Educational Explanations. Christopher Winch
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can have practical implications for teachers and policymakers. One might, perhaps, be prepared to live with these consequences of relativism if there were no alternative. But there is a much less drastic alternative way of making sense of multiple perspectives.
Even were we to adopt Mulhall’s (1990) Wittgenstein-derived account of permanent aspect perception as a way of thinking about multiple perspectives, it would not follow that each perceived aspect implied a distinct reality. What would follow is that reports of such intentional perception (McGinn 2015) could only be subjected to assessments of their sincerity rather than their truth. In fact, there are good grounds for thinking that what Wittgenstein termed ‘permanent’ aspect perception does not correspond to the phenomenon described by Mulhall, which as Arahata (2015) has argued, could be better described as ‘chronic’ aspect perception or the sense of knowing one’s way about in the world, of features of the world assuming a salience corresponding not only to biological needs and capacities, but also to particular cultural preoccupations and interests. Chronic aspect perception carries no implication of multiple realities.
Ironically, the idealism of the phenomenological approach is ultimately based on a kind of realism. It is assumed that true judgements correspond to reality and since such judgements are perspectival and there are potentially multiple perspectives, we have to assume that there are multiple realities which correspond to these perspectives. But, as we shall see in Chapter 2 we do not need to subscribe to a dogmatic form of realism in order to hold on to a secure concept of objective truth. There also appears to be a view implicit in the phenomenological approach that there are multiple incompatible perspectives on the same educational practices and because each perspective requires a reality to validate its statements, there must also be multiple realities corresponding to each incompatible perspective. But the assumption remains implicit that all the perspectives are about the same reality; otherwise there would be little sense in calling them alternative perspectives – they would merely be perspectives unrelated to each other, rather than a parent’s, a child’s or a teacher’s perspective on a particular educational practice. The phenomenological approach, in formulating its claims, arguably makes the very assumption that it seeks to reject. In other words, by assuming that there is a linkage between perspectives, it assumes tacitly that there is something which the different perspectives are perspectives on. Different individuals may look at a landscape from radically different perspectives with radically different results, but it is still the same landscape that they are all contemplating. It may be that we need to locate the problems that phenomenology encounters when seeking to deal with perspectivalism in both its hidden and its more overt realist assumptions. In Chapter 2 we will examine more closely how it is possible both to do justice to the reality of multiple educational perspectives and to work with a robust account of objective truth in EER.
SYNOPSIS OF THE CHAPTERS
Chapter 2 considers the issue of the possibility of objective and truthful educational research in more detail. The chapter will develop the claim that there can be a criterial understanding of truth which allows us to make objective claims about educational practices without submitting to a dogmatically realist account of truth, drawing principally on the work Ellenbogen (2003). Such an account will also do justice to the conception-dependent nature of educational practice and the fact of multiple perspectives on educational practices. An objective account of an educational practice can take account of the multiple perspectives in play and the conceptions of education that inform them, together with the possible conceptual distinctiveness of certain conceptions.11
The argument stresses the hermeneutic or interpretive tasks of EER. It is very often not possible to provide any explanation of an educational state of affairs or process until the conception and associated perspectives on the practice have themselves been adequately explained. Interpretation is a key, if neglected part of EER. In this sense, EER as one of the social sciences is, as Peter Winch (1958) argued, a philosophical enterprise. One of its main, although by no means the only one of its tasks, is an empirical investigation of educational and related concepts. In order to understand an educational phenomenon, there is no avoiding of the consideration of how its participants understand it.
This brings us on to a discussion of how the concept of rationality can inform our understanding of the great diversity of practices in education. Some distinctions are made which strengthen our view that we are not dealing with ‘multiple realities’ in the face of such diversity, while at the same time taking account of the reality of that diversity and the imaginative challenge involved in comprehending it.
Chapter 3 takes up the issue of the very possibility of EER and the various sceptical arguments that have been advanced against it. Scepticism concerning whether there really are such things as educational practices will be considered first. Such claims usually rely on a strong form of perspectivalism which denies the existence of a single educational reality. Another form of such perspectivalism maintains that, since educational practices are always value laden, there can be no investigation of such practices that does not involve some form of identification with those values. The confusions in these approaches will be set out.
Next, the claim it is not possible to know as opposed to believe any educational facts through EER will be considered. It will be argued that this claim is, in the end incoherent. Claims that educational phenomena can be considered through a faculty called ‘common sense’ will also be considered and rejected as incoherent. Finally the claim that EER is inherently unreliable and unable to fulfil its promise will be considered. This is the most serious objection to EER and will need to be considered with great care, paying due regard to the scope and limitations of EER. However, the conclusion will be a qualified positive one, albeit one which more positivistically inclined philosophers of EER may find difficult to accept.
Chapter 4 broaches the issue of what kinds of explanation are available for educational phenomena and is also concerned with the scope of educational explanations. There are a number of issues to be dealt with in a chapter on educational explanations. The first is what an educational explanation actually is. In order to deal with this, we need to remember the focus that most educational research has in trying to improve educational practices. Generally speaking, that purposive feature of EER shapes the kinds of explanations that are offered. But here we need to remind ourselves that explanation is closely tied to interpretation (see von Wright 1971, Ch. 4), not only in the sense that interpretation often has to precede explanation, but also in the sense that explanation sometimes involves interpretation. Explanations in EER tend to be focused on a practical issue, so they concentrate on why certain phenomena occur, in the sense of what causes and reasons are operative in bringing them about, but also on how they occur, in the sense of looking at the unfolding of processes in and around educational practices. In this sense, explanations are closely related to descriptions.The object (Achinstein 1975 in Körner ed. 1975) of an educational explanation is usually an educational phenomenon, but the origin of such an explanation arises from a question arising from a need for explanation.
This chapter will argue that the kinds of explanation appropriate to EER cannot be confined to one type, and that both what might be called causal and reason-based explanations will be deployed, sometimes in relation to the same phenomenon. We should be wary of making too strict a distinction between these two types of explanation and in particular should be aware of the Aristotelian distinction between efficient causes, which are primarily what causal explanation nowadays involve and formal causes. The distinction is well explained by Mulder (2016): ‘The formal cause determines what can happen, the efficient cause determines that something happens’ (p. 165). Another way of putting the distinction is that the formal cause concerns the structural properties of something that produces a cause: an object or process for example, while the efficient cause usually relates two events to each other in such a way that one is