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Reasonableness instead of Rationality
An Interview with
Clinton Golding
2009
By: Saeed Naji & Samira Pezeshkpour
Clinton Golding is lecturer in the Thinking Curriculum at the Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne. He previously had the position of ‘Thinking Coordinator’ in two schools in New Zealand where he was working to develop the thinking of staff and students across all year levels and subject areas. His special field of research is creating an educational culture of good thinking. He has presented many workshops and conference papers related to this theme in New Zealand and Australia and has also published several books, for example, Developing a thinking classroom: A workbook for professional development.
Q: Due to the fact that a proportion of your studies are dedicated to connecting subjects of school lessons to P4C programs, do you believe that we can use the community of enquiry in all the school lessons e.g. physics.
I try to connect P4C with other subjects by having P4C students consider philosophical issues that arise in the other subjects, and likewise I encourage the teachers of different subject areas to encourage their students to explore the philosophical underpinnings of what they teach. Yet I do not think that P4C is an appropriate way of teaching subjects besides philosophy. Rather, it is the pedagogical theory that underlies P4C (which Lipman sometimes calls ‘educational philosophy’) that is important for teaching in other subject areas. I recommend that all subject areas use a ‘community of inquiry’ approach, and that students learn by engaging in the same sort of inquiry that experts engage in. In this way students develop meaningful knowledge rather than merely a collection of discrete chunks of information that they might remember, but which do not make sense to them. However, a community of scientific or mathematical inquiry in the classroom. For example, is different from the community of philosophical inquiry in P4C. For the most part, mathematical or scientific inquiry would involve students engaging with mathematical and scientific problems and doing calculations, testing theorems, interpreting texts, gathering data, or designing and conducting experiments, depending on the subject. This will only sometimes include philosophical meta-inquiry into philosophical problems about the nature of the discipline and its fundamental concepts and assumptions.
Q: Regarding your article “Creating a Thinking School”, it seems that you have made many changes in the previous curriculum. If yes, please explain briefly.
I have advocated that curriculum changes be made. For example, I advocate that the development of thinking skills, dispositions and understandings be added as curriculum goals when these are absent. To learn a subject or discipline, students have to learn the ways of thinking involved, as well as the body of knowledge. But I rarely advocate any change to the body of knowledge to be covered, except perhaps that students should cover less, so they can develop a deeper understanding of the subject matter. The main changes I advocate for schools are pedagogical and institutional, rather than curricular, in order to allow for the education of thinking. I advocate that the curriculum be taught in a reflective manner, where students develop knowledge as the result of their own inquiry, for the reasons I gave in my answer to the first question. I also advocate that if a school wants to be a ‘thinking school’ and provide an environment that is educative for thinking, then it needs to place education for thinking as one of its highest priorities. Otherwise, being a ‘thinking school’ will be mere rhetoric, and educating for thinking will always be neglected because there is no time left after doing what is really important (such as drilling students for exams).
Q: According to your article “Epistemic Positions and Philosophy for Children”, it seems that you believe in Rationalistic ideas. What are the strongest logics you may respond to Relativistic ideas?
Q: Some believe that there is an opposition between Rationalism and Pragmatism (especially new pragmatism). In your opinion what ideas and solutions are there for this problem? Are they originally compatible?
I will answer two above questions together. I do not think there is a clear opposition or distinction between pragmatism and rationalism or relativism, because pragmatism, or at least the pragmatism I advocate, shares characteristics of both rationalism and relativism. For pragmatism, like relativism, there are no impartial, universal standards we can appeal to, only standards relative to some perspective or another. But equally for pragmatism, like rationalism, some perspectives are better than others. This is not because some are True and the others False, but because some better satisfy objective criteria than others, such as surviving the tribunal of the community of inquirers or resolving a problem (not what we like or want, but what actually resolves the problem within the constraints of the world). Pragmatism is only in opposition to extreme versions of relativism or rationalism: that there is an external Truth that we can apprehend impartially and with certainty, and that every perspective is equally as good as every other. I do not attempt to prove pragmatism is correct and extreme or radical relativism and rationalism are incorrect (as this would be to play the rationalist game), but I can offer good reasons for taking it to be a better position. My argument is that pragmatism is better than both extreme relativism and rationalism because they ignore useful and legitimate epistemic standards that are available to pragmatism. Rationalism can admit only of true and false. Relativism admits only of opinions. Both ignore the range of epistemically legitimate standards by which we can make reasoned judgements which are neither ‘true’ nor ‘false’ as such, but nor are they mere opinions. Extreme forms of rationalism set epistemic standards that are impossibly and unnecessarily high. Even if it were possible to attain truth, we could not verify that we have done so, and could not even tell if we had moved closer, because we do not have the independent access to the truth that is needed to measure the distance between our current conception and the true conception. This means that under extreme forms of rationalism, we cannot make or verify epistemic judgements, because the only standards we have available are impossible to meet. A consequence of this is that rationalism leaves us constantly in danger of dogmatism. Relativism sets epistemic standards that are unreasonably and needlessly low (in reality, having no epistemic standards at all). Relativism starts with an acknowledgement that we cannot have, or verify if we have, final truth, but then draws the conclusion that therefore we cannot have anything of epistemic value, only subjective opinions. Pragmatism, on the other hand is able to employ legitimate epistemic standards that fall between the impossible absolute truth and mere opinions. For example, pragmatism can appeal to logical coherence, harmony with other conceptions or the empirical data, absence of fallacies or strength of logical support. I do not reject rationalism on the basis of the inductive argument that we haven’t yet produced final truths so we probably never will. Nor do I reject the relativism because we might produce truths one day. Instead I argue that we better understand our epistemic standards by considering the legitimate epistemic achievements that pragmatism can support such as new or more refined arguments, questions and positions rather than by considering whether or not we can reach the truth, or if it is all a matter of opinion.
Q: According to your article “Truth or Making sense; what is more important in education?” can you “make sense” without paying attention to truth? It seems that inquiry consist in finding the meaning of truth.
In this article I argued that the aim of education is not for students to have the Truth, as such, but to make sense of it. A truth we do not (or cannot) make sense of is useless as an educative goal. Now I would argue differently – though I have yet to fully work out my position. The aim of education is to make sense. This is a different ‘game’ to seeking the truth. As I argue in my PhD thesis, “there are similarities between these games as there are between Australian Rules, Rugby, and American football, but they are different games with different rules, methods of play and most importantly, ways of scoring.” We can play the education game of making sense without paying attention to truth, which is only relevant in other games. The epistemic aim of education, I argue, is for students to construct or understand theories, interpretations, explanations, metaphors or descriptions that prove insightful and enable them to resolve inadequacies and incongruities in their conceptions, or in other words, to put all their various conceptions in greater reflective equilibrium (in the pragmatist sense I discussed in the previous answer). For example, we teach 12-year-olds a simplified view of science so they can better understand the world at their current level of understanding, and as they get older, we teach them more sophisticated conceptions. However, asking whether the simplified science we teach 12-year-olds (or 16-year olds or second year University students) is ‘true’ seems to be a muddled question and a category error. The science we teach at the different levels assists students to develop more and more sophisticated conceptions, which enable them to more and more make sense of and act successfully in the world. The question of truth or falsity is irrelevant to this endeavour (though I have to stress that this does not mean that anything goes in education, as this would be to resort to a radical relativism. The new conceptions have to enable students to make sense of the world, and such things as wishful thinking, conceptions based on logical error etc. will not serve this aim). If we really wanted to teach the truth (if there is such a thing), we would have to teach materials that were far beyond the comprehension of most of our students. But this is not the point of education. We have succeeded in education when students make sense of or understand more than previously, not when they have the truth.
Q: Due to the fact that many of our readers have not studied your book “Connecting Concepts”, please discuses its subjects briefly.
Connecting Concepts was designed to give a quick, easy, but still rigorous, strategy for assisting students to philosophise – with a particular focus on conceptual analysis. It is inspired by materials in various P4C texts, and works according to the same model of inquiry learning underpinning the P4C method. The basic strategy is to take a rich philosophical concept and have students address and try to categorise examples, counter-examples and borderline examples of this concept. The borderline examples, in particular, present philosophical problems for the students because they are so difficult to categorise one way or the other, and these become the stimulus for inquiry, with a similar function to that served by Lipman’s philosophical novels. For example, students might be inquiring into the concept of responsibility and they have to decide whether the following are examples of someone who was responsible, not responsible or whether they are uncertain how to categorise the example. -You break a plate while moving furniture.
-You break a plate that was left in the middle of the hallway.
-You break a plate that you were throwing in the air and catching.
-A driver intends to hit someone, but misses because he or she isn’t a very good driver.
-You teach your friend basketball and they go on to become a famous player.
-Jim was born with a genius IQ and gets a top job
Students attempt to categorise these examples, and in the process raise questions, alternative perspectives and possible definitions. The resulting inquiry and discussion is philosophically rich and fruitful.
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