I wish to discuss some of the problems that arise when we attempt to understand beliefs and actions that are alien to the things we believe and do. This will involve my saying something about the concepts of rationality and understanding so as to provide grounds for a claim I wish to make that we can understand beliefs, or doctrines, and actions that would not count as rational by our standards. I shall further examine a problem, in education, not all (...) of whose perplexities have been resolved by empirical research in conceptual development: the problem of how children with only a limited familiarity with the conceptual frameworks of their own culture can come to understand conceptual frameworks and ways of acting radically at variance with their own. British children, from the ages of eight or nine onwards, hear stories of the lives of the Aboriginals and the Eskimoes, and learn about the Romans, the Vikings and Elizabethan England, the beliefs and prophecies of the Old Testament, moral stories of the classical world and even the characteristics within their own societies of such institutions as monasteries. Not only have they to meet the problems of the historian and the anthropologist of understanding ways of life strange and distant, but they encounter them without the conceptual familiarity with the beliefs and actions of their own society possessed by the former. Lacking settled criteria of intelligibility for understanding their own society, they are asked to develop the criteria of intelligibility necessary to making some sort of sense of societies very different from their own: a situation probably not paralleled in any other aspect of their education. (shrink)

Gordon Reddiford; Imagination, Rationality and Teaching, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 205–213, https://doi.org/10.

Hepburn argues that all education, and so Arts Education, educates a person's subjectivity, his or her Lebenswelt; though the sciences take the ‘objectifying way’ they too educate our subjectivity. I show why there can be no decision procedures, involving the use of logical operators for interpreting a work of art, but argue that Hepburn's view that music etc. can furnish ‘authoritative imaginative realisations’, nevertheless presupposes a ‘soft’ objectivist position. Whilst Hepburn is right in thinking that the subjective provides the context (...) for objectifying procedures in education (and more generally), it cannot be the case, as he implies, that aesthetic criteria could have a role in the selection of preferred scientific explanations and theories. It is, however, argued that the aesthetic can be generative of objectifying ways, or theoryenabling. (shrink)