SCHEFFLER AND THE COGNITIVE ENDS OF TEACHING

摘要

The Schefflerian notion that teaching intentionally tries to bring about knowledge has been spiritedly challenged by Catherine Elgin. Perhaps, in light of our enlightened understanding of the limits of our claims to knowledge in the scientific realm, knowledge emerges as too ambitious a goal for teaching to set itself. In this essay, George Pollack explores the maneuvers Israel Scheffler employs to deflect the onslaught of this challenge. Pollack addresses this issue by examining the so-called rationality constraints on teaching championed by Scheffler. The thesis that these constraints are definitive of teaching is, the author argues, not arrived at on conceptual grounds, but draws for its support on the several strands of epistemological reasoning woven together in Scheffler's celebrated work, Conditions of Knowledge. The notion of a dynamically engaged-in teacher-pupil interaction, harnessed to a mutually shared system of beliefs, is shown to take on a heightened prominence.