Introduction: The Intentionalist Manifesto

Abstract

Over the past thirty years or so philosophers of education have made repeated assaults on the dominant tradition of educational research. This research tradition can be characterized, perhaps too roughly, as behavioristic in theory, statistical in methodology, and positivistic in epistemology and metaphysics. It has reared its head in almost every area of educational thinking and has ridden many waves of political and administrative faddism despite the outraged cries of philosophers from Dewey (1916) to Scheffler (1960) to Green (1971). But philosophers’ arguments have had remarkably little effect; in part this may be the result of — and evidence for — the relatively weak place that philosophically oriented people have in the educational establishment.