Interpreting Kant in Education: Dissolving Dualisms and Embodying Mind Sheila Webb UCL Thesis submitted to University College London, Institute of Education, for the degree of PhD 2019 1 Declaration I, Sheila Webb, confirm that the work presented in this thesis is my own. Where information has been derived from other sources, I confirm that this has been indicated in the thesis. 2 Abstract Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential thinkers of modern philosophy but he receives some fierce criticisms by theorists of education - mostly for intellectualism, a disconnect between mind and reality, and a ‘detached’ mind making and imposing meaning. This thesis challenges the typical ‘Kantian’ picture that is widespread in education, suggesting that some deep-seated assumptions about mind and world rooted in empiricist epistemology have shaped interpretations. Drawing on contemporary literature from philosophy of mind and epistemology, it argues that Kant can be read in quite a different way - as non-dualist, with mind as embodied and his subject responsive and sensitive to context. In the increasingly ‘standards’ culture in education, in which knowledge is too readily seen as a commodity, Kant’s first person ‘capacity’ view, with judgement at its core, offers a way to think about knowledge that has more in common with Aristotle than the dominant paradigms in education of empiricism and constructivism. Kant’s epistemology when read through a non-dualist lens offers rich conceptions of knowledge, mind and cognition that, due to the prevalence of the conventional ‘Kantian’ picture, have yet to be appreciated in educational thought. 3 Table of Contents Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 5 Summary of Chapters .................................................................................................................. 25 Part One Chapter 1: Empiricism and Dualisms .................................................................................... 29 Chapter 2: Kant, Dissolving Dualisms and Embodying Mind ........................................ 48 Chapter 3: Naturalisms, Materialisms and Ideality .......................................................... 80 Chapter 4: The Methods of Science and the First Person Standpoint ...................... 105 Chapter 5: Rorty, Kant and Mind-Dependent Views of Knowledge .......................... 127 Part Two Chapter 6: Kant as a Constructivist: a Disappearing World and the Loss of Objectivity ..................................................................................................................................... 151 Chapter 7: Kant as a Constructivist: the ‘Layer-Cake’ Conception of Human Mindedness ................................................................................................................................... 179 Chapter 8: Kant versus Kantianism, and the General and Particular ...................... 198 Chapter 9: Situated and Sensitive Agents .......................................................................... 218 Chapter 10: Contrasting Readings of Kant ........................................................................ 232 Concluding Comments ............................................................................................................ 246 REFERENCES ................................................................................................................................. 251 4 Introduction Immanuel Kant is one of the most influential thinkers of modern philosophy, but he receives some fierce criticisms by theorists working in the philosophy of education; criticism is typically aimed at dualisms, intellectualism, and a conception of mind as disembodied or detached from real life. This thesis draws on contemporary readings of Kant in philosophy of mind and epistemology in order to challenge the typical ‘Kantian’ picture in education that is widespread. Its focus is metaphysical; it seeks to reveal some deep-seated assumptions rooted in empiricist epistemology that are presupposed in interpreting Kant’s philosophy, and which have led to ‘dualistic’ readings that tend to reinforce the conventional ‘Kantian’ picture - and criticisms of it. But Kant can be read in a very different way, with rich pictures of mind and knowledge that have yet to be appreciated in educational thought. This thesis concentrates on the aspects of Kant’s epistemology that challenge the ‘dualist’ picture in education and show mind (as a capacity for knowledge) as embodied, and his subject in touch with and sensitive to her context. The background and motivation for this thesis is the increasingly ‘reductive’ or ‘standards’ culture in education in which knowledge is all too often treated as a commodity, a ‘portfolio of skills’, and empirical knowledge is seen as the only kind that counts. The rising tide of scientism is increasingly reflected in educational policy and practice, and has rightly been the focus of a sustained critique from diverse perspectives. Two illustrations of such critique draw attention to various dualisms that are frequently pointed out as a root of the problem. Richard Pring, for instance, is a long-standing critic of the commodification of education, arguing that despite “the centrality of knowledge and understanding in the development of the educated person, one too often adheres to a narrow interpretation of such knowledge and 5 understanding” (2014, p.11)1. Knowledge can be too readily seen in terms of facts or propositions, easily disseminated and assessed, and skill “has become the generic term for knowledge, understanding, mental capacity, practical competency, and interpersonal sensitivity, thereby blurring important distinctions” (Pring, 2007, p.329). Judgement, Pring argues, is “relegated to insignificance in a world of mechanical rationalism” (2013, p.69). I share this dissatisfaction, and in this current climate there appears little appetite for philosophical work (let alone metaphysical work) on the nature of knowledge. For Kant, judgement is central to his view, for he draws attention to something more fundamental than facts and propositions and this is our human capacity for knowledge. Pring points to the ‘wars’ between the two dominant paradigms of knowledge: one he characterises as naïve realism and the other is constructivism – the first “believes in ‘an objective reality’” while the other sees reality as “a ‘social construction of the mind’” (2000, p.251). He writes: “The division between the two has become quite sharp, reflected in their respective languages or in different logical configurations of otherwise familiar words – objective/subjectivity, reality/multiple realities, truth/consensus, knowledge/opinion, understanding/perception and so on. It is as though the Cartesian dualism has returned in a more subtle form to entrap the unwary, even those who would so roundly condemn it in its original formulation. … Thus, the contrast is drawn between the objective world (out there independently of our thinking about it) and the subjective worlds (in our heads, as it were, and individually constructed); between the public discourse and private meanings; between reality unconstructed by anyone and the ‘multi realities’ constructed by each individual”. (Ibid, p.248) This thesis argues that a form of dualism does indeed ‘entrap the unwary, even by those who would condemn its original formulation’, and this has 1 In asking what counts as an educated person, Pring refers to Bruner: “Jerome Bruner took up this theme of education as being an introduction to the distinctively human life. Learning to be human was at the centre of his educational enterprise” (2014, p.14). In many ways, the reading of Kant I present in this thesis resembles Bruner’s emphasis on a distinctively human life. 6 shaped interpretations of Kant’s philosophy in education. Kant tends to be associated with one or the other of these prevailing paradigms or approaches to knowledge; either with the foundationalism of empiricism or read as a constructivist. But while Pring sees dualisms between these paradigms, I will point to dualist assumptions about mind and world inherent in both of them, revealing the extent of these assumptions that are presupposed in typical characterisations of Kant in education. With different understandings of his terms, Kant’s critical philosophy can be read in a way that identifies the very philosophical misconceptions that give rise to the dualism that entraps the unwary, and (again contra to typical interpretations) provides non-dualist conceptions of mind and knowledge. Paul Standish is another long-term critic of the scientistic culture, with its preoccupation with measurement, empirical data and statistics, which are presented as “offering hard and often incontrovertible evidence” (2010, p.6). The push for empirical methods, evidence and measurable impact devalues conceptual work and philosophical research, the impact of which cannot be measured in quantitative terms2. Like Pring, Standish identifies dualisms, arguing that the “hardening of the subject-object dichotomy generates crude accounts of objectivity, where objectivity is thought to be synonymous with numerical measurement” (2011, p.3). Of the fact-value dualism, Standish quotes Hilary Putman: “Every one of you has heard someone ask, ‘Is that supposed to be a fact or a value judgment?’ The presupposition of this stumper is that if it’s a value judgment