“A posteriori: From what comes after: proceeding from effect back to cause, or reasoning form given facts to principles; pertaining to what can be known only through experience or facts; inductive or empirical (contrasted with a priori).”
Excerpted from: Grambs, David. The Random House Dictionary for Writers and Readers. New York: Random House, 1990.
To finish up for today, here is a learning support on using a comma with specific words or terms. This is the thirteenth of fifteen such posts. (You can find an excursus on this choice of publishing practice here.)
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Facts: Tools of authority.
Facts are supposed to make truth out of a proposition. There are the proof. The trouble is that there are enough facts around to prove most things. They have become the comfort and prop of conventional wisdom; the music of the rational technocracy; the justification for any sort of policy, particularly as advanced by special interest groups, expert guilds and other modern corporations. Confused armies of contradictory facts struggle in growing darkness. Support ideological fantasies, Staff bureaucratic briefing books.
It was Giambattista Vico who first identified this problem. He argued that any obsession with proof would misfire unless it was examined in a far larger context which took into account experience and the surrounding circumstances. Diderot was just as careful when he wrote the entry on facts for the Encyclopedie:
You can divide facts into three types: the divine, the natural, and man-made. The first belongs to theology; the second to philosophy and the third to history. All are equally open to question.
There is little room for such care in a corporatist society. Facts are the currency of power for each specialized group. But how can so much be expected from these ignorant fragments of knowledge? They are not able to think and so cannot be used to replace thought. They have no memory. No imagination, No judgement. They’re really not much more than interesting landmarks which may illuminate our way as we attempt to think. If properly respected they are never truth, always illustration.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Here is a reading on skepticism along with its attendant vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. This reading’s brevity should not distract from the fact (ironic, I know, to use that noun in a post containing a reading about skepticism) that it is a good general introduction to the topic of skepticism and its intellectual and philosophical principles.
And editorially, if I may? I cannot imagine a better time to teach this important mode of thought and analysis to students. In an age where social media has made it possible to spread mendacity and utter nonsense around the world with the stroke of a key, we owe it to students, and to civil society, to put this concept and its tools in the public square.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Moving right along, here is a learning support on using a comma in measurements. This is the twelfth of fifteen learning supports on commas posted in a series on Mark’s Text Terminal. (You can find an excursus on this choice of publishing practice here.)
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Manuscript: (Latin codex manu scriptus “book written by hand”) Strictly a book or document of any kind written by hand rather than printed or typed. True, a typewritten document is often called a manuscript. It is, in fact, a typescript.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
Here is a learning support on using a comma with age, city of residence, and political party affiliation. This is the eleventh in a series of fifteen posts in which a long passage from a leading punctuation manual is presented seriatim under their major headings from the book. (You can find an excursus on this choice of publishing practice here.)
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“visual memory: The ability to take in, store, and retrieve information presented visually. Short-term visual memory is the ability to hold visual information in short-term memory in order to process it, either moving it into long-term memory or shifting focus.
Visual working memory (or nonverbal working memory) involves the ability to hold visual information in mind while considering it, reflecting on it, or in some other fashion processing it.
Long-term memory also involves visual forms, in which images are stored on a long-term basis and available for recall.”
Excerpted from: Turkington, Carol, and Joseph R. Harris, PhD. The Encyclopedia of Learning Disabilities. New York: Facts on File, 2006.
“Anticlimax: 1. In rhetoric, a descent from the elevated and important to the low and trivial: ‘Here thou, Great Anna! whom three realms obey,/Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea’ (Pope, The Rape of the Lock, (1712). 2. In drama, the lowered state after a climax; in life, an outcome that fails to live up to expectations.”
Excerpted from: McArthur, Tom. The Oxford Concise Companion to the English Language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Here is a learning support on using a comma in a location address. This is the tenth of a series of fifteen such documents, all from the same punctuation manual, therefore all intra-connected, posted here. (You can find an excursus on this choice of publishing practice here.)
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
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