That doesn’t seem like a big problem to me. Just make a different textbook for each major approach, or a single textbook that talks about each of them in turn. I would love such a book, and would happily recommend it to people looking to learn more about the field.
Or, just go ahead and overlook big chunks of the field. As long as you are clear that this is what you are doing, the textbook will still be useful for those interested in the chunk it covers.
As I said in my answer to Kaj, the real problem I see is that I don’t think we have the necessary perspective to write a useful textbook. Textbooks basically never touch research in the last ten years, or that research must be really easy to interpret and present, which is not the case here.
I think we do. I also think attempting to write a textbook would speed up the process of acquiring more perspective. Our goals, motivations, and constraints are very different from the goals and motivations of most textbook-writers, I think, so I don’t feel much pressure to defer to the collective judgment of other textbook-writers.
That doesn’t seem like a big problem to me. Just make a different textbook for each major approach, or a single textbook that talks about each of them in turn. I would love such a book, and would happily recommend it to people looking to learn more about the field.
Or, just go ahead and overlook big chunks of the field. As long as you are clear that this is what you are doing, the textbook will still be useful for those interested in the chunk it covers.
As I said in my answer to Kaj, the real problem I see is that I don’t think we have the necessary perspective to write a useful textbook. Textbooks basically never touch research in the last ten years, or that research must be really easy to interpret and present, which is not the case here.
I’m open to being proven wrong, though.
I think we do. I also think attempting to write a textbook would speed up the process of acquiring more perspective. Our goals, motivations, and constraints are very different from the goals and motivations of most textbook-writers, I think, so I don’t feel much pressure to defer to the collective judgment of other textbook-writers.