Wittgenstein's ‘Relativity’: Training in language‐games and agreement in Forms of Life

Taking Wittgenstein's love of music as my impetus, I approach aporetic problems of epistemic relativity through a round of three overlapping (canonical) inquiries delivered in contrapuntal (higher and lower) registers. I first take up the question of scepticism surrounding ‘groundless knowledge’ and contending paradigms in On Certainty (physics versus oracular divination, or realism versus idealism) with attention given to the role of ‘bedrock’ certainties in providing stability amidst the Heraclitean flux. I then look into the formation of sedimented bedrock knowledge, or practices of knowing, by comparing Wittgenstein's remarks on animal habituation and initiate training into human forms of life. In the latter case, mastery of techniques—our common education—secures agreement in judgment. Finally, I entertain Wittgenstein's obscure references to Einstein's Relativity in Zettel, showing initiate training as a way of ‘setting the clocks’ with variable degrees of certainty, relative to the language‐games played. Together, these three approaches help us to stop the ‘endless circling’ when philosophers try to address knowledge questions through the logic of object and designation, or verification of correspondence between propositions and things. Instead, attention moves to the way we educate our children and how we employ agreements and bedrock certainties in practices.     

Training and Mastery of Techniques in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy: A response to Michael Luntley

Responding to Michael Luntley's article, ‘Learning, Empowerment and Judgement’, the author shows he cannot successfully make the following three moves: (1) dissolve the analytic distinction between learning by training and learning by reasoning, while advocating the latter; (2) diminish the role of training in Wittgenstein's philosophy, nor attribute to him a rationalist model of learning; and (3) turn to empirical research as a way of solving the philosophical problems he addresses through Wittgenstein. Drawing on José Medina's analysis of the fundamental role of training in Wittgenstein's later philosophy, the paper offers a tour of key passages in the Investigations and other works to develop an understanding of what Wittgenstein meant by ‘mastery of techniques’. In opposition to Luntley's liberal‐individual, or his subject as rational agent, the author explores Wittgenstein's non‐foundationalist, forms of life approach to how we act with agreement. More effort must be given to differentiating Wittgenstein's view from that of the analytic school, which Luntley appears to echo despite his criticism of the analytic divide.     

‘What it Makes Sense to Say’: Wittgenstein,rule‐following and the nature of education

In his writings Jim Marshall has helpfully emphasized such Wittgensteinian themes as the multiplicity of language games, the deconstruction of ‘certainty,’ and the contexts of power that underlie discursive systems. Here we focus on another important legacy of Wittgenstein's thinking: his insistence that human activity is rule‐governed. This idea foregrounds looking carefully at the world of education and learning, as against the empirical search for new psychological or other facts. It reminds us that we need to consider, in Peter Winch's words, ‘what it makes sense to say’ about certain educational phenomena, and how these meanings stand against understanding a wider form of life. This insight has important implications for doing educational research, and we examine some of these.     

Writing the Self: Wittgenstein,Confession and Pedagogy

In this paper I investigate ‘the confessional’ as an aspect of Wittgenstein's style both as a mode of philosophising and as a mode of ‘writing the self’, tied explicitly to pedagogical practices. There are strong links between Wittgenstein's confessional mode of philosophising and his life—for him philosophy is a way of life —and interesting theoretical connections between confessional practices and pedagogy, usefully explored in the writings of the French philosopher, Michel Foucault. The Investigations provides a basis and springboard for understanding the notion of ‘writing the self’ as a pedagogical practice which encourages a confessional mode compelling us to tell the truth about ourselves and, thus, creating the conditions for ethico‐poetical self‐constitution.     

Language Games in the Ivory Tower: Comparing the Philosophical Investigations with Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game

Wittgenstein explores learning through practice in the Philosophical Investigations by means of an extended analogy with games. However, does this concern with learning also necessarily extend to education, in our institutional understanding of the word? While Wittgenstein's examples of language learning and use are always shared or social, he does not discuss formal educational institutions as such. He does not wish to found a ‘school of thought’, and is suspicious of philosophy acting as a theory that can be applied to other areas of life. While Wittgenstein's focus on developing independent thinking was neither individualistic nor anti‐institutional, it did, however, focus on developing the thinking of his students rather than theorising about how this could be applied on a large scale. An analysis of Hermann Hesse's novel, The Glass Bead Game will help us to pick up where Wittgenstein deliberately left off—thinking about how (or if) one can institutionalise learning methods that encourage thinking for oneself. These differences in the writers’ treatment of education will become evident in the differences between their game analogies. While language‐games combat our ‘craving for generality’ in Philosophical Investigations, the Glass Bead Game represents this craving, and how it manifests itself throughout history in disciplines other than logic and philosophy of language. It also represents the potential for institutions to become insular, exclusive communities.     

‘THIS is Produced by a Brain‐Process!’ Wittgenstein,Transparency and Psychology Today

This paper examines sections of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations with a view to exposing trail‐effects of psychology in educational and social practice today. These are seen in understandings of the relations between mind and body, and language and thought, and their influence is identified in such contemporary preoccupations as accounting transparency and the new science of happiness. A Wittgensteinian critique is offered, with attention paid to the idea that ‘nothing is hidden’. Finally a question is raised as to how far it is the imperviousness of these practices to criticism that is the key to understanding them.     

Negotiating the World: Some philosophical considerations on dealing with differential academic language proficiency in schools

Differential academic language proficiency is an issue of major educational concern, bearing on problems varying from pupil performance, to social prospects, and citizenship. In this paper we develop a conception of the language‐acquiring subject, and we discuss the consequences for understanding differential language proficiency in schools. Starting from Wittgenstein's meaning‐as‐use theory we show that learning a language requires an activity that relates the subject both to the community of language users, and to the things language is about. In opposition to Luntley, we contend that this does not mean that linguistic development involves linguistic adjustment to the world ‘as it is’. It is argued that, in as far as linguistic development involves a process of adjustment, this concerns conceptions about the world as it is presupposed to be—a ‘world’ that is subjected to doubt and revision time and again. With respect to dealing with differential academic language proficiency, this approach to linguistic development suggests bringing pupils into situations which require active participation in processes of ‘negotiating meaning’, including negotiating the prevailing presuppositions about what the world is like. This also puts novices in a different position—less assimilatory—recognising their co‐constructive potencies at a more fundamental level.     

How to Conceive of Critical Educational Theory Today?

This paper starts from a brief sketch of the ‘classical’ figure of critical educational theory or science (Kritische Erziehungswissenshaft). ‘Critical educational theory’ presents itself as the privileged guardian of the critical principle of education (Bildung) and its emancipatory promise. It involves the possibility of saying ‘I’ in order to speak and think in one's own name, to be critical, self‐reflective and independent, to determine dependence from the present power relations and existing social order. Actual social and educational reality and relations are approached as a limitation, threat, alienation, re/oppression or negation of ultimate human principles or potential. The task of critical educational theory becomes one of enabling an autonomous, critical, self‐reflective life. While ‘critique’ and ‘autonomy’ have meanwhile become commonplace, and ‘critique’ and ‘autonomy’ are reclaimed and required from everybody, we should also consider the question of the relation between an institutional or ideological framework as that which claims to question this frame and to constitute its opposite. The trivialisation of critique is taken as occasion to recall Michel Foucault's analysis of power relations and especially his thesis according to which the ‘government of individualisation’ is the actual figure of power. Starting from the framework offered by Foucault, it can be made clear that the autonomous, critical, self‐reflective life does not represent an ultimate principle but refers to a very specific form of subjectification operating as a transmission belt for power. The autonomous, critical, self‐reflective person appears as an historical model of self‐conduct whereby power operates precisely through the intensification of reflectiveness and critique rather than through their repression, alienation or negation. This brings us back then to the question of how to conceive of the task of a critical educational theory at a time in which critique, autonomy and self‐determination have become an essential modus operandi of the existing order.     

A gaggle of raging grannies: the empowerment of older Canadian women through social activism

This article explores a particular expression of social activism by older Canadian women to consider its implications for later life learning. ‘Older women’, despite their heterogeneity, have tended to be pathologized as a part of the ‘problem’ of ageing and languishing welfare societies—i.e. stereotyped as passive recipients of welfare and healthcare services. Yet, they can also be seen as part of the ‘answer’ to the challenges societies like Canada face. Given the combination of a greying population and the growing tide of citizens' participatory democracy, it is timely and important to shed light on older women's social activism. Based on document analysis and fieldwork with the Raging Grannies in Canada, this qualitative case study examines the influence of activism on women's later life learning and development from an interdisciplinary perspective including adult development, critical gerontology, women's studies and psychodrama. Analysis focuses on the Grannies' motivations, the strategies they employ in their activities and the process of learning and changes they say they undergo. Themes emerging from document analysis, interviews and participant observation of 15 Grannies in Ontario are divided into three categories: (1) ‘Raging Grannies’ as a self‐defined social role; (2) the Grannies' dual‐layered mask strategies; and (3) their collective identity and sense of empowerment. These do much to explain the successes of Raging Grannies' activism as a social movement, which fosters older women's creative energy, critical awareness and self‐assurance despite their physical and psychological problems in later life. Implications of the Raging Grannies' movement help us reconsider current trends in later life learning, which tend overlook the needs and abilities of women in the third age.     

Training and Learning

Some philosophers of education think that there is a pedagogically informative concept of training that can be gleaned from Wittgenstein's later writings: training as initiation into a form of life. Stickney, in ‘Training and Mastery of Techniques in Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy: A response to Michael Luntley’takes me to task for ignoring this concept. In this essay I argue that there is no such concept to be ignored. I start by noting recent developments in Wittgenstein scholarship that raise serious issues about how we should handle the translation of Arbrichtung and arbrichten. I then concentrate on the substantive philosophical issues about the very idea that training can have a pedagogically productive role in education. I show that what work training does is a function of the prior skill set of the trainee. This means that we have to endorse some form of rationalism and acknowledge that the learner can only respond to training if they already possess sufficient mental equipment to generate the appropriate responses.     

Virtualisation and the late age of schools 1

This paper raises the issue of what it is to be ‘critical’ in education studies and in social theory more generally. It argues that this idea has for a long time been associated with forms of social constructionism and sociological reductionism. These understand the idea that knowledge is social in terms of reducing it to the experiences and interests of the groups whose perspective knowledge is held to represent. In this way knowledge is conflated with knowing. This approach has the consistent problem of collapsing into a relativism that denies of possibility of objectivity in knowledge or an epistemologically independent basis for knowledge claims. This paper offers an alternative view based in critical realism that attempts to provide non‐relativist, though fallible, grounds for knowledge claims that restore a sense of autonomy to fields of knowledge production by understanding the sociality of knowledge in terms of emergent materialism. In this manner, the argument provides an alternative to both social constructionism and to Bourdieu's relationalism.     

Critical Thinking as a Normative Practice in Life: A Wittgensteinian Groundwork

On the point that, in practices of critical thinking, we respond spontaneously in concrete situations, this paper presents an account on behalf of Wittgenstein. I argue that the ‘seeing‐things‐aright’ model of Luntley's Wittgenstein is not adequate, since it pays insufficient attention to radically new circumstances, in which the content of norms is updated. While endorsing Bailin's emphasis on criteria of critical thinking, Wittgenstein would agree with Papastephanou and Angeli's demand to look behind criteriology. He maintains the primacy of the practical, and yet contends that a reasonable person lets rules of rationality compel her. These rules are not mere heuristics. I further examine Burbules' conception of communicative reason, and, among others, his interpretation of Wittgenstein's sign‐post example.     

All the lonely people: the struggle for private meaning and public purpose in education

This paper argues that the ‘new world order’ achieved at the end of the cold war is in crisis, not generated from the threat of ‘war’ between Christian and Islamic worlds but from within western societies, specifically from the growing commercialisation and ‘privatisation’ of social and community life which has uncoupled the systems and activities of society from the collective and individual purposes of people who comprise that society. Drawing on interview data (life and work histories) from three cohorts (1950s-1960s, 1970s-1980s, 1990s to present) of US and Canadian teachers, the paper identifies evidence of this crisis in the fields of culture, education and public service (e.g. in the turning away from public and towards private pursuits as the motivation for one's ‘life's work’ or ‘passion’). It also looks to these fields in the search for answers to what motivates people and sponsors their meaning-making, specifically whether privatisation should be our only route to human meaning. The paper concludes that the personal ‘missions’ that people bring to their employment may be accommodated in some parts of the business world where people are given freedom to pursue their own ‘projects’, but these are largely frustrated in the micro‐managed and re‐regulated regimes of the public sector. Indeed, without invoking some ‘golden age’, the sense of vocation, public duty and ‘caring professionalism’ that characterised the ‘top end’ and ‘backbone’ of the public sector is diminishing as large numbers begin to withdraw their ‘hearts and minds’ while implementing the mandates and missions of others.     

Hilary Putnam interviewed by Naoko Saito and Paul Standish

The interview, which took place on the eve of the 2012 American presidential election, coincides with the publication of three major works by or about Hilary Putnam. It begins and ends with the topic of science, drawing attention to science's profound importance but also to its contemporary forms of distortion. It explores Putnam's current views on realism, with reference to conceptual relativity and ‘objectivity without objects’. The nature of philosophy and its sometimes‐dishonest relationship to scepticism is considered, especially in relation to the work of Stanley Cavell and Richard Rorty. Putnam acknowledges that he has learned much from Wittgenstein, but he laments Wittgenstein's apparent insensitivity to the value of, and spiritual depth in, Plato. He recognises Rorty's contribution to the revival of pragmatism, but he roundly criticises the version of it advanced by Rorty and by his student, Robert Brandom. It is classical pragmatism's achievement in overcoming the fact‐value dichotomy that Putnam wishes particularly to emphasise. While acknowledging tensions in the work of Dewey, between the sensitive aesthetician and the social reformer, Putnam stresses Dewey's importance, alongside that of Martin Buber, in shaping his own political and religious views. In the course of the discussion further tensions are considered—between pragmatism and American transcendentalism, and between analytic and continental philosophy. The interview closes with reference to politics and to the perilous situation of the humanities today.     

Finding Truth in ‘Lies’: Nietzsche's Perspectivism and its Relation to Education

In his 2001 article ‘Teaching to Lie and Obey: Nietzsche on Education’, Stefan Ramaekers defends Nietzsche's concept of perspectivism against the charge that it is relativistic. He argues that perspectivism is not relativistic because it denies the dichotomy between the ‘true’ world and the ‘seeming’ world, a dichotomy central to claims to relativism. While Ramaekers' article is correct in denying relativistic interpretations of perspectivism it does not go far enough in this direction. In fact, the way Ramaekers makes his case may actually encourage the charge of relativism, especially when it comes to his appropriation of perspectivism for education. This article proposes to pick up where Ramaekers left off. It will argue that Nietzsche's denial of the opposition between the ‘true’ world and the ‘seeming’ world opens up the possibility for the reestablishment of truth, albeit in a modified form. After examining Nietzsche's modified ‘realist’ epistemology, the paper will explore the implications of it for his philosophy of education. It will be argued that Nietzsche's educational philosophy is founded on his concept of perspectivism in so far as he demands that students be rigorously inculcated into a pedagogical framework that teaches students to discriminate between ‘true’ and ‘false’ perspectives. This framework is essential for the development of an intellectually robust and life‐affirming culture.     

What are the Bounds of Critical Rationality in Education?

Since Dilthey we have become used to thinking of reason as having a cultural and historical setting. If we take this insight seriously, then critical rationality or critical thinking can no longer be conceived of as context‐free skills. This paper takes up the line of thought that is elaborated by Christopher Winch in his ‘Developing Critical Rationality as a Pedagogical Aim’ and seeks to explicate it by drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's concept of ‘language games’ and on the re‐evaluation of ‘thinking’ by Theodor Ballauff (a German philosopher of education who was influenced by Martin Heidegger). The overcoming of a solipsistic and idealistic conception of thinking raises questions regarding the pedagogical settings and aims, as well as the problems over the limits of critique in education. A comparison of Ballauff's and Winch's positions reinforces the sense of the significance of critique: although the role of critical rationality within education is ambiguous and precarious, the investigation of autonomy (as an educational goal) shows that critique cannot be limited in any straightforward way.     

The Virtues of Unfulfilment: Rethinking Eros and Education in Plato's Symposium

The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of eros in relation to a sense of lack in Plato's Symposium. It starts from a sketch of the idea of fulfilment that is often found in the contemporary culture, especially when it is connected to the sense of a good life. The term ‘fulfill’, consisting of ‘fill’ and ‘full’, implies a sense a lack and an action of filling. Filling the lack to the full is the image that is often entertained when a good life, or a good education, is considered. The paper examines the similar image contained in Plato's Symposium, where lack is assumed as the precondition for love. One of the aims for love is to fill the lack; that is, to obtain the object of love. Three speeches in the Symposium, given by Aristophanes, Socrates and Alcibiades, will be discussed in turn. In doing so, three issues, in particular, will be discussed: the sense of lack, the object of love, and the aim for love. I suggest that instead of a straightforward solution to the predicament of love, a better way of understanding Plato's account of love through the three speeches is by understanding it as a dilemma, an approach taken by Martha Nussbaum. Nussbaum argues for Plato's hesitation in following Socrates’ program of the ascent of love, in which the ‘lack‐filling’ is guaranteed. The teacher's role is thus understood in two different ways. It is on the one hand, as the bridge between student and knowledge, and on the other, the revealer of the values of lack. The paper finally adopts a Lacanian idea of ontological lack to supplement Nussbaum's argument, taking up the often neglected values of lack in the Symposium, and its implication for education.     

A question of relevance: beyond the domestication of educational definition

This paper examines ways in which we, as teachers, can promote our students' critical awareness of the domesticating power of the very definition of education that is commonplace in contemporary discourse. It highlights how a first-year introduction to philosophy of education module encourages students to begin to ‘read their world’ by challenging not only the conventional renditions of education as simply ‘schooling’ but also those accompanying notions of ‘relevant learning’ that are commonly associated with an institutional and vocational focus. A further purpose of this paper is to highlight how a critical analysis of an individual's own social learning is a necessary prerequisite to personal growth and potential social transformation correspondingly. Such an analysis, it is argued, constitutes a direct assault on a much more invisible form of ‘banking’ educational practice than many Freirean educators have previously acknowledged.     

Bhaskar's Critical Realism and Educational Knowledge

As a critical realist Bhaskar is concerned with ‘emancipatory social practice’. For him the world cannot be changed rationally unless it is interpreted adequately and this interpretation has as its prerequisite the philosophical idea of the independent existence of the natural and the social world; he extends his ideas from the sciences directly into the social sciences. His organising theme is: the nature of, and the prospects for, human emancipation. This article is an attempt to give Bhaskar's ideas some exposure among those working in the sociology of education. It opens with a brief history of recent social epistemological thought in education, using critiques of Quine, Dewey and Popper as a backdrop to introducing Bhaskar. It concludes with an expository account of Bhaskar's conception of discovery, points to its strengths and relevance for education, and presents an interpretation of its stages.