Abstract
The authors – the co-editors of this volume – reflect on issues raised in the earlier chapters and convey their resultant insights. Ruitenberg opens by reflecting that the earlier chapters might have “fallen short” in the amount of attention they paid to culture, and when they have turned to address it, they have focused upon ethnicity. But there are other cultures (in the C. P. Snow sense of the term) that sometimes claim to have their own epistemologies – the arts being the prominent example. These do not produce propositional knowledge but rather (as some claim) aim to “enhance perspectives,” and they allow for non-prose modes of representation. Ruitenberg is sympathetic to this, but concludes that without, for example, explicit formulation and testing of knowledge-claims, it is not yet clear that this is epistemology. Phillips uses Ruitenberg’s discussion as his launching place and argues more strongly that it is a mistake to regard the arts as being producers of knowledge – a skeptical conclusion he extends to multicultural epistemology. There can be alternative paths within epistemology but not alternative epistemologies. To hold that there are “alternative epistemologies” associated with different cultural groups (or with the arts community) probably indicates that those concerned misunderstand the nature of epistemology; they are arguing in support of important educational programs and ideals in a misleading manner.
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Notes
- 1.
Like Snow’s characterization, the dichotomy I sketch here is a simplification, and many actual educational researchers will not recognize themselves as fitting in either one of these categories.
- 2.
I will leave aside here the fact that, within the “traditional” research approaches that are here painted as one homogeneous entity, there are significantly different views about what it means to say that one “knows” anything based on research. Popperians, for example, who believe hypotheses cannot be verified, only falsified, would argue that one never knows with full certainty that something is the case, and that research findings can only increase the confidence with which one believes something to be true.
- 3.
As Levisohn and Phillips have analyzed in their chapter in this volume, the term “epistemology” in general is used to refer to several different things, and it is no different with “aesthetic epistemology.” While philosophers in that branch of philosophy known as aesthetics have discussed “aesthetic epistemology” in the first sense of the term as discussed by Levisohn and Phillips, the normative sense of epistemology of aesthetic judgments (discussions about how we can “know” that a painting is beautiful), I limit myself here to “aesthetic epistemology” in the second and third senses of the term as discussed by Levisohn and Phillips, that is, as a particular normative set of beliefs about how the arts or the use of artistic media produce knowledge or a description of such a set of beliefs.
- 4.
An interesting philosophical complexity arises here: how many internal changes or “improvements” need to be made before the traditional epistemology can be said to have been transformed into a new one? The sources discussed in this book do not pursue issues such as this, perhaps another indication that it is a mistake to identify their concerns as being philosophical.
- 5.
I am sympathetic to this point, to a degree. The result of an analysis is often strongly determined by the case or example that is taken as representative and thus a focus for the analysis; I have called this the “foxtrot problem” (Phillips 2006, pp. 12–13). I do not go all the way with Code, for I hold that subjectivity is not a virtue in many epistemologically important inquiries, although it might well be crucial in the kind of cases that she (and Ruitenberg) focuses upon – knowing a person, for example.
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Ruitenberg, C.W., Phillips, D.C. (2012). Second Thoughts. In: Ruitenberg, C., Phillips, D. (eds) Education, Culture and Epistemological Diversity. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2066-4_8
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