A SYMPOSIUM ON EPISTEMOLOGY AND EDUCATION: INTRODUCTION

摘要

Education is concerned (among many other worthy things) with the transmission of knowledge, the fostering of the skills and abilities that enable students to think critically and believe rationally and justifiably, and the development in students of character traits relevant to responsible believing, such as intellectual curiosity and humility and the dispositions to question and demand reasons for candidate beliefs. All these raise epistemological issues (concerning the nature of knowledge and of justification, the character of rationality, and so on), thereby making epistemology and the pursuit of such issues central to the philosophy of education. Questions concerning teaching (as the transmission of knowledge and the fostering of epistemically relevant skills, abilities, and character traits), learning (as the acquisition of knowledge and the development of those skills, abilities, and traits), and curriculum (as knowledge worth transmitting) have also loomed large in the Western philosophy of education tradition. Epistemological matters have been central to work in philosophy of education since at least the time of Socrates. This is true of pretty much the entire long history of the subject, from Socrates and Plato through to John Dewey, Israel Scheffler, and R.S. Peters and Paul Hirst. Since the 1960s and 1970s, philosophers of education have also been heavily involved with related issues widely discussed in the philosophy of science and inspired by the work of Norwood Russell Hanson, Thomas Kuhn, Paul Feyerabend, W.V.O. Quine, and other leading figures in the challenge to the epistemological legacy of Logical Positivism and the development of a post-positivist philosophy of science - issues concerning the nature, reach of, and limitations imposed by conceptual schemes, the rationality of theory choice, the objectivity of scientific judgment, the proper understanding of scientific knowledge, and other epistemological topics. All of these epistemological issues are of the first importance for education, placing epistemology at the center of the philosophical study of education.