Mentalities like scientism and relativism idealise or belittle science respectively, and thus hurt science education and our literacy. However, it seems very hard to avoid the former mentality without sliding to the latter, and vise versa. I will suggest that part of what makes balancing between the two so difficult, is a representational account of meaning that science educators, like most of us really, usually endorse. Scientism then, arises from the assumption that ​there is such a thing called science​. Relativism, (...) on the other hand, assumes that ​there is no such thing called science,t​hereisnorealmeaningattachedtotheterm​.Wittgenstein'sremarksonrule-following then, could help us escape this twofold danger. Addressing scientism, Wittgensteinian writings remind us that, in order to understand the sciences, we do not need to point to some mental referendum of what science is. We rather need to grasp a matrix of overlapping, often implicit, always evolving rules that govern scientific practices. Addressing relativism, Wittgenstein's comments help us realise that there are always certain criteria about what kinds of things we call by a name; there are rules governing scientific practices, rules that even though they may be context dependent or evolving, are always in play. (shrink)

The move from respecting science to scientism, i.e., the idealization of science and scientific method, is simple: We go from acknowledging the sciences as fruitful human activities to oversimplifying the ways they work, and accepting a fuzzy belief that Science and Scientific Method, will give us a direct pathway to the true making of the world, all included. The idealization of science is partly the reason why we feel we need to impose the so-called scientific terminologies and methodologies to all (...) aspects of our lives, education too. Under this rationale, educational policies today prioritize science, not only in curriculum design, but also as a method for educational practice. One might expect that, under the scientistic rationale, science education would thrive. Contrariwise, I will argue that scientism disallows science education to give an accurate image of the sciences. More importantly, I suggest that scientism prevents one of science education’s most crucial goals: help students think. Many of my arguments will borrow the findings and insights of science education research. In the last part of this paper, I will turn to some of the most influential science education research proposals and comment on their limits. If I am right, and science education today does not satisfy our most important reasons for teaching science, perhaps we should change not just our teaching strategies, but also our scientistic rationale. But that may be a difficult task. (shrink)

Over the past decades, there has been an ongoing debate about whether education should aim at the cultivation of emotional wellbeing of self-esteeming personalities or whether it should prioritise literacy and the cognitive development of students. However, it might be the case that the two are not easily distinguished in educational contexts. In this paper I use J.L. Austin's original work on speech acts to emphasise the interconnection between the cognitive and emotional aspects of our utterances, and illustrate how emotional (...) force affects communication in the classroom. (shrink)

Over the past decades, science education researchers have suggested Inquiry-Based Science Education (IBSE) teaching interventions for science classes. In this article, we argue that IBSE’s basic principles can be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s work Emile or On Education (1762). First, we will look at IBSE’s rationale. Then we will turn to Emile and outline Rousseau’s educational ideas concerning science education. We will show that Rousseau’s suggested practices for science education are very similar to those of IBSE. Yet despite their (...) vivid similarities, Rousseau seems to pursue epistemic virtues, whilst IBSE aims at epistemic skills. However, nurturing epistemic skills might be seen as the first step for cultivating an epistemically virtuous character. So, embracing Rousseau’s ideal for full character development could further inspire IBSE’s proposals. (shrink)

In this paper I will try to defend a quasi-naturalistic interpretation of J.L. Austin’s work. I will rely on P. Kitcher’s 1992 paper “The Naturalists Return” to compile four general criteria by which a philosopher can be called a naturalist. Then I will turn to Austin’s work and examine whether he meets these criteria. I will try to claim that versions of such naturalistic elements can be found in his work.

Today, experimental philosophers challenge traditional appeals to intuition; they empirically collect folk intuitions and then use their findings to attack philosophers' intuitions. However this movement is not uniform. Radical experimentalists criticize the use of intuitions in philosophy altogether and they have been mostly attacked. Contrariwise, moderate experimentalists imply that laypersons' intuitions are somehow relevant to philosophical problems. Sometimes they even use folk intuitions in order to advance theoretical theses. In this paper I will try to challenge the so-called moderate experimental (...) attempts to rely on intuition in order to promote philosophical theses. Hoy en día, los filósofos experimentales ponen en duda la tradición de apelar a la intuición; coleccionan intuiciones empíricas populares y después utilizan sus descubrimientos para atacar las intuiciones de los filósofos. Sin embargo, esta estrategia no es uniforme. Los experimentalistas radicales critican cualquier uso de intuiciones en filosofía y han sido objeto de los mayores ataques. A diferencia de ellos, los experimentalistas moderados sugieren que las intuiciones del vulgo son de alguna manera pertinentes en los problemas filosóficos. Algunas veces incluso usan intuiciones populares para defender tesis teóricas. En este trabajo pretendo poner en duda los intentos de los llamados experimentalistas moderados de apelar a intuiciones para promover tesis filosóficas. (shrink)

Some experimental philosophers imply that philosophers should endorse folk intuitions and even use them to advance philosophical theses. In this paper I will try to contrast experimental appeals to intuition with J. L. Austin’s, whom some experimentalists cite as a precursor of their method. I will suggest that Austin evokes ordinary intuitions in order to dismantle philosophical quests. He even suggests (a) that the appeal to ordinary intuitions of the folk can hardly prescribe answers to extraordinary circumstances and (b) that (...) philosophical quests themselves are extraordinary. Therefore, the appeal to folk intuitions cannot prescribe answers to philosophical problems. It can only dissolve philosophical quests; yet, the dismantling of philosophy hardly accords with the experimentalists’ agenda. (shrink)

The movement of Philosophy for Children starts with M. Lipman in the early ‘70s. University professor Matthew Lipman noticed that his students lacked critical thinking skills. He suggested that, when students reach university age, it is rather late and difficult to teach them how to think.1 It would be wiser to undertake such a task at a much earlier age. Thus, he proposed the introduction of philosophy in elementary schools.

Originating from philosophy and science, many different ideas have made their way into educational policies. Educational policies often take such ideas completely out of context, and enforce them as general norms to every aspect of education; even opposing ideals make their way into school’s curricula, teaching techniques, assignments, and procedures. Meanwhile, inside the actual classrooms, teachers and students are left in limbo, trying to comply with, techniques, evaluation forms and a growing technical educational vocabulary. Here I would like to propose (...) an antidote to this absurdity by reminding us what teachers and students already know. Such an antidote can be found in J. L. Austin’s speech act theory. In this paper, I propose we revisit speech act theory and treat it as an educational theory. That might help us dismantle false dichotomies troubling education for decades. The point is not that the discussion over educational policies and priorities should stop, but that it should be kept in appropriate perspective. A modified speech act theory can help us facilitate such a perspective. (shrink)

n the analytic tradition, the appeal to intuition has been a common philosophical practice that supposedly provides us with epistemic standards. The authoress argues that the high epistemological standards of traditional analytic philosophy cannot be pursued by this method. Perhaps within a naturalistic, reliable frame intuitions can be evoked more coherently. Philosophers can use intuition as scientists do, in hypothesis- construction or data- collection. This is an ironic conclusion: Traditional analytic epistemologists rely on the appeal to intuition, but cannot justify (...) it. Naturalists, on the other hand, are not those who need such a method; yet they can better accommodate it within their view. (shrink)

Philosophers often invoke some sort of consensus in order to justify their analyses on knowledge. Such an appeal could be interpreted as a plea for common sense. Yet there are many senses of common sense. In this paper, I would like to explore G.E. Moore and L. Wittgenstein's appeal to such a folk consensus. I will argue that while the former attaches common sense with the everyday beliefs of plain men, the latter invokes the universal norms underlying human practice and (...) therefore invites an ideal common sense that can better serve as an epistemic criterion. (shrink)

Renia Gasparatou’s article contributes to a symposium on Moti Mizrahi’s For and Against Scientism: Science, Methodology, and the Future of Philosophy (2022) published by Rowman & Littlefield as part of the “Collective Studies in Knowledge and Society” book series.

Declarations of the death knell of postmodernism are rather quite commonplace. For its 50th anniversary, The Journal of Educational Philosophy and Theory conducted a philosophical experiment, asking philosophers of education to solicit a comment, argument or position concerning the so-called death of postmodern philosophy. Renia Gasparatou joined this experiment; in this short paper she suggests that, unfortunately, postmodernism is not dead enough!

Book Review. Reviewing the work of Boudry, M., & Pigliucci, M. (Eds.). (2018). Science Unlimited? The Challenges of Scientism. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-10: 022649814X, 320 pages.

Education happens all the time, in all places, and during all our lives. We all know that. However, the moment we hear the word “education,” our minds wander back to school. Schools and other educational institutions offer formal education and thus formalize the concept, turning it into a quasi-technical term that goes well with “policy,” “criteria,” “evaluation forms,” and all the rest of the modern educational vocabulary. The growing formalization of concepts is in line with a verificationist ideology that thrives (...) in formal education: methods and outcomes need to be tested; we need a scientific language that measures what students learn in a scientific way; science is a priority anyway, for it informs us of what lies beyond our ordinary conception of the world. Among the goals of education after all is to teach us a more accurate way to describe the world, leaving vulgar common sense behind. Drawing from Wittgenstein's arguments on rule following, I will argue against such temptations to attack common sense. (shrink)

Experimental philosophers track folk intuitions better than armchair reflection. Yet, many of them are stuck in a controversy: on the one hand they have vividly shown how untrustworthy intuition is. On the other, they depend all their theorising on the intuitions recorded. If intuition is unreliable, though, why does it make it bet- ter to rely on the intuitions of the many? A mistake is not less a mistake if made by many.

Most native speakers of Spanish are intuitively able to construct correct structures with the marker ‘se’. On the other hand, non-native speakers, even those at advanced proficiency levels, have difficulties producing most constructions with ‘se’. This is hardly surprising as the marker ‘se’, one of the most common words in Spanish, can convey highly pragmatic nuances with a variety of functions that are still much debated among linguists. This study analyses some of the most used functions of the marker in (...) the oral production of 18 Peninsular Spanish speakers from a multimodal Cognitive Grammar approach, identifying how gestures might be employed by speakers to create or clarify meaning. Our results confirm that gestures are used differently depending on the function of the marker. Middle voices where ‘se’ marks high levels of subject involvement and/or energy co-occur with related gestures, while middle voices or impersonal structures, where the involvement and/or energy is low, co-occur more often with unrelated gestures, if any. (shrink)

I would like to thank Renia Gasparatou, Philip Goff, and Andreas Vrahimis for contributing to the book symposium on For and Against Scientism: Science, Methodology, and the Future of Philosophy (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2022). I am grateful to James Collier for hosting this book symposium on the Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective. In what follows, I will reply to Gasparatou and Vrahimis’s contributions to this book symposium.1 Before I do so, I will summarize what I (...) take to be their main arguments against my conception of scientism. Briefly, my conception of scientism runs along the weak and broad lines of epistemological scientism (Mizrahi 2022a, 12). More specifically, Weak Scientism is the view that scientific knowledge is the best knowledge (or some other epistemic good, such as justified belief) we have. Weak Scientism is a weaker version of epistemological scientism than Strong Scientism, which is the view that scientific knowledge is the only knowledge we have. According to Weak Scientism, while non-scientific disciplines do produce knowledge, scientific disciplines produce knowledge that is superior—both quantitatively (in terms of research output and research impact) and qualitatively (in terms of explanatory, predictive, and instrumental success)—to non-scientific knowledge (Mizrahi 2017, 354; 2022a, 6–7; 2023, 41). (shrink)

Cet article s’attache à décrire l’évolution dans l’amitié entre Chŏng Yakyong et Yi Kigyŏng. Beaucoup de choses les rapprochaient, objectivement. Tous deux étaient de brillants lauréats du concours du doctorat de 1789, tous deux étaient membres de la même faction politique, les Namin (les ''Sudistes''), tous deux étaient fonctionnaires civils à la cour du roi Chŏngjo ( r. 1776-1800) dans la Corée de l'ère Chosŏn (1392-1897), et tous deux jouèrent un rôle important dans cette période de grands changements, à la (...) fois socio-politiques, religieux, culturels et intellectuels, que vécut alors la Corée. Chŏng Yakyong s’intéressa à de nombreuses branches différentes du savoir occidental qui parvenait alors à la Corée, et il embrassa même, brièvement après sa confession, la foi chrétienne en 1784. Se sentant critiqué et calomnié, il la renia publiquement en 1797, mais son ami Yi Kigyŏng, auteur du Pyŏgwip’yŏn 闢衛編 ( Compilation de documents pour le rejet de l’hétérodoxie et la défense de l’orthodoxie ), ne voulut jamais y croire. Cet ami devint même un ennemi au point qu’il l’attaqua violemment, en 1801, ce qui valut à Chong Yakyong un long et douloureux bannissement jusqu’en 1818. À travers la lecture des textes dont nous disposons, officiels et personnels, nous tentons de comprendre ce qui s'est joué alors et d'analyser l’évolution de leur amitié face à ce qui les divisa – ces événements qui furent tragiques pour beaucoup de monde. (shrink)

Cet article s’attache à décrire l’évolution dans l’amitié entre Chŏng Yakyong et Yi Kigyŏng. Beaucoup de choses les rapprochaient, objectivement. Tous deux étaient de brillants lauréats du concours du doctorat de 1789, tous deux étaient membres de la même faction politique, les Namin (les ''Sudistes''), tous deux étaient fonctionnaires civils à la cour du roi Chŏngjo ( r. 1776-1800) dans la Corée de l'ère Chosŏn (1392-1897), et tous deux jouèrent un rôle important dans cette période de grands changements, à la (...) fois socio-politiques, religieux, culturels et intellectuels, que vécut alors la Corée. Chŏng Yakyong s’intéressa à de nombreuses branches différentes du savoir occidental qui parvenait alors à la Corée, et il embrassa même, brièvement après sa confession, la foi chrétienne en 1784. Se sentant critiqué et calomnié, il la renia publiquement en 1797, mais son ami Yi Kigyŏng, auteur du Pyŏgwip’yŏn 闢衛編 ( Compilation de documents pour le rejet de l’hétérodoxie et la défense de l’orthodoxie ), ne voulut jamais y croire. Cet ami devint même un ennemi au point qu’il l’attaqua violemment, en 1801, ce qui valut à Chong Yakyong un long et douloureux bannissement jusqu’en 1818. À travers la lecture des textes dont nous disposons, officiels et personnels, nous tentons de comprendre ce qui s'est joué alors et d'analyser l’évolution de leur amitié face à ce qui les divisa – ces événements qui furent tragiques pour beaucoup de monde. (shrink)