Ed Reform In the University Part 3
Higher Ed, Knowledge and Problem Solving at the Center of the Knowledge Society
What is knowledge? John Dewey famously critiqued Western Phylosophy as having a “spectator view of knowledge” This is the idea that knowledge is a mind’s passive representation of an object in the world (Matthew Festenstein, Dewey’s Political Philosophy). It’s similar to the idea of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. Dewey believe quite the opposite, that knowledge is intimately linked to practice and resulted from inquiry that served the purpose of solving problems.
Not so, says Dewey. For Dewey, Peirce, and like-minded pragmatists, knowledge (or warranted assertion) is the product of inquiry, a problem-solving process by means of which we move from doubt to belief. Inquiry, however, cannot proceed effectively unless we experiment — that is, manipulate or change reality in certain ways. Since knowledge thus grows through our attempts to push the world around (and see what happens as a result), it follows that knowers as such must be agents; as a result, the ancient dualism between theory and practice must go by the board. This insight is central to the “experimental theory of knowledge,” which is Dewey’s alternative to the discredited spectatorial conception. (Douglas McDermid)
So this is an interesting reconception of the student from absorbers of disassociated knowledge to contexted scholars of inquiry. In spite of our reverance for science, I will note that much of what passes for science, especially social science, is more in line with spectatorial concepts rather than Dewey’s versoin of experimental theory.
Before continuing I think it is worth a deeper look at the concept of inquiry that I will build on.
“The existence of the experimental method makes us think we have the means of solving the problems which trouble us; though problem and method pass one another by” (Wittgenstein 1958, II, iv, 232). He says, near the close of this part of his lectures on aesthetics, “Aesthetic questions have nothing to do with psychological experiments, but are answered in an entirely different way” (Wittgenstein 1966, 17). A stimulus-response model adapted from scientific psychology — what we might now call the naturalizing of aesthetics — falsifies the genuine complexities of aesthetic psychology through a methodologically enforced reduction to one narrow and unitary conception of aesthetic engagement. For Wittgenstein complexity, and not reduction to unitary essence, is the route to conceptual clarification. Reduction to a simplified model, by contrast, yields only the illusion of clarification in the form of conceptual incarceration (“a picture held us captive”). (Hagberg, Garry, “Wittgenstein’s Aesthetics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
Even though few people would identify as behaviorists in the mode of Edward Thorndike, the “picture” of educational scholarship that we still maintain is overwhelmingly undergirded by Throndikes assumptions based in stimulus response theory. Thorndike’s error was not an incorrect view of science, but of the reduction and narrowing of scientific scholarship to an essence that has no way to address many important needs in problemsolving (problem and method pass one another by). As I explained elsewhere, this method, rooted as it is in behavior and logical positivist foundations, primarily leads us toward confusion not clarification and useful scholarship. Hence we see the crisis in replication and psychology and the prevelance of p-hacking. This is why any reorganization should include not only a reconception of knowledge, but also a reconception of inquiry, not along postmodernist lines, but along pragmatist lines of Peirce, Dewey and Quine.
It is easy to see that Drucker’s idea of knowledge in the knowledge society is much closer to Dewey’s and Wittgenstein ideas than our traditional university’s version which is often closer to a narrow version of the spectator theory of knowledge; something divorced from the practices of inquiry that will drive the problem-solving practicalities of the knowledge society. I will draw out two implications. This does not mean that all education is vocational or that education must sell itself as a business proposition. What it does mean is that both the sciences and the humanities should develop students as scholars and inquirers. It is common to promote the goal of problem-solving, but how we get to that is to build communities of inquiry that are both deep and wide and provides insight, not confusion.
In summary; if higher education is to have value, it will be because we are preparing students to be wide ranging and effective scholars of inquiry.
