Heeding Wittgenstein on “Understanding” and “Meaning”: A Pragmatist and Concrete Human Psychological Approach in/for Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over 60 years ago, the influential language philosopher L. Wittgenstein suggested that there is no need to use "understanding" and "meaning" to understand how language works and, in fact, that the two theoretical terms are part of a primitive idea. Today, both remain two of the most frequently used terms in education. The purpose of this paper is to stimulate a discussion about abandoning these terms from the theoretical discourse of education in the way these are commonly used. Case materials from the research literature chosen from a large database on knowing and learning in science are used to exemplify the approach that does not require either concept. Implications are drawn for education research and practice.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.052 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".