Educational Explanations. Christopher Winch

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Educational Explanations - Christopher Winch


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cultures. In ours, deductive reasoning holds particular sway. However, it is by no means the only way of thinking about rationality. Hollis (in Hollis and Lukes 1982), for example, argued that something like basic logical presuppositions would need to hold in all cultures in order for them to be intelligible at all. Such a position rests, in turn, upon a conceptual scheme in which particulars and persons are categorial primitives (Strawson 1961).

      But we also know that logical contradictions can be tolerated, not just in ‘primitive’ societies but also in our own (Evans-Pritchard 1936). Does this undermine the claim that there is an underlying logic to all societies? Not necessarily. That contradictions may be tolerated in certain contexts does not entail that ignoring them has no consequences. They tend to exist in those circumstances in which the benefits of tolerating them outweigh those of dispensing with them, for practical reasons such as the maintenance of the stability of a way of life. One could say that although humanity has a common constitutive rationality, various forms of practical rationality (to do with the determination of ends and means to those ends) may suspend the formalised canons of constitutive rationality in some circumstances. If such contradictions are exposed, it is the researcher’s task to first investigate whether they really are contradictions and, if they are, to enquire why and to what extent they are tolerated and, perhaps, to seek analogues in their own belief system.

      Thus Evans-Pritchard (1936), in his discussion of the Zande poison oracle, although noting the care the Zande took to ensure that the poison substance (benge) was not tampered with, were not inclined to dispute the pronouncements of the oracle, even when they were not apparently borne out by events. Zande tended to attribute such an outcome, not to a mistake on the part of the oracle, but as maladministration on the part of those consulting the oracle. Evans-Pritchard’s interpretation of the oracle practice involved seeing it as a form of primitive and ineffective scientific enquiry and thus, by the standards of modern academic scientific method, lacking in rigour and effectiveness.

      A good example of where debates about such issues can lead to widespread confusion relates to the role of literacy in our understanding of rationality. There is a long tradition dating at least from the work of Lévy-Bruhl (1910) which suggests that one of the marks of a ‘primitive mind’ is exclusively oral culture in which constitutive rationality, let alone critical rationality, cannot properly exist. Such a case has been argued for in a less extreme manner by for example Goody and Watt (1963), Olson (1977) and even Stubbs (1980). It has been disputed by Labov (1969), Finnegan (1973) and Winch, C. (1983, 1990). Debates about the enabling nature of literacy show us how intimately related are conceptual and empirical enquiries within the broad field of educational research. Without some clarification of what is meant by ‘rationality’, ‘argument’, ‘symbol’, ‘context’ ‘surveyability’ and ‘genre’ just to take some important terms, it is difficult to make much progress in understanding the terms of an investigation into the enabling powers of literacy, let alone conduct empirical investigations into these enabling powers.

      CAN A CRITERIAL CONCEPTION OF TRUTH BE DEFENDED?

      In this last part of the chapter I wish to consider some possible problems for the view that has been developed so far.


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