Education, Science and Truth

Rasoul Nejadmehr

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781135840648
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What is the main problem of contemporary education? Rasoul Nejadmehr argues that the cardinal problem with education is that it does not have an adequate notion of truth underpinning it. Thinkers mainly tend to veer towards two poles - absolutism and relativism. While a one-sided tendency toward absolutism leads to reified categories of thought and alienation, a tendency toward relativism leads to lack of universality and nihilism. Education, Science and Truth suggests a way out by bridging not only divides between and within analytical and continental philosophy but also those of modernism and postmodernism. By using a range of issues, disciplines and literature, Nejadmehr formulates a new version of the concept of objectivity based on the inclusion of multiple perspectives, including ones from art, philosophy and marginalized groups.

1
Truth, Universalism and Relativism

Since the notion of truth is central to this study, I begin by discussing it. This brings to the fore a wide range of conceptions like reality, knowledge, communication, exemplarity, conformity and creativity, since the question of truth concerns these issues closely. There is no consensus among philosophers about truth. Besides different theories of truth, we can talk, as Paul Ricoeur (1965) does, about different “orders of truth”—scientific, ethical, religious and philosophical. In the present context, we can talk about an educational order of truth. The complex questions concerning truth cannot be explored here.¹ I discuss only the local and the universal aspects of truth, since these questions are of importance to the relationship between truth, education and science. The focus then will be on the value of truth as a cognitive norm that guides our educational practices.² Having this starting point, a tension arises between the local nature of education and the universality of truth. This tension has to be dealt with properly. In the context of this study, this means reconciliation between the local and the universal in the same phenomenon, education.

Traditionally, this issue has been considered from two competing points of view. One has been based on a universalistic view of truth represented by philosophers from Plato to Russell, Carnap, Tarski, Frege and Habermas, for whom truth functions as an absolute and unquestionable ground of knowledge. From this perspective, truth has no local dimension. In matters of science, this tendency believes in scientific realism, according to which scientific knowledge is knowledge of theory-independent phenomena; true knowledge corresponds to entities in the natural world whose existence is not dependent on our beliefs and theories (Popper 1972, Putnam 1975). As different versions of this notion of truth are informed by the principle of correspondence—correspondence of thoughts to objects or the like—I subsume them under the umbrella notion of correspondence theories of truth.

The competing view has been based on the relativistic theory of truth advocated by philosophers like Protagoras, Quine, Rorty, Kuhn and Feyerabend, for whom a variety of local paradigms and truths compete for the allegiance of thought communities.³ According to this tendency, scientific observations and experiments are theory-based (Fleck 1979, Kuhn 1970). Correspondingly, two different roles have been ascribed to philosophers and philosophical discourse. The dispute has been about the nature of knowledge, the relationship between philosophy and science and what philosophy is and what it should do. In the former case, philosophers are assigned the exemplary task and privileged position of determining the truth once and for ever. Or, as Rorty, says the philosopher is considered to be the

cultural overseer who knows everyone’s common ground—the Platonic philosopher king who knows what everybody else is really doing whether they know it or not, because he knows about the ultimate context (the Forms, the Mind, Language) within which they are doing it. (Rorty 1979:317–18)

In this account, philosophy provides the firm foundation of scientific enquiry. As such, it is supposed to establish once and for all conditions, limits and scope of science, truth and related discourses. At the other extreme, this relationship is reversed and philosophy is subordinated to science. This conception of philosophy “simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science” (Quine 1969:82), as Quine puts it. As a result, philosophy loses its autonomy and becomes continuous with science; it is considered to be just another scientific discourse. This issue will receive due attention in Chapter 5.

UNIVERSALISM

Providing the ontological and epistemological foundation of science, in the former view, philosophy presupposes a notion of truth independent of diversity of contexts as the aim of our cognitive practices. Traditionally, discussions of truth have been focused on the notion of objectivity and a notion of knowledge independent of all contexts, be it the context of a culture, an era, a specific community of thought, or the cognitive condition of the individual knower. Seen in this light, truth is the suspension of historicity and contextuality. This notion of truth presupposes a universal standpoint valid for humanity as a whole and across time and place. In sum, truth is considered to be the agreement of minds on the one hand and agreement of minds and reality on the other. As a result, notions of consensus and correspondence are central to this view of truth. Language is considered to be an instrument which merely registers consensus and correspondence without distorting or changing them. This belief is based on the presupposition that there is a natural link between words and objects determining their meaning and that language users have no impact on it; words reflect the essence of things. Thus truth and meaning are constant and achievable only for those who search for them unconditionally. A devoted and true searcher for truth just discloses or discovers it, it is argued. In this way the notion of the adequacy of thoughts and reality or objective correspondence between thoughts and facts is established.

Traditionally, the relation between reality and thoughts is signified by the notion of fact. In the correspondence view of truth, for instance, a proposition is true if and only if it corresponds to facts and false if and only if it does not correspond to any fact. The genealogical basis of this perception of truth goes back to the Aristotelian definition of truth. He maintains that: “To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true” (Metaphysics, 1011b25). In contemporary philosophy of science, different nuances of scientific realism continue to advocate this view of truth. A classical example in this regard is Bertrand Russell. According to Russell, there exists an objective relation between mind and the world of objects. For a belief to be true, according to this view, there has to be a correlation between objects and their relation in the world and the way these are represented in the propositions. Russell believes a proposition is true or false independently of minds. In other words, “minds do not create truth or falsehood” (Russell 1959:129), they just reflect or represent them. Indeed, Russell belongs with those philosophers who consider true propositions constitutive of external reality. In the identity theory of truth, propositions do not merely correspond to facts, they are facts. According to this theory: “For every x, x is a true proposition if x is a fact” (David 2001:684). Other defenders of epistemological realism, like Putnam, formulate similar theories though he considers truth talk internal to our world view. Accusing Rorty of a “phobia of objectivity”, McDowell tries to keep the notion of objectivity. He relates our beliefs to reality and considers “the world as authoritative over our investigations”. This means that contrary to relativists like Rorty and Feyerabend, he believes in the normative significance of truth for our investigations and judgements. Contrary to Rorty, for McDowell truth “transcends consensus”. As a result, he makes us “answerable not just to the verdicts of our fellows but to the facts themselves” (McDowell 2005:140).⁴

In these philosophical systems science is the paradigm of truth and enjoys a unique position; it is the “touchstone” of truth and “all truths”, as Ricoeur puts it, “ought to be of science or at least like science” (Ricoeur 1965:170). Formulated differently, science is considered not only as an activity with a fixed essence, which distinguishes it radically from other cultural activities, but also as the pattern and paradigm of other truth-seeking activities. Rather than being one sort of social activity among others or being a part of culture, it is viewed as high above cultures and their differences. Science is considered “the only unproblematic … kind of knowledge that there is” (De Caro and Macarthur 2004:7), whose method of enquiry provides us with an exhaustive and reliable account of the world.

The universal notion of truth is related not only to a universal notion of science, but also to a universal notion of education, where scientific literacy is a “central goal of education” ( AAAS 1989:3). Such a notion of education is thought to bring up a universal kind of knowers who act for the benefit of humanity and whose perspective coincides with that of humanity. Embedded in this order of things is the presupposition that this universal type of knower is capable of creating the good life, a universal social order that is good for human prosperity (AAAS 1989:12–13). Indeed, universality of truth is used to establish the context-independency of science, scientific education and the scientific social order. This homogenous world with homogenous relationships between its components would be a comfortable place to live in, provided that things work in the way they are outlined to do. However, problems emerge as soon as we ask questions about the nature of truth, knowledge, facts, education and the relationships between them.

RELATIVISM

To begin with, a major problem emerges as soon we relate the historical conditions of education and scientific practices with their changing truths to the idea of truth as correspondence and consensus. Philosophers like Rorty, Quine, Kuhn, Wittgenstein, Feyerabend and Margolis relativise truth to particular contexts and highlight their importance in the constitution of truth. They challenge philosophers like Habermas, Russell and Frege, who try to find ways to transcend paradigms and reach unconditional agreement on what truth is.

Relativists see universalism as an “authoritarian approach” based on the perspective of the Platonic philosopher-king or “super-experts”. They also accuse proponents of the universal view of truth of wanting “the power to reshape the world in their own image” (Feyerabend 2005:151). Relativism advocates the view that “different cities (different societies) may look at the world in different ways” (Feyerabend 2005:151). To Feyerabend’s mind, philosophers have no privileged position and anybody can function as a “wise man”. Like Margolis, he overtly advocates Protagoras and his doctrine of: “Man is the measure”. Feyerabend calls his brand of relativism “democratic relativism”. It is democratic, he argues, because all citizens of a society are engaged in decisions upon and debates about basic assumptions, principles and disputes concerning truth. He defends a notion of science based on rejection of the distinction between the context of discovery and the context of justification. He is a critic of scientism and objectivism and their claims to a universal truth. Refusing intellectualism, he trusts “public opinion”, “citizens’ initiatives” and common sense as the bases of his view of truth and knowledge (Feyerabend 2005:53–54). According to this view, truth is totally local with no universal aspect. According to Feyerabend sciences are divided into different regions that are unable to communicate with each other or equip us with an objective truth about the universe. Rorty also places the Western metaphysical tradition and the normative “we” connected to it against the “other”. To his mind, transcendence is illusory and any claim to truth is dependent on a context.

Philosophers’ destabilisation of old bounds between reality and truth was deepened by historians of science like Kuhn. Through his notion of scientific revolution, Kuhn showed the rise and fall of competing paradigms in the history of science. These studies confirm the relativistic assumption that we inevitably belong to a form of life that determines the boundaries of our cognitive activities and their results. Thus, questioning as well as establishing truth occur within the horizon of a paradigm. As a result, these activities are not universal, this line of argumentation goes. Generally, these theories argue that truths are produced by human agents in different thought collectives, like that of the scientific community, rather than being given, agent-independent and community-transcending forces. The questions to be discussed are then can we identify the “we” of particular paradigms with humanity in general? Is there any possibility of overcoming the limitations of paradigms and reaching a universal view of truth? Have we good enough grounds to base truths on human practice rather than general and abstract ideas?

Universalism and localism are both based on weak notions of truth, their apparently strong claims notwithstanding. Universalism is not able to explain local aspects of truth adequately and localism is unable to overcome its local limits and present a satisfactory account of the universal aspect of truth. They limit us to a choice between relativism and absolutism. Absolutism demands consensus and assimilation of all perspectives into a single one and relativism disperses humanity into scattered paradigms incapable of communicating and agreeing on things. In both cases, perspectives that fall outside one’s own become inconceivable and are excluded. Both lead to philosophical dead ends. An inclusive notion of truth has to explain both aspects of truth, its singularity and universality, in an adequate way. As will be discussed in the coming chapters, to replace abstract definitions with notions like family resemblances is helpful in connecting truth to human practices and to the ways we do things.

To break down impasses of relativism and absolutism, discussions of truth have to change direction. Indeed, contemporary philosophy offers more alternatives than only universalism and localism. This is thanks to the destabilisation of the traditional metaphysics of truth based on dichotomies between notions of true/false and reality/appearance. A main source of this destabilisation has been the questioning of the representational notion of language. As a result, concepts of representation of and correspondence to reality, cornerstones of traditional views of truth, are strongly disputed. While objectivism tried to establish a notion of truth based on a language-and mind-independent world, the increasing tendency has been toward the contextualisation of truth. Truth is considered to be a process rather than a closed and pre-given entity to be discovered. Truth as proposition-thing correspondence and representational relations between language and the world are either rejected or at best are, as in Putnam’s new Platonism, modified and limited to the representational activities that take place within specific linguistic communities. Traditional notions of representation and correspondence are replaced by notions like life-world or common traditions. In all these cases historico-cultural horizons shared by a community of users of a single language are the focal point of scrutiny. Philosophers like Nietzsche, William James, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Derrida, to name some of the most famous ones, have contributed to changes in our perception of truth. Through their works, the discourse of truth has changed character, direction, form and content. Our need for truth remains, however, as acute as it was before. We cannot therefore dispense with truth or declare it redundant. Rather, we need a new notion of truth based on the reconciliation of its universal and local aspects.

The question Why truth? can be answered differently depending on our philosophical stand. One possible answer is: because “truth … today gives us a measure and a stand against the confusion of opinions and reckoning” (Heidegger 2005:243). This is however, as Vattimo puts it, not to consider truth “as the ultimate point of reference beyond which we do not pass and which silences all questioning” (Vattimo 2005:173–4). The logic of questioning, well established after the Nietzschean radical “school of suspicion”, is nowadays at work everywhere. And this contributes to our understanding of truth and the nature of human knowledge, its relation to the world and social order. The lesson we have learned from philosophers like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein is that truth is not an unquestionable foundation or unmediated “brute fact”. It is unquestionable while nobody questions it. The process of questioning the traditional foundation of truth, to mention one example, can be discerned in Wittgenstein’s philosophical life and career. The Wittgenstein of the Tractatus and his view of the relation between language and the world do not need any explanation. In this period, he considered true propositions as images of reality. Rejecting this theory in Philosophical Investigations, he presents forms of life as the final ground of thought. But in On Certainty, he gains the insight that we cannot have any such firm foothold whatsoever. We are, rather, living in a foundationless world and have to learn to live in it without anything functioning as a final ground. Like Nietzsche, he recommends that we acquire such a foundation “in order to later free ourselves” (Stickney 2005:304). Such a position not only signifies the loss of the old comfortable constant ground, it places that ground within human reach and makes it available for critical appraisal. This means encouraging the individual to take seriously his/her active participation in establishing and destabilising truth; this brings an ethical dimension to truth.

Questioning established truths is a good characteristic of thought, but, as will be explored later in this study, we have to make a distinction between different types of questioning. True, we realise the world within some conceptual frameworks, but we...

Table of contents

• Routledge International Studies in the Philosophy of Education
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Truth, Universalism and Relativism
• 2 Objectivism and Alienation
• 3 Relativism and Nihilism
• 4 Inclusive Notions of Science and Objectivity
• 5 Cognitive Pluralism
• 6 Plurality of Perspectives and Unity of Style
• 7 The Question of the Ground of Understanding
• 8 Education and Educators
• 9 Relations between Educators and Learners
• 10 The Educational Order of Truth
• 11 Education and the Problem of Authority
• 12 The Nature of Educational Renewal
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index