I am a member of BERA.
Text (slightly revised) of my BERA paper below (non-philosopher-friendly version to follow on the blog):
- Link to BERA's main website here
- Link to the site for the Philosophy of Education Special Interest Group (SIG) here
- Link to the Philosophy SIG presentations (including mine) at this year's conference here
Text (slightly revised) of my BERA paper below (non-philosopher-friendly version to follow on the blog):
Just the Facts: The State of Knowledge in Educational Discourse
Save for a few concluding, cursory remarks on arts-practical subjects, my paper will is concerned, first, with certain characterizations of knowledge in educational discourse; second, with the opposition of knowledge and skills. I’ll outline some problems that I think are fairly common in educational discourse, of which I’ll be treating Daisy Christodoulou as representative, and will gesture towards a phenomenologically-inflected alternative.
I’m aware that taking a non-philosopher to philosophical task can smack of cheap academic shots; and I’d like, before I get into the substance of my talk, to ward-off that criticism with two points. First, philosophy of education has yet to fill a space that public debate has left open for it: at this year’s PESGB annual general meeting, those of us in attendance were informed that despite its rude academic health, in the rings of public debate and policy philosophy of education is punching well below its weight. One thing philosophers of education can afford to do, then, is engage with the (often undisclosed) philosophical bases of influential, popular or populist work – just as John White did some years ago with Howard Garnder – and show where, how, and why such work is workable or unworkable. Second, it’s worth noting at the outset that while in her recent book, The Seven Myths About Education (published by Routledge, an established academic press), Christodoulou does not position herself as a philosopher, but she does explicitly present herself as dealing with matters on a theoretical and philosophical level. So: let’s take her seriously, and engage with her on that basis; for where Dennett said of science – that “there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination” – so can we say of much writing on education.
Christodoulou’s project has been to challenge scepticism in education “about the value of truth and knowledge.” She seems to articulate a foundational view of knowledge that is more or less in line with intellectualism, and also with what Neil Gascoigne and Tim Thornton call the Principle of Codifiability, which states that knowledge per se is explicit knowledge, which must be codifiable in context-independent terms. However, I stress that Christodoulou only seems to articulate such a view, as her roughly intellectualist account of knowledge is never fully formulated, and her reader is left to unravel a skein of definitional and logical confusions and tensions. Let’s consider some of them.
First, then: to advocate the central importance of knowledge to education surely requires some working definition, if not a full-fledged theory as such, of knowledge; unfortunately, Christodoulou takes just what “knowledge” and “skills” are and mean for granted, so both the intellectualist bent and the apparent presumption that knowledge per se must be explicit are guiding principles implicit in her work, but which she manages inadvertently to undermine. For one thing, “knowledge” per se is contrasted with “conceptual knowledge” – a fatal problem, potentially, for to imply that the foundational knowledge Christodoulou prioritizes is non-conceptual is to pave the way for a view she is trying to avoid by insisting that propositional or factual knowledge is foundational. In fairness, one must recognize that what Christodoulou and philosophers mean by “conceptual knowledge” might not be the same; Christodoulou does use it interchangeably with “higher-order thinking skills.” But here – and leaving aside the fact that with this latter term she maintains the very opposition of skills and knowledge she says she wishes to challenge – we are forced to recognize that such different accounts of knowledge as those offered by Christopher Winch and Hubert Dreyfus recognize so-called “higher-order thinking” as necessarily bound up in the acquisition of propositional or factual knowledge.
Indeed, though there is no time for detailed argument and analysis, I note in passing that, read against Winch’s account of epistemic ascent and Dreyfus’s of skilful or fluid coping, Christodoulou appears to be caught in an unresolved tension between epistemic and phenomenological accounts of knowledge, skill, and learning. The key bullet-points here are that Winch’s idea of epistemic ascent looks, superficially, as if it might complement Christodoulou, who takes for a granted a simplified Bloomian type of ascent from factual knowledge “up.” But where Christodoulou sees factual knowledge as the knowledge-base-cum-building-blocks of a subject, Winch writes of ascent towards a subject proper. Christodoulou seems to accept what Winch rules out: namely, that a subject S as taught in school is a simplified version of S as practiced by its experts.
Dreyfus’s phenomenology of fluid or skilful coping offers an account of novice-to-expert development that begins with the learning of clearly codified rules and moves to more fluid modes of knowing that do not presuppose nor rely on mental representation of propositional contents. Despite this initial similarity, however, Dreyfus is ultimately no help to Christodoulou because his theory is neither epistemic nor one of ascent: the rule-governed stage of the novice is not the foundation of expertise, but, rather a quite different mode of being. There is more to say than time allows, so suffice it to that (1) for Dreyfus, the rule-governed stage of the novice is one in which knowledge is limited and highly abstract (abstraction being the end- not start-point for Christodoulou); and (2) in Dreyfus, facts or rules are not a “knowledge-base,” because one does not ascend from them towards expertise; the expert simply neither “has” representations of nor follows rules.
What Christodoulou takes to be foundational knowledge is sometimes called, simply, “knowledge,” elsewhere “factual knowledge.” There is an important difference, however, between knowledge the rules of which can be codified in propositional form, and factual knowledge expressed in sentences. The former means that knowledge amounts to general rules, which themselves may or may not be expressible or articulable;[1] the latter refers simply to expressible and articulable facts or states of affairs.[2] It is this latter understanding that Christodoulou seems to have in mind as foundational or basic knowledge. But ability to understand, assimilate, and recall facts relies on prior – some might say “tacit” – capacities and normative processes. These Christodoulou either identifies with so-called “higher orders” of learning realizable only on the base of factual knowledge – which position would lead her to hopeless regress – or simply takes for granted, in which case she cannot be said to be tackling knowledge at all, but merely which canons of learning should be taught. If this is the argument that Christodoulou hopes to win, then it makes nonsense of the claim that is the rationale for her book – namely, that the education system has endorsed the teaching of empty, contentless skills at the expense of factual knowledge – because, to the extent that anything is taught and learned, it will be so linguistically; therefore propositionally (depending on one’s understanding of “proposition”); therefore factually. We language-users are always-already dealing – on some level and in some way – in facts.
Some closing thoughts, then (which will betray my preference for a broadly phenomenological rather than epistemic account of knowledge).
Firstly, an adequate account of knowledge is unlikely to be developed if it includes talk of orders, levels, or types of knowledge and continues to distinguish knowledge and skills by degree. We will be better off if we speak in terms of normatively conditioned styles or manners of attention, which are not related to one another in the manner of logical hierarchy, but which are seen as responses to what Dreyfus calls environmental “affordances,” which should be understood as what the environment or situation allows in terms both of what it discloses to us and the responses it draws from us.
Secondly, just as real expertise is not an aggregate of a finite number of fully codifiable techniques, neither is knowledge a similarly determined aggregate of propositions. Knowledge cannot be modelled, pace Christodoulou, in building-block or foundation-superstructure fashion: brute reality is not, of necessity, built from logically discrete, given states of affairs; likewise, facts are not the building blocks of knowledge, but, rather, partial descriptions or articulations of chunks of the world brought to a particular style of attention. (Indeed, I suspect that one source of the problems in Christodoulou is a felt acceptance of an epistemological picture that has had some persuasive challenges set against it – on this, one might refer to Charles Taylor’s essay on Merleau-Ponty and epistemology, as well as Dreyfus’s work on the failures of AI.)
Thirdly, the knowledge/skills opposition might fruitfully be rethought along broadly phenomenological lines that see our occasioned skilful copings with environmental affordances as instantiations of skill-gestalts, which embody knowledge-gestalts. (I say “occasioned” as a shorthand distinction between, say, uninvited thoughts about the moon and situationally required ball-kicking.) Such an approach shows skills and knowledge as descriptively distinct and different in kind rather than degree, and as unthinkable apart from embodied persons-who-know. No skill-gestalt is ever given in its entirety, just as one’s knowledge is never so given. Clearly, questions of the skill/knowledge relation are enmeshed with those of knowledge-that and knowledge-how, and of conceptual and non-conceptual knowledge. While these are not areas governed by consensus, they do offer vantage-points from which the claim that we are teaching skills without knowledge looks like nonsense. Whether one is more Rylean or intellectualist, from either corner of the ring knowledge and skills are interdependent; regardless of arguments over logical or phenomenological priority, or, indeed, conceptual content or practical ability, one has to say either that for any kind of knowledge to have been learned an appropriate skill for the partial expression of that knowledge must be in place, or vice versa.[3] I’m not suggesting that there is nothing at stake in the contest for priority between knowledge-how over knowledge-that or any other roughly equivalent placeholders; to be honest, I can’t see how, in theories of knowledge, the dreaded regress can be avoided unless one makes room for a broadly phenomenological account of tacit knowledge. But the point to bear in mind is that no serious theory of knowledge models an ascent from knowledge to skills.
The foregoing comments are little more than a starting point for a fuller account of knowledge, one which I hope might begin to clear the way for an understanding of arts-practical subjects – which are what I was supposed to be discussing today – as properly knowledge-based (or, if one prefers, knowledge-indicative). In the case of Creative Writing teaching (my area of pedagogical interest), there is an enforced encounter with the very stuff of co-called “propositional knowledge.” What it and other arts-practical subjects promote and enable, then – and here, I’m stealing from and distorting Phillip Larkin – are more “skilled, | Vigilant, flexible, | U nemphasised, enthralled | Catching[s]” of our own being in the world. The political challenge – which just this week was made more urgent by Ofqual’s decision to scratch A Level Creative Writing, only two years in – is to get others to realize that this really is knowledge.
[1] See, e.g., Gascoigne and Thornton’s Tacit Knowledge (Durham: Acumen 2013), especially the sections dealing with Kripke, Moore, and Wittgenstein in relation to rule-following and tacit knowledge. The issues of articulability is played across the book; indeed, it is central to Gascoigne and Thornton’s thesis that for tacit knowledge to be knowledge, it must be (partially or fully) articulable, while not – in order for it to be in some way tacit – codifiable.
[2] For example, the fact that the dimensions of this room are x by x by x feet; or that King James I of England was also King James VI of Scotland.
[3] I agree with Gascoigne and Thornton that for tacit knowledge to count as knowledge it must be at least partially articulable, as it must be knowledge of something. But this requirement does not entail a rejection of Dreyfus’s skilful copings. To be able to place one’s abilities under some sort of partial description does not entail that one accept the myth of the mental as an explanation of how one executes one’s skills, and nor does it require mental representation prior to execution of skill. Description of one’s tacitly held skills is retrospective, diagnostic even, and does not exhaust, as it were, the skill in its totality.
Save for a few concluding, cursory remarks on arts-practical subjects, my paper will is concerned, first, with certain characterizations of knowledge in educational discourse; second, with the opposition of knowledge and skills. I’ll outline some problems that I think are fairly common in educational discourse, of which I’ll be treating Daisy Christodoulou as representative, and will gesture towards a phenomenologically-inflected alternative.
I’m aware that taking a non-philosopher to philosophical task can smack of cheap academic shots; and I’d like, before I get into the substance of my talk, to ward-off that criticism with two points. First, philosophy of education has yet to fill a space that public debate has left open for it: at this year’s PESGB annual general meeting, those of us in attendance were informed that despite its rude academic health, in the rings of public debate and policy philosophy of education is punching well below its weight. One thing philosophers of education can afford to do, then, is engage with the (often undisclosed) philosophical bases of influential, popular or populist work – just as John White did some years ago with Howard Garnder – and show where, how, and why such work is workable or unworkable. Second, it’s worth noting at the outset that while in her recent book, The Seven Myths About Education (published by Routledge, an established academic press), Christodoulou does not position herself as a philosopher, but she does explicitly present herself as dealing with matters on a theoretical and philosophical level. So: let’s take her seriously, and engage with her on that basis; for where Dennett said of science – that “there is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination” – so can we say of much writing on education.
Christodoulou’s project has been to challenge scepticism in education “about the value of truth and knowledge.” She seems to articulate a foundational view of knowledge that is more or less in line with intellectualism, and also with what Neil Gascoigne and Tim Thornton call the Principle of Codifiability, which states that knowledge per se is explicit knowledge, which must be codifiable in context-independent terms. However, I stress that Christodoulou only seems to articulate such a view, as her roughly intellectualist account of knowledge is never fully formulated, and her reader is left to unravel a skein of definitional and logical confusions and tensions. Let’s consider some of them.
First, then: to advocate the central importance of knowledge to education surely requires some working definition, if not a full-fledged theory as such, of knowledge; unfortunately, Christodoulou takes just what “knowledge” and “skills” are and mean for granted, so both the intellectualist bent and the apparent presumption that knowledge per se must be explicit are guiding principles implicit in her work, but which she manages inadvertently to undermine. For one thing, “knowledge” per se is contrasted with “conceptual knowledge” – a fatal problem, potentially, for to imply that the foundational knowledge Christodoulou prioritizes is non-conceptual is to pave the way for a view she is trying to avoid by insisting that propositional or factual knowledge is foundational. In fairness, one must recognize that what Christodoulou and philosophers mean by “conceptual knowledge” might not be the same; Christodoulou does use it interchangeably with “higher-order thinking skills.” But here – and leaving aside the fact that with this latter term she maintains the very opposition of skills and knowledge she says she wishes to challenge – we are forced to recognize that such different accounts of knowledge as those offered by Christopher Winch and Hubert Dreyfus recognize so-called “higher-order thinking” as necessarily bound up in the acquisition of propositional or factual knowledge.
Indeed, though there is no time for detailed argument and analysis, I note in passing that, read against Winch’s account of epistemic ascent and Dreyfus’s of skilful or fluid coping, Christodoulou appears to be caught in an unresolved tension between epistemic and phenomenological accounts of knowledge, skill, and learning. The key bullet-points here are that Winch’s idea of epistemic ascent looks, superficially, as if it might complement Christodoulou, who takes for a granted a simplified Bloomian type of ascent from factual knowledge “up.” But where Christodoulou sees factual knowledge as the knowledge-base-cum-building-blocks of a subject, Winch writes of ascent towards a subject proper. Christodoulou seems to accept what Winch rules out: namely, that a subject S as taught in school is a simplified version of S as practiced by its experts.
Dreyfus’s phenomenology of fluid or skilful coping offers an account of novice-to-expert development that begins with the learning of clearly codified rules and moves to more fluid modes of knowing that do not presuppose nor rely on mental representation of propositional contents. Despite this initial similarity, however, Dreyfus is ultimately no help to Christodoulou because his theory is neither epistemic nor one of ascent: the rule-governed stage of the novice is not the foundation of expertise, but, rather a quite different mode of being. There is more to say than time allows, so suffice it to that (1) for Dreyfus, the rule-governed stage of the novice is one in which knowledge is limited and highly abstract (abstraction being the end- not start-point for Christodoulou); and (2) in Dreyfus, facts or rules are not a “knowledge-base,” because one does not ascend from them towards expertise; the expert simply neither “has” representations of nor follows rules.
What Christodoulou takes to be foundational knowledge is sometimes called, simply, “knowledge,” elsewhere “factual knowledge.” There is an important difference, however, between knowledge the rules of which can be codified in propositional form, and factual knowledge expressed in sentences. The former means that knowledge amounts to general rules, which themselves may or may not be expressible or articulable;[1] the latter refers simply to expressible and articulable facts or states of affairs.[2] It is this latter understanding that Christodoulou seems to have in mind as foundational or basic knowledge. But ability to understand, assimilate, and recall facts relies on prior – some might say “tacit” – capacities and normative processes. These Christodoulou either identifies with so-called “higher orders” of learning realizable only on the base of factual knowledge – which position would lead her to hopeless regress – or simply takes for granted, in which case she cannot be said to be tackling knowledge at all, but merely which canons of learning should be taught. If this is the argument that Christodoulou hopes to win, then it makes nonsense of the claim that is the rationale for her book – namely, that the education system has endorsed the teaching of empty, contentless skills at the expense of factual knowledge – because, to the extent that anything is taught and learned, it will be so linguistically; therefore propositionally (depending on one’s understanding of “proposition”); therefore factually. We language-users are always-already dealing – on some level and in some way – in facts.
Some closing thoughts, then (which will betray my preference for a broadly phenomenological rather than epistemic account of knowledge).
Firstly, an adequate account of knowledge is unlikely to be developed if it includes talk of orders, levels, or types of knowledge and continues to distinguish knowledge and skills by degree. We will be better off if we speak in terms of normatively conditioned styles or manners of attention, which are not related to one another in the manner of logical hierarchy, but which are seen as responses to what Dreyfus calls environmental “affordances,” which should be understood as what the environment or situation allows in terms both of what it discloses to us and the responses it draws from us.
Secondly, just as real expertise is not an aggregate of a finite number of fully codifiable techniques, neither is knowledge a similarly determined aggregate of propositions. Knowledge cannot be modelled, pace Christodoulou, in building-block or foundation-superstructure fashion: brute reality is not, of necessity, built from logically discrete, given states of affairs; likewise, facts are not the building blocks of knowledge, but, rather, partial descriptions or articulations of chunks of the world brought to a particular style of attention. (Indeed, I suspect that one source of the problems in Christodoulou is a felt acceptance of an epistemological picture that has had some persuasive challenges set against it – on this, one might refer to Charles Taylor’s essay on Merleau-Ponty and epistemology, as well as Dreyfus’s work on the failures of AI.)
Thirdly, the knowledge/skills opposition might fruitfully be rethought along broadly phenomenological lines that see our occasioned skilful copings with environmental affordances as instantiations of skill-gestalts, which embody knowledge-gestalts. (I say “occasioned” as a shorthand distinction between, say, uninvited thoughts about the moon and situationally required ball-kicking.) Such an approach shows skills and knowledge as descriptively distinct and different in kind rather than degree, and as unthinkable apart from embodied persons-who-know. No skill-gestalt is ever given in its entirety, just as one’s knowledge is never so given. Clearly, questions of the skill/knowledge relation are enmeshed with those of knowledge-that and knowledge-how, and of conceptual and non-conceptual knowledge. While these are not areas governed by consensus, they do offer vantage-points from which the claim that we are teaching skills without knowledge looks like nonsense. Whether one is more Rylean or intellectualist, from either corner of the ring knowledge and skills are interdependent; regardless of arguments over logical or phenomenological priority, or, indeed, conceptual content or practical ability, one has to say either that for any kind of knowledge to have been learned an appropriate skill for the partial expression of that knowledge must be in place, or vice versa.[3] I’m not suggesting that there is nothing at stake in the contest for priority between knowledge-how over knowledge-that or any other roughly equivalent placeholders; to be honest, I can’t see how, in theories of knowledge, the dreaded regress can be avoided unless one makes room for a broadly phenomenological account of tacit knowledge. But the point to bear in mind is that no serious theory of knowledge models an ascent from knowledge to skills.
The foregoing comments are little more than a starting point for a fuller account of knowledge, one which I hope might begin to clear the way for an understanding of arts-practical subjects – which are what I was supposed to be discussing today – as properly knowledge-based (or, if one prefers, knowledge-indicative). In the case of Creative Writing teaching (my area of pedagogical interest), there is an enforced encounter with the very stuff of co-called “propositional knowledge.” What it and other arts-practical subjects promote and enable, then – and here, I’m stealing from and distorting Phillip Larkin – are more “skilled, | Vigilant, flexible, | U nemphasised, enthralled | Catching[s]” of our own being in the world. The political challenge – which just this week was made more urgent by Ofqual’s decision to scratch A Level Creative Writing, only two years in – is to get others to realize that this really is knowledge.
[1] See, e.g., Gascoigne and Thornton’s Tacit Knowledge (Durham: Acumen 2013), especially the sections dealing with Kripke, Moore, and Wittgenstein in relation to rule-following and tacit knowledge. The issues of articulability is played across the book; indeed, it is central to Gascoigne and Thornton’s thesis that for tacit knowledge to be knowledge, it must be (partially or fully) articulable, while not – in order for it to be in some way tacit – codifiable.
[2] For example, the fact that the dimensions of this room are x by x by x feet; or that King James I of England was also King James VI of Scotland.
[3] I agree with Gascoigne and Thornton that for tacit knowledge to count as knowledge it must be at least partially articulable, as it must be knowledge of something. But this requirement does not entail a rejection of Dreyfus’s skilful copings. To be able to place one’s abilities under some sort of partial description does not entail that one accept the myth of the mental as an explanation of how one executes one’s skills, and nor does it require mental representation prior to execution of skill. Description of one’s tacitly held skills is retrospective, diagnostic even, and does not exhaust, as it were, the skill in its totality.