Exploring the Complementary Nature of Education and Learning. Response to Joakim Larsson and Bo Dahlin
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The paper by Joakim Larsson and Bo Dahlin "Educating far from Equilibrium: Chaos Philosophy and the Quest for Complexity in Education" can be called a manifesto of anti-dualism.Inspired by Dewey's century old creed, the authors present a wellresearched argument for a complementary approach towards balancing historically conflicting modes of thinking, knowing and educating.In my response to their article I will focus on both philosophical and scientific sources that exemplify the principle of complementarity -first called as such by Niels Bohr who problematized the mutually exclusive descriptions of nature at its most subtle, quantum, level in terms of either particles or waves.In the move from either/or to both/and, Bohr saw a connection between his idea of complementarity and Eastern philosophy.His epistemic position considered that what we may perceive as binary opposites at the level of ordinary experience are in fact not contradictory but complementary.For Bohr, the interplay of yin and yang tendencies forming one integrated whole in Chinese philosophy of Taoism was relevant to, and informative for, his principle of complementarity in physics.Yet the adoption of the both/and, integrative, principle as it has been in the physical science, appears to have been long overdue in social sciences, including education.Integrative or holistic practices are largely absent among Western educational systems and relegated, if at all, to Eastern traditions and philosophies, such as Tao, Yoga, or Buddhism (cf.Roberts, 2012).The Western philosophical thought and, by implication, existing educational theories continue to be informed by the Cartesian substance dualism with its strict division between res extensa (corporeal substance as extended, material, body) and res cogitans (incorporeal substance as immaterial, nonextended, mind).Education habitually confines itself to narrow instrumental rationality, the logic of which is reduced to reasoning directly from premise to conclusion without risking an inclusion of any uncertain, in-between categories such as interpretation or mediation.So in the West, philosophy and education alike continue to suffer from the great bifurcation between such supposedly opposite, dual, categories as subject and object, mind and body, or -at the sociocultural level -self and other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.019 | 0.044 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".