Philosophy here now edition pdf download

Published: Mar Downloads: Pages: Grenepages issue 24 grenepages. Published: Dec Downloads: 35 Pages: Grenepages issue 23 grenepages. Published: Sep Downloads: 53 Pages: Grenepages issue 22 grenepages. Published: Jul Downloads: 86 Pages: The free community edition version is still available. It plays an important role in the BullZip philosophy where everybody should be able to afford the software.

You can use it if you are in a small company with less than 10 installations or you want to use the software for personal projects. For example, the student in Bubbles needed to know that gases do not penetrate solid objects like a glass, that air expands when heated, that the volume of an enclosed gas varies directly with its temperature and inversely with its pressure, and that hot objects will spontaneously cool down to the ambient temperature of their surroundings unless kept hot by insulation or a source of heat.

Critical thinkers thus need a rich fund of subject-matter knowledge relevant to the variety of situations they encounter. This fact is recognized in the inclusion among critical thinking dispositions of a concern to become and remain generally well informed.

Experimental educational interventions, with control groups, have shown that education can improve critical thinking skills and dispositions, as measured by standardized tests. For information about these tests, see the Supplement on Assessment. What educational methods are most effective at developing the dispositions, abilities and knowledge of a critical thinker?

Abrami et al. They also found that in these studies a combination of separate instruction in critical thinking with subject-matter instruction in which students are encouraged to think critically was more effective than either by itself. However, the difference was not statistically significant; that is, it might have arisen by chance. Most of these studies lack the longitudinal follow-up required to determine whether the observed differential improvements in critical thinking abilities or dispositions continue over time, for example until high school or college graduation.

For details on studies of methods of developing critical thinking skills and dispositions, see the Supplement on Educational Methods. Scholars have denied the generalizability of critical thinking abilities across subject domains, have alleged bias in critical thinking theory and pedagogy, and have investigated the relationship of critical thinking to other kinds of thinking.

McPeck attacked the thinking skills movement of the s, including the critical thinking movement. He argued that there are no general thinking skills, since thinking is always thinking about some subject-matter. It is futile, he claimed, for schools and colleges to teach thinking as if it were a separate subject. Rather, teachers should lead their pupils to become autonomous thinkers by teaching school subjects in a way that brings out their cognitive structure and that encourages and rewards discussion and argument.

As some of his critics e. To make his argument convincing, McPeck needs to explain how thinking differs from writing and speaking in a way that does not permit useful abstraction of its components from the subject-matters with which it deals.

He has not done so. Nevertheless, his position that the dispositions and abilities of a critical thinker are best developed in the context of subject-matter instruction is shared by many theorists of critical thinking, including Dewey , , Glaser , Passmore , Weinstein , and Bailin et al. McPeck argued for a strong subject-specificity thesis, according to which it is a conceptual truth that all critical thinking abilities are specific to a subject.

He did not however extend his subject-specificity thesis to critical thinking dispositions. In particular, he took the disposition to suspend judgment in situations of cognitive dissonance to be a general disposition. Conceptual subject-specificity is subject to obvious counter-examples, such as the general ability to recognize confusion of necessary and sufficient conditions.

A more modest thesis, also endorsed by McPeck, is epistemological subject-specificity, according to which the norms of good thinking vary from one field to another. Epistemological subject-specificity clearly holds to a certain extent; for example, the principles in accordance with which one solves a differential equation are quite different from the principles in accordance with which one determines whether a painting is a genuine Picasso.

But the thesis suffers, as Ennis points out, from vagueness of the concept of a field or subject and from the obvious existence of inter-field principles, however broadly the concept of a field is construed.

For example, the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning hold for all the varied fields in which such reasoning occurs. A third kind of subject-specificity is empirical subject-specificity, according to which as a matter of empirically observable fact a person with the abilities and dispositions of a critical thinker in one area of investigation will not necessarily have them in another area of investigation. The thesis of empirical subject-specificity raises the general problem of transfer.

If critical thinking abilities and dispositions have to be developed independently in each school subject, how are they of any use in dealing with the problems of everyday life and the political and social issues of contemporary society, most of which do not fit into the framework of a traditional school subject?

Proponents of empirical subject-specificity tend to argue that transfer is more likely to occur if there is critical thinking instruction in a variety of domains, with explicit attention to dispositions and abilities that cut across domains.

But evidence for this claim is scanty. There is a need for well-designed empirical studies that investigate the conditions that make transfer more likely. It is common ground in debates about the generality or subject-specificity of critical thinking dispositions and abilities that critical thinking about any topic requires background knowledge about the topic.

For example, the most sophisticated understanding of the principles of hypothetico-deductive reasoning is of no help unless accompanied by some knowledge of what might be plausible explanations of some phenomenon under investigation. Critics have objected to bias in the theory, pedagogy and practice of critical thinking.

Commentators e. The critics, however, are objecting to bias in the pejorative sense of an unjustified favoring of certain ways of knowing over others, frequently alleging that the unjustly favoured ways are those of a dominant sex or culture Bailin These ways favour:. A common thread in this smorgasbord of accusations is dissatisfaction with focusing on the logical analysis and evaluation of reasoning and arguments. While these authors acknowledge that such analysis and evaluation is part of critical thinking and should be part of its conceptualization and pedagogy, they insist that it is only a part.

Paul , for example, bemoans the tendency of atomistic teaching of methods of analyzing and evaluating arguments to turn students into more able sophists, adept at finding fault with positions and arguments with which they disagree but even more entrenched in the egocentric and sociocentric biases with which they began.

Martin and Thayer-Bacon cite with approval the self-reported intimacy with their subject-matter of leading researchers in biology and medicine, an intimacy that conflicts with the distancing allegedly recommended in standard conceptions and pedagogy of critical thinking. Thayer-Bacon contrasts the embodied and socially embedded learning of her elementary school students in a Montessori school, who used their imagination, intuition and emotions as well as their reason, with conceptions of critical thinking as.

Thayer-Bacon — Students, she writes, should. Alston Some critics portray such biases as unfair to women. Her charge does not imply that women as a group are on average less able than men to analyze and evaluate arguments. Facione c found no difference by sex in performance on his California Critical Thinking Skills Test.

Kuhn — found no difference by sex in either the disposition or the competence to engage in argumentative thinking. The critics propose a variety of remedies for the biases that they allege. In general, they do not propose to eliminate or downplay critical thinking as an educational goal. Rather, they propose to conceptualize critical thinking differently and to change its pedagogy accordingly.

Their pedagogical proposals arise logically from their objections. They can be summarized as follows:. One can get a vivid description of education with the former type of goal from the writings of bell hooks , She abandons the structure of domination in the traditional classroom. It incorporates the dialogue, anchored instruction, and mentoring that Abrami found to be most effective in improving critical thinking skills and dispositions. What is the relationship of critical thinking to problem solving, decision-making, higher-order thinking, creative thinking, and other recognized types of thinking?

If critical thinking is conceived broadly to cover any careful thinking about any topic for any purpose, then problem solving and decision making will be kinds of critical thinking, if they are done carefully. If critical thinking is conceived more narrowly as consisting solely of appraisal of intellectual products, then it will be disjoint with problem solving and decision making, which are constructive.

For details, see the Supplement on History. As to creative thinking, it overlaps with critical thinking Bailin , Thinking about the explanation of some phenomenon or event, as in Ferryboat , requires creative imagination in constructing plausible explanatory hypotheses. Likewise, thinking about a policy question, as in Candidate , requires creativity in coming up with options. Conversely, creativity in any field needs to be balanced by critical appraisal of the draft painting or novel or mathematical theory.

Critical Thinking First published Sat Jul 21, History 2. Examples and Non-Examples 2. The Definition of Critical Thinking 4. Its Value 5. The Process of Thinking Critically 6. Components of the Process 7. Contributory Dispositions and Abilities 8. Critical Thinking Dispositions 8.

Critical Thinking Abilities Required Knowledge Educational methods Controversies He defined it as active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends.

His research includes work on price adjustment, consumer behavior, financial markets, monetary and fiscal policy, and economic growth. Mankiw has been a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, an adviser to the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the Congressional Budget Office, and a member of the ETS test development committee for the advanced placement exam in economics. From to , he served as chairman of the Presidents Council of Economic Advisers. The question is: what exactly are you about?

The question about purpose is another question altogether. This point may be summed up by saying that whereas to talk of purposes is always to refer to some external end to which the activity is directed, to talk of aims is not to refer to external ends but to the activity itself, to its internal end. A teacher may be asked to state his aim in a particular lesson, that is, to make clear what he is doing or trying to do. He may also be asked what is really a separate question, namely, why he is doing it, what he is doing it for, what his purpose is in trying to get his pupils to write poetry or to solve quadratic equations.

So, too, it is possible to ask of education itself, what its aims are and what its purpose may be. Now, the aim of education, as has already been suggested, is to produce an educated man, one who meets the various criteria of intellectual, moral and aesthetic development. Education can, of course, be said to have subordinate aims, as, for example, the development of literary awareness, or the giving of an appreciation of scientific or mathematical modes of thinking, but taken all together these various subordinate aims coalesce in the overall end of making a certain kind of person.

No reference is made here, however, to any good outside education. It is quite another question to ask: what is education for? Answers to this question are different from those given in response to questions about aims. The purpose of education, it might be said, is to increase the number of literate, knowledgeable citizens, or to produce sufficient numbers of doctors, lawyers, civil servants, engineers and the like.

Here the reference is to valuable ends which lie outside the actual practice of education, social, political or economic ends. This is an important conceptual point. To ask the aim of education is to conceive of education as an end in itself, something intrinsically good, involving the development of a person. To ask its purpose or purposes is to think of it as a device designed to bring about external goods, skilled workers, executives, professionals.

It is because of this distinction that it is often said that the aims of education are internal and that it is inappropriate to ask for an aim which lies outside education itself. An unfortunate result of a recognition that education is intrinsically valuable is the conclusion that to go further and ask the purpose of education is a trifle ill-bred.

Education, it may be thought, being an end in itself should not be regarded in terms of purpose. There is, however, no warrant for this kind of exclusiveness. There is a sense in which education is a good per se, and its own reward.

But it makes good sense to ask: why do we want well- developed, sensitive, intellectually equipped, useful people? The educated man needs also to be a good citizen, a good worker, a good colleague, and being educated may be, indeed should be, a great help in achieving these worthwhile external ends. Education has important purposes as well as important aims.

To realise this end it recommends certain pedagogical procedures for practice. But between the aim and the procedures there must be certain assumptions made about the raw material, the person to be educated.

It has to be assumed that human nature is to some extent malleable, that what happens to the pupil by way of experience has some lasting effect on his subsequent behaviour. There would be no point in trying to teach children if whatever was done could make no difference to them. This assumption is, like the assumption about aims, a logical prerequisite of education taking place at all, and it is a matter of philosophical interest that such an assumption is one that not merely may be made but must be made.

Apart from this logical assumption there are others which, as a matter of fact, may be made about human nature. Here we run into another area of philo- sophical concern. The non-logical, contingent assumptions about pupils which would be of most use to educational theorists would be those based on the results of empirical enquiry and evidence. It is the failure to adopt assumptions based on such evidence which vitiates a good deal of what was offered by the historical general theorists.

In the past assumptions of a substantial nature about children were often derived, supposedly, from metaphysical or religious views of the nature of man, and were seldom based on any systematic examina- tion of actual men or children. A child of angelic disposition would not falsify the Calvinistic assumption, since it would be assumed that his wickedness had been driven out, not that he was originally free of it.

Neither Calvin nor Rousseau ever tried to establish these assumptions by finding out what children in general are like. This could be true in fact, although modern linguistic theorists like Chomsky to some extent question it. Locke, however, tended to argue its truth without making any serious empirical enquiries to estab- lish it. They are a priori assumptions, adopted ahead of experience, and often of the kind that experience can do nothing to confirm or refute.

What is needed in an edu- cational theory is an accurate factual picture of human nature, especially of child nature, and this can come only from studies which set out deliberately to discover what children are like. Here we have a further philosophical point of some importance. It is this: if we want to discover some truth about the world, about what exists in it or what is likely to happen in it, we have to begin by examining the world, by observation and experiment.

No help is given by making assumptions prior to experience about what is the case or what is likely to happen. Whatever the outcome it will be compatible with this assumption. Those made by Calvin and by Rousseau do not help very, much either. What educational practitioners need to know about children: how they develop, how they may be motivated and managed, what may be expected of them at different stages in their development, will come from scientific studies of children themselves.

Piaget, Freud, Kohlberg and other child-study specialists have more to offer in this respect than the great names in traditional educational theory. The assumptions reflect what may be called mechanistic and organic accounts of phenomena. Amongst the various entities which exist in the world some are quite obviously contrivances of one kind or another. Others are obviously organisms, or living creatures. A clock is an example of the first kind, a vegetable an example of the second.

This distinction may be utilised, by analogy, to gain insights into the workings and behaviour of entities and organisations which are not really like clocks or vegetables, for example, society, or the state, or a man. Thomas Hobbes, in writing Leviathan, likened a man to a wonderfully contrived machine, composed of springs, wheels and levers. Hobbes adopted this model because he wanted to pursue a particular line of political argument, to depict human society itself as a contrivance made up of individuals who themselves could be regarded in this way.

The parts are regarded as living tissues which taken together constitute the whole. The whole is logically prior to its parts, in the sense that the parts exist only as parts of a whole.

Thus a man is more than an assemblage of bones and muscles, nerves and sinews, and, as Hegel and his followers would have it, a society is something more than the totality of individuals who compose it. An organism is a whole which transcends its parts. Moreover, unlike a machine an organism is capable of growth and development; it has an internal dynamic principle which helps to determine its history.

Now, as suggested above, it is possible, and it may sometimes be useful, to make assumptions about human nature based upon this mechanistic—organic distinction. There is a sense in which a man is like a machine, a system of inputs and outputs, one which can work effectively or ineffectively. This much could be established by empirical enquiry and any assumption of this kind would be scientifically respectable.

It would not of course be the whole story. To regard a man simply as a machine would be to ignore what is essentially human in him. Nonetheless it may sometimes be the case that man is best understood in mechanistic terms. The organic model offers an alternative account which seems, prima facie at any rate, to be a more plausible basis for an adequate view of man, emphasising as it does his capacity for growth and development.

This model has advantages and disadvan- tages, perhaps the most telling disadvantage being its tendency to lead towards vagueness and unquantifiable assertions about feelings, aspirations and the like. In fact, though both models have their uses it is as well not to press either analogy too far.

Neither of them, alone, gives an adequate picture; both may be useful as models, simplified versions of reality. The point of introducing them here is to suggest that they may each feature as a fundamental assumption about human nature and underpin a general theory of education.

Moreover they are both assumptions for which there is some empirical justification. Translated into an educational context these two approaches would take different forms. An educational theory framed on mechanistic assumptions would hold that man is a kind of machine.

As with any machine, effective working would be revealed by performance, which in a man would be his external behaviour. Education would be one of the means of making his external responses as effective as possible. A pupil would be seen as a device whose workings could be deliberately regulated from without. Teaching would be a matter of organising desirable inputs—knowledge, skills and attitudes. The educated man would be one whose behav- ioural outputs met the criteria of worthwhileness adopted by his society.

They have had considerable and significant influence on educational theory and practice. Historically, the mechanistic approach has been adopted by the French philosopher Helvetius, James Mill [11] and, more recently, by B. Education peut tout was a slogan which derived from this approach. The organic view is exemplified by Rousseau and his many disciples and imitators, Froebel for example, and Dewey.

Faced with educational theories of these kinds, the task of the philosopher of education is to draw out and make explicit such assumptions and to enter certain caveats against them.

This has already been done to some extent above. It has been suggested that neither of them should be regarded as anything more than an analogous description, and neither of these models should be taken too literally. They are not wholly divorced from empirical evidence, but each tends to give a one-sided view of the whole.

Nonetheless, as analogies they have their uses. They provide useful ways of looking at the practice of education, and each assumption does service in drawing attention to aspects of human nature which the other might play down or ignore. The historical theorists tended to adopt one or the other as complete accounts of human nature and to this extent these historical theories are themselves one-sided. A better way of utilising the analogies is to recognise that each offers a different perspective in education, and that neither of them should be supposed to give a complete or comprehensive view.

The present chapter indicates some of the philosophical moves that might be made. It takes as its starting- point the idea of a general theory of education. Central to the logical structure of a general theory of education are certain assumptions without which such a theory could not operate at all.

Two of these basic assumptions are then examined. The first was the assumption that prior to any recommendations for educational practice there must be some desirable end to be achieved, this desirable end being formally expressed as an educated man. The second assumption, or set of assumptions, concerned the nature of man, the raw material of education.

In the course of the chapter some elementary points of philosophical significance were introduced: the distinction between educational aims and educational purposes, a brief analysis of the concept of education, and the point that answers to questions about empirical matters, for example questions about the nature of children, must be derived from empirical enquiry and not assumed ahead of empirical evidence.

Suggestions for further reading P. Peters, The Logic of Education, chapter 2, contains a discussion of the aims of education. Peters, J. Woods and W. Dray appears in The Philosophy of Education ed. Peters, Oxford University Press, The various assumptions about human nature made by past educational theorists have to be studied in the original texts, references to which are given in the bibliography.

A discussion of the assumptions made by some of the more important theorists is given in T. Moore, Educational Theory: An Introduction, chapters 3 and 4.

What knowledge, what sorts of understanding and what skills will come under this heading will depend on the kind of society which does the educating, but any society sophisticated enough to have a concept of education must regard some knowledge and some skills as worth passing on to the next generation. This corpus of knowledge and skill will constitute a curriculum, and a general theory of education must involve some assumptions about the curriculum, about what must be taught.

These assumptions will be those about the nature of knowledge and this chapter sets out to examine what is involved in this con- cept. A preliminary distinction needs to be made, however, between the curriculum and the rules for educational practice, between what is taught and how it is taught.

In what follows the curriculum will be understood as the content of education, what is taught. Educational practice and methods come under the heading of pedagogy which will be dealt with in the next chapter. The curriculum, then, is a matter of knowledge and skills to be passed on to pupils. Traditionally, the curriculum breaks down into different subject areas or disciplines, math- ematics, science, history and so on, but generally the curriculum may be considered simply as a body of knowledge which it is thought ought to be transmitted to others.

So far as a general theory of education goes, the curriculum is one of the means by which the overall aim is translated into achievement: educated men and women are formed by being intro- duced to and initiated into various kinds of knowledge and skill. The philosopher of educa- tion is interested in two aspects of this: firstly, in an analysis of the concept of knowledge and its relation with other concepts, like belief and truth, and secondly, in the question of what knowledge and skills should be taught, what knowledge is worth having.

The edu- cational theorist recommends, for example, that educating a man involves teaching him mathematics, science, history and the other traditional disciplines. The philosopher asks: why these subjects? In other words the philosopher has to do with analysis and justification. His questions are: what is knowledge? This question is really two questions in one, and each raises issues of considerable com- plexity. The two questions are: what is knowledge in general, what exactly is it that can be known?

Knowledge in general The question we try to answer here is: what is knowledge about? These objects stand outside the world of everyday things, outside space and time, and can be known only by a kind of intuitive grasp which comes, Plato thought, from a special kind of quasi-mathematical training. The objects of the everyday world, trees, rocks, clouds, men and the like cannot, strictly, be known about, since for Plato knowledge involved a special kind of certainty.

Whatever is known, he thought, must be known indubitably, and it seemed plain to him that we could have no certainty about the everchanging world of everyday things. About this world, a world of phenomena or appearances, we could have only opinion or beliefs. Knowledge was a matter of grasping necessary truths about a nonphenomenal world, necessary in the sense that it was impossible to be mistaken about them.

A development of this view led, in the seventeenth century, to what is called the rationalist tradition, associated with philosophers like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibnitz, in which knowledge is regarded as analogous to the grasping of mathematical truths. This view may be characterised by saying that it holds mathematics to be the paradigm example of knowledge. It is easy to see why mathematics should be chosen as a paradigm.

For mathematical truths are universal: they are truths always, everywhere. Moreover, they are necessary truths. Three times three must be nine: the internal angles of a triangle must add up to degrees. To deny these propositions would not merely be an error: it would be a self-contradiction. Mathematical reasoning is demonstrative, or deductive. It has the comforting characteristic that if its initial premisses are accepted and the correct procedure followed, the conclusion follows of necessity.

The rationalist philosophers were attracted by this model of knowledge and they tried to use it to establish certain and necessary truths about the actual world, truths which they thought could be derived from self-evident prin- ciples and grasped as we grasp the truths of mathematics and logic. An alternative view takes science as a paradigm. Here knowledge is not a matter of deduction from selfevident principles, but comes as the result of observation and experi- ment in the empirical world.

The order and regularity with which our experiences occur enables us to make large-scale generalisations about the contents and events of the world, which we can use to explain and predict the course of future experience. This is the empiri- cist model of knowledge, associated with philosophers like Hume and James Mill, which sees substantial knowledge not as a body of necessary truths but as contingent conclusions, depending on the way the empirical world happens in fact to be.

It happens to be the case that fire burns, that sugar tastes sweet, that gases expand when heated; it might have been otherwise. This conclusion may be put in this way: the contrary of any empirical truth is always possible, whereas the contrary of a mathematical truth is logically impossible and so absurd.

Uncompromising empiricist philosophers like the Logical Positivists of the s held that all substantial, informative knowledge was of this contingent kind. Such knowledge was purely formal, a matter of definitions and derivations from them, the conclusions of which were necessarily true simply because of the way in which the various terms were defined.

Both the rationalist and the empiricist accounts of knowledge seem to be one-sided and so not wholly adequate. The defect of the rationalist adherence to the mathematical paradigm is that necessary truths, though certain, give no substantial information.

It is forever true that the internal angles of a triangle add up to degrees but this tells us nothing about the actual existence of triangles. The proposition would be true even if no triangles existed. Truths of this kind are formal, necessary, but empty, and attempts by the rationalists to arrive at necessary truths about the empirical world could not be successful. On the other hand, empirical generalisations are true only in so far as there is evidence to support them, and there is always the possibility that fresh evidence may show them to be false.

Thus empirical propositions purport to give substantial information about the world but they are never logically certain or necessarily true; propositions in mathemat- ics and logic when true are necessarily true but give no substantial information about the world. This dilemma tends to produce considerable intellectual discomfort, since if taken strictly it would preclude us from ever claiming to have knowledge of the world we live in, knowledge, that is, which carries with it the requirement of strict certainty.

This issue is complicated by the fact that we seem to have an inescapable conviction that there is a kind of necessity inherent in the world, that what happens in it has something more than a mere contingency.

Two attempts were made in the eighteenth century to account for this convic- tion of necessity. David Hume, a Scottish empiricist, recognised that, apart from logic and mathematics, there were no necessarily true propositions, but he held that we nonetheless project a kind of necessity into our account of the world.