The Synoptic View

“Executive Summary”

A couple of years ago, I made up the self-mocking term “paleo-paedagogic” for an emphasis on lectures with questions more than on discussion simpliciter.  I was subsequently asked, “how is that [sc. paleo-paedagogic] working for you?” My reply then:

Briefly: "history" (the subject) is beholden to facts and truth but truth and facts are only understood in and indeed are only facts/truth within a holistic setting (context).  Students provided with "just the facts" or with fragmentary accounts are hobbled in a correct evaluation of the material and of their own understanding unless they both see synoptic accounts and attempt them on their own.  Of course, all accounts are fragmentary, but some accounts are better at showing and taking into account their limitations -- and that requires taking a synoptic view.  I mock myself with the term "paleo-pedagogic" but the argument for synoptic understanding is as old as Anaximander and as modern as the science of neuro-cognition and of self-teaching robots.  So it works for the kids as self-teaching neuronal entities.

At the time, I had just read an article about new forms of artificial intelligence centered around self-teaching -- I would say self-revising -- artificial intelligence as opposed to older types of programming.  The article claimed that self-correcting holistically structured programming provided greater efficiency and efficacy than older programs that sought to engineer specific capabilities. In terms of the vocabulary I use below, newer programs were conceived on the model of claim-criticism-supplement rather than on an answer-in-the-back-of-the book expertise model.  Anyhow, this short essay is an extended version of my previous reply, spurred in good measure by a bland line I read this summer that led me to scribble in the margin “the importance of subordinate clauses.”

“Whoever speaks exclusively in terms of objects cannot, for structural reasons, state what he is talking about, but must assume it as already understood.”

- Pirmin Stekeler-Wiethofer, Philosophie des Selbstbewußtseins.

Setting out for …?

Since we act with partial information and partial understanding, and since our actions are always social, that is, replying to others and responded to by others, our efforts inevitably go awry.  There is, in fact, a philosophical term for this, “semantic pessimism.”

The logic of making claims can be generalized as critique: any claim made or position taken invites criticism, which itself is an invitation for supplementation.  Criticism and supplementation are endless, but they can undergird the original claim with reasons; that is, the claim then responds to criticisms and supplementations -- is edited and revised -- and in our so doing we come to understand the claim and the claim gains a better purchase on reality.  Think of the simple example of the difference between having the answer, “the sum of angles in a triangle is 180°” and understanding that answer, namely being able to explain why “the angles of a triangle sum to two right angles” as Euclid puts it (see link below).

Education, like all social practices, is contested; its goals, methods, content and so on are contested as also is its authorization.  Who participates in that conversation and who should speak? Who are the educators? Moreover, what is the good of education and who benefits?  This contestation is doubly appropriate. First, as with all social practices, in its rendering explicit the considerations and reasons in educational practice and institutions the contestation liberates agents to become autonomous, expanding the realm of human agency and freedom by expanding the range of ends and actions.  Second, the contestation is indeed the very practice of understanding limned above, the giving and taking of reasons to transform “answers in the back of the book” (cultural “chatter” about education”) into understanding.

Here I respond to two closely related current topics: the problem of fake news and the need for critical thinking.  My claim -- and it is not at all original with me; I merely rehearse here a bit of long-established educational wisdom -- is that education seeks to transfigure the noisy confusion of claim and counterclaim, the plethora of information, and endless chatter of opinions into the giving and taking of reasons that follows a logic of claim-criticism-supplementation.  In other words, education transfigures chatter into conversation. More specifically, a means of so doing is to bring a certain pressure to bear on claims not only to invite criticism but more especially to invite worthwhile supplementation so that responses are responsible. I propose that a large and significant dosage of lecturing accomplishes this better than open-ended discussion, and I commend it as a means of “teaching” critical thinking and the discernment of fake news.

Our notion of open-ended discussion has much to do with the rise of democratic sentiments and romanticism two and a half centuries ago.  They, particularly Romanticism, found an ideal in their construal of Socratic dialogues. (The Romantic misreading of Plato’s dialogues is both widely diffused and repeatedly shown to be erroneous).  Their version of a non-dogmatic Socrates encouraged individual expression and open-ended discussion.  Even if mistaken about Socrates, the resultant attention to individual student participation was right to emphasize that understanding is always an individual achievement; collective understanding is coded in a textbook, a dogma, an answer key in the back, but it is “practiced” by individuals.  This “Romantic” Socraticism urged teacherly tact and modesty, proposing needling questions rather than learned expositions so as to draw out the student to “think for herself,” to work up her own understanding. (I leave as a problem for the reader the social and political implications for teachers of this Socraticsm.)  What is missed in such discussions is how to manage the transition from criticism to supplementation, and most importantly, what is a supplementation and not merely another claim?

“To look once, twice, and once again.”

If I walk in a forest or a student looks at a Euclidean proof or we read a paragraph on the mechanics of inter-institutional credit in a financial crisis, each of us sees what is to be understood, but at first it looks to be a tangled undergrowth of symbols and jargon.  The learned botanist sees much more, both labeling the plants and their details as well as instructing my eyes to see relevant features and differences and to understand the significance of those features and differences. Likewise with the unriddling of a mathematical proof or the parsing of ‘commercial paper’ and ‘libor rates.’  A more informed perception sees more clearly, sees an ecosystem, not a tangle. Left to myself in the undergrowth, even in discussion with other neophytes, I may sharpen my attention a bit and notice more, but it is unlikely I will gain an informed botanical view, whereas the botanist, for example, brings the pressure of Botany to bear on our discussion of the tangled undergrowth and articulates my perceptions into a flowering of understanding and an articulate appreciation of floral forms.

The language of botany, geometry, or finance, is not merely one of vocabulary but of terms embedded in networks of implication and explanation.  The attached Geometry worksheet has students fill in not only the terms “the angle sum in a triangle is equal to two right angles” but also explain the connection of those terms and the connections that explain the various parts of that explanation.  The explanation itself is entangled with other explanations (which have their own botanization: definitions, postulates, theorems, etc.). Indeed, for most of the past 2300 years, Euclid has served as a standard of what should count as an explanation, as knowledge.  Knowledge is not the assertion of claims (triangle sum = 180°) alone but the explanation of those claims and the explanation of the claims involved in the explanation -- and all that organized in some architectonic fashion.  To state the point, theory is holistic, at least in aspiration and as a requirement of its validity. Claims, criticisms, and supplementations need to be “to the point” but also to “make sense” in view of the larger project of explanation.  This is a second pressure that ought to be brought to bear on a discussion. If the first pressure is to clarify both reference and facts, the second, by consideration of context, clarifies implications and cogency both for understanding and for action.

A developed explanation may have details and an organized account of their implications but it might be no better than the 300 page, 500 footnote manuscript I once saw that made an old Rambler station wagon parked on the UT campus well into the 1980’s a key item of evidence in the JFK assassination.  The credit-default swaps and collateralized debt obligations of the 2000’s flourished because they made so much sense, they fit so well with other information and economic practices. Like a “conspiracy theory,” it all worked out and made sense -- except that it did not. Some few, who made money selling that market short, went back to the details, the implications and connections, the explanations, and checked them.  They took a second look, informed by experience and a developed sense for what details counted, for which implications were relevant, for what sort of account or explanation should be developed. They had a synoptic view, an “ability to see life steadily and see it whole.” That ability to use subordinate clauses to explicate background is the third pressure that can be brought to bear on a discussion.

Ninth grade essays in history tend to be paratactic, a Greek term for a certain a narrative form that lays one item alongside another.  It is well represented in a child’s narration: “and then … and then … and then …..” History, in this narration, becomes only slightly better than a phone book or social media, a listing of material in a paratactic order that leaves out and so elides the very assumptions needed to see and make sense of the information.  History as explanation and understanding, reorganizes such listings into subordinate clauses, figuring forth events and trends, decisions and policies, facts and themes, evidence and theses. That sort of tarrying with details and considering not their associations and coincidence but their expressive and articulated sum, as in the way we take in the details of a novel or a person or a city and sum it into an “impression” (totally the wrong word!), that sort of tarrying spelled out in a manner that figures forth the relations is a synoptic view.  For example, the libor rate, which indexes various short-term loan rates among banks, loans that are necessary for banks in the same way that credit cards are useful for thrifty salaried citizens who find it more efficient to purchase quotidian or emergency items on credit rather than pausing to collect the cash in advance, serves as a useful indicator for banks to calculate just how “short” they can be, that is, how much it will cost them in the long run to borrow money for “right now” to tide them over until their long-term income covers the short-term loan.  The falsification of the data for that rate was one of the factors in the 2008 financial crisis since banks could not correctly assess how much income they needed to remain solvent and so held on to funds rather than loaning them out.

One can go back and parse the last two sentences to notice they are not paratactic, they are not simple inferences, they state a simple claim (in the second sentence) but undergird it by marshaling evidence in the first sentence -- descriptive, analogical, and explanatory -- to bring out the “whole picture.”

“One who sees synoptically is a dialectician (conversationalist/philosopher); one who does not see, is not.”  ὁ μὲν γὰρ συνοπτικὸς διαλεκτικός, ὁ δὲ μὴ οὔ (Republic 537c)

Sentences with subordinate clauses require a certain reading stamina, an epistemological stamina that is not natural and needs to be inculcated by example and fortified by training.  Students need guidance for whatever natural potential they have to inquire, and that means both prodding to undertake inquiry and direction to have the inquiry go somewhere. Inquiry left to itself is like removing the communist party in Russia or the Baathist party in Iraq with the directive “discuss amongst yourselves.”  Left to figure out on their own, students are extremely likely to fall back on the clichés of the culture, clichés of the last article they read or soundbite they heard, the idées fixes of what they feel or seems right to them.  The descent of Russian and Iraqi politics to kleptocracy and violence (state or sectarian) is evidence not only that “you can’t drop democracy from 10,000 feet” but more to the point, democracy and improvement are not just a matter of open-ended conversation.  The reality of fake news is not dealt with by more critical and independent thinking pushed in “open-ended” discussions; much better is to provide a sherpa for the discussion, someone familiar with the area who can articulate implications and complications. Citizens lean on discussions and on politics with researched attention to facts and further attention to the inferential space of reasons -- the entitlements and implications of various claims -- and most of all a synoptic view.  Have these concerns been properly shepherded?

The teacher and student/the regime and citizen.

The metaphor of “pressure” from above to push for greater discernment in perception (botanist), for greater context (geometry), and for greater comprehension (economics) captures an “external” feature of education.  To reverse the physics of the metaphor of pressure, the teacher draws out and directs the student mind, an unschooled mind likely to flounder on its own in ways alluded to above. Or to switch the metaphor altogether, the teacher helps lay out a topography of the subject matter for the student to explore.  Whatever the metaphor, the task requires an extensive presentation from the teacher, a lecture, and a good lecture accomplishes the three tasks sketched above. In Raphael’s “The School of Athens” (below), Aristotle, commanding an understanding of the human world with his outstretched hand and holding his Ethics, looks for guidance toward his revered teacher Plato who, holding his Timaeus, points beyond both of them to the unseen measures that rule the roiling and swirling conversations going on all about them.  [The term “unseen measures” is explained in an appendix below.]

The School of Athens

Plato and Aristotle

Teachers provide the topography of the human world and the orientation to see it as a whole.  It is only in terms of a larger topography and of a synoptic view that criticism has force, and that claims of truth or falsity make sense and can be evaluated.  I know that sounds sententious but there is a long development, re-enacted in the 20th century, that stands behind the claims of the previous sentence. Letting the student find his own way or in group study leaves him vulnerable to the “fake news syndrome,” slow or even unable to sift what he hears because lacking an adequate sense of what a proper account would be, what the relevant context is, or how to sift data in terms of relevant context.  Mere critical thinking, just questioning or just learning how to de-construct claims re-enacts the fundamental orientation that it then tries to combat, namely “dogmatism”, an endless “answer-like” assertion of claims. To use a phrase quoted above, mere critical thinking cannot state what it is expressing but must assume its perspective is already understood.

In history classes, I tend to use the language of policy making to provide the topography and orientation of understanding to students.  Thinking about the material in terms of policy with its consideration of a “problem” or “crisis” brings into view a larger context as well as the need to formulate and assess means and outcomes (“strategy, tactics, logistics”).  That entails not only a horizontal stretch across much material -- and modesty about the limitations of any personal or institutional grasp of the full situation -- but also tarrying for the internal subordinate clauses, for how the various parts of the policy comport with one another, the details, possibilities, and complexities.  Then comes a vertical ascent to a synoptic consideration to see a whole topic and how it settles on its parts, gathering them together much like a piece of music settles into being its performance, gathering in notes, phrases, timbre, color, variations etc. The language of policy-making invites students participation since they are less shy about speaking, not being responsible for the whole picture but curious how what they do know fits in.

Appendix I.  “Socrates”

“Socrates” is a complex phenomenon, and it is well to keep in mind that “he” is primarily a character in fictional dialogues written by Plato who was deeply in love with the real Socrates but also sharply critical of him.  His most obvious criticism is that Socrates carried out philosophical conversations in public -- for which he was executed. Following Plato’s advice, educational institutions ever since have generally sought to sequester themselves from the public eye.  There are good reasons for that; real conversation is very fragile and usually comes to grief in the public sphere. It is “politically unreliable.” Also keep in mind:

• • Socratic ignorance is a false modesty, as everyone in the dialogues seems to recognize.  He is not an ignorant yahoo; even the Delphic oracle knew otherwise and proclaimed him the wisest man in Greece.

  • Socratic “ignorance” induces and establishes a “space of reasons”: the interlocutors must explain; assertion, threats, and other acts of violence are parried and shown to be mute i.e. ignorant in a proper sense.  Think of the phrase, “the more you learn the less you know.” Socrates is ignorant in that sense.

  • Correlative with this, a Socratic space of reasons moves the ontology of knowledge from answers (“in the back of the book”) to a “field” (knowing one’s way around a topic).  Or, using logical terminology, while judgments (sentences) are the basic unit of sense/meaning, inferences (syllogisms) are the basic unit of understanding. Knowledge claims of the second sort are tentative and revisable, arise within inquiry and not as a conclusion.  I would also say knowledge is collaborative, not individual, but Plato may think otherwise, though it is clear he thinks dialectic (traced out in the above lucubrations) is necessary. Socrates does not have the all-impressive smack-down answer, but he can find his way. Socratic knowledge is able to “give an account” and “come to the aid of an argument” (two recurrent phrases in the dialogues).

  • Socratic false modesty is also an aristocratic virtue: not to assert one’s advantages but to set them aside, bracket them so that the interlocutor may put herself forward, show herself, and engage with the subject matter at hand.

  • Socratic dialogue moves one to “give an account” and not just a statement of opinions, or conviction, or “beliefs”, all of which, at best, start a dialogue but are not the playing out of knowledge, a knowing one’s way around, and certainly not an account (a logos).

  • Most importantly, with the space of thinking cleared as delineated in the above points, Socrates can actually engage in inquiry by drawing the interlocutor up and out of her “answer,” her claim, towards the unseen measures that guide the answers achieved and the topic and conversation.  He can only do so because he is not ignorant; he sees the unseen measures at work and can put them into play, calibrated to draw the opinionated but ignorant interlocutor towards informed inquiry, informed by an awareness of the unseen measures. Note the phrasing; the unseen measures are seen at work, not had as “answers.”  The term “unseen measure” is from Heraclitus (DK fragment 54). It clearly is invoked by Plato as a way of describing the Ideas but the term “Idea” is much too loaded with “Intro Philosophy” baggage about Plato’s “theory of Ideas” as if ideas were things or a technical/conceptual vocabulary to be mastered (once again a topic for another day but also for another institution).  Platonic dialogues manifest the ideas in the way that they are actually manifest: as the explanatory constraints that appear only as we attend to a topic. They are like the laws of logic, invisible if we just utter opinions but they come into view as we work out and attend to our accounts, our explanations.

Appendix II. A provocative but very reasoned comment.

“One should not rate the peculiarities of people too highly.  On the contrary, the assertion that the teacher should carefully adjust himself to the individuality of each of his pupils, studying and developing it, must be treated as idle chatter.  He has simply no time to do this. The peculiarities of children are tolerated within the family circle; but at school there begins a life subject to general regulations [academic disciplines, legal frameworks, social norms], to a rule which applies to all; it is the place where mind must be brought to lay aside its idiosyncrasies, to know and to desire the universal, to accept the existing general culture.  This reshaping of the soul, this alone is what education means. The more educated a man is, the less is there apparent in his behavior anything peculiar only to him, anything therefore that is merely contingent.” - G.W.F. Hegel, Enz. §395 Zusatz.

Supplementary translation for those horrified at the last few sentences (or more).

• • - “to know and desire the universal” - just think of our efforts to get students to write well, that is, know and desire the ability to use English, or history, or community service, or lacrosse, or whatever is the student’s “passion.”  For them to excel at a game, they must attend to the game itself, a universal.

• • - “to accept the existing general culture” - as is all too obvious from Hegel’s extensive writing but all too hidden from his extensive critics, he did not advocate submissive citizens but rather citizens capable of participation.  The acceptance here might be better rendered as a clear perception of current circumstances in terms of which both an individual and a collective future will be worked out. Otherwise one is trying to say something without knowing the language; one is culturally incompetent.

• • - “the less apparent anything peculiar or contingent” - this maps exactly onto current notions of superficiality and depth.  For example, an individual has peculiarities of how he looks and where he is from (both geographically and socially), but we, who are not “nationalists,” think that we should respect an individual not for such contingencies but for his worked out character and achievements, his efforts and his engagements.  Those have a general, not idiosyncratic, claim on us.

Appendix III. The Triangle Sum Theorem

Handout for Triangle Sum Theorem.

This was originally composed in early 2011 for a teaching self-evaluation, and has been lightly edited a few times since then.  Current (late 2024) and continuing trends in education seem to confirm these views but also ask for more substantial work reframing the active intellect, a much needed task in this era of intense confusion about cognition.