So ... continuing our line of thought into a third day: why is this idea of individually specific concept acquisition (about "dog" or "life-bearing planets" or whatever) important for the philosophy of education? The answer is that it emphasizes that educators have to meet a child where he is -- where, conceptually, he lives. The temptation, given the old Baconian view of concepts, might be to fill a child's mind with facts and then start showing him how to draw inferences from these facts, in effect drawing up a chart of similarities and differences. Dewey gives an example from geography, "The first thing to do" on a Baconian view, may be to give a definition of geography itself. Then to define "the various abstract terms ... pole, equator, ecliptic, zone -- from the simpler units to the more complex which are formed out of them; then the more concrete elements are taken in similar series: continent, island, coast, promontory, cape.......
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As we discussed yesterday: a child will begin working with a concept of dog with only one data point: Fido. Nobody waits, or should wait, for enough material to build up a table of similarities and contrasts. The building of assumptions and experimentation begins immediately. Meeting the neighbors' dog is simply an early experiment in one's life. The neighbors' dog may be much larger than our own family dog: I may have to revise my view that dogs fit naturally on human laps, like Fido. Ah, but what does that have to do with us? One might ask. "There are only adults in this room." Still: there are matters on which we have only one datum. Consider life on Earth. We know as of yet of only one planet that hosts life. We have hypotheses about others, and a huge body of fiction on the subject. But we have no reliable information about any other such planet. This is NOT an example of Dewey's. [He was writing How we think only a few years after ...
I discussed in two earlier posts the broad argument of John Dewey's book, HOW WE THINK, introducing a philosophical foundation for a theory of education in which schools have the goal of teaching how to think critically. This week I would like to focus three posts on a single important, though rather dry, issue within that book. What are concepts and how are THEY formed? According to Dewey, a conception is simply "a definite meaning which is standardized." As Dewey would have known, William James once offered a two-word statement of the same point, "thingumbob again". How do we acquire these standardized meanings? Most especially: how do we acquire concepts that may be considered somewhat abstract, where for example the standardized meaning allows for variation? Dewey offers a nice run-down of the standard account here before offering his own. The standard account (one may call it Baconian) is that a child begins with a lot of different particular things. ...
I wrote last week about a book by John Dewey, published 104 years ago now, "How we think". I described then the conclusion of the first chapter, that thinking in its essence is the operation by which present facts suggest other facts in such a way as to induce belief in the latter on the basis of the former. Let us take his line of thought (about thought) a little further. For he moves quickly from thinking in a generic sense to reflective or critical thinking. And THAT is the key. John Dewey is still probably better known as an educational theorist with a reputation for an aversion to tough grading or school discipline. That reputation is overblown. But ... HOW WE THINK was aimed at the philosophy of education, Its program is this: first let us figure out what thinking is attempting to do, and then let us infer how THAT can be done well. That in turn will lead us to an understanding of how older humans can teach younger ones to do a good ...
Book note. An important but neglected work by John Dewey, published by DC Heath, Boston, 1910, and one in the public domain, is known as How we think . Here is a link. https://gutenberg.org/cache/epub/37423/pg37423-images.html How we think opens in striking fashion, "No words are oftener on our lips than thinking and thought. So profuse and varied, indeed, is our use of these words that it is not easy to define just what we mean by them." That phrasing could have led to a Wittgensteinian view of such definitions as games, where usage drives meaning rather than the reverse. It doesn't go there. Rather: the first chapter comes to the conclusion that thinking is "that operation in which present facts suggest other facts (or truths) in such a way as to induce belief in the latter upon the ground or warrant of the former." He suggests a man out for a walk who notices a cold breeze. This may induce him to look toward the sky, which may in tur...
Five points on Dewey as an educational theorist. 1. Dewey tells us that the key intellectual purpose of education is the development of reflective or critical thinking as a skill and a habit. Even without decoding the adjectives, we can see that the emphasis here is going to be on THINKING, an activity, not a passive body of knowledge that has to be passed along like a family heirloom. 2. But let us get into the adjectives. Reflective thinking is the habit of actively, persistently and carefully considering any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, those that suggests doubt, and the further conclusions to which it would lead it adopted. 3. Memorizing data so that one can recite it back again on command is not reflective thinking. It has its uses, but it should be some distance from the center of our thinking about thinking, that is, from a system of education. 4. Dewey was actually a critic of the "child-centered approach" to ed...
Aeon published a story recently about American pragmatism's influence and evolution in India. The story, written by Scott Stroud, condensing Stroud's recent book on the theme, centers on Bhimrao Ambedkar, a man who had returned to India after studying philosophy under John Dewey at Columbia in the 'teens of the 20th century. Ambedkar is a fascinating figure -- of the "untouchable" or Dalit caste, he became one of the framers of the new Republic of India's constitution in the 1940s. That is him (standing and dressed in black) in the photo, when he formally presented the final draft of the new constitution to the president of the Constituent Assembly. He was already then a member of the first cabinet upon Independence, Nehru's cabinet. Ambedkar's title was Law Minister. What had he learnt from Dewey? Certainly one great theme of Dewey's writings, around the time that he would have been teaching young Bhimrao, was his unhappiness with the ...
One of the perennial positions in the philosophy of education is perennialism. "Perennialism" is a valuable word for identifying the ideas behind, say, the Great Books curriculum conspicuously offered by St John's College at Annapolis. The underlying idea is that the best idea are the ones that have lasted over centuries, because time is the great editor. Perennialists typically set students to work reading and analyzing the works by history's finest thinkers and writers. AT its best, this is of course very different from rote learning. One is not expected to learn medicine by memorizing the thoughts of Hippocrates and Galen. But one might well be expected to learn something valuable about science by analyzing what Hippocrates and Galen wrote, why they wrote it, what their concerns were, and so forth. Perennialism is neither all right nor all wrong. I thought I should mention it today because I was writing about Hutchins here, yeste...
Here's a link to a fascinating diagram that surely represents a lot of work and thought, https://chrisblattman.com/2014/11/17/positions-philosophy-science/?fbclid=IwAR0N9hy9FqL7Oo4czEp7TZOQ2r2xczO2jpH6TTWS5lEWW7tS1zLFNM07xbs I hope you'll each follow the link and look around at the diagram. I won't try to reproduce it here. I'd either have to make it prohibitively small or crop some of it. Instead, my visual here is a diagram of quarks fusing. The underlying question behind the philosophy of science, as least as it is portrayed in this chart, is the following: is a "quark" (for example) a real thing -- part of the furniture of the universe, like the tree just outside my window -- or is it merely a useful postulate? As you can see if you follow the link, the fellow who prepared the graph takes the distinction between realism and anti-realism to be fundamental. The distinction is represented by a blank space in the middle -- and both positions are rep...
Barbara Branden, perhaps best known as the author of The Passion of Ayn Rand (1986), and as co-author, with then-husband Nathaniel Branden, of Who is Ayn Rand? (1962), died on December 11th. The actress Julie Delpy played Barbara in a TV movie based on The Passion of Ayn Rand, and sharing that name, which aired in 1999. No less of a legend than Helen Mirren played the titular protagonist. Given the above two paragraphs, you may well see the headline above as odd. But as Branden tells us in The Passion , and as many of the obits have mentioned, BB did study philosophy with the Marxist/pragmatist/and eventual neocon Sidney Hook, at New York University. She defended Hook in conversations within the Randian circle as someone who was committed to reason. I'd rather write about Hook than about Rand any day. In the era in which BB knew him, Hook was known as the author of Toward the Understanding of Karl Marx (1933)and From Hegel to Marx (1936). Th...
Last week I quoted the philosopher John Dewey on the difference between life and non-living matter. "The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered. While the living thing may easily be crushed by a superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence." A friend asked why I considered that profound. I'll reproduce here my response, with some very slight re-working. _____________________________ One obvious example of what Dewey has in mind is the immune system in humans and in just about all other creatures with blood coursing through veins. There is a wide range of infections which cause various nasty diseases in humans, whence most of those struck can and do recove...
"The most notable distinction between living and inanimate things is that the former maintain themselves by renewal. A stone when struck resists. If its resistance is greater than the force of the blow struck, it remains outwardly unchanged. Otherwise, it is shattered. While the living thing may easily be crushed by a superior force, it none the less tries to turn the energies which act upon it into means of its own further existence." DEMOCRACY AND EDUCATION (1916).
One critical fact about the philosophy of William James is that it is a good deal more subtle than many newcomers to philosophy expect it to be. The crude use of the word "pragmatism" to mean "unprincipled" or "opportunistic" has contributed to the false impression that there isn't a lot of intellectual/philosophical substance to it. Also, the fact that much of what James wrote on the subject was written with a wider audience in mind than his fellow academics, has had the unfortunate side effect of giving it a reputation in some quarters as the philosophy for those without the patience, or perhaps the intellectual heft, to read real philosophy. Barzun, in A Stroll with William James, devoted his own considerable gifts to clearing up such misconceptions. I won't retread that ground here but will move to a related problem: we associate pragmatism as much with Dewey as with James, and through Dewey it has come to have a close connection wit...