Abstract
Literature on indoctrination has focused on imparting and revising beliefs, but it has hardly considered the way of teaching and acquiring certainties—in Wittgenstein’s sense. Therefore, the role played by rationality in the acquisition of our linguistic practices has been overestimated. Furthermore, analyses of the relationship between certainty and indoctrination contain major errors. In this paper, the clarification of the aforementioned issues leads me to suggest the avoidance of the term ‘indoctrination’ so as to avoid focusing on the suitability of the case to the concept rather than on the analysis of the case itself. This should facilitate that the process of helping children to acquire a world-picture—by teaching them to ignore alternatives to certainties—is definitely accepted as normal and natural, for many beliefs are expected to end up becoming ungrounded certainties not only in the medium or long term, but also, and above all, in the short term.
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Notes
In Wittgenstein’s later work, rationality becomes context-dependent, for the rules applied on each occasion depend on the language-game that is being played at that moment: thus, what is rational in a specific context need not be so in a different one. However, it should be noted that this paper displays a narrow conception of rationality, for I focus on the weighing of grounds and the ability to raise doubts. In this sense, Wittgenstein (OC 110) notes that the chain of justifications of empirical propositions comes to an end in “an ungrounded way of acting”.
Since the first passages of On Certainty were aimed at responding to Moore, who considered certainty in propositional terms, Wittgenstein began by regarding certainty as belief in framework propositions. However, Wittgenstein’s conception of certainty developed in such a way that he ended up contemplating it as an instinctive, non-propositional and non-epistemic mode of acting, to the extent that it is immune to doubt within the very world-picture it belongs to (Stroll 1994). This second conception came to dominate On Certainty. But even though certainties can be verbally articulated for heuristical purposes, this should not lead us to think that they are propositional beliefs (Moyal-Sharrock 2004).
To be precise, one can argue for certainties, but the premises of such argument are bound to be less firm and robust than the conclusion they are supposed to prove. To this it should be added that certainties have consequences that abductively support them (see OC 248).
Once our certainties have been acquired, they are also independent of our mental states inasmuch as we constantly take for granted countless certainties regardless of whether we are then thinking about them, and even when we would prefer that they no longer make up our world-picture (Ariso, 2018).
If a concept is family-resemblant, there is no non-trivial feature that is shared by all members of the extension of the concept.
Of course, I do not mean that the term ‘indoctrination’ should be avoided because it is a family-resemblance concept, but because of the reasons provided hereafter.
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This paper has been written within the research project ‘Cognitive Vulnerability, Verosimilitude and Truth’ financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FFI2017-84826-P).
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Ariso, J.M. Teaching Children to Ignore Alternatives is—Sometimes—Necessary: Indoctrination as a Dispensable Term. Stud Philos Educ 38, 397–410 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9642-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-018-9642-3