There are also plenty of things in science that are taught that are technically incorrect, but give you a working model that you can build on later. The atomic model being a rather typical example.
That’s fair: abstraction. The technical wrongness of “orbiting electrons” as in the whichever-model serves a purpose: the truth is hairy, and more importantly not practically relevant if you’re calculating sliding boxes around planes and that sort of thing.
On the other hand, “10% of the brain” and similar nuggets of common “wisdom” are just flat-out wrong, often stupidly so. There’s very little use in that.
There are also plenty of things in science that are taught that are technically incorrect, but give you a working model that you can build on later. The atomic model being a rather typical example.
That’s fair: abstraction. The technical wrongness of “orbiting electrons” as in the whichever-model serves a purpose: the truth is hairy, and more importantly not practically relevant if you’re calculating sliding boxes around planes and that sort of thing.
On the other hand, “10% of the brain” and similar nuggets of common “wisdom” are just flat-out wrong, often stupidly so. There’s very little use in that.
Oh. Yeah. That’s a good point. When I taught a dead language, I would tell my students that all grammars lie to you, but some of the lies are useful.
The Wittgensteinian Ladder. The pedagogical expedient misinformation.