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Siegel’s Educational Ideal and Non-instrumental Philosophical Practice

Harvey, Siegel (2017) Education’s Epistemology: Rationality, Diversity, and Critical Thinking. Oxford University Press, New York, NY. ISBN: 9780190682675 296 pages, price $ 85.00 (Hardcover)

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Notes

  1. Siegel also criticized normative naturalists, like Quine, for stating that cognitive ends or goals are presupposed or “given” and are not criticizable on the basis of reasons, and he generally rejects accounts of normativity that focus on fitting “means” to “given” ends.

  2. “…my view is that autonomy is a necessary but not sufficient condition of critical thinking … because to the extent that the critical thinker is not autonomous she is not ‘free to act and judge independently of external constraint, on the basis of her own reasoned appraisal of the matter at hand’” (p. 41).

  3. For Siegel, genuine thinking dispositions are real tendencies, propensities, or inclinations people have, reducible neither to formal rules of good thinking nor to specific behavioral patterns to think in particular ways in particular contexts. Dispositions involve counterfactuality, and as they are predictable, “they are tendencies to engage in particular sorts of behaviors” (p. 53). The closing paragraph summarizes the answer to the question “What good are thinking dispositions?”: “Thinking dispositions are good to the extent that they cause or bring about good thinking. They do their job when they constitute the “animating force” that causes thinkers to think well” (p. 61).

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  1. Department of Argumentation and Marketing Research, Institute of Business Economics, Eötvös University (ELTE), Budapest, Hungary

    Gábor Á. Zemplén

  2. Morals and Science Research Group (MTA Lendület), Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary

    Gábor Á. Zemplén

  3. Department of Philosophy and History of Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics (BME), Budapest, Hungary

    Gábor Á. Zemplén

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Correspondence to Gábor Á. Zemplén.

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Zemplén, G.Á. Siegel’s Educational Ideal and Non-instrumental Philosophical Practice. Sci & Educ 27, 555–562 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-018-9979-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-018-9979-6

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