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Draft: do not cite without author’s permission

Wittgenstein on rule-entanglement, contradictions and arbitrariness in educational language-games: "Where will the harm come?"

Jeff Stickney, University of Toronto

Abstract Wittgenstein's rule-following argument draws considerable attention: its policy-significance, very little. Exploring political aspects, I investigate cases of rule-entanglement in education: showing how teachers respond differently, carrying-on with fuzzy or sometimes contradictory rules. Confronted with rule-deviation, what justifies claims to 'sound'/'unsound' implementation, or reasonable adaptation? Playing on Mighton's Possible Worlds scenario, I probe these questions on different planes of inquiry through five similar vignettes, including one focused on his ethically-aimed math training program. Surveying the topic-space I first touch on fervent debate between Rorty and his critics, Putnam and McDowell, over 'solidarity' grounding judgment. Is sharing a 'sense'/'sensibility' (fact/value) of 'pedagogic soundness' sufficient to uphold its veracity? Must soundness claims be 'answerable to the world'? In terms of student diversity, which possible worlds beckon account? Wittgenstein's argument with Turing over harm done by contradictions and arbitrariness helps distinguish philosophical from mathematical problems. Applications follow: (1) Contrasting “Theory of Knowledge” (ToK) in the International Baccalaureate1 program with epistemology, arbitrariness in grammar results in playing different games. (2) Wittgenstein's remarks on his own teaching efficacy demonstrate his distinction between empirical (or causal) and philosophical inquiries. (3) Finally, I explore controversy between contending paradigms of discovery learning and Mighton's guided-training in fundamentals, illustrating opposition between liberal-analytic definitions of teaching with training. Drawing on Medina, the problem of encountering alien practices is seen through the lens of 'logical insanity'. Faced with seemingly 'unsound' reforms, teacher resistance acts as healthy, conservative brakes; alternately, recalcitrance can normatively blind teachers to innovation, effectively stalling improvement in learning.

1 (Assessment Headquarters in Cardiff)

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The civil status of a contradiction, or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical problem. (PI§125)1

1. Judging 'soundness' Educators working in the midst of 'madness' may share Wittgenstein’s lament that ‘philosophers have to cure themselves of many sicknesses before arriving at notions of sound human understanding’ (RFM,IV.53). Frequently cast into bewildering change-initiatives, teachers wonder if these are arbitrary, contradictory, useless, or even harmful. What warrants judgment that some teaching practices or curricula are ‘sound’ and others relatively ‘insane’ or injurious? Foreshadowing the final section on playwright John Mighton: As with George (Tom McManus) and Joyce (Tilda Swinton) in Possible Worlds (2000), I find myself probing this topic repeatedly on different planes of application.2 Inspecting variances in how teachers follow-through on directions governing education, I revisit Wittgenstein's extended rule-following argument in the Philosophical Investigations (§§143-242; Stickney, 2005): exploring from different angles where rules and their criterion of success reside. Not just another rule-following paper, here we step aside from Wittgenstein's illuminating scenes of pupils extending numerical series (games of +2, PI§185)3 to enter more politically charged, parallel worlds within educational reform. Linking epistemology with political philosophy, teachers' intransigence and improvisation with curricular-rules reveal scenes of paradigm conflict: broader terrain where professional autonomy and accountability come into peripheral vision. Pairing teacher anecdotes with scattered remarks from Wittgenstein's corpus can be illustrative but hazardous. Sage advice is not to look for educational theory in Wittgenstein’s writing but to see his later philosophy as pedagogical (Peters, 1995; Peters and Marshall, 1999; Peters, Burbules, Smeyers, 2008) or as therapeutic (Smeyers, Smith and Standish, 2008), and not looking upon pedagogy as a ‘science’ (Standish, 1995). Accepting these boundaries, I transgress slightly: probing Wittgenstein’s elementary teaching and thoughts on learning, attending later to Mighton's math training initiative in Canada and the UK -- Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies (JUMP) -- that employs quasi-Wittgensteinian methods. Not chronicling Wittgenstein's biography or his uptake by educationists, the analytic-goal is to sort empirical propositions from conceptual problems regarding pedagogy. Demarcation lends critical perspective in current "math wars" (Carlson, 2014). Blind opposition to JUMP shows how dogmatic faith in the venerable discovery model undermines open inquiry and professional development into scaffolding methods for improving math competency. Conservancy of practice acts as necessary brakes on senseless initiatives but enthrallment in established models also has negative

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implications when preventing educators from experimenting with progressive methods. Drawing on Josè Medina's reading of Wittgenstein (2002), I explore this contest through the lens of 'logical insanity': alienation experienced when confronting seemingly senseless practices. Understanding JUMP's regimen of math training comes gradually through initiation. Appreciation also hinges, however, on second-order recognition of the contrast between the normativity involved in guided-inquiry into math competencies and higher ethical, liberal aims of autonomy and self-fulfillment entailed in JUMP's goals. Virulent reactions to math 'training' throws light on the contrast between liberal-analytic conceptions of teaching as ‘the giving of reasons’ (Hirst, 1971) and Wittgenstein’s description of training into normative practices: initially compared with animal training (BB,pp.70-79), and ultimately depicted as giving 'certainties' grounded in a form of life -- 'beyond justification' as 'something animal' (not requiring ratiocination, OC§§358-9,475).4

I cannot describe how (in general) to employ rules, except by teaching you, training you to employ rules. (Z§318) Any explanation has its foundation in training. (Educators ought to remember this.) (Z§419)

Adherence to liberal-analytic pictures of learning makes suspect Wittgenstein's scenes of training, but the perplexing relationship between inculcation and autonomy within rules in Wittgenstein's later philosophy does not entail abandonment of traditional, precious values. Ostensibly, initiation into forms of life, both at rudimentary levels and within the 'space of reasons', come into perspective here as our common ground for judging teaching practices as sound-or-unsound.5 2. Situating philosophical problems Wittgenstein’s summation of 'knowing how to go on' (§§179-200,cf. §151) -- that pupils deviating from instructors’ intended rules raises the paradox that “no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every course of action can be made out to accord with the rule” (PI§201) -- led Kripke (1982) into the much-debated interpretation that Wittgenstein reveals the 'indeterminacy’ of rules and therefore of correct meaning/use of expressions (cf.OC§61; Wright, 2001, 117). Avoiding Kripke's quagmire, Wittgenstein's paradox gives pause to wonder when educational rules are indeterminate or contradictory; arguably, I try to distinguish occasions where choices are arbitrary from curricula and teaching-moves that are more tightly bound with experience: demonstrating utility and (though exceedingly difficult to isolate) building upon causal relations in teaching like scaffolding techniques. Judging pedagogic soundness, however, involves broader and more accessible controversy than etiological problems addressed later. Wright (2001, 11) responds to

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Kripke’s scepticism by noting that people do not coherently doubt most meaningful expressions in daily life; furthermore, more precise rules preclude notions that there are indefinitely many, equally good alternatives 'in accordance'. Curricular expectations, for instance, can be quite precise (e.g., at this age, ‘all students will/should know the multiplication table up to 10’, which is clear but unachievable, drawing Daggett's retort: ‘We don’t buy children age-specific shoes’6). Myriad interpretations of rules in situ present challenging real-life problems. Teaching practices differ within the same curricular and policy-frameworks (in/among schools and departments), resulting in archipelagos of divergent evolution instead of uniform landscapes and 'aligned' school systems envisioned by educational administrators (Stickney, 2015). Who decides which adaptation is right? Plurality demonstrates how shallow and fragile the desired 'consensus' can be within education, but does not commit us to an 'isles-of-language' type relativity where incommensurability prevents communication or correction across differences (see Rory, 1991, 211; Burbules, 2000, 52-3; Scheman, 1996). Isolationism is defeatist, precluding negotiation among agents for reasonable improvisation and 'freedoms within the rules' (Tully, 2002). Multiplicity of interpretation demonstrates there are often many ways of effectively muddling through on vague or conflicted educational policies, especially when administrators recognize complexities and allow for re-negotiation within specific contexts (see Greenhalgh, 2015, 211). But educators diminish their capacity for growth when harbouring in mutually reinforced enclaves of blind habit or folk-tradition (Dewey, 1944). Cavell (1979) reminds us that in 'entering claims we are answerable for our assertions'; meaning educators cannot hide behind Wittgenstein's ‘digging’ aphorisms:

If I have exhausted the justifications I have reached bedrock, and my spade is turned. Then I am inclined to say: "This is simply what I do." (PI§217)7

Hargreaves quips:8 we rationally expect more justification for teaching methods than Julie Andrews’ reply in The Sound of Music: "These are a few of my favourite things." ‘For justification-minded philosophers of education’, however, Wittgenstein's rule-following cases reveal vicious circularity: more sweeping education reforms rely upon prior training into concepts and practices: “Now, we must ask, how is all of education to be justified as the philosopher insists if significant parts of that education must already be taken for granted?” (McCarthy’s, 1995, 199). If judgments of 'suitability' rest upon foundations (concepts/customs/institutions/seeing-as) previously established through training,9 how can we step outside the circle, or at least glimpse ourselves circling without then seeking (in Ludwig's terms) 'greater depth' or succumbing to the 'disease' of trying to explain what can only be described (PI§109)?10 Cognizant of this circularity, Putnam and McDowell offer criticisms worth considering before tunneling into Wittgenstein's notion of 'agreement in judgment' (PI§242). Normatively ‘thick’ cases like 'sound teaching' offer escape from 'entanglement' in the

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fact/value dichotomy (Putnam, 2002, 34, re: 'cruel teachers'), not regarding these judgments as simply empirical or measurable questions of efficacy. As Putnam notes (126), citing Wittgenstein (PI,p.227), some learn to make such judgments better than others without then having the ability to teach how to do it, other than demonstrating or giving tips. But Wittgenstein grounds judgment of emotion and intention in percipience: "Corrector prognoses will generally issue from the judgments of those with better knowledge of mankind" (PI,p.227).

To be sure, there is this: acquiring a knowledge of human nature; it is also possible to help someone with this, to give lessons, as it were, but one only points to cases, refers to certain traits, gives no hard and fast rules. (RPP,II§607; cf,PI,p.227)

Adopting an informed ethnographic view like Wittgenstein's implies astute observation of human behaviour and culture.

If we look at things from an ethnological point of view, does that mean that we are saying that philosophy is ethnology? No, it only means that we are taking up a position right outside so as to be able to see things more objectively. (CV,p.37e)

Accepting that science rests upon presuppositions and epistemic values, some facts must be in place before values come into question: e.g., realist intuitions such as presuming the existence of different cultures capable of holding disparate views of how an 'objective' world works (Putnam, 143, contra Rorty). Wittgenstein's philosopher, however, is not trying to resolve whether traditional medicine or teaching works, but is rather describing the grammatical context (language-games) in which efficacy-claims become regarded as certain. Not 'backsliding' into explanation of things as they are in-themselves (Rorty, 1999), Wittgenstein shows instead how "Essence is expressed by grammar" (PI§371). Exegetically, these statements appear to leave Wittgenstein's philosophical concerns squarely on the analytic side of Hume's fork.

Philosophical problems ...are not empirical problems: they are solved, rather, by looking into the workings of our language, and that in such a way as to make us recognise those workings: in spite of an urge to misunderstand them. The problems are solved, not by giving new information, but by arranging what we have always known. Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language. (PI§109)

Following Wittgenstein onto this analytic side it is quite another thing to suppose one can pull up the draw bridge and proclaim teaching beyond the purview of empirical science. Siegel and Phillips (2013) indicate (perhaps unfairly) that Carr hazards this move in proclaiming that “the forms of human association characteristic of educational engagement are not really apt for scientific or empirical study at all” (Carr 2003, 54–5).

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His reasoning is that educational processes cannot be studied empirically because they are processes of “normative initiation”—a position that as it stands begs the question by not making clear why such processes cannot be studied empirically. (Siegel and Phillips, 2013)

But there has to be more backing, we commonly think, warranting asserted pedagogies than Foucault’s historically decanted ‘games of truth’ or Rorty's 'solidarity' with agreeable practitioners (see Putnam, 2002, 100).11 Addressing Rorty, McDowell (2000, 137) argues that philosophers risk losing their 'sanity' when rejecting the possibility that 'inquiry can be normatively beholden not just to current practice but to its subject matter'.12 Parsing 'soundness' through McDowell (135), avoiding pitfalls of linguistic-idealism and anti-realism: "Open-eyed to contingency," we cannot afford a "dismissive attitude to the very idea of making ourselves answerable to the world."

We must indeed avoid the illusion of transcendence...but we do not put our capacity to do so at risk if we insist that in claim-making we make ourselves answerable not just to the verdicts of our fellows but to the facts themselves. (McDowell, 2000, 140)

Though McDowell cites scientific cases like cold fusion, here we wonder whether restoration of ‘facts’ means there are 'right ways' of teaching epistemology or math, attuned to 'how things really are' (134) in terms of techniques, capacities and causal learning conditions. How can we weigh claims to veracity behind contending educational practices, without slipping back into logical-positivism’s verificationism, and, given student diversity, which possible worlds beckon account? Forster (2004, 174) notes that Wittgenstein moved away from earlier notions of finding meaning through verification, often inquiring instead, "How is the word learned?"

Asking whether and how a proposition can be verified is only a particular way of asking "How d'you mean?" The answer is a contribution to the grammar of the proposition. (PI§353)

In cases explored below, meaning pivots around questions like: "How can someone mean 'theory of knowledge' is not 'epistemology'?" or "Am I as sure that JUMP improves math competency as of sensations that rain is imminent?" (PI§354). Seeing these as grammatical rather than empirical questions, we nonetheless face problems of access to intelligibility. Must one train 'blindly' or devoutly in these practices (ToK/JUMP) in order to grasp the answer or master techniques (cf.PI§198)? Religious appropriations of Wittgenstein shelter in the affirmative (Kerr, 1998).13 Forster notes opposition in Wittgenstein's later philosophy between the suggestion in Philosophical Investigations that one must be committed to the rule or grammar in order to grasp meaning, and a diversity thesis -- especially prominent in posthumously published works such as On Certainty and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (intended connection to the Investigations, PI,p.232) -- allowing intelligibility of alternate grammars and concepts

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(167). Forster finds exegetical resolution and more philosophical plausibility in taking the less severe interpretation among: (a) barring understanding if one has not joined into a social tradition; or, (b) 'making social tradition a causal and normative obstacle preventing easy access' to alternate grammars or concepts (164). He compares this limitation on understanding 'others' with Wittgenstein's anti-sceptical thinking in On Certainty, where, without precluding interpretation of others, Wittgenstein emphasises limitations to what we can readily doubt. Entrenchment in 'world-pictures' causes us to feel "intellectually very distant" from those who think differently (OC§108).

How does it come about that doubt is not subject to arbitrary choice? -- And that being so – might not a child doubt everything because it was so remarkably talented? (Z§409)

A person can doubt only if he has learned certain things…. (Z§410)

Philosophically implausible, however, is the notion that we cannot bridge these differences when in daily life and in teaching, certainly, we so often do.

I want to say: an education quite different from ours might also be the foundation of quite different concepts. For here life would run on differently. (Z§387-88;cf.PI,p.230)14

Defending Rorty's 'contingency' without invalidating critical reactions to his spade-turning concept of 'solidarity', danger comes in going down dead-end paths of essentialism (1999).15 Instead of lamenting the poverty of our epistemic situation, post-linguistic turn, Rorty invites escape from metaphysical pictures long holding us captive (PI§115). With Dewey he sees education as neither inducing or educing truth: most often at the primary and secondary level it establishes what elders regard as true and then promotes more critical inquiry later in post-secondary education ('Socialization and Individuation', 1999, p.118). Today we push those limits on critical thinking into lower grades (see Stickney, 2014). Not that Rorty or Dewey first noticed this contradiction; Kant's Pedagogy turned apposition between methods and goals in child-rearing into a philosophical antinomy.

One of the greatest problems in education is, How can subjection to lawful constraint be combined with the ability to make use of one’s freedom? For constraint is necessary. How shall I cultivate freedom under conditions of compulsion? I ought to accustom my pupil to tolerate a restraint upon his freedom, and at the same time lead him to make good use of his freedom. (Kant, 1904, §29,p.131).

The schoolboy believes his teachers and his schoolbooks. (OC§263)

What we believe depends on what we learn.... (OC§286)

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Mocking his critics, Rorty defies epistemology's quest: "truth can safely be neglected" (1999,p.118), noting that "Dewey put a new twist on the idea that if you take care of freedom, truth will take care of itself." Re-describing this neo-pragmatist stance in an interview (2006,142), "It suggests that there are lots of ways of describing things; and that we choose among languages on the basis of utility, not on the basis of correspondence to the true nature of experience." Addressing such aporia, Wittgenstein observes that in flagging some assertions as 'true' we have not demonstrated correspondences promised by robust empiricism.

Well, if everything speaks for an hypothesis and nothing against it – is it then certainly true? One may designate it as such. – But does it certainly agree with reality, with the facts? With this question you are already going around in a circle. To be sure there is justification; but justification comes to an end. (OC§191-92)

Equally, he defends against accusations of 'reductionist behaviorism'. But doesn’t anything physical correspond to it? I do not deny that. (And suppose it were merely our habituation to these concepts, to these language-games? But I am not saying that it is so.) If we teach a human being such-and-such a technique by means of examples – that he then proceeds like this and not that in a particular new case, or that in this case he gets stuck, and thus that this and not that is the ‘natural’ continuation for him: this of itself is an extremely important fact of nature. (Z§355)16

Viewed from Wittgenstein's post-foundational epistemology, criteria for what counts as 'sane' pedagogy are both infused with social values (linguistically filtered under descriptions 'all the way down') and defeasible, resting upon shifting bedrock -- open to ranges of interpretation or alternate reactions based on enculturation into ingrained educational pictures and practices (PI§218;OC§§94-98). Without hope of settling grand controversies in epistemology, or looking upon 'sound pedagogy' as resolvable someday by educational ‘science’ (PI§308;PI,p.232), Wittgenstein directs us to look at how practitioners operate fluently or become entangled with ‘agreements in judgment’ (PI§242).

The agreement, the harmony, of thought and reality consists in this: if I say falsely that something is red, then, for all that, it isn’t red. And when I want to explain the word “red” to someone, in the sentence ‘That is not red,’ I do it by pointing to something red. (OC§429)

Wittgenstein’s point is not that human agreement makes things red, but that we are taught to regard them as such (Z§422-32).

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For I describe the language-game “Bring something red” to someone who can himself play it. Others I might at most teach it. (Relativity.) (Z§432)

Not anticipating resolution, we amble through several contexts of application in this problem-space, lending educational relevancy to familiar polemics. As Wittgenstein clarifies, the goal is to shift the pivotal interest of our investigation from disengaged theorizing to perspicuous description of particular cases: “the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need” (PI§108)

3. Contradictions and logic-bridges Debating effects of contradictions within mathematical systems (e.g., 1=0, or anything can be derived from a contradiction: p and ~p) Wittgenstein drew sharp rebuttal from Alan Turing, attending his seminars and also lecturing on the foundations of mathematics at Cambridge (1938-9). Not a mathematician of Russell’s or Turing’s calibre, Wittgenstein explored this topic by dealing with rudimentary cases: calculations familiar to students six-to-fifteen.17 To Wittgenstein's query, "Why are people afraid of contradictions?" when "nothing has been done wrong. ...where will the harm come?" Turing replied: "The real harm will not come in unless there is an application, in which a bridge may fall down or something of that sort" (LFM,XXI-XXII). If a bridge falls down it’s due to violation of some natural law, Wittgenstein rebutted, drawing a boundary between outside applications and contradictions internal to mathematics. Seeking to formalize mathematics and anticipating real-life applications, Turing saw internal contradiction as potentially catastrophic: "You cannot be confident about applying your calculus until you know there is no hidden contradiction in it." Cora Diamond interprets Wittgenstein’s reply as suggesting hidden contradictions either go unnoticed, or can be ignored in practice.18 Fortunately, educators don’t always act on policy absurdities: teachers often work effectively in spite of contradictory rules.19 Philosophical Investigations finds Wittgenstein lingering here a decade later, still arguing with Turing -- his imagined interlocutor.

It is the business of philosophy, not to resolve a contradiction by means of a mathematical or logico-mathematical discovery, but to make it possible for us to get a clear view of the state of mathematics that troubles us: the state of affairs before the contradiction is resolved. (And this does not mean that one is sidestepping a difficulty.) The fundamental fact here is that we lay down rules, a technique, for a game, and that then when we follow the rules, things do not turn out as we had assumed. That we are therefore as it were entangled in our own rules. This entanglement in our rules is what we want to understand (i.e. get a clear view of). It throws light on our concept of meaning something. For in those cases things turn out otherwise than we had meant, foreseen. That is just what we say when, for example, a contradiction appears: "I didn't mean it like that."

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The civil status of a contradiction, or its status in civil life: there is the philosophical problem. (PI§125)

Reading five indentations as musical notation -- 'bars' delivered from a philosopher wanting to be read adagio (CV,pp.57&68)20 -- this densely compacted cluster of staccato remarks hammers out tones resonating through several interrelated aspects of Wittgenstein's later philosophy: each of critical significance to the public lives we carry out within educational institutions. Frequently passed over in Wittgenstein commentary, this passage intervenes more familiar sayings: Philosophy "leaves everything as it is" (PI§124); it "simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. -- Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain," and therefore anything hidden "is of no interest to us" (PI§126). Occurring midway into the rule-following argument, he is more narrowly responding to his earlier project in the Tractatus and deflating aspirations of Russell, Turing and the logical positivists in contending that philosophy cannot provide foundations for language or mathematics (cf.PI,pp.224-32). Instead of providing a logical foundation with ‘crystalline purity’, Wittgenstein discovers one on the ‘rough ground’ (PI§107): wonderfully flawed, but operating well enough in the flow of life. Often taken as indication of Wittgenstein’s latent conservatism, philosophical non-intervention clears the path for normative training and mastery of techniques to appear (§§185-201) as the only ground remaining for appraising ‘correct’ reactions to rules. Wittgenstein joins the closing passages on rule-following (§§241-2) with the topic of expert judgement: comparing relative certainty in mathematical truths (calculations) and reading emotions or intentions in faces (PI,pp.224-27). In both rule-following and expert judgment, something has to remain stable as ‘given’, and this ungrounded-ground (OC§§166,253) is forms of life or ‘agreement in judgments’.21 Here we find political aspects dwelling alongside the epistemological, with relevant application to educational policy and teacher training. So often we find ourselves bewildered at how our games turn out (PI§109). Entangled in rules governing education, we are caught in shallow contradictions nobody on the outside can rectify -- least of all indifferent philosophers! At most posting these to our attention, philosophers are ‘not sidestepping difficulty’ by withholding resolution: something agents must negotiate or improvise themselves. Upon inspection, contradictions reflect back on the realization that in most cases, 'meaning is found in use' and is 'sometimes explained by pointing to its bearer' (PI§43), as when we see our policies or curricula interpreted differently than intended and flag our intentions. The weight or value we give to contradictions, sometimes ignoring them and at other times falling out, can have immense significance in public life -- certainly of interest to philosophers, as are deviations in ways people react to the rules and training (PI§185;Z§355). Not adopting the role of grammar-police or arbiter of correctness, Wittgenstein did not think such minutia was beneath philosophical inspection. Deflationary tones resonate here with trademark separation of philosophical from empirical matters:

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What we find out in philosophy is trivial; it does not teach us new facts, only science does that. But the proper synopsis of these trivialities is enormously difficult, and has immense importance. Philosophy is in fact the synopsis of trivialities. (CL,#2,p.26;cf.PI§122)22

Heeding Wittgenstein, we are seeking the synoptic or perspicuous view (PI§122) of the linguistic and practical situation out of which such contradiction arises, surveying the grammar of what possibly makes sense for us -- at this juncture in our history and culture. Ingloriously, "destroying houses of cards" (PI§118): “... the results of philosophy are the uncovering of one or another piece of plain nonsense and of the bumps that the understanding has got by running its head against the limits of language” (PI§119).23 But on Wittgenstein's account, philosophy does not fix problems internal to mathematics, nor interfere with actual usage of language (PI§126,132). "A 'leading problem of mathematics' is for us a problem of mathematics like any other" (PI§124). Philosophically, this means that gaining overview results neither in refinement or completion of rules/systems (PI§133), but therapeutic dissolution of the problem haunting us; it "gives philosophy peace," helping us to "stop doing philosophy when we want to." Not that solutions are impossible or ineffable, leading to defeatism or quietism.24 Linguists and mathematicians develop solutions on their own.

Such a reform for particular practical purposes, an improvement in our terminology designed to prevent misunderstandings in practice, is perfectly possible. But these are not the cases we have to do with. The confusions which occupy us arise when language is like an engine idling, not when it is doing work. (PI§132)

Sometimes boundaries are established in order that we transgress them (OC§499).25 More constructively, Wittgenstein describes practical solutions to contractions as opening alternate avenues to road-blocks, or bridgework (cf. RFM,I.163-66; Medina, p.154).26

Contradiction is between one rule and another, not between rule and reality. One feels that a wrong rule is an obstruction in the way, but in fact it is only another different way. If you give the wrong rule, you give a different rule. If you feel unable to get over the obstruction, it is not in the physical sense 'unable'. In the physical sense you can try to remove the obstruction. In the other sense it is a choice between one or other calculus. (LC,pp.93-4).

The lesson drawn from contradictions is that rules embed no deeper than in their teaching, giving surficial ground for judging correct application; open to interpretation, instructors and administrators nonetheless do not countenance rule-deviation. Pupil

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and teacher incorrigibility leads educators to consider causes: bad habits of teaching/ learning, or lacking capacities to learn (cf.PI§144). Wittgenstein directs us instead to witness the instruction, or avenue, securing felicitous performance: "Once you have got hold of the rule, you have the route traced for you" (RFM,VI,31).

…What is the criterion for the way the formula is meant? Presumably the way we always use it, the way we were taught to use it. (RFM,I.1-2)

Frequently using scenes of learning to free us from assuming there is only 'one right way’, Wittgenstein constructs an imaginary word ('Boo') to depict training into common use through ostensive definition (e.g., 'that coat's colour'):

The point is that one only has to point to something and say, “This is so-and-so”, and everyone who has been through a certain preliminary training will react in the same way. (LFM,XIX,pp.182)27

And when we automatically follow rules of usage, regarding the colour as 'Boo', what then? His interlocutor (Turing) questions whether there are ‘right rules’ for usage, or ten-thousand meanings. Wittgenstein rebuts:

– It sounds as if your learning how to use it were different from your knowing its meaning. To know its meaning is to use it in the same way as other people do. “In the right way” means nothing. You might say, “Isn’t there something else, too? Something besides the agreement? Isn’t there a more natural and a less natural way of behaving? Or even a right and a wrong meaning?”... This hangs together with the question of how to continue the series of cardinal numbers. Is there a criterion for the continuation – for a right and wrong way – except that we do in fact continue them in that way, apart from a few cranks who can be neglected? ...28 One might say, “But are you saying, Wittgenstein, that all this is arbitrary?” – I don’t know. Certainly as children we are punished if we don’t do it in the right way. (LFM,XIX, pp.182-83)

So-called 'cranks' respond differently to training, as though having different natural reactions (PI§185). But it is not just agreement of familiars that makes something right; as Rorty argues (2006,32,41&145), we can expand the context of contingent application and communication within the widest aperture of free and open inquiry; not reading philosophy as a quasi-scientific endeavor while awaiting geniuses like Wittgenstein to come along and "kick over the chessboard."

Following a rule is analogous to obeying an order. We are trained to do so; we react to an order in a particular way. But what if one person reacts in one way and another in another to the order and the training? Which one is right?...

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The common behaviour of mankind is the system of reference by means of which we interpret an unknown language. (PI§206; cf.§207)29

Instead of ruling-out possible sense on external or logical criteria, Wittgenstein asks us to consider ‘surroundings’ where usage finds a home: inventing or adapting language-games where a technique could be practiced, and thus a context to which its sense and degree of certainty is relative (PI,p.214). “If someone wanted to alter the number series to read 12, 14, 13,” he remarks, “This would be immensely impractical, inconvenient – but not wrong” (LFM,VIII,p.83). Questioning whether it would be useless or uninteresting to leave 13 out of mathematics, he remarks:

… It may under certain circumstances be very useful to count differently.... There is discovery that 13 follows 12. That’s our technique – we fix, we teach, our technique that way. If there is a discovery – it is that this is a valuable thing to do. (LFM,VIII,p.83)

Sounding like pragmatism (OC§422)30, Wittgenstein grounds 'reasonableness' in sustainable, communal practices.31 Arguing with Turing over the flexibility of the word ‘analogous’ – an identity term needed for other teachings to be effective – Wittgenstein counters:

The point is indeed to give a new meaning to the use of the word ‘analogous’. But it is not merely that for one is responsible to certain things. The new meaning must be such that we who have had a certain training will find it useful in certain ways. (LFM,VI,p.66)

Finding ourselves at loss to explain why techniques or models suit given purposes, we easily fall back on shared perspective, pointing to what seems obvious to most: "A good ground is one that looks like this" (PI§483). We can never articulate fully the circumstances or holistic-context for judging meaning and appropriateness (Taylor, 1995c). Nor can we teach someone explicitly how to judge suitability of teaching practices, though they can learn gradually through practice and with guidance (PI, p.227).32

It is not only difficult to describe what appreciation consists in, but impossible. To describe what it consists in we would have to describe the whole environment. (CV§20,p.7)

Explanations for rule-following lead to an infinite regress problem (each explanation begs further clarification, PI§198). Like social-dancing, cultural context forms the basis upon which we interpret innovations to the rules or appraise new ‘steps’. Having the wrong look, or misstep registers as ‘impractical’ or 'unhandsome' (Cavell, 1990) against the background of collected techniques or rules within the educational community. Being accustomed to rules and meanings provides comfortable range (ethos) within

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which to dwell, also rendering occupants vulnerable to reaction when someone deviates from expected patterns.

A poet’s words can pierce us. And this is of course causally connected with the use that they have in our life. And it also is connected with the way in which, comfortable to this use, we let our thoughts roam up and down in the familiar surroundings of the words. (Z§155)

Of course people differ without being 'cranks'. ‘We’ don't always share the same bedrock certainties or reactions.33 Mouffe (2000, §27), citing Tully (1989), warns against inscribing homogeneity into Wittgenstein, inviting ready accusations of conservatism (see Gasparatou, 2009; Heyes, 2003, and Burbules, 2005 counter).34 Entertaining alternatives offers promise that, “Our way of seeing is remodelled” (RFM,IV.30). Macmillan (1995) cautions that students with learning disabilities may find themselves outside ‘normal’ reactions, living alternate forms of life. Their questions or doubts may be unintelligible to the frustrated teacher (OC§310).35

For how can a child immediately doubt what it is taught? That could mean only that he was incapable of learning certain language-games. (OC§283)

Accepting contingency without excluding diversity, forms of life limit ranges of rule-alteration in education, referring back to utility or sensibility apparent for communities of practitioners.

“We are sure of it” does not just mean that every single person is certain of it, but that we belong to a community which is bound together by science and education. (OC§298)

3. Arbitrariness in grammar: ToK ≠ Epistemology * [Extemporaneous: Not read at conference, from here to page 19.]

I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. (PI,viii). Adopting Wittgenstein's methods, building upon seemingly arbitrary curricula will help to 'clear the fog' and gain 'clearer perspective' (PI§5) before moving onto contending math paradigms. Observe how:

With different training the same ostensive teaching of these words would have effected a quite different understanding. (PI§6)

Training for the International Baccalaureate’s Theory of Knowledge course (ToK, 2014) I startled, hearing that examiners count hypothetical cases in student essays as grounds for 'deduction'. Strangely, creativity registers negatively when epistemology was built upon thought-experiments and just as IB added 'imagination' as one of the

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eight Ways-of-knowing.36 Visceral reaction stems from regarding ToK as Epistemology, therefore contradictory, whereas IB considers it separate from Philosophy. Former ToK textbooks read like introductions to philosophy, including canonical thinkers in epistemology and ethics, proofs of the existence of god, social contract theory, philosophy of science and math, aesthetics, formal and informal logic, etc. Newer texts focus on embedding Ways-of-knowing (WoKs) in various Areas-of-knowledge (AoKs), making ToK a seminar on reasoning across disciplines. IB means a different thing by 'theory of knowledge' than Russell or Grayling: not epistemology per se, but a ToK language-game exploring WoKs-in-AoKs. Does it make sense? It engages students in critical thinking, a necessary-but-insufficient condition logically entailed in teaching epistemology (Siegel, 2008, 81), but it ejects traditional epistemology content.

TOK is a course about critical thinking and inquiring into the process of knowing, rather than about learning a specific body of knowledge. (ToK Guide for 2015, p.8)

Bringing Wittgenstein's later philosophy to bear on minutia like the connotative range of ‘ToK’ appears overblown, but he sought to dissolve such muddles through philosophical reflection on grammar, often surveying the 'surroundings of words' (PI§217&530-32;PI,p.219;Z§§155&534). Indeterminacy over what counts as legitimate "theory of knowledge" does not render arbitrary teaching methods for engaging students in critical inquiry. Teacher expertise builds upon a repertoire of partly ineluctable (PI,pp.227-8) techniques for deftly manoeuvring familiar problem-spaces, making rule-following in teaching akin to both conversation and social dance, or ‘embodied reasoning’ (Taylor, 1995a). The art or savoir faire of teaching is also closer to cooking in this regard, borrowing Wittgenstein's analogy, if we recall that there are many fine ways of cooking the same dish:

Why don't I call cookery rules arbitrary, and why am I tempted to call the rules of grammar arbitrary? Because 'cookery' is defined by its end, whereas 'speaking' is not.... You cook badly if you are guided in your cooking by rules other than the right ones; but if you follow other rules than those of chess you are playing another game; and if you follow grammatical rules other than such-and-such ones, that does not mean you say something wrong, no, you are speaking of something else. (Z§320;cf.,PI§§496-499)

Accordingly, IB-ToK is not 'wrong'-form: it's playing another game than epistemology, and as in most games the rules do not circumscribe or regulate all of the activities involved (PI§68). No underlying commonality or essence unifies all ToK or epistemology-games (cf.PI§§69-70 on 'games'), so it doesn’t matter whether teachers cover Hume’s fork or Wittgenstein's case of seeing forks as cutlery (PI,pp.194-5). Epistemologists teaching ToK may have to acquiesce, like Wittgenstein: "My life consists in my being content to accept many things" (OC§344).

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In Ontario, however, IB-ToK students earn credits for "Grade 12 Philosophy." Ministry curriculum stipulates including at least two core subjects (epistemology and either metaphysics or ethics) and one optional unit (philosophy of science, political philosophy or aesthetics). Ministry rules trump IB's (I can hear the dragon roaring in Cardiff), justifying teachers who choose to convert ToK into philosophical-survey courses. Colleagues in the Catholic separate-system teach ToK coupled with Religious Education, giving another variation. Entangled in conflicting rule-sets, we play two games simultaneously: primarily negotiating the meaning of ‘ToK’ iteratively with colleagues and students, while teaching. As in chess, rules reside in lists, in their teaching, and in the day-to-day practice of playing (PI§197).37 Although game-ambiguity makes quality assurance more difficult for IB, ensuring accordance with the rules and teacher accountability are problems encountered throughout education, inviting ineffective remedies like teacher-inspection (see Stickney, 2009a). What is the penalty for breaking curricular-rules? Who decides felicitous performance?38 Compare the case of inferring rules:

‘But am I not compelled, then, to go the way I do in a chain of inference?’ Compelled? After all, I can presumably go as I choose! ‘But if you want to remain in accord with the rules you must go this way’. Not at all, I call this ‘accord’. ‘Then you have changed the meaning of the word ‘accord’, or the meaning of the rule’. No; -- who says what ‘change’ and ‘remaining the same’ mean here? (RFM,I.113)

Grammatical flexibility doesn’t prove curriculum arbitrary. We must “stave off the craving for generality” (BB,p.18). In courses requiring sequential learning, like math and language, it matters greatly whether and when certain content or skills are covered: indeed, mastered through a variety of means reaching students with diverse needs. Not just any game will do, but too often Ministries attend to new menus instead of improving the cooking. 4. Wittgenstein as Educator: Arbitrariness and causation in learning Can we be certain about our approaches to math or language-training? Addressing this problem, here I set Wittgenstein's later remarks on training against the background of his own elementary-school teaching practices in rural Austria (1920-26), sorting empirical from philosophical matters applicable to the math wars. Wittgenstein’s practical approach to teaching was in keeping with child-centred movements in Austria, in vogue while attending Vienna’s Teacher Training College (1919-20; Phillips, 1977,7-10; cf. Savickey, 1999). Bartley, however, recalls Wittgenstein joking about these reforms: perhaps embracing the anti-scholastic spirit and practices, but amused by campaign rhetoric. Edmonds and Eidnow (2001, 61) also recall that “Wittgenstein poked fun at the programme’s ‘more vulgar slogans and projects.” Wittgenstein was

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cautious about ‘language gone on holiday’ (PI§38): “...Don’t let yourself be seduced by the terminology in common currency” (CV,p.74e).39 That early teaching-experience influenced later thinking at Cambridge is apparent from Wittgenstein’s use of orthography as a paradigmatic case40. Remarks on orthography adduce Wittgenstein’s general attitude toward flexibility within rules and practices.

Just as in writing we learn a particular basic form of letters and then vary it later, so we learn first the stability of things as the norm, which is then subject to alteration. (OC§473)

Appealing to the superintendent’s attention, Wittgenstein says his Dictionary for Elementary Schools (1926)41 has the goal “to fill an urgent need with respect to the present teaching of orthography” (Phil.,p.15). Prefacing the dictionary 'to make intelligible his general plan', he justifies violating standard rules of alphabetical order, recognized for efficiency and logic. As though making a philosophical refutation, he argues it reduces slippage in learning:

But if the purely alphabetic order inserts a heterogeneous word between two closely related ones, then in my opinion the alphabetic order demands too much from a child’s power of abstraction. Thus, because of the comprehension of words and the highly important saving of space, the purely alphabetic order often cannot be recommended. Equally, each instance of clinging to a dogmatic principle leads to an arrangement that does not suit our purpose and has to be abandoned – even if this would make the author’s work much easier. Rather, it is necessary to compromise again and again. (DES,p.23; emphasis added)

Wittgenstein’s pedagogy sought to reduce what we may see through On Certainty as erosion of bedrock (OC§94-98). Breaking convention, simplifying better secures learning, showing that teaching technique is not arbitrary. From what he refers to as his “subjective view” it was pedagogically better to group families of words sharing etymological roots, even if this method “clashes with the generally held principle of alphabetic order” (p.21).42 Pondering students' learning-slippage, he later remarked (1940):

A teacher may get good, even astounding, results from his pupils while he is teaching them and yet not be a good teacher; because it may be that, while his pupils are directly under his influence, he raises them to a height which is not natural to them, without fostering their own capacities for work at this level, so that they immediately decline again as soon as the teacher leaves the classroom. Perhaps this is how it is with me; I have sometimes thought so. (CV,p.38e)

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Wittgenstein later (c.1950) reflected on his certainty when professing the validity of his pedagogic techniques.

I myself wrote in my book that children learn to understand a word in such and such a way. Do I know that, or do I believe it? Why in such a case do I write not “I believe etc.” but simply the indicative sentence? (OC§290)

Weighing grammatical suitability in applying the concept ‘believing’ versus ‘knowing’43 when no doubt occurs in the flow of his teaching44, Wittgenstein distinguishes his philosophical from pedagogical remarks. Repeatedly, Wittgenstein notes that reflections on students 'taking things together' in arithmetic or learning the multiplication table are observations or "remarks about concepts, not about teaching methods" (PI,pp.208,227).45

Am I doing child psychology? I am making a connexion between the concept of teaching and the concept of meaning. (Z§412)

Philosophically, he was concerned at Cambridge with ontological problems of meaning instead of earlier training in 'pedagogical science.' Wittgenstein’s methods aver scientific approach (Standish, 1995), attending instead to enculturation (Smeyers, 1995, 2008).

When I write down a bit of a series, that you then see this regularity in it may be called an empirical fact, a psychological fact. But, if you have seen this law in it, that you then continue the series in this way – that is no longer an empirical fact. (RFM,VI.26; cf.PI§109)

Adumbrated here, science and philosophical-grammar they are like passing trains:

The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by. (PI,xiv,p.232).

Not throwing out empirical studies on the basis of this distinction, Wittgenstein’s advises not waiting for a future science of ‘mental states’ to answer our questions about what makes sense philosophically or pedagogically:

Sometime perhaps we shall know more about them – we think. But that is just what commits us to a particular way of looking at the matter. For we have a definite concept of what it means to learn to know a process better. (The decisive movement in the conjuring trick has been made, and it was the very one that we thought quite innocent.) (PI§308)

Deflating expectations, waiting for educational psychology to solve our problem of what constitutes ‘sound’ teaching is like anticipating ‘science’ to explain what is beautiful or tasteful.46

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Equally, however, Wittgenstein is not anti-etiological; recall that he came to Manchester to study aeronautical engineering (on how this training influenced his writing style, see Burbules).47 Demonstrating that interpretations of rules seem to 'hang in the air', unable to support or determine meaning, Wittgenstein draws an illustrative connection.

“Then can whatever I do be brought into accord with the rule?” -- Let me ask this: what has the expression of a rule – say a sign-post – got to do with my actions? What sort of connexion is there here? – Well, perhaps this one: I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do so react to it. But that is only to give a causal connexion; to tell how it has come about that we now go by the sign-post; not what this going-by-the-sign really consists in. On the contrary; I have further indicated that a person goes by a sign-post only in so far as there exists a regular use of sign posts, a custom. (PI§198)

His distinction shifts emphasis from etiological inquiries into learning, to inspection of training into culturally sanctioned practices and customs.

"How am I able to obey a rule?" -- If this is not a question about causes, then it is about justification for my following the rule in the way I do. (PI§217) Here we are not asking ourselves what are the causes and what produces this impression in a particular case. (PI,p.201, on seeing something as, say, a triangle)48

For Wittgenstein, causal relationships securing learning -- an educational psychology topic of possible importance in teaching -- is not a philosophical (ontological) issue, whereas degrees of arbitrariness and grammatical entanglement in educational language is ostensibly ‘philosophical’ (PI§§124-126).49 Pragmatic learning-theory as inquiry into causal processes (e.g., “teaching by means of indirection”) attends, fallibly but instrumentally, to causal learning-conditions.50 Although Wittgenstein appears to have been rearranging conditions to effect learning in his elementary classroom and dictionary, his later philosophical pursuit concerns how – once meaning is secured through training -- it ranges ‘sensibly’ within our grammar. * [Resume reading from here, for conference version.] Medina (2002, p.158) notes this separation from causes was made too insistently in the early 1930s, softening in Wittgenstein's thinking after 1938.51 Contrast his 1930s Cambridge lectures with 1940s emphasis (RFM and PI) on training securing rules.

The process of learning does not matter; it is history and history does not matter here. ...This laying down of a rule is exactly analogous to learning language. The

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laying down of the rule is not contained in following the rule; the laying down is history. (CL,#2,p.55)

In later reflections on learning, “He emphasizes that, through training processes, our behaviour becomes, not causally determined, but normatively structured; that is, we acquire the ability to engage in self-regulating behaviour” (Medina, p.159).52

So, for Wittgenstein, our training into techniques is more than an inductive process or a process of conditioning: it is a process of structuring behaviour until it becomes self-regulated. Learning processes of this kind endow us with more than behavioral dispositions or empirical certainties. These processes lead to the adoption of normative standards…. (Medina, p.159)53

Medina recalls Wittgenstein’s descriptions of cajoling students during training: “The words 'right' and 'wrong' are used when giving instruction in proceeding according to a rule. The word 'right' makes the pupil go on, the word 'wrong' holds him back" (RFM,VI.39;cf. Medina, pp.164-5). Through drilling-and-instilling students acquire, blindly, the normative attitude of their mentors.54

When I obey a rule, I do not choose. I obey the rule blindly. (PI§219)

Our children are not only given practice in calculation but are also trained to adopt a particular attitude towards a mistake in calculating. What I am saying is that mathematics is normative. But “norm: does not mean the same thing as “ideal.” (RFM,VII.61)

But this inculcation into norms is not simply what liberal-analytic philosophers have eloquently opposed as the ‘suppression of reason’. As the McCarthy’s remind us: their ability to critique ‘doctrinaire’ teaching and mere ‘conditioning’ hinges on rudimentary training into the concepts being mapped. Medina offers important qualification: that the higher goal of initiate-training is to open possibilities rather than merely fix them. Training students into normative attitudes, teachers create regularities, a “consensus of action” leading toward mastery of techniques (PI§199)55; adept pupils, however, show more autonomous, self-corrective behaviour within the rules.56 Higher functioning is a worthy goal, but it cannot form the standard upon which we evaluate earlier training.

6. JUMP Math and Possible Worlds

Nothing seems to me less likely than that a scientist or mathematician who reads me should be seriously influenced in the way he works.... I ought never to hope for more than indirect influence. (CV,pp.61-62)

Junior Undiscovered Math Prodigies is a social justice initiative aimed at improving math competency for all students.57 Seeing the ‘ubiquitous bell curve’58 as indication of methodological problems instead of dim realities, JUMP strives to place most students

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into the 80-90th percentile by not underestimating their ability. Developed by mathematician and playwright John Mighton, the charity aims to fulfill children’s intellectual potential by providing teacher training and curricula based on 'guided discovery' in “meticulous, well formulated steps” (Mighton, 2003, p.43).59 If you miss a step in math you cannot go on; losing confidence stifles progress.60 Math teaching promoting anxiety is circularly linked with perpetuation of 'the myth of ability' (Mighton, 2003). "What if this belief itself was the main cause of the problem," Mighton asks? His goal is to break the negative feedback loop whereby missing one step leads to failure at math, ultimately diminishing possibilities in life. Basically, JUMP employs a 'guided approach to discovery' (e.g., unravelling puzzles and discerning patterns/rules/algorithms/theorems); steps are broken down into simplified language, often using models to aid comprehension. 'Guided repetition and practice are essential', with explicit instruction needed in developing facility with math notation (McIlroy, 2010). Compare Wittgenstein’s philosophical reflection on pedagogy:

Of course, we teach children the multiplication tables in the form of little sentences, but is that essential? Why shouldn’t they simply: learn to calculate? And when they can do so haven’t they learnt arithmetic? (RFM,I.143)

Struck by JUMP’s similarity with Wittgenstein's builder's language (the three-word language: 'block'/'slab'/'hilarious', appearing in Mighton’s movie-script Possible Worlds), and finding his Masters Philosophy dissertation (Mighton,1982) on the Philosophical Investigations, I discovered that Wittgenstein's influence permeates Mighton’s artistic, philosophical and mathematical thinking.61 Asking John if similarity was more than coincidence, he replied (Toronto: October, 2014):

I'm not sure exactly how Wittgenstein influenced my work for JUMP-- it would be interesting to see if any of the methods used in JUMP derive from or are in keeping with Wittgenstein's ideas. But I know that Wittgenstein had a profound effect on my work in theatre and in mathematics. I learned a way of thinking from him that I apply everywhere (in particular, asking if things have to be a certain way or if we are being misled by language). I also feel a deep attraction to his mystical perception of the world and love his prose style and the general style of his work. I refer to Wittgenstein several times in my book The End of Ignorance. Part of the central argument of that book is that in education we are constantly seduced by questionable arguments because they are framed in very appealing and progressive sounding language. Unfortunately the ideas behind those arguments do a great deal of damage to kids and condemn our society to deep inequalities. (They also fly in the face of rigorous research in cognitive science.) I also look at some of the ways educators are misled by language (through

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equivocation and so on). So in that respect, I would say that Wittgenstein had an influence on my work in education. JUMP has gathered a large body of evidence that suggests that it would be worthwhile for schools to test the program, but we are facing a lot of resistance from math consultants. The school system unfortunately is more faith based than evidence based. We are trying to change that.

JUMP found considerable success in Vancouver, Ontario, the US and in London’s inner-city Lambeth Borough. Empirical claims for validity are supported by two randomized, controlled studies (Mighton, 2013), with the U.S. Department of Education funding the $2.7 million, two-year study at Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto comparing students working from Ontario's math curriculum with another group in JUMP training. Coupled with statistical evidence are encouraging qualitative reports from teacher testimonials and district implementation studies. Despite mounting evidence, however, JUMP has come under fervent attack. Wittgenstein frequently reminds us that arguments rarely break out over solutions to mathematical problems62, however tempers flare over its teaching techniques. Here, on the "mathematics battleground" we observe the convergence of facts and values (Putnam, 2002, 36) in an ethically ‘thick’ problem of what constitutes ‘sound teaching’. Opposition to JUMP is rooted in an alternate picture: Discovery learning (broadly conceived) belongs to a 'paradigm' (Kuhn, 1977) or 'social imaginary' (Taylor, 2004) grounded in Rousseau (1979) and Dewey's (1938) progressive, applied-learning philosophies. Some versions include directed investigation: not simply dropping students into problem-spaces to ‘figure it out your-self’. Fearing ‘drill-n-kill’ methods, JUMP's detractors also draw on presuppositions and values inherited distally from the professoriate's immersion in the liberal-analytic school of philosophy of education (c.1960s-90s; Hirst, 1971, Spieker, 1991): reasonable suspicions that rudimentary training is more akin to conditioning or indoctrinating into unshakable, irrational mindsets than teaching pupils how to weigh evidence and demand justifications.63 Education in this liberal-analytic mode of thinking has been quite successful in armouring teachers against administrative efforts to indoctrinate or proselytize them into new paradigms of education; as representatives of the various liberal arts, autonomous professionals reasonably demand evidence or justification for changing practice (Stickney, 2015). So it's not that educators are wrong to hold these fears, or like post-analytic philosopher Aaron Ridely (1998) --- drawing on Collingwood -- to 'inveigh' against education reforms that reduce teaching to the 'supine' act of transferring technique: purveying learning skills or mere craft instead of engaging in more noble, liberal arts of making finer distinctions. But most artistry requires technique, building upon laborious training in fundamentals.

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Here we have a contradiction with considerable civic status (PI§125): adherence to liberal principles we wish to uphold may prejudice assessment of JUMP’s training methods. Ironically, rational and empirical arguments for experimenting with JUMP are suppressed in the interests of promoting critical thinking, stemming from entrenchment in idolized views of open-discovery as the only avenue to autonomy and creativity. Mighton responds: "In all the debates that are going on, we think it’s a bad idea to throw [discovery learning] out, but the other side is right also. ...The parents and those who want to go back to basic math are right in some sense: You need to combine the discovery with guidance” (Carlson, 2014). Overreacting to terms like ‘fundamental' or 'basic training' in math can halt innovation in the classroom; in worst-case scenarios, forming ideological blocks on reasonable, evidence-informed discussion of effective pedagogy.64

The effect of making men think in accordance with dogmas,.... It is not a wall setting limits to what can be believed, but more like a brake which, however, practically serves the same purpose; it’s almost as though someone were to attach a weight to your foot to restrict your freedom of movement. (CV,p.28e)

Instead of being guided by faith Mighton requests educators consider the evidence and enter into the training before ruling JUMP techniques ‘outlandish’. What appears at first as 'logical insanity' may become customary upon initiation. Wittgenstein created scenes of imaginary woodcutters using seemingly incomprehensible selling practices (by area instead of volume, or even by effort, RFM,I.146-151), or people using worn coins with no apparent value (RFM,I.151-2), to demonstrate that meaningful usage hinges off training into a consensus of action.

It is perfectly possible that we should be inclined to call people who behaved like this insane. And yet we don’t call everyone insane who acts similarly within the forms of our culture, who uses words ‘without purpose’. (Think of the coronation of a King.) (RFM,I.152)

Paraphrasing Medina's reading of Wittgenstein's 'liberal-contextualism': confronted with estrangement from Others' techniques ‘we can either train the aliens into our practices to fill normative and conceptual gaps, or we can enter into processes of negotiation and mutual clarification with the aliens’. He concludes: “we are not forced to withdraw the presumption of intelligibility on a priori grounds even when no such understanding can be obtained. After all, the recognition of a gap that we have been so far unable to bridge does not warrant the conclusion that the gap is in principle unbridgeable” (Medina, pp.153-4).65 Under benign conditions of professional autonomy (free-play) it may be incumbent on recalcitrant teachers to openly enter into new practices like JUMP: training and trying in classrooms what at first appeared uncanny, improvising with novelties instead of rejecting them out-of-hand. Easily dismissed as trivial, such attempts to broker understanding are crucial to ethical regard of others and to negotiation of 'freedoms in the rules' that unnecessarily bind us (Tully, 2002, 2003).66

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Regarding Forster's rejection, that adepts need to embrace training wholeheartedly in order to internalize rules, this proviso would require sampling innumerable techniques available in the 'marketplace' of educational discourses. On who's advice do superintendents or teachers buy into programs, expending limited resources? 'Consumer reports' help us see JUMP as a "possible world" for viably improving math education for many pupils, altering the universe of possibilities for disadvantaged learners. Teaching academically challenged ‘work-place’ destined students, Tara Arnott (Darlington, ON) explains that JUMP plugged major gaps in fundamental skills (cf. Winch, 2006). Experimenting with JUMP, she wonders whether rebranding in Dweck’s (2012, 2006) popular terminology around 'growth mindsets' could open avenues for the program.67 Educators captured in discovery-learning 'pictures' (PI§115) of what works, however, do not create the 'logical space' (Owen, 2003, 90) to entertain second-order beliefs about the truth or falsity of their first order beliefs; consequently, alternate pictures cannot find their way in, creating conditions of model-entrapment.

The truth cannot force its way in when something else is occupying its place. To convince someone of the truth, it is not enough to state it, but rather one must find the path from error to truth. (RFGB, Phil.,p.119)68

As Mighton concedes, and as I argue concerning liberal-analytic conceptions of learning in relation to Wittgenstein's emphasis on normative training, it is not an either/or. Educators need convincing by reasons and demonstration, otherwise feeling infantilized during education reforms; initiation into practices is part of training and deliberative processes, without presuming 'trying is believing'. Witnessing combinations in practice (in the conservatory), and addressing McDowell’s demand for “answering to the world,” I asked my colleague Andrew Wilson at University of Toronto Schools what he made of the conflict. Working together on a high school philosophy text (Stickney et al, 2011), Andrew wrote the logic unit. Not surprisingly, he saw this as a ‘false dichotomy’ fallacy. Teaching more gifted math students, classes begin with a JUMP-start drill to ‘rev up their minds’ and to ‘develop neuro-plasticity’ by exercising basic operations; he then moves into an inquiry task, developing more elaborate lessons around central problems; and then they move into investigation, where higher cognitive tasks and critical thinking are required. Some lessons/assignments also involve composition, though at an introductory level. Arguing from analogy, he asks: "Would we criticize music teachers for having students do their scales?"69 Relying on discovery learning alone means students must perform many rich applications before arriving at eureka moments of recognizing underlying principles, which is something JUMP provides readily through well-chunked, coherent and logically sequenced lessons. But JUMP is not a self-sufficient panacea. Wilson likens math teaching to musical composition: designing integrated, developmentally-staged lessons and whole concertos/courses, comprising a coherent

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curriculum extending from Grades 7-12. All parts have to come together in ways students comprehend, building for successive years, with more complex mathematical inquiries as students mature. Challenging to conduct, given that his Grade 7 students come from 68 different elementary schools (with several teachers at each), where methods or emphases varied. Math curricula must build-in accommodations for students who focused on technique to the exclusion of theory or inquiry, or remedy over-emphasis on ‘authentic’ learning contexts (word-problems) by showing multiple but formulaic solutions to various problems -- providing basic tool-kits that allow for later exploration and creativity in math. Working with 68+ possible worlds of math teaching, Wilson is not developing a single training regimen or battery of problems (workbook) for all, but rather assemblages of exercises, strategies, prompts, inquiries, etc. that will assist diverse pupils pursue their alternate worlds in post-secondary programs and careers -- relatively few becoming engineers or accountants. Unfortunately, Wilson notes, proponents of ‘discovery math’ easily fall into the problem Kuhn (1977) identified where adherents ‘hire in their own image’. Supportive testimonials of experienced math teachers provide significant but limited evidence for JUMP’s efficacy; in this feedback loop, however, narrative accounts register positively only when cohering with everything else ‘we’ adhere to as true or agreeable (Cioffi, 1998).

But I did not get my picture of the world by satisfying myself of its correctness; nor do I have it because I am satisfied of its correctness. No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false. (OC§94)

Empirical studies cannot provide indubitable credibility either; given the messiness of learning-conditions, we rightly scrutinize adequacy of controls and immensurability of variables. Purported causes for learning may prove dubious, inviting caution on one hand and separation from philosophy on the other.

The insidious thing about the causal point of view is that it leads us to say: “Of course, it had to happen like that.” Whereas we ought to think: it may have happened like that – and also in many other ways. (CV,p.37e)

I worry, however, that in philosophy of education circles evidence-based research and neuroscience are too quickly dismissed as scientistic, deemed fraudulent on the basis of form instead of considering practical circumstances in which we readily weigh the fidelity of evidential claims for efficacy behind contending techniques. Do we cast less doubt on sports science (aerodynamic gear) and neuroscience of music (algorithms predicting hits), than on our ability to judge suitable means of teaching these topics?70 "Am I less certain that this man is in pain than twice two is four?" Wittgenstein queries, taking us back to context-relativity for the veracity of assertions.

I can be as certain of someone else's sensations as of any fact. But this does not make the propositions "He is depressed", and "25 X 25 = 625" and "I am sixty

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years old" into similar instruments. The explanation suggests itself that the certainty is of a different kind. -- This seems to point to a psychological difference. But the difference is logical. ...'Mathematical certainty ' is not a psychological concept. The kind of certainty is the kind of language-game. (PI,p.224)

Wright (2001, 73) notes that defeasibility comes in several kinds, here applied to JUMP: (1) Perhaps stronger evidence will be produced for discovery learning or for equally strong alternatives; (2) Perhaps there are alternative, equally plausible explanations for why data appear to support JUMP; or (3) Perhaps someone can fault the evidence, showing reasons for disqualifying the data. The first two, Wright explains, admit the data but dispute their capacity to warrant conclusions favouring belief. The third undermines the data. Wright argues cases are impeccable if immune to defeat in this third way; furthermore, it constitutes a genuine warrant for belief "if it is both impeccable and will not be defeated in either of the first two ways no matter what the additions to our knowledge." Crouched in Toulmin's (1969) argument-form (warrants for data, and qualifications on conclusions), Wright's formula teases us with reward of 'impeccability' while at the same time reminding us of fallibilist suspicions that endurance is implausible. (Rousseau's Emile is not our authority on breastfeeding.) Caught in the circle we started with, we arrive back at Wittgenstein's realization that – even for techniques that apparently work -- within our linguistically bounded gaze and eroding riverbed of certain knowledge (OC§§94-98) we can only hold or count things as true. Regarding the role of experiments in informing our practice Wittgenstein steps away from thorough anti-realism, again referring to how we learn to carry on.

I am taught that under such circumstances this happens. Not that that would prove anything to us, if it weren’t that this experience was surrounded by others which combine with it to form a system. ...But in the end I rely on these experiences, or on the reports of them, I feel no scruples about ordering my own activities in accordance with them. – But hasn’t this trust proved itself? So far as I can judge – yes. (OC§603) There are countless general empirical propositions that count as certain for us. (OC§273).

But is judging math teaching then just a matter of solidarity with like-minded others, as Rorty's solidarity-stance suggests (1989)? Wittgenstein repeatedly answers with ambivalence, leaning toward coherence over correspondence models of truth.

All testing, all confirmation and disconfirmation of a hypothesis takes place already within a system. And this system is not a more or less arbitrary and doubtful point of departure for all our arguments: no, it belongs to the essence of what we call an argument. The system is not so much the point of departure, as the element in which arguments have their life. (OC§105)

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Appraising pedagogic suitability or effectiveness rests upon similar, prior agreement in judgments (PI§242).

We do not learn the practice of making empirical judgments by learning rules: we are taught judgments and their connexion with other judgments. A totality of judgments is made plausible to us. (OC§140) 71

Cohesion also applies to the way we perform calculations or follow rules of logic, but it is not as if we check in with others to confirm our sensibility or vote on these agreements.

They are determined by a consensus of action: a consensus of doing the same thing, of reacting in the same way. There is a consensus but it is not a consensus of opinion. We all act the same way, walk the same way, count the same way.72 (LFM,XIX,pp.183-84)

7. Conclusion

In philosophizing we may not terminate a disease of thought. It must run its natural course, and slow cure is all important. (That is why mathematicians are such bad philosophers.) (Z§382)

Investigating contradictions internal to educational language-games reveals our linguistically-filtered process of weighing curricular options. Adopting Wittgenstein's post-foundational perspective avoids both vicious circularity of assuming firm standpoints for judging, and scepticism in rejecting any basis. Without releasing all realist footholds, agreement in forms of life and judgment (PI§§241-2) provides genealogical73 realization that pedagogical truth-claims are held in relation to temporally-specific, culturally-contingent and -intricate weaves of interrelated practices, customs, institutions, argument-forms and second-nature reactions (Z§§567-9;cf. OC§279-80,603;see Mulhall, 1999; Taylor, 1995a; Stickney, 2009b).74 Without conferring others or actively interpreting (PI§201),75 how we carry-on and determine accordance with curricular rules hinges upon shared bedrock knowledge and a consensus of practice, giving us limited pictures of pedagogic 'soundness'. Not the business of philosophy to solve contradictions internal to education, gaining perspective on them opens vexing philosophical problems. Frequently entangled in rules, educators naturally ask: “Where will the harm come?” Contradictions like [ToK ≠ epistemology] are rarely catastrophic: educators safeguard what communities of like-minded practitioners and students regard ‘reasonable'. The conflict between JUMP training and discovery learning models (informed by liberal-analytic conceptions of education) is a contradiction of greater civil status. Sharing background has conservative effect on education reform: brakes effectively stopping teachers from

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driving onto faulty bridges. Not only averring plunges into absurdity, however, conservation of practice can also halt critical assessment of and experimentation with alternative methods. Regarding initiatives foreign to us, it may be premature to judge that seemingly insane practices “make no sense” absolutely or objectively -- in supposed correspondence to reality. Alternate practices may more simply clash with the cultural background constitutive of our way of life, vogue theories causing reactionary response. Discovering degrees of arbitrariness in curricula and basing judgment of teaching practices on forms of life does not warrant stronger assertions that we cannot ascertain or rely upon any correspondence between learning theories and realities, nor any identifiable causes of learning retention. Sceptical readings of Wittgenstein's 'agreement in judgments' (PI§242) -- attributed (perhaps harshly) to Rory's concept of 'solidarity' by Putnam (2002, 100) and McDowell (2000) -- risk detaching ordinary truth claims from the kinds of 'certainty' to which teachers like Wittgenstein and Mighton attest. Wittgenstein’s suggestive remark, “At the end of reasons comes persuasion,” illustrated by ‘missionaries converting natives’ (OC§612) does not imply for educators that we do not need convincing reasons, nor liberally-educated teachers76 wrong to demand them when being inducted into education reforms or cast into paradigm shifts (see Stickney, 2009b). Wittgenstein's On Certainty implies more prudently that if we undergo initiate training into another way of acting and seeing, then perhaps some alien practices would not seem so unreasonable in context.

If someone asked us “but is that true?” we might say “yes” to him; and if he demanded grounds we might say “I can’t give you any grounds, but if you learn more you too will think the same”.

If this didn’t come about, that would mean that he couldn’t for example learn history. (OC§206)

“Is our confidence justified? – What we accept is shown by how we think

and live” (PI§235; cf.PI,p.200). Sorting empirical from grammatical questions to better inspect contradictions without actively resolving them, I hope not to sidestep either political or epistemological difficulties in revealing how educators become unnecessarily entangled in rules, or judge the soundness of various interpretations. Politically, philosophers may at best show the agents involved alternate pictures or concepts -- lending genealogical perspective and terms with which to re-describe their own entanglement. Although such perspicuous description of enthralling traps is a crucial precondition to engagement, 'rebellious' Ludwig doubted messianic abilities of avatars to extricate people: “those who following all their instincts live within the herd” (Phil.,185). Only a change in practice – ‘modes of thought and life’ -- can ‘cure the sickness of a time’: “not …medicine invented

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by an individual” (RFM,II.4). 'Answering to the world' to the best of our ability (albeit fallibly), we attend to educational subjects from our shared descriptions of 'the facts' concerning learning capacities and teaching techniques. When these descriptions disagree, as between ToK and epistemology or discovery and JUMP math, we fall back upon 'agreements in judgment' in arbitrating which is the most constructive model of learning to accept: not upon some metaphysical flight into the world itself, but into the many possible worlds77 our diverse students represent and which teachers encounter as active, mutually engaged learning-subjects in classrooms. # References Bartley, William Warren III (1974). Theory of Language and Philosophy of Science as Instruments of Educational Reform: Wittgenstein and Popper as Austrian Schoolteachers. In Methodological and Historical Essays in the Natural and Social Sciences, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science (14).

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Endnotes -- A ladder to be cast away. 1 Following convention, titles for Wittgenstein’s works are abbreviated (PI = Philosophical Investigations),

with section (§) or page number (p.), with full citation and initials (RFM) in the References. 2 Addressing Paul Hirst's (1971) deceptively simple question "How, upon entering classrooms, do

inspectors know 'teaching' is taking place and not crazy and fuzzy things in its name?" I wrote companion papers responding from Wittgenstein (2009a) and Foucault (2012). 3 When a teacher instructs a pupil to add 2 to 100, 200, 300, ….why is it ‘wrong', he wonders, for a pupil

to add 4 instead, when reaching 1000, 2000 ... -- frustrating teachers expecting 1000 + 2 (PI§185)? We say to him ‘Look what you’ve done!’ – He doesn’t understand. We say: ‘You were meant to add two: look how you began the series!’ (PI§185)

I do it, he does it after me; and I influence him by expression of agreement, rejection, expectation, encouragement. I let him go his way, or hold him back; and so on. Imagine witnessing such teaching. None of the words would be explained by means of itself; there would be no logical circle. (PI§208) 4 You must bear in mind that the language-game is so to say something unpredictable. I mean: it is not

based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is there – like our life. (OC§559) 5 The topic of teacher training refreshes a polemic with Michael Luntley carried out in EPAT's Special

Edition on Wittgenstein (see Luntley, 2007, 2008; Stickney 2008; cf. Simpson, 2014). Respecting Michael's work (see Luntley, 2003), I appreciate him rising to my challenge to "March onto the field with mace, axe and broad sword" -- well before Game of Thrones revived anachronistic dueling. Without revisiting exchanges I can perhaps clarify key distinctions between empirical and grammatical problems, between liberal-analytic philosophy and post-foundational epistemology, and between training as an almost animal activity and the rationally-autonomous enterprise of teaching as ‘the giving of reasons’. 6 Bill Daggett, International Center for Leadership in Education. See

http://premierespeakers.com/bill_daggett 7 How can he know how he is to continue a pattern by himself – whatever instruction you give him? –

Well, how do I know? – If that means “Have I reasons?” the answer is: my reasons will soon give out. And then I will act, without reasons. (PI§211) The danger here, I believe, is one of giving a justification of our procedure where there is no such thing as a justification and we ought simply to have said: that’s how we do it. (RFM,II.74; referring to how we check the accuracy of calculations by going over them again) 8 Andy Hargreaves, Quest conference (York Region, 2005).

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9See Stickney (2014) on judging dance.

...So how do we explain to someone what “understanding music” means? By specifying the images, kinaesthetic sensations, etc., experienced by someone who understands? More likely , by drawing attention to his expressive movements. – And we really ought to ask what function explanation has here. And what it means to speak of: understanding what it means to understand music. For some would say: to understand that means: to understand music itself. And in that case we should have to ask “Well, can someone be taught to understand music?”, for that is the only sort of teaching that could be called explaining music. (CV,p.70)

10 To what extent can the function of a rule be described? Someone who is master of none, I can only

train. But how can I explain the nature of a rule to myself? The difficult thing here is not, to dig down to the ground; no, it is to recognize the ground that lies before us as the ground. (RFM,VI.31; Wright, 2001, p.xi) 11

Foucault carefully noted rather late in his writing that he did not mean to suggest that there is no scientific validity to psychology. “…when I talk about power relations and games of truth, I am absolutely not saying that games of truth are just concealed power relations – that would be a horrible exaggeration. My problem… is in understanding how truth games are set up and how they are connected with power relations.” He elaborates: “One can show, for example, that the medicalization of madness, in other words, the organization of medical knowledge around individuals designated as mad, was connected with a whole series of social and economic processes at a given time, but also with institutions and practices of power. This fact in no way impugns the scientific validity or the therapeutic effectiveness of psychiatry: it does not endorse psychiatry, but neither does it invalidate it.” [Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern,” 296.] Likewise, to the critical question, “So is truth not a construction?” – Foucault, like Wittgenstein, answers by directing us to look at specific cases: “That depends. There are games of truth in which truth is a construction and others in which it is not.” [Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern,” 296-7.] Less mature sciences, like psychology, are more apt to make up arbitrary rules than mature ones like physics. Wittgenstein thought it laughable that psychology masqueraded as a ‘science’, after the paradigm and metric of mechanics and physics (PI,p.xiiv; LC,pp.28-29). At the end of the Investigations he remarks that the difference has less to do with psychology being younger, as though one day it will solve its problems, but with method and problem passing one another by. 12

Bernard Williams achieves this kind of craziness, offering a bizarre caricature in his introduction to Truth and Truthfulness ((2002, 10): "Philosophy, here, on lines various laid down by Hume, Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, needs to recall us to the everyday. All these writers, however, want to recall us to the everyday from the personal alienation of a fantastic philosophical scepticism which claims to doubt that there is an external world, or past time, or other minds." Our picture of the world is one of Wittgenstein's examples of bedrock we cannot doubt (OC§94-98), forming an axis around which our other inquiries rotate (PI§108). 13

Wittgenstein notes that members of religious forms of life reason differently in response to assertions about the final judgment (LC,pp.53-55). 14

...Our interest certainly includes the correspondence between concepts and very general facts of nature. (Such facts as mostly do not strike us because of their generality.) But our interest does not fall back upon these possible causes of the formation of our concepts; we are not doing natural science; nor yet natural history -- since we can also invent fictitious natural history for our purposes. I am not saying: if such-and-such facts of nature were different people would have different concepts (in the sense of a hypothesis). But: if anyone believes that certain concepts are absolutely the correct ones, and that having different ones would mean not realizing something we realize -- then let him

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imagine certain very general facts of nature to be different from what we are used to, and the formation of concepts different from the usual ones will become intelligible to him. (PI,p.230) 15

Hacking’s 'historical ontology’ (2002) avers problems of social constructivism by embracing a Wittgensteinian-Foucauldian hybrid of dynamic realism and historical nominalism. 16

The origin and the primitive form of the language game is a reaction; only from this can more complicated forms develop. Language – I want to say – is a refinement, ‘in the beginning was the deed.’ (CV,p.31e) 17

Wittgenstein explains that this is why he can lecture on the foundations of mathematics, even though he is not an expert like Russell or Whitehead (authors of Principia Mathematica), because as a philosopher he was dealing “with puzzles which arise from the words of ordinary everyday language, such as ‘proof’, ‘number’, ‘series’, ‘order’, etc. Knowing our everyday language – this is one reason why I can talk about them. Another reason is that all the puzzles I will discuss can be exemplified by the most elementary mathematics – in calculations which we learn from ages six to fifteen...” (LFM,p.14). 18

In particular, as Wittgenstein suggests, there is in fact no way that a “hidden contradiction” can vitiate a calculus as it is actually used. For if the contradiction remains “hidden,” it has no effect on our actual practice of calculation; and if it is “discovered,” then we need not act on it, and so again it can cause no harm. You might put it: There is always time to deal with a contradiction when we get to it. When we get to it, shouldn’t we simply say, 'This is no use—and we won’t draw any conclusions from it?" (Diamond, 1976,XXI, p.209) 19

By way of example, an Ontario outcomes-based learning initiative (OBL, 1993), unwittingly coupled "mastery learning" with conventional percentage-grades: discursively combining incommensurate-systems of evaluation. "Mastery at 60% (C-level)" is literally nonsense (<A ≠ A), as is failing students below A-level. Motivationally, "redoing-it" to higher standards increases student success and self-confidence. 'Hidden contradiction' did not obstruct reporting; teachers “raised the bar” (an OBL slogan) on achieving stipulated outcomes, reporting percentages in accord with Ministry regulations. 20

Sometimes a sentence can be understood only if it is read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly. (CV,p.57e) I really want my copious punctuation marks to slow down the speed of reading. Because I should like to be read slowly. (As I myself read.) (CV,p.68e) 21

Taylor (1995b) observes that here Wittgenstein (like Heidegger) employs a Kantian argument-form, making 'agreement' in our life-forms' language-games and judgments the a priori filter on how we see or regard everything (cf. PI,p.196; re: Heidegger, see Mulhall, 2001; Stickney, 2009b). Wittgenstein captures this hermeneutical turn in the course of his rule-following argument, pausing to note that there is way of seeing and grasping the meaning of a sign that is not an interpretation (PI§201). Comparing expressions of rules to following sign-posts, he addresses the sceptical question: "Then can whatever I do be brought into accord with the rule?" -- Answering in both cases: "I have been trained to react to this sign in a particular way, and now I do react to it" (PI§198). 22

What contradictions fill our in-boxes with furious chatter? Well, grading schemes are often arbitrary. Why are exams worth more/less than final papers? Marking the same papers (ToK essays/PESGB submissions), it is hard to gain agreement among evaluators using the same criteria. Why is this thesis unsatisfactory, or this paper in bad-form? Witness heated discussion as to whether teachers at either the secondary or post-secondary level should omit marks of 49%, where 50% equals "pass" and 51% commonly means "social promotion"; additionally, whether this procedure only makes sense at term-end, giving a definitive professional judgment of standing and reducing appeals, or also at mid-term.

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What was valuable at term-end proved capricious at midterm (over-ruled after three years' battle). Analytically, the midterm procedure ‘fudges’ or misinforms: calling the contest too early, it compromises principles of transparency in reporting as students cannot calculate their own course-standing, based upon contractual agreements in the syllabus as to weightings. Undermining grading and rounding norms could be catastrophic, but the new procedure could not gain purchase; ‘grounded’ in other-wise ungrounded practices (OC§§166,253,378), like an 'axis of rotation' (OC§152) our common grading norms (like hinge proposition) were not open to doubt.

This doubt isn’t one of the doubts in our game. (But not as if we chose this game!) (OC§317) 23

What we do is bring words back from their metaphysical to their ordinary use. (PI§116) 24

In making fine aesthetic distinctions, “the field of force of a word…is decisive” (PI,p.219).

If a theme, a phrase, suddenly means something to you, you don’t have to be able to explain it... Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. (Z§158)

In art it is hard to say anything as good: as saying nothing. (CV,23e)

The words we call expressions of aesthetic judgment play a very complicated role, but a very definite role, in what we call a culture of a period. To describe their use or to describe what you mean by a cultured taste, you have to describe a culture. (C&V, p.8) 25

To say “This combination of words makes no sense” excludes it from the sphere of language and thereby bounds the domain of language. But when one draws a boundary it may be for various kinds of reason. If I surround an area with a fence or a line or otherwise, the purpose may be to prevent something from getting in or out; but it may also be part of the game and players supposed, say, to jump over the boundary; or it may shew where the property of one man ends and that of another begins; and so on. So if I draw a boundary line that is not to say what I am drawing it for. (OC§499;cf.§500) 26

Language contains the same traps for everyone; the immense network of well-kept // passable // false paths. And thus we see one person after another walking the same paths and we know already where he will make a turn, where he will keep on going straight ahead without noticing the turn, etc., etc. Therefore wherever false paths branch off I should put up signs which help one get by the dangerous places. (Philosophy, p.185 ) A multitude of familiar paths lead off from these words in every direction. (PI§534) 27 Teaching which is not meant to apply to anything but the examples given is different from that which

‘points beyond’ them. (PI§208) 28

He goes further into the same argument made later in PI, over any criterion for following being an interpretation that itself hangs in the air – it is endless regress of interpretations of the original rule, “which can be reinterpreted in any way whatsoever” (LFM,p.183). 29

-- To obey a rule, to make report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions). To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique. (PI§199) 30

So I am trying to say something that sounds like pragmatism. Here I am being thwarted by a kind of Weltanschauung. (OC§422)

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This game proves its worth. That may be the cause of its being played, but it is not the ground. (OC§474) 31

Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end; -- but the end is not certain propositions’ striking us immediately as true, i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting, which lies at the bottom of the language-game. (OC§204) 32

Is there such a thing as ‘expert judgment’ about the genuineness of expressions of feelings? – Even here, there are those whose judgment is ‘better’ and those whose judgment is ‘worse’. Corrector prognoses will generally issue from the judgments of those with better knowledge of mankind. Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can. Not, however, by taking a course in it, but through “experience”. Can someone else be a man’s teacher in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip. -- That is what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here. – What one acquires here is not a technique; one learns correct judgments. (PI,p.227) 33

See Zerilli (2005, 44-49) for rule-following and criteria for gender roles. 34

See also Scheman and Medina on seeing from the margins as a central elements in Wittgenstein's thinking. 35

A pupil and a teacher. The pupil will not let anything be explained to him, for he continually interrupts with doubts, for instance as to the existence of things, the meaning of words, etc. The teacher says “Stop interrupting me and do as I tell you. So far your doubts make no sense at all”. (OC§310) Consider that you have to teach the child the concept. Thus you have to teach it evidence (the law of evidence, so to speak). …Remarkable the concept to which this game of evidence belongs. (LW,I,p.55e) While at school our children get taught that water consist of the gases hydrogen and oxygen, or sugar of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. Anyone who doesn’t understand is stupid. The most important questions are concealed. (CV,p.71e) 36

WoKs = Reason, perception, emotion, language, intuition, imagination, memory and faith. 37 Where is the connexion effected between the sense of the expression “Let’s play a game of chess”

and all the rules of the game? – Well, in the list of rules of the game, in the teaching of it, in the day-to-day practice of playing. (PI§197) 38

Imagine teacher inspections for 'quality assurance’ where subjects snap into alignment with expectations, albeit temporarily complying for appearances. When afraid we often ‘act quickly, with perfect certainty, and lacking reasons does not trouble’ performance (PI§212).

When someone whom I'm afraid of orders me to continue the series, I act quickly, with perfect certainty, and the lack of reasons does not trouble me. (PI§212)

Extrinsic motivation, however, secures either brief accord or prolonged dissimulation instead of intended uptake or compliance (Stickney, 2009a). After registering paradigm 'accord', out of purview, teachers easily slip into former habits: unless entering the training on good-faith and, as university-educated adults, accepting the rationale justifying change of practice. 39

Despite strict discipline, students later described Wittgenstein as a highly devoted if demanding teacher (see Bartley, 1985; Monk, 1990). In his elementary classroom (1920-26), Wittgenstein assiduously compiled words students used, forming a reference dictionary. Edmonds and Eidnow (2001, 61) note that “his dictionary was in keeping with the [reform] movement and the position in the Investigations that

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rural dialects could be in perfect order as they are.” Phillips (1977, p.8, citing Bartley,1985, p.117) claims that by keeping their own dictionary Wittgenstein’s students gained an appreciation of “the ambiguity of their own usage of the language.” In this sense, Wittgenstein was conservator of the child’s quotidian language: pedagogy congruent with his later philosophy – meaning-as-use (OC§61; cf. Lesnik-Oberstein, 2003). 40

One might think: if philosophy speaks of the use of the word “philosophy” there must be a second-order philosophy. But it is not so; it is, rather, like the case of orthography, which deals with the word “orthography” among others without being second-order. (PI§121) 41

At the time Wittgenstein was undergoing an inquest over his well-documented use of corporal punishment (e.g., accounts of pulling girls’ hair and cuffing boys’ ears, etc.); common practices at the time, the proceedings brought against him may have been inspired by other accusations concerning his ‘strangeness’. Wittgenstein's rather Nietzschean views of education appear untimely now.

I think the way people are educated nowadays tends to diminish their capacity for suffering. At present a school is reckoned good ‘if the children have a good time’. And that used not to be the criterion. Parents moreover want their children to grow up like themselves (only more so), but nevertheless subject them to an education quite different from their own. – Endurance of suffering isn’t rated highly because there is supposed not to be any suffering – really it’s out of date. (CV,p.71e)

42 Under alphabetic order the words alt and Alter are broken up by a heterogeneous word, Altar:

alt, das Alter old, old age der Altar altar D[d]as Alterum, altermümlich antiquity, antique 43

The child learns by believing the adult. Doubt comes after belief. (OC§160) 44

Only in the stream of thought and life do words have meaning.(Z§173, cf. §174) Conversation, the application and interpretation of words flows on, and only in the flow of life does a word have its meaning. (Z§135;cf.§§173-174) 45

How does one teach a child (say in arithmetic) “Now take these things together!” or “Now these go together”? Clearly “taking together” and “going together” must originally have had another meaning for him than that of seeing in this way or that. – And this is a remark about concepts, not about teaching methods. (PI,p.208) “We all learn the same multiplication table.” This might, no doubt, be a remark about the teaching of arithmetic in our schools, -- but also an observation about the concept of the multiplication table. (PI,p.227) 46

You might think Aesthetics is a science telling us what's beautiful -- almost too ridiculous for words. I suppose it ought to include also what sort of coffee tastes well. (CV,§2,p.11) I may find scientific questions interesting, but they never really grip me. Only conceptual and aesthetic questions do that. At the bottom I am indifferent to the solution of scientific problems; but not the other sort. (CV,p.79e) People often say that aesthetics is a branch of psychology. The idea is that once we are more advanced, everything -- all the mysteries of Art -- will be understood by psychological experiments. Exceedingly stupid as the idea is, this is roughly it. (CV,§35, p.17; cf. III, §7,p19, where he explores "what sort of thing we would call an explanation of an aesthetic judgment "-- what psychology is supposed to offer.)

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Burbules (year?) notes: “Wittgenstein read Principles of Mechanics, a book by Heinrich Hertz, and committed to memory a passage from Hertz’s discussion of force:

When these painful contradictions are removed, the question as to the nature of force will not have been answered; but our minds, no longer vexed, will cease to ask illegitimate questions.

CONCLUSION…Wittgenstein’s training in engineering seemed to give him a methodical approach to problems of philosophy. The examples he used and the format in which he chose to write, are familiar to the engineering profession. Repetition with variation and analysis based on the level of understanding, are methods used throughout the engineering curriculum that are also found in Wittgenstein’s philosophical works. After a rigorous German education in the physical sciences, young Ludwig Wittgenstein entered Manchester University as an aeronautical engineering research student. http://rsnr.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/61/1/39 48

Earlier, PI,p.200: The primitive language-game which children are taught needs no justification; attempts at justification need to be rejected. [Here too he speculates on looking for room for a form in another dimension.] 49

Answering his interlocutor’s accusation that emphasis on training amounts to operant conditioning Wittgenstein again shifts attention from science to grammar.

“Are you not really a behaviourist in disguise? Aren’t you at bottom really saying that everything except human behaviour is a fiction?” – If I do speak of fiction, then it is of a grammatical fiction. (PI§307)

Concerning mental states/processes, Wittgenstein distinguishes his approach from behaviourism, pointing instead to our taken-for-granted concept of ‘learning’ -- bedrock (cf.,OC§94-98) underlying our acquisition of language and mathematics.

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Growth in judgment and understanding is essentially growth in ability to form purposes and to select and arrange means for their realization. The most elementary experiences of the young are filled with cases of the means-consequences relationship. …The trouble with education is not the absence of situations in which the causal relation is exemplified in the relation of means and consequences. Failure to utilize the situations so as to lead the learner on to grasp the relation in given cases of experience is, however, only too common. (Dewey, 1938, E&E, 104-105) 51

When we learn the meaning of a symbol the way in which we learn it is irrelevant to our future use and understanding of it. The way in which I learned my A B C and learned to read is irrelevant to my future understanding of written symbols — it is a matter of purely historical interest. But something does as it were adhere to the symbol in the process of my learning its meaning, and this becomes part of the symbol. (CL #3,p.117) 52

Williams (1999) refers to grammatical, 'non-causal necessity': The arguments Wittgenstein develops against ostensive definition and rules, as the primitive or basic devices for fixing the normative standards of language use, show that both are indeterminate in their application and so cannot account form the normativity of language. Successful ostension and rule-following presuppose a background of what is obviously the same to the participants. And according to Wittgenstein, that background consists in the mastery of techniques of application that are acquired in the process of learning. The process of learning techniques is in this way constitutive of what is learned, namely, of what is the same as what or what it is to go on in the same way. The normativity of our practices involves non-causal necessity, that is, logical or grammatical necessity. ("The etiology of the obvious. Wittgenstein and the elimination of indeterminacy," Ch.8, 216).

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Medina (p.164) notes that for Wittgenstein, the teacher must treat the child with 'courtesy', as though he/she is capable of making correct usage of the rules. 'The teacher treats the pupil's correct responses as indicative of an incipient competence and her incorrect responses as 'mistakes' (cf.RFM,VII.61). But the learner's reactions to the training are invested with normative significance only when viewed against the background of the whole rule-governed practice (cf.RFMVII.47). " The teacher checks and corrects the students responses until self-correction takes over, thus normatively structuring the pupil's behaviour. 54

See Hanns-Johann Glöck, A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 111-12. EXPLANATION “Wittgenstein claims that it is fruitful to investigate how a word is taught. But this is not because he is engaging in armchair learning-theory (LC 1-2; Z §412). Even this claim that teaching through explanations presupposes certain fundamental linguistic skills is not an empirical genetic theory, but conceptual: explanations are correlates of requests for explanations of, or of unclarities about, meaning, and hence presuppose a certain degree of linguistic understanding on the part of the learner, for example the ability to ask for the meaning of a word ((PI 6, 27; PG 62; PLP 126). Wittgenstein’s only contingent observation is that we are not born with such abilities, but acquire them through ‘training’ (Abrichtung) or ‘drill’. He also makes a pedagogic claim which is reminiscent of his observation that even doubt presupposes the recognition of some authority: educators should keep in mind that training provides the foundation of explanation, as it does for rule-following or calculation (Z 419; PI 5, 86, 157-8, 189, 198, 206, 441; LFM 58-60, 182-8; see Framework). Training does not presuppose understanding, but only patterns of reaction on the part of the trainee. A child will look in the direction in which one points, while a cat will look at the pointing finger. Wittgenstein also claims that the order of teaching is a necessary condition for any logical priority between concepts: ‘seems F’ cannot be logically prior to ‘is F’ if it must be taught later (PI 143-6; AWL 102; Z 414-15). Historical and psychological facts about how we are taught to speak are philosophically irrelevant, what matters is what is taught (LWL 38; BB 12-14; PG 41, 66, 70). In teaching, what we explain is the meaning of words. An explanation of meaning, unlike mere drill or a drug which induces understanding, is normative, it provides a standard for the correct use of a term. In this respect explanations are linguistic rules, a point which makes plausible Wittgenstein’s idea that language is structured by GRAMMAR, a system of rules (PG 191; TS 228 34)” (p.112).

55 -- To obey a rule, to make report, to give an order, to play a game of chess, are customs (uses, institutions). To understand a sentence means to understand a language. To understand a language means to be master of a technique. (PI§199) 56

Medina (pp.164-5): The normative background that the teacher brings to bear upon the behaviour of the novice is progressively made available to the learner through the training, up to the point where the learner’s behaviour becomes regulated by norms without the assistance of the teacher, thus becoming an autonomous practitioner. In other words, by interacting with masters who structure and regulate the learning environment, novices come to adopt structuring and regulatory behaviour of their own. The process of initiate learning is, therefore, a process of acquiring autonomy or gaining control in normative practices. What characterizes this process is a gradual shift of responsibility and authority, a developmental progression from other-regulation to self-regulation. Initiate learning is thus conceived as a process of enculturating or apprenticeship: we learn norms by being acculturated into rule-following practices, by mastering techniques.

This cultural account of learning explains how the behaviour of the initiate learner becomes normatively structured. On this account, the criteria for the correct application of a rule are established by training. 57

http://jumpmath.org/cms/ TED Talk, The math of learning | John Mighton | TEDxCERN (Oct 29, 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qbxnk5SKaTA&list=UUsT0YIqwnpJCM-mx7-gSA4Q&index=19

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58

see: John Mighton on The Ubiquitous Bell Curve http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmpVOUrLqq8 59

http://jumpmath.org/cms/Philosophy JUMP Math replaces the self-fulfilling myth that some people are born with mathematical ability while others do not have the ability to succeed with assumptions that all children can be led to think mathematically. JUMP Math Philosophy: JUMP is aware that there is a strong causal link between a child's academic success and his or her future contribution to society. We strive to increase children’s chances of success, to reduce socio-economic disparities, to engender a sense of belonging and, most importantly, to endow voiceless children with opportunity.

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Mighton, If you could succeed in math, wouldn't you tell yourself you could do anything? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ezx0Yiz841Y

Confidence begets attention, which begets rich learning. “I’ve never met a teacher who will tell you that a student doesn’t need to be confident to excel in school,” explains Mighton. “But I’ve never seen a math curriculum that follows the implications of that idea rigorously.” Math is well-suited to build confidence. Teachers can reduce things to tiny steps, gauge the size of each step to the student and raise the bar incrementally. When math is taught this way, surprising things happen. (Bornstein, 2011, quoting Mighton)

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Al Etmanski writes: http://www.aletmanski.com/al-etmanski/2010/10/jump-starts-with-john-mighton.html

[W]hat do you get when you cross Good Will Hunting with Wittgenstein? Answer: John Mighton. John is also a philosopher whose way of thinking has been influenced by Wittgenstein's Investigations. And he was a math consultant to the movie Good Will Hunting which evolved into an on screen cameo. John plays Tom, the guy at the blackboard in front of a complicated math formula who says in the middle of the movie that most people never find the teachers that believe in them and then they get convinced they’re stupid and that they can’t do something.

Possible Worlds. Plot: A man lives in parallel worlds, falling in love with the same woman, while the police hunt down a serial killer who steals brains. In Possible Worlds, Tilda Swinton ponders: "Can you 'compare' a vase with itself?" In PI§216, Wittgenstein concludes that saying "A thing is identical with itself" is a useless proposition. Bounding our terms of identity reminds us that when we accept or reject something, we are deciding whether there is logical space within our conceptual world to harbour what at first appears alien. In the case of Rub in’s vase, we can see the image as a vase in one world, and as two faces in another. Wittgenstein called this aspect-dawning, where the same configuration of lines may have more than one identity or meaning (e.g., Jastrow’s duck-rabbit or the Necker cube, PI,p.196). JUMP has this ability to appear now-as-this, and now-as-that, given different audiences. 62

There can be a dispute over the correct result of a calculation (say a rather long addition). But such disputes are rare and of short duration. They can be decided, as we say, 'with certainty." Mathematicians do not in general quarrel over the result of a calculation. (This is an important fact.) (PI,p.225) Of course, in one sense mathematics is a branch of knowledge, -- but still it is also an activity. And ‘false’ moves can only exist as the exception. For if what we now call by that name became the rule, the game in which they were false moves would have been abrogated. (PI,p.227) There is in general no such agreement over the question whether an expression of feeling is genuine or not. (PI,p.227)

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63

McClellan (1976) refers to ‘counterfeits of teaching’), 53-4. Green (1968) offers the most Wittgensteinian analysis, demonstrating fuzziness in the boundaries between educational concepts: training, advertising, conditioning, proselytizing, indoctrinating, teaching.

The concept of teaching is like a blurred picture. It is a vague concept. Its boundaries are not clear. However accurately we may describe the activity of teaching there will, and always must, remain certain troublesome border-line cases.

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A math consultant from my district (anonymous) is cited as opposing JUMP based on 'world-wide learning theories'. (McIllroy,2010). 65

The analogy he was to produce wasn’t given him. In fact he produced it. You gave him an explanation of the analogy – but you haven’t taught him what to do unless your explanation works. He doesn’t cross the bridge until he gets there. (LFM,VIII,p.84) 66

In James Tully’s formulation, “subjects raise a problem about a rule of the practice in the languages of communication and legitimation or challenge a relation of governance on the ground, enter into the available procedures of negotiation, deliberation, problem solving, and reform with the aim of modifying practice.” Tully, J. (2002). 67 See Dweck, Learning and the Adolescent Mind

http://learningandtheadolescentmind.org/people_01.html 68

Beginning: One must start out with error and convert it to truth. That is, one must reveal the source of error, otherwise hearing the truth won’t do any good. 69

Wilson notes: Musicians (savants, prodigies) not needing scales often practice and improvise so much they are immersed in the activity all the time; to some extent, scales are embedded in the repertoire constantly rehearsed. For how can it be explained what ‘expressive playing’ is? Certainly not by anything that accompanies the playing. -- What is needed for the explanation? One might say: a culture. – If someone is brought up in a particular culture – and then reacts to music in such-and-such a way, you can teach him the use of the phrase “expressive playing”. (Z§164) Understanding and explaining a musical phrase. – Sometimes the simplest explanation is a gesture; on another occasion it might be a dance step, or words describing a dance. ... (CV,p.69e) 70

Rationally (intuitively) and empirically (observably), Plato and Locke argued that rhythm provided a foundation for arithmetic, and math a basis for reasoning across disciplines like the natural sciences. Today we can use algorithms to determine whether songs tap into hit clusters, predicting their accord with shared agreements in musical taste. Neuroscience can also monitor which parts of the brain light up while listening to music or counting money, giving educators some insight into basic motivation such as reward centres in the amygdale gland of the reptilian brain: of possible use for securing student engagement or classroom management. 71

The propositions describing this world-picture might be part of a kind of mythology. And their rule is like that of rules of a game; and the game can be learned purely practically, without learning any explicit rules. (OC§95) 72

In counting we do not express any opinions at all. There is no opinion that 25 follows 24 – nor intuition. We express opinions by means of counting. (LFM,XIX, pp.183-84) 73

One of the most important methods I use is to imagine a historical development for our ideas different from what actually occurred. If we do this we see the problem from a completely new angle. (CV,p.37e)

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74

Instead of the unanalysable, specific, indefinable: the fact that we act in such-and-such ways, e.g., punish certain actions, establish the state of affairs thus and so, give orders, render accounts, describe colours, take an interest in others’ feelings. What has to be accepted, the given – it might be said – are facts of living // forms of life. (PI§630;cf.PI,p.226) 75

For of course I don’t make use of the agreement of human beings to affirm identity. What criterion do you use, then? None at all. To use a word without justification does not mean to use it wrongfully. (RFM,V.33) 76

Though easily misconstrued as 'atomic', 'liberal-autonomous subjects' (see Taylor, 2004). 77

Pointing back to our established training practices in math, Wittgenstein imagines the alternate-universe of an inspiration model of learning (cf. Scheffler, 1965):

It would also be possible to imagine such a training in a sort of arithmetic. Children could calculate, each in his own way – as long as they listened to their inner voice and obeyed it. Calculating in this way would be like a sort of composing. (PI§233)