Dear Gregg,

I returned feeling upbeat and very stimulated intellectually. It was good to get out of the confines of my Toronto home office and experience the welcoming warmth of you, the other ToKers and the whole JMU community. THANK YOU!!!

One thing I have been wondering about is how you envision building knowledge within your ToK system?  I think that we have strong negative reactions to scientific thought as it is currently practiced, but we may have different ways of reacting to that negative feeling.  My feeling is that scientific thought has taken over too much of the dialogue.  Experts use the “data shows that…”argument to silence opposition. The truth is that the data seldom show anything with absolute clarity.  It is not surprising that ordinary people have given up on science and stopped listening.  My solution to this problem is to try to contain science by putting it in balance with a narrative.  I believe that the narrative (theory) can only be built using data. Once we have a narrative, we can use new data to refine or change the it, but without a narrative, we are at sea.

My impression of your negative reaction to the same reality is to blast through it with your strong and good intuitions about how things fit together. I like and trust your intuitions, but how do you argue to the outside world that your intuitions are better that theirs?

Nancy



From: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>> on behalf of Gregg Henriques <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Reply-To: tree of knowledge system discussion <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Date: Monday, April 16, 2018 at 10:30 AM
To: "[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>" <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Thanks to all who made the conference a success

Dear TOK Society,

  I am writing to offer deep gratitude to all those who came and participated in the first ever TOK Society conference over the weekend. I thought the talks were splendid. The breadth of ideas covered was huge and yet they did seem to cohere around key themes and pointed to future directions for education, psychology and society at large. I also found the conversation on the back half of Friday to be very stimulating and demonstrated how thinking about big TOKs could illuminate powerful perspectives on real world issues.

 I will be in consultation with folks about next steps. One thing I would like to consider is having folks share their powerpoints on the list and perhaps have some time devoted to reviewing the talks and engaging in some exchange about them on this list.

Thanks again to everyone.

Best,
Gregg
___________________________________________
Gregg Henriques, Ph.D.
Professor
Department of Graduate Psychology
216 Johnston Hall
MSC 7401
James Madison University
Harrisonburg, VA 22807
(540) 568-7857 (phone)
(540) 568-4747 (fax)

Be that which enhances dignity and well-being with integrity.
Check out my Theory of Knowledge blog at Psychology Today at:
https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__www.psychologytoday.com_blog_theory-2Dknowledge&d=DwIF-g&c=eLbWYnpnzycBCgmb7vCI4uqNEB9RSjOdn_5nBEmmeq0&r=HPo1IXYDhKClogP-UOpybo6Cfxxz-jIYBgjO2gOz4-A&m=Juk60hGu1CZhdxRJtBM7WIs6w_5lt2vuWHMjngCjLqY&s=RmWJ8gbPqrT25c6lk_wlXp7aiI0wwyVvlnjeGNCtY_I&e=

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