Philosophy of Education Notes

Fine agrees that the relation between ordinary modality and the special modalities is a neglected problem. He also agrees that the problem has to be handled with much greater formal and conceptual care than essentialists have usually shown. But once he starts reconstructing the issue, he subtly shifts the terrain in three major ways. He changes, first, what exactly is being related to what. He changes, second, the form that the relation should take. And he changes, third, what sort of explanation we should expect from the connection between ordinary and metaphysical necessity. Once those shifts are made, the educational discussion we have been developing also has to be reworked.

If we return to looking at what Margaret Vetter does we reopen a question that essentialists have tended to bypass, namely how the austere, object-grounded notion of metaphysical modality relates to the messy, shifting, yet indispensable modal judgements that structure ordinary life. The starting point remains Fine’s reversal, that necessity is not primitive but derivative, that what is necessary is what flows from the essences of things. But Vetter immediately notices that this reversal has largely been developed in a rarefied register. It gives us an account of metaphysical necessity, understood as truth in virtue of the nature of all things, and by duality an account of metaphysical possibility as compatibility with those essences. What it does not obviously give us is an account of the much more familiar modal claims that guide action, planning, regret, and judgement, claims such as that this car can reach a certain speed, that a journey must take a certain amount of time, that a person cannot avoid sneezing in a given moment, or that a vase is more liable to break than a desk.

Up to this point, the Litland-inspired route has encouraged us to think in terms of manifolds of real definition, multiple permissible ways of defining an educational thing, and then to derive essence from what survives across those definitions. That has been fruitful for educational ideas such as decolonisation and demasculinisation because it has let us say that these are not empty slogans yet are not governed by a single neat canonical definition either.

In educational discussion, “decolonisation” is often used in ways that slide rapidly between slogan, aspiration, diagnosis, programme, critique, policy label, moral demand, curricular intervention, institutional restructuring, and even a general mood of suspicion toward inherited canons. One result is that debates frequently become confused at the outset. People argue over whether decolonisation is essential to education, or whether it has been misunderstood, or whether it is too radical or not radical enough, before first asking a prior and more disciplined question: what sort of thing is “decolonisation in education” supposed to be?

Jon Erling Litland’s paper 'Real, Immediate, Multiple: Towards a Theory of Definition' is doing a technical and intuitive thing. The intuitive thought is : instead of starting with essence and then asking what a real definition is, why not start with real definition and then explain essence in terms of it?

Up to now I have been asking, first, how to distinguish necessity from essence, then how ordinary modality relates to more formal or special modalities, and then how those distinctions might help educationalists think more carefully about capacities, constraints, sequencing, space, timing, and institutional design. Rosen forces a sharper question. It is not just, what is essential to a thing, or what can or must happen under certain conditions, but: what kinds of essences are even legitimate candidates for there being? Which alleged natures are genuine, and which are spurious? Which definitions carve out something real, and which merely combine words without corresponding to any proper item, property, or educational form at all?

What follows from my previous notes is that metaphysical and epistemological thinking should not be treated as remote, ornamental, or embarrassingly abstract additions to educational theory. They should instead be seen as part of the modelling apparatus by which educational practices, institutions, and environments are rendered intelligible. Once one takes seriously the kinds of distinctions opened by Williamson, Fine, and Vetter, it becomes difficult to regard classroom management, timetabling, curricular sequencing, assessment design, or the architecture of educational space as merely practical or administrative matters. They are all already structured by assumptions about possibility, necessity, dependence, identity, relevance, evidence, and grounding. In other words, they are already shaped by metaphysical and epistemological commitments, whether these are acknowledged or not.

Let's add a new level of depth to the question already opened by the Fine Williamson dispute discussed in the previous note. That earlier dispute helped us distinguish between necessity and essence, between what must be the case and what belongs to the nature of a thing, and it showed why a philosophy of education concerned with understanding cannot rest content with merely extensionally correct outputs. But before we ask whether a learner has grasped an essence, or whether educational understanding is merely modal rather than essential, we may need to ask what kind of modality educational discourse itself traffics in when it says things like “the student cannot yet do this,” “she must now move to abstraction,” “he could solve this if given more time,” “they are able to reason historically,” or “it is impossible to understand this theorem without grasping the proof idea.” These are not usually claims of pure metaphysical necessity, nor are they usually merely deontic claims about obligation, nor merely epistemic claims about what is likely. They belong to that elusive region the philosopher Barbara Vetter calls ordinary modality.

What is it to understand something, rather than merely to get it right? This question sits at the centre of philosophy of education yet much contemporary practice tends to answer it indirectly by tracking correctness, fluency, or performance under assessment conditions. Kit Fine and Timothy Williamson offer a set of conceptual tools that allow us to reopen this question with much greater precision. They subtly disagree on some things and subtly agree on others.

This is a note that at some point might become an essay. It follows on from the previous notes on Lonely which was about applying contemporary accounts of vagueness to educational assessment. What I'm doing in these and other essays/notes is to try and illustrate how philosophy of education might apply issues of mainstream metaphysics , epistemology and logic to educational issues. What I hope is that people might see that this might be a fruitful approach even if they think how I do it is not up to scratch.

Jennifer Nagel’s says in ordinary life, knowledge seems easy to spot. We constantly attribute it to ourselves and others. We rely on it. We organise conversation around it. Yet the moment we begin to reflect in a certain way, knowledge seems to evaporate. Merely mentioning the possibility of error, the broken clock, the unseen bus, the hidden defeater, is often enough to make us retract earlier attributions. Nagel’s Locke Lectures, “Recognizing Knowledge: Intuitive and Reflective Epistemology”, take this divergence seriously as a phenomenon to be explained rather than as a nuisance to be brushed aside.

I was told by Y to read the utilitarian philosopher Henry Sidgwick because he has a notion of esoteric action and she said that that's important. So I did and she was right. It is. So hat's off to Y and Henry is what I say. What follows is an argument for a position that will appear, at first sight, politically deflationary and theoretically ungenerous. It is neither. It is a position that arises from taking metaphysics seriously in a period when educational institutions are increasingly saturated by managerial, technological, and political pressures that distort the grounds of the very values they publicly proclaim.