Intellectual Virtues, Group Knowledge and Education

Eidyn’s new pilot Projects ‘Epistemology of Education‘ and ‘Group Knowledge‘ are hosting a joint workshop on 

‘Intellectual Virtues, Group Knowledge and Education’

Date: 15 May 2014. Venue: Edinburgh Informatics Forum, 4.31/ 4.33.

Mainstream epistemology has recently turned its focus on the concept of intellectual virtues. In this one-day workshop we will explore, both from a philosophical and a cognitive science perspective, how intellectual virtues are related to individual knowers, how they can facilitate group dynamics in epistemic contexts, and how thinking about knowledge in terms of intellectual virtues, both at the individual and group level, can shape the future of education.

Everyone is welcome and the event is free, but ticketed. Click here to book a place.

Porgramme:

09:30-09:45    Welcome and Registration

09:45-10:45    Introductory Remarks

  09:45-10:15     Orestis Palermos (Edinburgh): The ‘Group Knowledge Project’

  10:15-10:45    Adam Carter (Edinburgh): ‘The Epistemology of Education Project’

10:45-12:00     Ben Kotzee (Birmingham):  ’Disciplinary Knowledge and 21st Century Skills (or: Why You Can’t Just Google It)’

In contemporary educational thought, disciplinary knowledge is (just) emerging from a long losing streak. Progressive educational thinkers (inspired by, for instance Rousseau and Dewey) have long attacked the organisation and transmission of knowledge in the form of the traditional subject discipline, preferring, instead, an organisation dependent on the student’s needs or interests. Furthermore, political criticism of the discipline since the 1960′s has focussed on how the traditional subject disciplines entrench the perspectives of the privileged and should be replaced, instead, by themes, projects, experienced-based learning or other student – and/or ability-centred approaches. More recently, anti-disciplinary approaches to the curriculum have been organised under the slogan that schools should not teach facts, but ’21st Century Skills’ (such as problem-solving, critical thinking and creativity). Advocates of 21st Century Skills hold that, since they are now armed with Google, children need not learn facts. In this paper, I sketch the importance of the skills versus knowledge debate in education to epistemology. I trace work in the philosophy of education on this issue to debates regarding Ryle’s distinction between knowing that and knowing how. Specifically, I discuss Ryle’s thoughts about learning to make an academic argument as a form of doing (the so-called Lewis Carroll-problem (Stanley, 2011)). I consider intellectualist and anti-intellectualist analyses of what it is to know how to ‘do’ a discipline and outline the consequences for the skills/knowledge debate as it touches the disciplines. I outline an account of the value of disciplinary knowledge that takes knowledge to be an indispensable part of proficiency in a discipline but that resists seeing knowledge of how to do disciplinary study as itself no more than extensive knowledge that. In closing I outline what a virtue epistemological account of academic knowledge has to offer over an account focussed on critical thinking skill and sketch out the prospects for further philosophical work.

12:00-13:00: Lani Watson (Edinburgh): ‘Why Should Philosophers Study Questioning’

The practice of questioning is a ubiquitous part of our everyday lives. It plays a central role in our interactions with the world around us and our communication with the people in it. As such it provides a rich topic for philosophical investigation. Despite its widespread and familiar applications however, the practice of questioning has not been the subject of extensive analysis in the Western philosophical tradition. In this paper I argue that philosophers should pay greater attention to both analysing and evaluating the practice of questioning. This is particularly pertinent within an applied philosophical context given the valuable role that questioning plays in a wide variety of practical and everyday settings. I focus in particular on the epistemological significance of questioning arguing that it plays a central role in the acquisition of epistemic goods such as knowledge and understanding. With this in mind, a significant area of applied philosophical interest in which an examination and evaluation of questioning has beneficial applications is education. Furthermore, when examined as a practice questioning can be viewed as an indispensable form of social cohesion As such the practice of questioning emerges as a topic of wide-ranging philosophical import and one worthy of rigorous analysis and evaluation within an applied philosophical context.

13:00-14:00     Lunch

14:00-15:00     Paul Anderson (Edinburgh):  ’Orchestrating the Student Experience with Social Media Tools’

I will describe some work that we did as part of a Principal’s Teaching Award to look at the different ways in which social media and other tools are used across the University to support specific types of pedagogical interaction. I will summarise the findings from our interviews, speculate on whether it is useful to think about the applications in terms of their interaction models, and mention some of the significant emerging themes.

15:00-16:15: Richard Menary (Macquarie): Scaffolding the Cultural Brain: Between a Rock and a Hard Place

How do brains acquire the capacity to recognise and manipulate external symbols? The proposal of this paper is that the human brain is an open and adaptive system, which is functionally and structurally plastic (Li 2014, Menary in press). Cortical functions are modifiable by cultural scaffolds such as number systems and alphabets. Our brains are, in this sense, flexible enough to acquire new cultural functions that are not evolutionary endowments and this is the neural basis of how we acquire control over external symbol systems. I also address a problem facing an account of the cultural brain: how do we navigate between the Scylla of innate genetic constraints on the development of the brain for specialised neural circuitry and the Charybdis of unconstrained plasticity (Dehaene in press)? I sketch a model of the development of neural circuitry that underpins symbolic thinking, allowing for both developmental constraints and learning driven plasticity in the brain. Developmental pathways that include environmental scaffolding and learning driven plasticity can lead to canalisation and robustness.

16:15-18:00: Drinks

18:00: Dinner