What Philosophy Is; Clip 1 Video Lecture | Philosophy of Education: Introductory Course - Self Help Learning

all right so far we have in this
introductory unit on philosophy of
education broken apart the phrase first
focusing on the phrase education
unpacking a little bit what is involved
in that preliminary definition and when
we started to explore in more detail
what was built into the educational
process the idea of preparing students
for adult life for dealing with the real
world having certain capacities and
functionalities we found ourselves led
to big picture complicated philosophical
issues and so far we've looked at three
such categories of questions questions
of human nature are we in control of our
destinies or or or not
we are rational beings where emotional
being what is the relationship between
those two and so forth questions of
metaphysics are we living in a causal
world or a chaotic world is there a God
or is the natural real world the entire
reality is it a benevolent world or a
benevolent malevolent world rather
questions of ethics and the the meaning
of life what are the big values that we
want to students to pursue as adults
what should their career goals be their
family goals right and so forth to the
extent that we can help them sort those
issues out give them the skills and
knowledge that's necessary what kind of
character traits are going to be
important to our students as adults
right and so on and all the questions of
ethics that are there are significant
here one other category of question
that's a philosophical question there's
absolutely a essential for educational
practice and I'll first give you the
technical name for it here and that is
epistemology another possibly new piece
of terminology to you again it's a Greek
origin we have the ology here part which
is to give an account of something in
this case what we're giving in a is an
account of epistemic Greek word for or
knowledge or one of the Greek words for
knowledge rate of a certain sort here
epistemological questions are
fundamental to philosophy and education
for philosophical reasons because if you
take any question from any of the other
ants branches of philosophy here I make
a
claim for example that God exists
there's a natural follow-up question
which is how do you know right that God
exists right or if you don't believe in
God you come not to believe in the
existence of God what makes that a
reasonable position to to to adopt right
at a certain point here so what we are
asking in the case of epistemological
questions are questions of knowledge
what is it - no and if education is
about anything it is about knowledge we
are a knowledge intensive species we're
a highly intelligent species and to a
large extent how we function and
flourish in the world is a result of the
knowledge that we acquire or the the the
knowledge that we don't acquire which
puts us in a position for for for
failure so what is it really to know
what is it to know who we are as human
beings what is it to come to know the
world that we are living in what does it
come to know what it is to be a good
person and and how to approach the
achievement of various important values
in our lives here and some questions of
epistemology are important questions in
in philosophy everything is
controversial here from those who argue
that we don't really know anything who
will adopt a more skeptical skeptical
approach if as educators we don't think
that knowledge is possible then
certainly we're going to radically
de-emphasize the importance of the
transmission of knowledge and knowledge
acquisition skills right as educators
but also there is an important debate
within epistemological circles among
those and an applied cognitive circles
implied knowledge circles between those
who believe that knowledge is possible
but have radically different approaches
to the achievement of knowledge for
example if we tie epistemology to
metaphysics as it often is we can say
one side of the metaphysical divide is
between those who are very naturalistic
in their view of reality the world is
the natural world and so that's an
important thing for us to to come to
know but if the world is the natural
reality then how do we come to know that
it makes sense to say that well we have
five sensory organs if we're born normal
and healthy and
those are the basis of our knowledge so
we come to know the world through sense
perception we have a rational capacity
that that we can use to classify our
sensory perceptual data that can be
formed go on to form abstract hypotheses
chains of cause-and-effect theoretical
understandings of the world and so we
might then make an argument that
knowledge is something that should be
based on the senses that should be a
matter of reasoning and maybe in the
most complicated frontier cutting-edge
parts of knowledge that we really come
to know things as a result of doing
science right if something gets through
the the scientific method that is
something that really can count as
knowledge of course if we have partial
sensory data or our reasoning is
inconclusive because we don't we don't
have enough data to go upon or if we're
in the initial stages and we merely have
hypotheses that we were kicking around
and trying to sort out we might have
terms that are there or not as as
heavily fraud as saying that we know
what's going on we might say that rather
than our knowledge being the definitive
we have only probabilistic knowledge at
this stage or we have a number of
possibilities right at this stage and so
an important then part of cognitive
training will be teaching students how
to make those more fine-grained
judgments being able to tell when
they're dealing with something that's
only a hypothesis or something that that
is a reasonable certainty or being able
in some cases obviously to dismiss
certain things as just as ridiculous and
not worth spending ones time on so
developing our rational capacity in all
of these areas then becomes a very
important part of the project if we are
more naturalistic right now or
metaphysics