The topic of this paper is the constructivism-realism debate, construed as an example of the intrusion of philosophy into science. Against this intrusion I maintain that philosophical problems are not only different from scientific and practical ones. They are also problematic in themselves. That is why their import into our scientific and practical work only creates confusions that hinder us in our work. The aim of the paper is to show that the philosophical problems that create those confusions need a Wittgensteinian therapeutic treatment. The method of the paper consists in comparing what philosophers (or philosophising scientists) say we do with what we actually do. After giving an example of what happens when a rightly respected scientist starts philosophizing, the method is applied, first, to the relation between language and the world and, second, to the relation between theories and the world. In the first application a story about three umpires is used to distinguish language and discourse, between questions of meaning (of the words we use) and questions of truth (of the things we say). In the second application a comparison between maps and theories is used to show the difference between assessing the truth of descriptive statements and explanatory theories. The examples of the umpires and maps are introduced by Weick and in both cases I show that neither constructivist nor metaphysical realist conclusions follow.
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“Municipal Youth Work taken over by Christians”. (Binnenlands Bestuur, 2009) This heading refers to the work of Youth for Christ in an Amsterdam neighbourhood. This organisation, successful in Youth Work nationwide, last year came out first in an open competition of the Amsterdam district De Baarsjes. Because of this they were commissioned to undertake all the youth work in this multicultural neighbourhood. The conditions were not to evangelise and not to limit recruitment of personnel inside their own circle but to recruit from outside the organisation as well. When they later appeared to have put a job advertisement only on their own website, this led to heated debates. Finally Youth for Christ acknowledged and rectified this mistake. This example is a concrete illustration of the actual and sometimes delicate relationships between philosophy of life and social work
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In secondary school philosophy classes students learn to reason critically about social and scientific issues. This study examined the effects of a whole-class, teacher-led philosophy classroom dialogue intervention on students’ value-loaded critical thinking. Value-loaded critical thinking is logically consistent, self-reflective reasoning focused on making moral value-judgments about what is right to believe or do. In a quasi-experimental study (N = 437 students) with a pre-test post-test design, we investigated whether engaging in classroom dialogues in which the teachers implemented five design principles for promoting value-loaded critical thinking and transfer thereof, positively affected students’ (n = 150) value-loaded critical thinking in transfer tasks. The results were compared to two comparison conditions: students (n = 149) who participated in regular teacher-led philosophy classroom dialogues and students (n = 145) who followed a regular 10th-grade curriculum without philosophy classes. Results showed that students in the intervention condition outperformed students in both comparison conditions on referring to moral values. Regarding critical reasoning, we only found significant effects compared to the students who followed the regular 10th-grade curriculum. Findings indicate that a specifically designed dialogic intervention can enhance students’ capacities in value-loaded critical thinking.
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