Now I cannot claim any
expertise in research on teaching. At best, I could claim that one paper explicitly
addresses a pedagogical issue.
Thornton, T. (2006) ‘Judgementand the role of the metaphysics of values in medical ethics’ Journal of Medical Ethics 32: 365-370
It argues that the way to teach
skill in medical ethical judgement is to proceed via an account of moral
particularism, in order to break the stranglehold of distorting principlist
concerns. I guess a similar interest, not so much in normative ethics but how
best to think of and thus to share competence in making value judgements, has
shaped my thinking about what is often called ‘Values Based Practice’ in eg:
Thornton, T.(2011) ‘Radical liberal values based practice’ Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 17:
988-91
Reflection on teaching
philosophy of mental health in particular led to a conference presentation at
the MHHE conference in 2010 which is written up on my blog and is published in the AAPP bulletin. But it was scornfully rejected by the Journal of Mental Health Training Education and Practice, however.
I also think that the account of tacit
knowledge Neil Gascoigne and I have developed in our forthcoming book:
Gascoigne, N. and Thornton, T. (forthcoming 2013) Tacit Knowledge, Durham: Acumen.
and rehearsed in a number of papers especially:
Gascoigne, N. and Thornton, T. (forthcoming 2013) Tacit Knowledge, Durham: Acumen.
and rehearsed in a number of papers especially:
Thornton, T. (2010) ‘Clinical judgement, expertise and skilled coping’ Journal of
Evaluation in Clinical Practice 16: 284-291
has implications for teaching. Tacit
knowledge is practical, context-dependent but nevertheless conceptually
structured. There is thus continuity between a rational agent’s practical
know-how and their explicit linguistically structured judgements in so far as
they are connected via an holistic inferential structure (the structure of the space of
reasons!). (Why is it tacit? Because
it can only be articulated (for
example in practical demonstrations structured by demonstrative concepts) not
fully linguistically codified in context-free general terms. It is only effable
given a chicken, or a Polynesian canoe, or whatever.)
But whilst the
bolshy teenager in me wants to answer the question ‘What learning and teaching theorists have had an influence on your
teaching practice?’ by saying ‘none!’, that isn’t actually true given a suitable
understanding of ‘learning and teaching theorist’. Since the Institute of
Education is presently a hotbed of McDowell studies, I can surely claim him. And
if him why not his most reliable teacher (if spookily from beyond the grave): Wittgenstein? With
that combination in the back of my mind I can think about what surely seems the
most serious threat to the idea of education: Jerry Fodor’s typically
pugnacious reductio of the very idea. (I can never tell whether Fodor intends
it in this way but it seems damning to me.) Perhaps attempting to head off this worry will count, or serve, as a philosophy of education. After all,
Here’s the highlight of the argument in his recent book LOT2: The language of thought revisited
[Fodor 2008]. Fodor himself sets up the argument with three key premises but I
just want to highlight two here starting with this. Learning is a rational process.
[T]he experience from which a concept
is learned must provide (inductive) evidence about what the concept applies to.
Perhaps COW is learned from experience with cows? If so, then experiences with
cows must somehow witness that it’s cows that COW applies to. This internal
connection between concept learning and epistemic notions like evidence is
the source of the strong intuition that concept learning is some sort of
rational process. It contrasts sharply with kinds of concept acquisition where,
for example, a concept is acquired by surgical implantation; or by swallowing a
pill; or by hitting one’s head against a hard surface, etc. Intuitively, none
of these is concept learning; but any or all of them might eventuate in
concept attainment. [Fodor 2008: 135]
It
seems, however, that there is only one way to meet this. Learning must be a
matter of induction. More precisely, it must be a matter of hypothesis
formation and confirmation. This applies centrally to the idea of learning
concepts.
There is, I think, a pretty general
consensus in the cognitive science literature about what makes a kind of
concept acquisition a kind of concept learning. Roughly, it’s that concept learning
is a process of inductive inference; in particular, that it’s a process of
projecting and confirming hypotheses about what the things that the concept
applies to have in common. [ibid: 132]
With
this set up, the argument against genuine concept learning and, in its place, for
nativism (for the idea that basic concepts at least are innate) runs as
follows.
Consider any concept that you’re
prepared to accept as primitive, the concept GREEN as it might be. Then ask ‘What
is the hypothesis the inductive confirmation of which constitutes the
learning of that concept?’ Well, to acquire a concept is at least to know what it’s
the concept of ; that is, what’s required of things that the concept
applies to. So, maybe
learning the concept GREEN is coming to believe that GREEN applies to (all and
only) green things; it’s surely plausible that coming to believe that is at
least a necessary condition for acquiring GREEN. Notice, however, that (assuming
RTM) a token of the concept GREEN is a constituent of the belief that the
concept GREEN applies to all and only green things. A fortiori, nobody
who lacked the concept GREEN could believe this; nobody who lacked the concept
GREEN could so much as contemplate believing this. A fortiori, on pain of
circularity, coming to believe this can’t be the process by which GREEN
is acquired. Likewise
mutatis mutandis for any other primitive concept; so, LOT 1 concluded
quite correctly that no primitive concept can be learned. If one then throws in
the (empirical; see above) assumption that most of the concepts one has are primitive
(which is to say, not definable) you get the consequence that most of the
concepts one has can’t have been learned. [ibid: 137-8]
In fact, in LOT2, Fodor goes further than he did in LOT and argues that there can be no concept learning at all, not
just no learning of the basic concepts. ‘What I
should have said is that it’s true and a priori that the whole notion of concept
learning is per se confused. Punkt.’ [ibid: 130]. But I won’t go
into that here.
If concept learning is a matter of hypothesis
formation (where the alternatives look not to be any kind of rational process
worthy of the labels ‘teaching’ or ‘learning’) then it seems that that process
requires prior possession of the concept one is supposed to be learning in
order to represent to oneself the hypothesis, testing of which constitutes
learning. To be in a position even to contemplate that a concept applies to a particular
class of instances one seems already to need to use the concept to single out
the potential infinity of instances. Even if we pick out the concept in
question demonstratively (as this!
concept, rather than naming it GREEN) still the class of instances will have to
be picked out by some concept or other but which? Although sniffy of regress
arguments, Fodor has one up his sleeve here. Sooner or later the class of
instances will have to be picked out by a concept for which one has no synonym,
a basic concept, and that, by the argument, will have to be innate. Thus there can be no genuine learning of new concepts. We must already have all the concepts we will ever have. That seems a damning view of the transforming possibilities of teaching and learning to me.
Two points on this.
First, as Fodor sets up the argument, it
depends on his Representational Theory of Mind (RTM). He says (above): ‘Notice,
however, that (assuming RTM) a token
of the concept GREEN is a constituent of the belief that the concept GREEN
applies to all and only green things’.
RTM is the idea that the conceptual articulation of thought is mirrored (and
explained by) structural articulation of the vehicles of thought. (To explain that notion of a vehicle of thought or content consider: This sentence carries the thought it expresses. In the sentence I just deployed, those mere squiggles meant: This sentence
carries the thought it expresses. The squiggles are the vehicle of – they ‘carry’ – the meaning, content or thought expressed by the sentence.) But that now invites the question: how do those inner vehicles
successfully carry thought to all and only green things? Once we attempt to
explain how concepts reach out to their potentially infinite class of instances
through the idea of inner tokens, things that just stand there like signposts in our heads, things look bleak because of the threat of a
regress argument familiar from Wittgenstein and which in Ryle’s hands runs
thus: [for my Wittgensteinian take on this see Thornton 1998: 1-68]].
If a deed, to be intelligent, has to be
guided by the consideration of a regulative proposition, the gap between that consideration
and the practical application of the regulation has to be bridged by some go-between
process which cannot by the pre-supposed definition itself be an exercise of intelligence
and cannot, by definition, be the resultant deed. This go-between application- process
has somehow to marry observance of a contemplated maxim with the enforcement of
behaviour. So it has to unite in itself the allegedly incompatible properties of
being kith to theory and kin to practice, else it could not be the applying of the
one in the other. For, unlike theory, it must be able to influence action, and,
unlike impulses, it must be amenable to regulative propositions. Consistency requires,
therefore, that this schizophrenic broker must again be subdivided into one bit
which contemplates but does not execute, one which executes but does not contemplate
and a third which reconciles these irreconcilables. And so on forever. [Ryle 1945:
2]
This first concern is not a knock down
argument against Fodor’s worry. His claim is that having the concept, and hence
the inner correlate of that concept in RTM, is necessary not sufficient. He can
argue that, whilst things may look bleak, that is just because we have not yet
deployed something like his own causal theory of reference to animate the internal mental
representations that populate the language of thought in a way that sidesteps
either Ryle’s or Wittgenstein’s regress arguments. But it will have to provide
the right kind of animation and that prompts a dilemma: either it begs the question
of the correctness of the link between concept and instance and invites Ryle’s
regress argument. Or it deploys merely causal notions and thus fails to account
for the essential normativity of concept use. (That is, when one understands a concept one understands how to use it correctly. There are a number of entries on semantic normativity on this blog.)
So the first worry is enough to make Fodor’s
solution to the problem that he raises unattractive. But that may seem to make
us worse off. Now we have a problem – the one Fodor persuasively highlights –
and no obvious way round it.
The second point to note is that Fodor’s
account of concept learning is, in effect, a description of learning a second
language. One learns, for example, that ‘est rouge’ means is red. Now this is entirely consistent with Fodor’s view because,
as he concludes, all natural languages are second languages, including one’s
mother tongue, because one starts out with an innate language of thought (hence the name LOT). But
whilst a consistent package of ideas, it is not obligatory and seems to falsify
the phenomenology of what one might ordinarily describe as learning a new
concept. In such cases, it does not seem that one merely translates the new
into ideas that one had antecedently available. Rather, it seems – or it can
seem – that one begins to make discriminations that one could not make before.
One sees differences to which one had been blind.
Let me give an example. Wittgenstein talks
of using words in secondary sense. In
Philosophical Investigations he
introduces it in the context of seeing aspects
such as seeing the duck-rabbit figure now as a duck and now as a rabbit. The
key instance he gives of secondary sense is, however, the attitude most of us have
towards words. We feel that a word carries its meaning somehow immediately with
it. It can loose this kind of meaning if repeated. He describes this kind of
immediate perception or experience of the meaning of a word in isolation as a form of
understanding meaning. Since Wittgenstein’s official recommendation is to think
of understanding as grasp of a practice, the use of the words ‘understanding’
and ‘meaning’ in the case at hand is not straight-forward. It is not a
metaphor, however, because nothing can be said to explain why we want to use
these words for this kind of experience. But whilst this is not a metaphorical
use it is nevertheless a secondary use: one which we find natural given the
primary use, but which is discontinuous with, and could not be used to teach,
the primary use [Wittgenstein 1953: 216]. Another example Wittgenstein gives is
the use of ‘fat’ in the claim that Wednesday is fat. Clearly Wednesday cannot
in any ordinary sense be compared with other fat or thin things. And it would
be optimistic to attempt to teach the meaning of ‘fat’ by giving Wednesday as
an example. Nevertheless, many language users give spontaneous expression to
the thought that Wednesday is a fat day.
Teaching the concept of secondary sense to
undergraduates does not seem merely to be a case of reminding them (on the
platonic view of education) of something they already know in other terms.
Wittgenstein’s handful of examples, and those suggested in secondary texts, may
be enough to explain the concept but it takes further practical testing to see
whether this really is so. And when the concept is grasped, it does not merely
seem to present previously grasped distinctions. Rather, it seems as though
seeing some examples of word use as instances of secondary sense is seeing something
new, spotting a difference of which one was previously both theoretically but also
phenomenologically ignorant.
This idea, that learning is a matter of
enculturation, of acquiring through teaching and practice a ‘second nature’ in
which, for example, one can respond to reasons to which one was previously
deaf, is represented in John McDowell’s later work by the German word Bildung: the moulding of character or
‘second nature’ such that one’s eyes can be opened to whole tracts of reality [McDowell
1994: 84 et passim]. It suggests that learning is a matter of
developing perceptual sensitivities and intellectual skills, both of which
require practice, rather than relating new words back to innate concepts.
An appeal to second nature is no easy
solution to the problem raised by Fodor’s argument since it goes hand in hand
with the idea that the truths graspable only by those with the right Bildung are not reducible to more basic
notions. One learns to respond to moral or aesthetic reasons to which one had
been deaf. But equally, one learns, according to Thomas Kuhn’s picture of ‘normal
science’ to see the relevant similarities between different physical systems (a
subatomic particle and wave on a string; a gas and elastic balls) and them and
mathematical formulae. And thus the account of how it is possible to be drawn
from having mere animal first nature into an encultured second nature remains
underdeveloped. (A full account would require that one can reduce all second nature concepts back to first nature concepts, a view Fodor happily accepts* as part of his reductionist naturalism and McDowell rejects as a piece of scientistic prejudice.)
But the first worry raised above, and the
connection between second nature and acquiring skills and perceptual sensitivities, suggests one line of response which echoes a problem that dates back to Kant’s
chapter on the schematism, which he called ‘an
art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity
nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover’ [Kant 1929: 183]
though I’ll leave that connection fairly gnomic here (see this).
Fodor
takes concept learning to require representing to oneself, for example, the
fact that the concept GREEN applies to all and only green things. That is what leads to his nativism. In
effect, one is ‘always already’ (as the pesky Continentalists usefully say) at the end
of a process of concept acquisition (since one already has a language of
thought). Of course, if concept learning were possible, then afterwards one
would be able to say what one had learnt by using those very concepts. That’s
not the problem. The problem is to say by what rational process one acquired the concepts before one was
able to entertain any thought that presupposes one already gasps the green
instances. With Wittgensteinian and Rylean thoughts about the primacy of the practical
in mind, one solution is to deny that one needs to be able to think that the concept GREEN applies to all and only green things before one has
completed one’s learning. Rather, one needs just to be able to think that the
concept GREEN applies to this!, this! and that! case and cases like
them. Now that invocation of cases like
those demonstratively identified is not a piece of magic. Thinking that thought (the thought about what is like these) carries the novice no further than her capacity can take her (cf Wittgenstein’s
comments about sameness when following a rule). But during the learning process
there is no need to think that novice must have a context-independent grasp of
the conceptual structure she will later acquire. The intermediate stage is a
practical grasp of practically demonstrated instances. And hence combining Bildung and practical demonstration (or
McDowell with Wittgenstein and Ryle) provides a response to Fodor’s reductio.
Fodor, J. (2008) LOT2: The language of thought revisited,Oxford: Oxford University Press
Fodor, J. (1987) Psychosemantics: the problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Fodor, J. (1987) Psychosemantics: the problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Kant, I. (1929) Critique
of Pure Reason, London: Macmillan
McDowell, J (1994) Mind
and World, Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press
Ryle, G. (1949) The
Concept of Mind, London: Hutchinson.
Ryle, G. (1945) ‘Knowing How and Knowing That’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society,
46: 1-16
Thornton, T. (1998) Wittgenstein on language and thought, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.
*I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep. It’s hard to see... how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with... properties that are neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. [Fodor 1987: 97]
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell.
*I suppose that sooner or later the physicists will complete the catalogue they’ve been compiling of the ultimate and irreducible properties of things. When they do, the likes of spin, charm and charge will perhaps appear upon their list. But aboutness surely won’t; intentionality simply doesn’t go that deep. It’s hard to see... how one can be a Realist about intentionality without also being, to some extent or other, a Reductionist. If the semantic and intentional are real properties of things, it must be in virtue of their identity with... properties that are neither intentional nor semantic. If aboutness is real, it must be really something else. [Fodor 1987: 97]
