Educational Explanations. Christopher Winch

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Educational Explanations - Christopher Winch


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rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_8147956a-ce7a-5a98-9708-9de6da743f47">2 We presuppose it in the sense that we act as if there is, without in any way articulating that belief (Wittgenstein 1969).

      3 3 Wittgenstein (1953) IIxi, p. 225, for example.

      4 4 Education as a preparation for life is offered as a primary characterisation of the significance of the concept in human life. It is not a definition and is certainly not meant to exclude such phenomena as higher, further and adult education.

      5 5 See Peters (1981) for a similar view. Peters modified his views on education considerably at the end of his career. In my view, this late approach was a potentially most fruitful one which was, unfortunately, not developed.

      6 6 Societal values do usually also contain an empirical element as well, for example, beliefs in the abilities and moral standing of different elements of the society.

      7 7 Which is to say that curricula, whether formal or informal, have normative force.

      8 8 The term ‘worthwhile’ is used because alternatives like ‘flourishing’ may not capture what is aimed for in education, which cannot be assumed to be a flourishing adulthood, whatever that may mean. ‘Worthwhile’ implies a form of living worth striving for for an individual or group, crucially even if that individual or group may not recognize its worthwhileness for them. It may or may not encompass a notion of flourishing and here again, what counts as flourishing for X may not, from X’s perspective count as flourishing for Y, even if it may count as such for Y.

      9 9 A related debate concerns whether or not careers guidance should properly be counted as a form of education. See Winch P. (2015) for more on this.

      10 10 Relativism does not, per se, entail the equal validity of all perspectives. For more on this see Wreen (2018).

      11 11 See for example the discussion of different conceptions of know-how in Chapter 10 .

      12 12 As Mulder points out, this could not happen without the efficient cause, or some of its elements, having appropriate structural properties.

      INTRODUCTION

      Empirical educational research (EER) lies in the region of social science. As such, many of the problems and disputes concerning its aims, presuppositions and methods are held in common with the other social sciences. It is, however, distinctive in three ways. First, although there is a field of study, namely educational practices in all their variety, there is no distinctive educational methodology for investigating them. Typically EER uses a selection of sociological, economic, historical or psychological methods whenever they are thought to be appropriate. Second, philosophy has always been one of the central educational disciplines and, even if empirical researchers try to ignore the philosophical issues that arise in the interpretation of central educational concepts, those which structure our understanding of education (see Ch. 1), that does not mean that they go away. Finally, EER usually has a practical objective based loosely around the idea of improving an educational practice or educational performance. These three features make it distinctive among the social sciences. In what follows, some issues will be peculiar to education while others apply more generally to the social sciences.

      OBJECTIVITY AND TRUTH CRITERIA

      A criterial conception of truth is to be distinguished from correspondence accounts whereby a proposition is true if it corresponds in some way to a state of affairs (Ellenbogen 2003; Vision 2005). We might ask whether or not a proposition does correspond to a state of affairs and we would need some criterion for saying whether or not it did. A coherence account of truth would broadly claim that a proposition is true if it coheres with or perhaps is consistent with other propositions taken to be true, or better, if it belongs to a set which provides mutual explanatory support (Young 2018). While coherence accounts attempt to provide a sufficient account of what it is for a proposition to be true, this can only be the case if it is possible to advance satisfactory criteria for coherence and there is often substantial disagreement about what these are.


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