Philosophising and facts

Some people contend that philosophy is out of the picture once factual considerations come into play. Nicholas Rescher identifies the common view as: ‘Whenever questions require factual materials for their satisfactory resolution, then addressing them is “no longer doing philosophy (p.35).”’ He quotes Bertrand Russell:

‘… as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science (p.35).’

Yet big philosophical problems can, and often do, arise within subjects that are seemingly distinct from philosophy, such as science, psychology, politics, economics and history. An important role for philosophical dialogue is, using Rescher’s phase: ‘the philosophical elucidation of fact-laden issues (p.36).’

In philosophical enquiry with young people, a neglect of factual details could have some unfortunate consequences. Firstly, teachers might limit the agenda for enquiry to issues that don’t require additional research. They might avoid some of the most pressing questions of the day, with huge moral, political and epistemological implications, even when young people want to discuss them.
 
Secondly, young people may not have sufficient background knowledge available to them, even after pooling their own experiences and prior learnings, with which to exercise their best thinking about issues that matter to them.

Rescher considers two words in relation to agenda-setting that I use a lot when I work with young people: interest and importance.

He writes that the importance of a philosophical issue can be evaluated by considering ‘the difference its absence makes in the larger scheme of things'. What is lost by not discussing the issue? On the other hand, interest hinges on people’s personal – and potentially idiosyncratic – concerns.

Ideally, one wants young people to think their sessions of philosophical enquiry are both interesting and important. However, when factual input is avoided or sessions move too quickly from one topic to another, issues of importance are bound to be crowded out or treated in shallow ways. Then philosophy becomes the preserve of enthusiasts. If it doesn’t much interest you, why bother making an effort? If you’re not having fun, why give it your attention?

There is an argument that reasoning skills and dialogical virtues will transfer from context to context and subject to subject. According to this view, when adults inevitably encounter fact-laden controversies in life, they will be better prepared to navigate them and act wisely if, as young people, they have honed their skills and communicative virtues on abstract thought experiments or brief discussions in response to a single information source (otherwise known in p4c circles as ‘the stimulus’). That is plausible but not convincing. It might be better to deliberately help children recognise the importance of philosophising for ‘the elucidation of fact-laden issues.’ That means working with young people to welcome the world into the space of philosophical dialogue, seek relevant facts from more than one source, evaluate them and link them to the ‘big picture’ that lives and grows within groups and individuals.

The dark side of Plato’s cave

 Symbols can outlast the arguments they serve to illustrate.

The allegory of the cave presented by Plato in The Republic (514a-520a) is embedded in western culture (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave). Works of fiction such as ‘The Matrix’ have built on Plato’s vision of a community of cave dwellers constrained by the orthodox, yet false, beliefs they have acquired by watching shadows on their cave walls and mistaking them for reality. One of their number escapes his shackles and glimpses an authentic reality outside the cave but his wisdoms are dismissed by the cave-entombed majority.

Plato likens the rejection of the enlightened escapee by the cave people to the likely rejection of a philosophical truth seeker in society. Plato’s truth seeker is capable of self-correction – not just once in response to a great revelation but as an ongoing labour. He is aware of his own ignorance and fallibility.

Nowadays, a host of zealous truth claimers and conspiracy theorists pronounce to the world as if they are the ones who have escaped a cave of ignorance. They look back at those who remain in the cave with pity and disdain, for surely they are brainwashed by mainstream media and prevailing expert opinion on matters such as climate change or Covid-19.

The humility of the genuine truth seeker is not the modus operandi of the self-aggrandising truth claimer. The virtue of modesty, the painstaking work of acquiring expertise and the patience to sift though evidence before before pronouncing, do not serve them well. And yet they appear to thrive.

This is the dark side of Plato’s allegory as it plays out in modern times.

Accusation in a mirror

Recently, I came across an article that I think is interesting and useful. It highlights a rhetorical device called "accusation in a mirror" (AiM). The article is mainly about genocide and the author notes that, very often, the preferred method of preparing for, and then igniting, a genocide is to claim that members of the target group are going to do what, in fact, you want your followers to do. “They plan to kill us!” is understood as a call for “them” to be massacred (hence the mirror metaphor). The author writes: “Before one's enemies accuse one truthfully, one accuses them falsely of the same misdeed." He makes a good case that this kind of rhetoric can be a dependable predictor of violence: “AiM has six interrelated functions: to shock, to silence, to threaten, to insulate, to legitimize, and, finally, to motivate or incite.”

When I think about it, the AiM is often used for a range of purposes. For example, Donald Trump seeks to propagate fake news so first he accuses his critics of producing fake news. When he intends to steal an election, he accuses the other side of stealing an election.

Elites seek to enhance their freedom, power and influence so they accuse people who stand in their way of constituting an elite. People want to produce a chilling effect on criticism of themselves so they accuse their critics of trying to silence them.

In education
In relation to education and critical thinking, I think the AiM is a phenomenon that teachers should draw students’ attention to. Teachers could, for example, suggest that for every sweeping accusation in civic discourse, students should not only check the veracity of the claim but also attend to the possibility of a mirror image in the behaviour of the accuser.

Sources
FREE ARTICLE: Kenneth L. Marcus, Accusation in a Mirror. https://lawecommons.luc.edu/luclj/vol43/iss2/5/

 

The importance of 'importance'

 A crucial question in philosophising with young people is: 'Should adults bring issues they regard as important to students for consideration?' I believe they should but refrain from manipulating the outcomes of enquiry or striving for a consensus they regard as desirable. This notion of importance is central and unavoidable when philosophising with children. The philosopher, Dorothy Emmet, explained the importance of 'importance' as follows:

Without some judgement of 'importance' we are presented with mere multiplicity of detail or, at best, a dead level of facts. A judgement of what is important brings form into a multiplicity, whether in presenting an intellectual theme or in the practical conduct of life. There is, of course, always the danger that it may impose preconditions; but a preconception can at least sustain interest and later be corrected, whereas a mere manifold of undigested matter of fact can tell us nothing. (Dorothy Emmet, The Nature of Metaphysical Thinking 1966, p.196)

Reciprocal exchanges between adults and young people about what is important are possible and should be encouraged. I think this process is under-represented in the literature of philosophising with children and perhaps also in practice. Much has been written about the selection of starting points for enquiry and the creation and selection of questions.

However, relatively little attention has been paid to a very simple idea: sitting down with young people and asking: What is important to you at the moment? What excites your imaginations? What makes you angry or hopeful? The teacher would then help put together a programme of enquiries and events to explore those concerns and seek out philosophical dimensions in the topics to be discussed.

I think, also, that young people would expect their teachers to put topics on the philosophical agenda and give reasons for doing so. In an age of climate change, pandemics and obvious injustices around the world, I think children will welcome such an on-going dialogue. That is not to say that all philosophical initiatives in schools should be initiated using this strategy, only that such an approach would play a significant role within the overall practice. Enlightenment without manipulation could be taken as a regulative ideal – a goal that may never be achieved in every respect but that regulates practice. That is because enlightenment, taken to be a broadening of experience and an enhancement of capacities, is a worthy aim.

Philosophy in the humanities

 This post is devoted to a single quote from Alan Bullock (1914-2004)*.

It is taken from his book, The Humanist Tradition in the West (Thames and Hudson, 1985, pp 186-7). It illustrates, I think, the spirit of philosophy for children. In these dichotomous times, I should stress that I don’t think Bullock’s recommendations would necessarily lead to a lack of focus in teaching or learning. Nor would they deprive pupils of a healthy acquaintance with Shakespeare or other great writers. If you are one of the subject-knowledge-is-everything crusaders, try to apply the principle of charity* to your reading of Bullock. If you can accept that there should be at least some time in the curriculum for the sort of thing he proposes, then Philosophy for Children has much to contribute. If you like to see children pondering science-fiction-type thought experiments and paradoxes and you call that kind of thing ‘proper philosophy’, consider Bullock’s vision as an alternative that connects life, learning and philosophising together.

"…I have learned, in a world in which older people are continually deploring the disappearance of values, the extent to which young people are trying to work out for themselves new values to live by, their own codes of behaviour, their own concepts of conscience and of the qualities they prize. They are not the same as those of their grandparents, but neither were ours the same as the values of the Victorian age, nor the Victorians’ as those of the eighteenth century.

I suspect that this is the only way in which values can be re-created in the modern world, no longer by direct transmission but by encouraging young people to discover, or rediscover, them for themselves, out of their own experience and insights, often in discussion with their peers, not taken on authority but deeply influenced by the sympathy and above all the example (practice not precept) of older people.

At a time when the place of the humanities in education is under question, young people’s search for values by which to live seems to me to define the role the humanities can play. It will require something of a revolution in the presentation of history, literature and the arts, to start not from the achievements of the past, but from the human needs of young people today. But it is the same role which the rediscovery of the ancient world played for the Renaissance, providing those who were young then with a strange and exciting world which they could explore and on which they could draw to work out their own answers to the questions and conflicts presented by their own experience. Today the material on which to draw on is no longer limited to the ancient world, but includes the whole range of human experience, contemporary as well as historical, that of other cultures as well as our own Western tradition. This material, thanks to film, television and videos, is now accessible as never before.

Here is a great opportunity to make available to young people in schools and colleges, not a traditional course in the humanities, but a direct encounter, taking advantage of these new media, with human experience of the questions that bother and fascinate them. It could focus in turn on such questions as conscience, conflicts of loyalty, rebellion and authority, the ambivalence of feelings, the search for identity, the power of art and myth, passions and compassion, as these are reflected in literature, theatre, the arts, history and philosophical debate – with the same object, to prompt them, as the discovery of Greece and Rome prompted the young people of the Renaissance, to reach their own conclusions.

Any such encounter with the humanities is valuable not only for the results it can produce, but for the activity itself, engaging the imagination and the emotions in the penetration of other people’s worlds and ideas. In an education which is all too inclined to fill students with information and limit itself to teaching them techniques, here is a way of fostering the emotional, subjective side of human nature which is of so much importance for young people, and which needs to be developed as much as the intellectual if they are to acquire confidence and establish satisfying relationships with other human beings."

LINKS
*Alan Bullock: http://www.theguardian.com/news/2004/feb/03/guardianobituaries.obituaries
*The Principle of Charity: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity