Inoculation against Wonder: Finding an antidote in Camus,pragmatism and the community of inquiry

In this paper, we will explore how Albert Camus has much to offer philosophers of education. Although a number of educationalists have attempted to explicate the educational implications of Camus’ literary works, these analyses have not attempted to extrapolate pedagogical guidelines towards developing an educational framework for children’s philosophical practice in the way Matthew Lipman did from John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which informed his philosophy for children curriculum and pedagogy. We focus on the phenomenology of inquiry; that is, inquiry that begins with genuinely felt doubt, pointing to a problematic to which the inquirer seeks a solution or resolution. We argue that the central purpose of education is to develop lucid individuals. To this end, we concentrate on Dewey and the pragmatist tradition, starting from Peirce, leading to Lipman’s development of Dewey’s educational guidelines into classroom practice. We show where Camus and the pragmatists are congruent in their thinking, insofar as they can inform the educative process of the community of inquiry. What we conclude is that the role of the teacher is to develop lucid individuals facilitated in a classroom that is transformed into a community of inquiry embedded in contemporary historical moments.     

皮尔斯符号过程中不明推论的美学维度与艺术表达研究

皮尔斯的符号学是认知的符号学,人们通常关注其认知方面的问题,而忽略了其与美学相关的问题。其实,皮尔斯符号过程中的不明推论这一认知步骤,就显现出了美学的维度,它是艺术表达的基础。皮尔斯从实用主义与其符号学的关联开始,美学维度在不明推论环节显现,其包含的本质要素是符号的冲突,进而以此为基础阐释艺术和艺术作品的表达,显示了皮尔斯符号学的美学价值,可以深化对其符号学的认识。     

Classroom Interpreting Games with an Illustration

Classroom communication has been recognized as a process in which ideas become objects of reflection, discussion, and amendments affording the construction of private mathematical meanings that in the process become public and exposed to justification and validation. This paper describes an explanatory model named “interpreting games”, based on the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce, that accounts for the interdependence between thought and communication and the interpretation of signs in which teacher and students engage in mathematics classrooms. Interpreting games account both for the process of transformation (in the mind of the learner) of written marks into mathematical signs that stand for mathematical concepts and for the continuous and converging private construction of mathematical concepts. Teacher–student and student–student collaborative interactions establish a mathematical communication that shapes and is also shaped by the conceptual domains and the domains of intentions and interpretations of the participants. A teaching episode with third graders is analyzed as an example of a classroom interpreting game.     

Peirce’s Rhetorical Turn: Conceptualizing education as semiosis

Abstract

The later works of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1913) offer an extended metaphor of mind and a rich conception of the dynamics of knowledge and learning. After a ‘rhetorical turn’ Peirce develops his early ‘semiotics’ into a more general theory of sign and sign use,while integrating his pragmatism, phenomenology, and semiotics. Therefore, in this article I bring Peirce’s notion of semiosis—the sign’s action—to the forefront. In doing so, I hope to disclose how Peirce’s rhetorical turn not only opens up towards a richer conception of the dynamics of knowledge and learning, but also invites a shift of perspective from the psychological processes of learning to the semeiotic processes that characterizes the very dynamics of knowledge production.     

对皮尔士和拉卡托斯在数学易缪性上的几点比较

数学易缪性是对传统数学真理观的挑战。皮尔士和拉卡托斯虽然都提出了数学的易缪性,但二者对于数学易缪性的理解并不一致。文章从三个方面即数学易缪性的提出、数学易缪性的根据和对数学易缪性的信心介绍了皮尔士和拉卡托斯的数学易缪性,在此基础上对二者的数学易缪性进行了比较。     

哲学家皮尔士开创的科学经济学

一百三十年前,皮尔士用后来被称为新古典经济学的方法,探讨了科研活动的成本与收益,证明了科学活动无需绝对可靠的基础,只需权衡成本与收益,便可以有效地为知识的大厦添砖加瓦。皮尔士的工作被埋没了一个世纪之久,直至科学的非哲学研究开始兴盛之时才被科学哲学家重新发现。今天的人们也许会质疑皮尔士关于知识累积的观点,却不会在尊之为科学经济学的哲学先驱时有多少异议。     

Critical Thinking about Truth in Teaching: The epistemic ethos

This paper discusses the most persistent controversial issue that occurred in Western educational philosophy ever since Socrates questioned the Sophists: the role of truth in teaching. Ways of teaching these kinds of controversy issues are briefly considered to isolate their epistemic characteristics, which will enable the interpretation of Plato and Dewey as exemplars of rationalism and empiricism regarding the role of knowledge in the curriculum and thus include their partial truths in the epistemic ethos of teaching. The consideration of pedagogy will then include the partial truths of rationalism and empiricism in the epistemic ethos of teaching by following Kant's 'Concepts without percepts are empty; perceptions without conceptions are blind'.
This claim, however, is narrowed down in two ways compatible with postmodernism and the heavy emphasis on constructionism in faculties of education. After quoting Harry Broudy's statement that the educational epistemic ethos should be domain-specific, guided by the experts' inquiry protocols in each curricular area, it is narrowed down further with Maxine Greene's explication that it should be pluralistic and lesson-specific. This epistemic ethos is not argued as a synthesis but as an aggregate of the partial truths of various epistemologies in the spirit of the postmodern doubt in any one theory of knowledge without throwing out the baby with the dirty bath water.
Finally, the streams of consciousness involved in teaching and learning good knowledge are described phenomenologically to disclose how truth can be disclosed in teaching, thereby grounding propositional knowledge, for example, ontologically in the being of the student and in the being of the world.     

Inquiry-based learning with young learners: a Peirce-based model employed to critique a unit of inquiry on maps and mapping

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) has become a common theme in both school and higher education in recent years. It suggests a model of curriculum development and practice that moves educational debate beyond teacher or student-based approaches towards a model of teaching and learning in which the endeavour is shared. This paper discusses an investigation into the practice of IBL among primary schoolchildren in the setting of the Primary Years Programme of the International Baccalaureate. Three ideas from the work of the philosopher C.S. Peirce are used to provide an epistemological base for analysing the pedagogical practice of IBL: semiotics, reasoning and community of inquiry. Findings are presented under these three headings to illustrate the potency of Peirce's conceptualisation of learning. Drawing in particular on findings from a unit of inquiry on maps and mapping, it suggests an empirical frame for IBL for the use of teachers in the development and assessment of IBL.     

Mathematical Epistemology from a Peircean Semiotic Point of View

Learning is better than knowing, generalization is more illuminating than abstract generality or universality because we perceive and thus become conscious of change or development only. Signs and representations establish the dialectic of fixation on the one hand and transformation on the other, which is so essential to learning and cognition. Mathematical epistemology from a semiotic point of view therefore is above all a genetical epistemology. All real mathematical activity is concerned with representations of mathematical entities rather than with things in themselves and with the processes of continuous transformation of a given representation into others. This paper tries to give an overview of the essential relationships between activity theory, epistemology and mathematical education, using the semiotics of Charles S. Peirce as a unifying reference. It is certainly beyond the scope of such a paper to spell out all the questions involved in every detail. Much of what is said in the four short sections to follow is calling for further concretization and research.