. Chamberlin

Shifting Perspectives and Representing The Truth

In an exquisite video presentation Tricia Wang explains the benefits of perspective shifting to better represent the truths of our worlds and its peoples:

This resource will situate Wang’s powerful and important ideas in the context of our Art of Comprehensivity, our learning practices for building an ever more extensive, ever more intensive, and ever more integrated understanding of our worlds and its peoples.

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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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December 2020 Update on Comprehensivist Wednesdays

Since the November 23th update, Comprehensivist Wednesdays has organized eight events. This update documents three forthcoming events and collects resources including event descriptions, video, and essays from the seven most recent past events.

Three 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 Eight 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 group conversations that facilitate incrementally the formation of ever broader and deeper and more integrated 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

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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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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