By the early 1970s, Edel was in good company, for the analytic/synthetic distinction had sustained damaging criticism from Quine (1951, 1960) and conspicuous appeal to analyticity had greatly diminished as a ground for the justification of claims in mainstream, Anglo-American, philosophy. Indeed, its lingering influence in philosophy of education was something of an anomaly. With appeal to analyticity disallowed, the structure of justification changes. Take, for example, the defence of S: ‘Teaching is an activity conducted with the intention of bringing about learning.’ Instead of engaging in the usual meaning analysis of ‘teaching’ in order to establish a case for conceptual truth of S, we can view S as providing the most immediate context for understanding the conceptual role of ‘teaching’.
But relevant context extends beyond S to other related sentences: S is embedded in some theory, T. Defending S now becomes a matter of arguing the epistemic case for T against rivals. Although theory choice has its problems it has considerably more resources for decision than meaning analysis. Note that in formulating the problem of justification in this manner a move has been made against merely assuming the epistemic privilege of ordinary language and its embedded commonsense theory of the world (see Evers, 1979).
A second problem lies with the provision of necessary conditions for the correct use of a term. While analytic philosophers of education might be willing to concede on sufficient conditions, it is important to hold the line on necessary conditions. So, to Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist charge that, for example, there is no common feature to all games (which would undermine the condition that the presence of such a feature is a necessary condition for something to be called a game), Hirst and Peters (1970: 6) respond that he overlooked something: ‘A necessary conditon of calling something a game is, surely, that it is an activity which is indulged in non-seriously.’
One need not have played poker for oil wells, on a Mississippi riverboat, to query the ‘surely’. In response, analysts might want to distinguish two concepts: a fun one for those whose sense of propriety prevails, and a more serious one suitable for higher stakes. But now, is the sentence ‘a game is an activity indulged in non-seriously’ a conceptual truth, or even a truth? Well, once we begin to factor in the relevant social, cultural, and geographical factors that specify the surrounding theoretical context in which each use of ‘game’ figures, the epistemic sense of the question either drops out altogether, becomes relativised to prevailing local contexts, or becomes a matter of theory competition.
And the same conditions of justification will apply to distinctions between so-called central and peripheral uses of ‘game’, or ‘education’, or ‘teaching’, or ‘learning’. Since the presence of necessary conditions of usage in a sufficiently restricted domain is equivalent to their absence in a broader domain we can ask whether consideration of domain size really matters in explaining how humans can master and readily employ concepts (or use terms).
According to Stephen Stich (1992: 248–50), who appeals to empirical work in the psychology of concept acquisition, the answer is no. To appreciate the relevance of empirical conditions, consider an example. A small child is playing with a stick which at first is a gun, then a sword, then a walking stick, and finally a golf club. Analytic ways of thinking might suggest that these things all have something in common – perhaps that length exceeds breadth.
Well, this is true of every solid object in the universe that is not perfectly symmetrical. Moreover, guns can contract smoothly on their major axis without lapsing in gunhood, and likewise for swords, and even walking sticks. Perhaps the child’s imagination is not constrained by affine invariance (maintenance of proportion), or topological invariance (maintenance of boundaries). Given that language – which is quite grainy, discrete, and finite at the level of vocabulary – is being used to describe a world that is infinitely partitionable, one would expect cognitive advantages to accrue to creatures whose learning permits plasticity of feature detection.
But to meet this condition, it is better to see concepts as the result of categorisation by similarity to a prototype, or alternatively, similarity to an exemplar, where neither prototypes (the most typical members of a set) nor exemplars (the most familiar) satisfy anything like necessary or sufficient conditions (see Stich, 1992: 249). It is customary in APE to analyse the nature of human cognition and knowledge through its products, which are invariably taken to be rule-based symbol systems, from natural languages and informal sign systems through to the artificial systems of logic, mathematics, and computing. Certainly, a belief in rules underlying performance would lend credence to the otherwise quite brittle and implausible demands of analysis.
However, when it comes to explaining the human learning of these competencies, it is important nowadays to attend to theories of brain functioning (see Grossberg, 1982). But from a neutral perspective, categorisation and concept formation (and, more controversially, reasoning) are better seen as products of pattern recognition and processing – processes characteristically driven by the application of soft constraints – rather than as being rule-based with precise conditions of application (see Bechtel and Abrahamson, 1991: 220–54; Evers, 1990.)
Notice that analytic methodology needs to challenge more than the truth value of these psychological reflections. In maintaining a conceptual/empirical distinction, it needs to challenge their relevance. The task of meshing a theory of conceptual analysis with a theory of concept acquisition was attempted in the early APE literature – and most clearly seen in the writings of Peters (1974: 119– 50) – by a shift in favour of Piagetian stage theories (shorn of their empirical excrescences). The last major criticism raises the question of whose concepts are being analysed. It is important, because various answers strike at the assumption of epistemic privilege analysis allots to ordinary usage.
For example, theories which see ordinary language as an ideology functioning to reproduce capitalist economic social relations of production, will count almost all the APE claims to conceptual truth as the most central falsehoods of a systematically false theory of education. (The best early critiques along these lines are Adelstein, 1972, and Harris, 1977.) More generally, the concepts of those for whom language is actually a structured misrepresentation of reality will not bear the epistemic weight required to justify educational claims. So gender theorists, for example, who see familiar discursive practices as gendered and part of the male symbolic order, would place little value in ambitious versions of analysis (see Davies, 1989).
A more drastic depature from analysis is to deny the possibility of a preferred knowledge of the semantics of language, and standards of rationality, sufficient to give sentence tokens the stable representational structure required for what are in any case debatable demands of educational justification. Rorty’s (1979: 357– 94) account of philosophy without mirrors (and some of the literature of post-modernism) raises the option. In what follows, I shall canvass benign rather than drastic post-analytic consequences for philosophy of education.
Read More : Criticisms of analytic of Education methodology
