Abstract
I take as my starting point recent concerns from within educational psychology about the need to treat the conceptual and philosophical underpinnings of empirical research in the field more seriously, specifically in the context of work on the self, mind and agency. Developing this theme, I find such conceptual support in the writings of P. F. Strawson and Donald Davidson, two giants of analytic philosophy in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Drawing particularly on Davidson’s later work, in which he seeks to integrate key claims about subjectivity, objectivity, belief, truth and knowledge, within what he refers to as a triangular framework of two speakers and a common world, I find support for pedagogic and classroom organizational structures based on collaborative thinking and dialogue. While Davidson did not write about education, I argue that his framework has much to offer, most particularly in view of the priority it affords language and dialogue as the necessary and sufficient conditions for reason, belief and thought—in short, for being a person in the world.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Self-regulation is a reflective—and reflexive—practice which is conceptually underpinned by our capacity to be both the subject and the object of our own agency. Individualism is understood implicitly by Martin and McLellan, as the negation of the thesis that persons and their agency—including self-regulation—are constituted inter-subjectively, through various forms of social interaction. Psychologism is “the idea that processes of reasoned choice and intentional action [i.e. agency] can be explained by appeal to inner psychic entities or agents.” It is “a highly interior conception of selfhood”, in which the mind, the self, and all the ingredients of human agency are both mentalist and causally responsible for those (behavioral) performances we describe in terms of exercising self-management, etc. (Martin and McLellan 2008, 441).
“… an overly-individualistic emphasis in education also jeopardizes students’ self-sufficiency by possibly providing too little in the way of exposure to the interests and perspectives of others with whom a reasonable level of civil co-existence is necessary for both personal and societal flourishing.” 440.
Strawson’s “purely logical” truth is really one of a pair, the second of which may be stated thus: No (non-trivial) concept can be truly applied to all objects; in other words, for a given concept C, if we can truly predicate “C” of some object x, then there must be—conceivably if not actually—a distinct object y of which C can be meaningfully but falsely predicated.
Compare the following empirical rendering: “One becomes differentiated from others through rudimentary dissimilar experiences. If stubbing one’s toe brings pain, but seeing others stub their toe brings no personal pain, one’s own activity becomes distinguished from that of other persons” (Bandura 2008, 19). See also Quigley (2001) and Rychlak et al. (1986).
For an excellent general discussion of Davidson’s place in analytic philosophy, see Malpas (2009).
Percy’s belief that the store he has entered sells cheese may be understood in terms of his holding a characteristic kind of attitude toward a certain proposition or statement (roughly: an attitude of assent or agreement to the statement that the shop in question sells cheese).
See Davidson (1992). Avramides provides a nice summary statement of Davidson’s position here: “So, while we find that our knowledge of the world depends on the communication between persons, we also find that the communication between persons depends on our recognition that we occupy a shared world.” (Avramides 1999, 148).
See especially the first half dozen papers in his 2001d.
Davidson (2001b). See also Davidson (1993, 1995a). Davidson’s work produced a sea-change in thinking about the realm of the mental. Familiar phrases such as “a given mental event” or “mind–body identity” had now to be unpacked much more carefully, being ambiguous as to token or type status. Other writers have offered sympathetic variations on Davidson’s original thesis; for example McGinn and Hopkins (1978); also Kim (1993a, b). A recent review article ends with these words:
At present, non reductive physicalism is (probably still) the dominant position in Anglo-American philosophy of mind. Its proponents … have even called the nonidentity of mental content with any physical properties “practically received wisdom” among philosophers of mind (Bickle, Fall 2008).
Still, the debate continues; see Yalowitz (2008).
The defeat of Psychologism actually only requires (A), but the educational implications of (A) and (B) together are significant. (B) challenges a tendency among cognitive psychologists to shore up the scientific status of psychology by reducing many of its general statements to those of physics. See Martin et al. (2003).
Martin et al. (2003, 10); also 103, 117, 126.
In their more recent book, Martin et al. in line with the analysis offered by Peter Hacker, modify their ontological view of kinds in favor of what I should call a more “Strawsonian” approach, viz. that human agency is not conducted by elements or components of persons, but by persons themselves (Martin et al. 2010, 157). Accordingly, they no longer refer to such elements as constituting explanatory or agentic kinds. While this change meets part of my concern, I believe that Davidson’s approach, and his artful defense of AM in particular, include at least one point overlooked by Martin and his colleagues. For Davidson, as noted earlier, human action has both causal (= physical) and explanatory (= semantic or linguistic) dimensions. Ontologically, persons are physical objects constituted of other physical objects, all of which behave in accordance with the laws of physics. But semantically—i.e. in terms of understanding and explaining why we do what we do—we function as rational and intentional agents. Where Martin et al. refer, in the later book, to persons as “irreducible selves”, they appear, again, to equivocate between these two dimensions.
For one discussion of this kind of viewpoint, see Hall (1992, 277).
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of this journal for pointing out that Davidson’s triangle metaphor, or versions of it, has been used by a number of developmental, cognitive and social psychologists. Zittoun et al. (2007) offer an insightful analysis of several such accounts, covering the work of Vygotsky, Freud, Piaget and, even, Mead. However, even assuming that the respective vertices and lines of these triangles correspond to those in Davidson’s model—viz. myself, another speaker and a world we both share—(an assumption which appears implausible at first sight), the major difference is conceptual: where the psychological focus is on development, Davidson is more interested in epistemic and semantic inter-connections that the elements of the triangle represent.
See Splitter (2009).
References
Avramides, A. (1999). Davidson and the new skeptical problem. In U. M. Zeglen (Ed.), Donald Davidson: Truth, meaning and knowledge (pp. 136–154). London, New York: Routledge.
Bandura, A. (2008). Toward an agentic theory of the self: Dynamic new approaches. In H. Marsh, R. Craven, & D. McInerney (Eds.), Self-processes, learning, and enabling human potential (pp. 15–50). Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing, Inc.
Bickle, J. (Fall, 2008). Multiple realizability. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, September 5, 2010.
Davidson, D. (1982). Rational animals. Dialectica, 36, 317–328.
Davidson, D. (1983). A coherence theory of truth and knowledge. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Subjective, intersubjective, objective (2001st ed., pp. 137–153). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, D. (1987). Knowing one’s own mind. Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 60(3), 441–458. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3131782.
Davidson, D. (1992). The second person. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Subjective, intersubjective, objective (2001st ed., pp. 107–121). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, D. (1993). Thinking causes. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Truth, language, and history: Philosophical essays volume 5 (2005th ed., pp. 185–200). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1994). Dialectic and dialogue. In G. Preyer, F. Siebelt, & A. Ulfig (Eds.), Language, mind and epistemology (pp. 429–437). Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Davidson, D. (1995a). Laws and cause. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Truth, language, and history: Philosophical essays volume 5 (2005th ed., pp. 201–220). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1995b). The problem of objectivity. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Problems of rationality (2004th ed., pp. 3–18). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1998). The irreducibility of the concept of self. In Donald Davidson: Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (pp. 85–91). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Davidson, D. (1999). The emergence of thought. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Subjective, intersubjective, objective (2001st ed., pp. 123–134). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/20012936.
Davidson, D. (2001a). Epistemology externalized. In Subjective, intersubjective, objective (pp. 193–204). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, D. (2001b). Mental events. In Essays on actions and events (pp. 207–225). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Originally published in 1970.
Davidson, D. (2001c). The myth of the subjective. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Subjective, intersubjective, objective (pp. 39–52). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, D. (2001d). Subjective, intersubjective, objective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Davidson, D. (2001e). Three varieties of knowledge. In D. Davidson (Ed.), Subjective, intersubjective, objective (pp. 205–220). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effect of human kinds. In D. Sperber, D. Premack, & A. J. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multi-disciplinary approach (pp. 351–383). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hacking, I. (1999). The social construction of what?. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Hall, S. (1992). The question of cultural identity. In D. Held, T. McGrew, & S. Hall (Eds.), Modernity and its futures. Oxford: The Open University.
Kim, J. (1993a). Can supervenience and ‘non-strict laws’ save anomalous monism? In J. Heil & A. Mele (Eds.), Mental causation (pp. 19–26). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Kim, J. (1993b). The non-reductivist’s troubles with mental causation. In J. Heil & A. Mele (Eds.), Mental causation (pp. 189–210). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
LePore, E., & Ludwig, K. (2005). Meaning, truth, language, and reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Malpas, J. (2009). Donald Davidson. Retrieved August 27, 2010, from http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/davidson/.
Martin, J. (2007a). Educating communal agents: Building on the perspectivism of G.H. Mead. Educational Theory, 57(4), 435–452.
Martin, J. (2007b). Interpreting and extending G.H. Mead’s “metaphysics” of selfhood and agency. Philosophical Psychology, 20(4), 441–456.
Martin, J., & McLellan, A. M. (2008). The educational psychology of self-regulation: A conceptual and critical analysis. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 27, 433–448.
Martin, J., Sugarman, J., & Hickinbottom, S. (2010). Persons: Understanding psychological selfhood and agency. New York: Springer.
Martin, J., Sugarman, J., & Thompson, J. (2003). Psychology and the question of agency. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
McGinn, C., & Hopkins, J. (1978). Mental states, natural kinds and psychophysical laws. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes, 52, 195–236.
Quigley, J. (2001). Psychology and grammar: The construction of the autobiographical self. Theory and Psychology, 11, 147–170.
Rychlak, J. F., Williams, R. N., & Bugaj, A. M. (1986). The heuristic properties of dialectical oppositionality in predication. Journal of General Psychology, 113, 359–368.
Splitter, L. J. (2009). Authenticity and constructivism in education. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 28(2), 135–151.
Splitter, L. J. (2010). Caring for “the self as one-among-others”. Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children, 19(4), 33–39.
Splitter, L. J., & Sharp, A. M. (1995). Teaching for better thinking: The classroom community of inquiry. Melbourne: The Australian Council for Educational Research.
Strawson, P. F. (1990). Individuals: An essay in descriptive metaphysics. London: Routledge.
Yalowitz, S. (2008). Anomalous monism. The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. Retrieved September 9, 2010.
Zittoun, T., Gillespie, A., Cornish, F., & Psaltis, C. (2007). The metaphor of the triangle in theories of human development. Human Development, 50(4), 208–229.