Intellectual Agency and Virtue Epistemology: A Montessori Perspective

Patrick Frierson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350267442
• eBook ISBN: 9781350018839
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

Drawing on the work of Maria Montessori and contemporary virtue epistemologists such as Linda Zagzebski and Jason Baehr, Intellectual Agency and Virtue Epistemology presents a new interpretation of the nature of intellectual agency and its associated virtues. Focusing on Montessori's interpretation of specific virtues including sensory attentiveness, intellectual love and intellectual humility, it discusses why these are virtues, why one can be held responsible for them, and how they relate to each other. Moreover, it considers pedagogical implications of considering these capacities to be virtues. Intellectual Agency and Virtue Epistemology not only reveals the value of seeing Montessori as a virtue epistemologist, it encourages educationalists to take seriously the cultivation of intellectual virtues as an important part of the education of children.

1

Introduction

In 1901, at the age of thirty-one, Maria Montessori enrolled as a doctoral student in philosophy at the University of Rome. By this time, she had already completed her medical degree, had a private medical practice, had served as a lecturer and research assistant, and had been appointed co-director of a major new initiative: an orthophrenic school for children with disabilities. She represented Italian women at a major feminist conference in Berlin and was widely seen as a rising star in the medical establishment. In her psychiatric work with children, this woman who had once sworn that she would be “anything but a teacher” (Standing 1984:23) had come to think “that mental deficiency was more of an educational than a medical problem” (2:21). She traveled to Paris and London to study the works of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and Édouard Séguin, pioneers in pedagogy for disabled children. She conducted research, wrote articles, and gave speeches on treatments—mostly pedagogical—for those with various intellectual deficiencies. Her work with intellectually disabled children suggested to her that “the methods I was employing … contained educational principles more rational than those then in use” (2:22). Despite her strong empiricist background and even a resistance to “abstract philosophical ideas” that have no relation to “the human individual[’s] … actual life” (Montessori 1913:14), she nonetheless felt a need to “enroll as a student of philosophy” in order to conduct a “thorough study” as part of “preparing myself for an unknown mission” (2:23).¹ Montessori never completed her degree in philosophy, taking on a teaching position in anthropology in 1904 and eventually moving full time into the development of her own educational method. Her early recognition of the centrality of a solid philosophical understanding for her pedagogy manifested itself, however, in a set of pedagogical writings that are exemplary for their range of philosophical—not merely pedagogical—insights.

Among the most important philosophical principles Montessori emphasized was the centrality of agency for human life. After early empiricist and even positivist emphases, she came to resist passive notions of the intellect as mere receptacle for knowledge or information. Instead, she describes “intelligence” as literally “the sum of … activities which enable the mind to construct itself, putting it into relation with the environment” (9:147). To be an intelligent person is to actively take in and process the world around one and to use the results of that cognitive self-construction in order to enhance activity in the world. With her emphasis on agency came the centrality of various intellectual virtues: “The … virtues are the necessary means, the methods of existence by which we attain to truth” (9:103). Much of Montessori’s epistemology involves the clear articulation, elucidation, and defense of intellectual virtues that excellent epistemic agents have, and that children develop when given freedom in the right environment. She provides an impressive agency-oriented epistemology that can make significant contributions to contemporary philosophical discourse.

Despite her philosophical efforts, philosophers have generally ignored possible contributions Montessori might make to their discipline.² There are several possible reasons for this marginalization. Unlike most late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers, Montessori did not spend her life within a department of philosophy or even predominantly within a university department. Like Freud and Marx, she focused on bringing her philosophy into the world to transform it, and her primary audiences were those willing to be sympathetic to her cause. Moreover, while she engaged with philosophers ranging from Nietzsche and William James in her early years to Bergson and Tagore in later works, she primarily focused on developing her own philosophical vision. In that sense, her marginalization was at least partly self-wrought. As the case of Freud illustrates, however, one can focus on developing a movement in the light of one’s own ideas and still be taken seriously by the intellectual establishment. Much of her further marginalization is likely due to Montessori’s triple-stigmatization of being a woman, an Italian, and an advocate for children.

It is time to revisit possible contributions of a Montessori perspective for contemporary philosophy, and this book makes a first foray into that investigation by showing how Montessori’s philosophy of human cognition can enrich contemporary epistemology. The time is ripe for at least three reasons. First, within the discipline of philosophy, there is increased appreciation of the ways that philosophical voices have been unjustly marginalized and kept out of the “canon” of Western philosophy. Second, within the community of educators in general and particularly Montessori educators, there is an increased awareness of the value of philosophical underpinnings for pedagogy. Third, and most important in the context of the present volume, the philosophical subfield of epistemology has opened its inquiries beyond relatively narrow preoccupations with the necessary and sufficient conditions of “knowledge” or the development of new and better responses to epistemic skepticism. Montessori fits particularly well among those virtue epistemologists who seek to “serve intellectual communities far beyond the borders of contemporary epistemology” and “humaniz[e] and deepen … epistemology” (Roberts and Wood 2007:112, 7).

The primary purpose of this book is to lay out a theory of intellectual agency and virtue worth taking seriously today. As we will see, Montessori’s approach bridges current divides between so-called reliabilist and responsibilist approaches to intellectual virtue, and it represents a broadly naturalistic approach in epistemology. Her recognition of cognition as embodied gives rise to a virtue epistemology that contributes to intersecting debates in the philosophy of mind. Her conception of character provides excellent responses to current concerns about how virtue epistemology can respond to psychological studies showing the situation-dependence of epistemic success. Her theories of both intellectual love and intellectual humility de-emphasize narrowly doxastic interpretations of these virtues that see them taking epistemic states as their objects. Her discussion of sensory acuity shows how this paradigmatic “faculty” virtue is something for which agents can legitimately be held responsible. Her introduction of dexterity and patience as central virtues adds to current catalogs of virtues. These are only a few samples of what she has to offer.

Because the proposals in this book are drawn from and inspired by the works of Maria Montessori, I appeal to her works to introduce and elucidate them, but the ideas stand or fall on their merits, not on any status—positive or negative—of Montessori herself. Because Maria Montessori is familiar to many Montessori educators but unfamiliar to most philosophers, while current conversations and debates among contemporary virtue epistemologists are a recognizable subfield for philosophers but unfamiliar for most Montessorians, a rapprochement between these communities requires some introduction. I thus start with a short history of virtue epistemology to set the stage for the contributions that Montessori can make to this growing field and to show how developments in philosophy make it more useful than ever for educators seeking to clarify the goals of their pedagogy. I then briefly introduce Montessori. Much more will be said about both virtue epistemology and Montessori’s philosophy over the course of the rest of the book, as I lay out in a brief chapter outline in §3. I close with some remarks about intellectual agency that set the stage for my detailed discussion of Montessori’s epistemology in Chapter 2.

1. Virtue epistemology: A short history

“Epistemology,” from the Greek terms “episteme” (knowledge) and “logos” (reason, study), refers to the study of knowledge. While the notion of “epistemology” has been used to refer quite broadly to the study of anything that can be known,³ it typically refers in contemporary philosophy to the subdiscipline that asks about the nature of knowledge (what is knowledge?) or about the conditions of justification (how can one know something?), or, more narrowly, about what distinguishes genuine knowledge from mere belief. Philosophical skepticism—the notion that we cannot know anything at all—is a perennial boogeyman of philosophical epistemology, and defusing the threat of skepticism has been a concern of epistemologists from Descartes to the present.⁴

“Virtue Epistemology,” typically seen as a subset of epistemology (though sometimes also as a subset of ethics), shifts focus from questions about particular beliefs—how can I justify this belief, or what distinguishes a belief from a piece of knowledge—to questions about persons and their traits. For virtue epistemologists, central questions include such things as “what are the traits one needs in order to think well about the world?” or “what makes courage, open-mindedness, etc. a valuable intellectual trait?” or “what traits characterize epistemic exemplars?” or “for what can we hold intellectual agents responsible, and on what basis?” Virtue epistemology in European philosophy goes back as far as Plato’s “enumeration of virtues,” which “includes wisdom alongside temperance, courage, and justice” (see Zagzebski 1996:139) and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, wherein “episteme” literally just is a kind of “intellectual virtue” (ἀρετῆς … διανοητικῆς, Aristotle 1103a, 1139a). The contemporary field of virtue epistemology, however, as a subfield of Anglo-American analytical philosophy, has a more recent history. One can trace two independent strands of late-twentieth-century philosophy that gave rise to contemporary virtue epistemology, one emerging from epistemological struggles over the nature of knowledge and the other from increasing interest in virtue theory among moral philosophers.

The first source for virtue epistemology arose from epistemology itself. For much of the twentieth century, the question of “the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge” was central for epistemology. Plato’s claim that mere true belief is insufficient for knowledge (see his Meno) had led epistemologists to define knowledge as “justified true belief,” which allowed them to focus on what precisely constituted sufficient justification for beliefs. In 1963, however, in a short article entitled “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?,” philosopher Edmund Gettier argued that one could have justified true beliefs that do not amount to knowledge, describing two hypothetical cases to illustrate his point. Here is one such case, quoted in full from the article:

Suppose that Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job. And suppose that Smith has strong evidence for the following conjunctive proposition:

d. Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket. Smith’s evidence for (d) might be that the president of the company assured him that Jones would in the end be selected, and that he, Smith, had counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. Proposition (d) entails:

e. The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.

Let us suppose that Smith sees the entailment from (d) to (e), and accepts (e) on the grounds of (d), for which he has strong evidence. In this case, Smith is clearly justified in believing that (e) is true.

But imagine, further, that unknown to Smith, he himself, not Jones, will get the job. And, also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. Proposition (e) is then true, though proposition (d), from which Smith inferred (e), is false. In our example, then, all of the following are true: (i) (e) is true, (ii) Smith believes that (e) is true, and (iii) Smith is justified in believing that (e) is true. But it is equally clear that Smith does not know that (e) is true; for (e) is true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith’s pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith’s pocket, and bases his belief in (e) on a count of the coins in Jones’s pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job. (Gettier 1963:122)

This article has provoked more than sixty-five years of philosophical discussion, as epistemologists sought (and still seek) to develop conditions for knowledge that could avoid so-called Gettier problems, while other philosophers use Gettier’s cases as inspiration to develop ever more complex counter-examples to ever more complex formulae of the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge.

At this point, there was a need for something other than mere justification to distinguish true knowledge from mere belief, something that would be present in genuine cases of knowledge but not in the Gettier cases that caused so much trouble. At least some epistemologists—most notably Ernest Sosa and Linda Zagzebski—would turn to a new sort of epistemology, virtue epistemology, to address the problem. To see why, however, we need to take a short detour through the other key twentieth-century antecedent of virtue epistemology: moral philosophy.

Where epistemology studies the nature of knowledge, moral philosophy studies the good life. In the early twentieth century, moral philosophy was like epistemology in emphasizing clear necessary and sufficient conditions for the application of various ethical concepts, such as “good” or “right.” One debate, for instance, involved whether or not sentences like “It is wrong to eat meat” have a truth value (i.e., can be true or false). One theory argued that such sentences are best understood as emotional ejaculations, expressions of one’s strong feelings and perhaps exhortations to others to feel similarly, so “It is wrong to eat meat” just means “Ew, meat, yuck, right?” (see van Roojen 2018). Many of these debates (like those about knowledge in epistemology) were far removed both from psychology and from ethical issues that arise in ordinary life, while the default for policy making and arguably even individual decision making was a blend of utilitarianism and disjointed moral intuitions.

In the mid-to-late twentieth century, ethical inquiry got two significant jolts. One can be represented by John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971), in which Rawls developed an approach to moral, social, and political issues based loosely on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant.⁵ The details of Rawls’s theory are less important than the fact that he helped reinvigorate philosophical reflection about what is actually the best way to construct a society and to live one’s life. Moral philosophy immediately following Rawls was dominated by debates between Kantians and utilitarians about which principles one should use in order to determine what one ought to do in particular situations. Rather than “what sort of grammatical structure do moral statements have?,” philosophers were asking “how do I determine what is the right thing to do?”

A second jolt can be seen in an essay entitled “Modern Moral Philosophy,” by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. This essay had a less significant immediate reaction than Rawls’s work, but it served as a precursor—or, as Rosalind Hursthouse put it, as a “herald” (Hursthouse and Pettigrove 2016)—of what would become an emphasis on virtue. Anscombe made three important arguments that set the stage for “virtue ethics.” First, she argued that “moral philosophy … should be laid aside … until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology” (Anscombe 1958:1). In order to do good moral philosophy, she suggested, we need to pay more attention to what human beings are actually like. Second, she argued that many of the problems of “modern moral philosophy” arise from the conjunction of sets of ethical concepts—particularly the notions of “obligation,” “right,” and “moral”—that had meaning only in a Christian context that philosophers had largely rejected. And third, she points to Aristotle (and other ancient philosophers) as proponents of philosophical ways of thinking about ethics that use thick virtue-concepts rooted in human nature rather than (now) groundless moral principles or laws to which we are obligated by nothing in particular.

As debates between utilitarians and Kantians reached a series of stalemates, increasing numbers of moral philosophers turned to “virtue” as a new way of doing ethics. Philosophers such as Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), Rosalind Hursthouse (1999), and Philippa Foot (2001) argued that we should stop focusing on what moral principles make an action right or wrong and instead turn to what kinds of human beings are virtuous. The details of these theories differ from one moral philosopher to another, but the shift to virtue theories in ethics typically involved emphasizing character traits rather than isolated actions, so rather than asking, “What ought I to do in this case?,” one should ask “What kind of person should I be?” or “What character traits is it good to have?” Virtue ethicists also drew more from Plato and Aristotle (and to some extent Hume) than from philosophers typically associated with the so-called “Enlightenment.” And virtue ethicists were oriented toward moral cultivation, education, and development, rather than nailing down precise formulae for one-off moral dilemmas.

Meanwhile, epistemologists got increasingly stuck in a morass of Gettier cases, responses, counter-examples, and counter-responses, and the possibility of something like a virtue epistemology started to look appealing. Just as pre-virtue moral philosophers were looking for principles that could lay down necessary and sufficient conditions for deciding about particular actions whether they were morally right or not, epistemologists were looking for exact definitions or methods of justification that could lay down necessary and sufficient conditions for deciding about particular mental states whether or not they constituted knowledge. And just as virtue ethics shifted the debate from principles for individual actions to virtues of moral agents, so too virtue epistemology might shift debate from criteria for assessing individual mental states to epistemic virtues of intellectual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Montessori’s Interested Empiricism
• 3 Unconscious and Embodied Intellectual Agency
• 4 Intellectual Virtues
• 5 Character
• 6 Intellectual Love
• 7 Sensory Acuity
• 8 Physical Dexterity
• 9 Patience and Quickness
• 10 Humility and Courage
• 11 Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint