Teaching and learning with Wittgenstein and Turing: sailing the seas of social media
Files
Accepted manuscript
Date
2019
DOI
Authors
Floyd, Juliet
Version
Accepted manuscript
OA Version
Citation
Juliet Floyd. "Teaching and Learning with Wittgenstein and Turing: Sailing the Seas of Social Media." Proceedings of the British Wittgenstein Society. British Wittgenstein Society Meeting, 2018. London, University College, 2018-07-29 - 2019-07-30.
Abstract
A history of the mutual impact of Turing and Wittgenstein on one another points to the contemporary foundational significance of our artful capacity to embed everyday words in forms of life. Wittgenstein’s mature focus on forms of life, interlocutory drift, and rule-following, with its play between the ‘I’ and the ‘we’, was an informed critical response to Turing’s idea of a “Turing machine”, his analysis of the very idea of taking a “step” in a formal system. Wittgenstein’s characterizations of our drive to evade a responsibility in speech, especially by appealing to “machines” or “algorithms” as pure mathematical objects, are invaluable warnings for us. The enduring importance of mutually-attuned “phraseology” to education may be formulated as a humanistic challenge to the very ideas of “computational foundations” and “Big Data” in our hyper-connected world. This raises critical challenges for democracy, especially in a world where social media shapes human-to-human conduct in ways we are only beginning to appreciate.