Wednesday, February 3, 2016

Poetry Question - February 6, 2016

Comment on the following famous quote by the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey who lived from about 1856 - 1952.




                           We don't learn from experience, but  from reflecting on experience. 



1) Do you agree with it?
2) Why or why not
3)  Does this have anything to do with poetry?

15 comments:

  1. I think in some cases you can learn from just experience. Without reflecting on some experiences you can still learn from them. So I don't agree with the quote above. I think this could relate to poetry because sometimes poetry has to do a lot with reflecting on life and instances in people's lives.

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  2. I do not agree with it. I don't because I believe reflecting is an experience in it's self. When you look back, you are remembering and REFLECTING. Everything we see, hear, taste, smell, and feel are experiences and I truly believe we do not stop experiencing stuff, until we are dead. No matter what you do, it's an experience. It has to because many poets have to right about what they have EXPERIENCED and put it into writing which is REFLECTING.

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  3. I believe it can go both way. I do think that humans have a set of instincts that require no thought. In other words s we, as humans, have actions we just do. On the other hand, many experiences are actually learned from reflection on these experiences. Without reflection no one would learn anything. For example, a person can be caught speeding and given a ticket and they can either reflect on this and learn not to do it again, or they can not think about it and continue to get tickets and not learn from their mistakes. This creates to poetry because of the many messages we receive from poems. Without reflecting on these messages we would never learn from them.

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  4. I like to believe that we learn from a combination of experience and reflection. People react differently depending on the situation, their history, and their personality, for example some people use their "gut" to make all decisions, people use different combinations of instinct, and reflected lessons to perform most athletics, and as for most art, well that's mostly reflection. Personally at least, I believe that poetry reflects upon, a feeling, a moment, a wish, and isn't something experienced, it's something, reflecting upon one's own experience.

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  6. I believe we do not need to reflect on experience to learn unconsciously. The human body has a number of reactions and functions which occur with no previous thought. Some experiences can be learned from in an instinctual fashion and do not need to be consciously reflected upon. I believe in order to consciously learn things, some form of reflection must occur. However things learned through reflections can also, over time become innate or instinctual. I believe in many cases refection must occur, but not all. Poetry is, for the majority, refection on experience and the sharing of thoughts.

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  7. I believe we learn from both experience and reflection. Life itself is an experience composed of a multitude of little experiences. As I'm typing this comment right now, I am experiencing it. Am I reflecting at the moment? Yes, as I am thinking of the discussion we had in class last week. When we learn from experience it's more of less from common sense, for example if a child were to touch the stove their brain would connect the dots and process stoves aren't meant to be touched simply because of the pain the child experienced. The argument could go either way.

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  8. Yes, I agree with this because when you do something you shouldn't have done then you reflect on it and realize you shouldn't do it again. If you touch something really hot then you're going to reflect on that and never touch something hot again. Yes this does have something to do with poetry. In poetry they reflect on life situations.

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  9. I agree with the quote but I feel that the word "reflection" is replacing the word "thought". I feel in order to learn we must have experiences and some sort of thought process, whether it be a quick thought or drawn out the experience still must be processed in some way. This relates to poetry because poetry is reflection.

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  10. I think we learn from both. If I were to touch a stove, I'm not going to reflect on it and think about it to know I'm not going to do it again. I believe instinct is something you don't have to think or reflect on to act on it. If a ball was thrown at my face, my instant reaction is to cover my face with my hands. I don't have to reflect on what happens if I don't cover my face. The human body learns different from the mind. Your mind can tell you to touch a stove, but your body will resist it because it knows what happens when you touch something burning hot.

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  11. I believe everything we learn from has a certain degree of reflection. For instance touching a stove doesn't take nearly as much reflection as committing murder. I would say looking back on something you have done is reflecting so even touching a stove, you would look at what happened last time you touched the stove and make a conscious decision not to touch it again. This quote applies to poetry because when people write poetry they reflect on the experiences in their life.

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  12. I think we do reflect on our experience but I think some of our experience we don't reflect on such as instinct or some event that one has never encountered so how can someone reflect on that. I think it does have to deal with poetry because when we have to reflect on a poem after we read it to figure out what it's about.

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  13. I do believe that we learn from reflection wether or not it comes from are own personal experience or from someone else's. After much time has passed it starts to become an instinct were you don't haft to think before you react. I also think it does have to do with poetry since everything we have experienced we reflect on, and what we write about is the experiences.

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  14. I do not agree with that, because experience is something that has to be physically done. You can relate reflection to thinking, knowing is different from wondering. To have truly learned something means to reflect on it means without experience. You can just sit there and think about being burned and actually get burned? I think thats all reflection is... Thoughts on what should happen next time.

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