One may question the pedagogical value of final exams, especially when one is in the midst of grading them, but the plain truth is that in-class exams afford a somewhat unique opportunity for feverishly scrawled… artwork (reproduced via Paint here):
The problem of induction, illustrated.
Happy grading, everyone.
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21 comments
May 13, 2009 at 3:47 pm
expat lumberjack
A+ work right there.
May 13, 2009 at 3:52 pm
Levi Stahl
I’d say it was A work, except that I think Hume posits the gap as being a tiny bit wider. The jumper needs to stretch more.
Oh, and it’s missing the conceptual alligators at the bottom.
May 13, 2009 at 3:57 pm
kid bitzer
worry:
does this encourage students to think that the only solution to hume’s problem is a “leap of faith”?
May 13, 2009 at 4:09 pm
Matt
Kid- there’s a long tradition that looks back to Hume that thinks the “leap of faith” idea is just right. But I don’t think that Hume himself was athletic enough to make that jump.
May 13, 2009 at 4:13 pm
saintneko
So… did they get points for that answer or no?
it’s funny… in scientific classes (well, electron microscopy anyway) we are required to draw the answers to some questions . I can now draw most electron microscopy related equipment from memory, including necessary vacuum system diagrams.
May 13, 2009 at 4:15 pm
ekogan
Stop drawing the English Channel coastline every time you need to depict a gap. You might as well have put Nazi bunkers on the right side.
May 13, 2009 at 5:28 pm
ben
But I don’t think that Hume himself was athletic enough to make that jump.
He was fat enough to bridge the gap, so it’s ok.
May 13, 2009 at 7:23 pm
vn
If it were the English Channel he could now use the Chunnel. Too bad he died 230 years too soon.
May 14, 2009 at 7:14 am
Chris
Shouldn’t Hume be standing firmly on the left side warning someone else *not* to try to jump the gap?
May 14, 2009 at 7:18 am
Michael Turner
it’s missing the conceptual alligators at the bottom.
There’s a bottom? How do you know that?
May 14, 2009 at 7:19 am
kid bitzer
nah, he only does that in his study.
after a game of backgammon, he strides across it without a second thought.
May 14, 2009 at 7:23 am
Dr J
I would weep with joy if I found something like that in a bluebook.
Instead, I get “Johnson wanted to out due the Kennedy’s and Neal Deal.”
May 14, 2009 at 10:39 am
rea
There’s a bottom? How do you know that?
Years of grim experience, alas.
May 14, 2009 at 12:39 pm
JPool
Victory! Victory for
ZimHumedana!May 15, 2009 at 1:48 pm
hilzoy
Dr. J: Consider my all-time favorite student sentence:
“Descartes divides the truths into three groups: true, false, and on slim grounds.”
It’s astonishing how many levels of wrongness that student managed to fold into thirteen short words.
May 15, 2009 at 4:47 pm
kid bitzer
must try harder!
May 15, 2009 at 6:06 pm
dana
Any more points of error and it would be a chiliagon!
May 15, 2009 at 6:46 pm
kid bitzer
no, no–that’s a contest to see who can survive the most scoville units.
May 15, 2009 at 7:42 pm
dana
The habanero battle between Arnauld and Descartes is of couse legendary.
May 15, 2009 at 11:07 pm
Michael Turner
I propose hilzoy units: number of levels of wrongness times the number of individual points of error, divided by the number of words.
It could be a measure of “error pressure”, a means to quantify the oppressive horror one feels in a bathysphere descending into a Skeptical Gap of Doom, such as might be found at the bottom of a deep trench in the Ocean of Philosophy — if there are any not yet filled with student bluebook final-exam essays.
There, one would find, at last, where the Giant Squids sleep.
May 16, 2009 at 3:34 am
kid bitzer
opponents would sometimes defeat him with their inability to think, but descartes remained impassive.
“i’ll show them something clear and distinct,” he’d say, while roasting chilis over his stove.
and after a few bites, no cogitation was required: “conflagro!,” they’d yelp, “ergo sum!”
it worked no matter how feebly they languished: “si tabescis,” he’d say, “tabasco.”