Journal of Philosophy on Education, Vol. 21, No. I , 1987 119

Wilson on Relativism and Teaching JIM MACKENZIE

John Wilson draws some surprisingly detailed conclusions about teaching from his attack on relativism (Wilson, 1986), especially given his characterisation of it as “a cluster of thoughts and feelings, often incoherent but immensely powerful in educa- tion” (89). One would not expect an attack on an often incoherent cluster to yield much positive guidance on anything. In this paper I shall first look at Wilson’s arguments against two different kinds of relativism, and then at whether his educa- tional conclusions follow from these attacks.

Relativism

The first kind of relativism Wilson attacks is that of the “out-and-out relativist” (89). This position is a familiar bogy of philosophers, thought it may actually have been adopted by Protagoras (Diogenes Laertius Vitae ix 5 1, Sextus Empiricus Adv. Math. vii 60f., Chisholm, 1966: 92), and even more extreme positions have been described; for example, that any distribution of truth values over propositions is acceptable (cf. Feyerabend, 1978: 83), or the three-stage scepticism ascribed to Gorgias of Leontini by Sextus Empiricus Adv. Math. vii 65ff., namely that nothing exists, that if anything did exist it would be unknowable, and that if anything were knowable it would be incommunicable.

Wilson says, “It is indeed hard to see how an out-and-out relativist can assert anything at all (or believe anything, or take up any kind of position): for these ideas too carry with them the idea of truth, of what is the case.. .” (89, Wilson’s emphases). In this sentence, Wilson telescopes together the two distinct arguments which are usually directed against out-and-out relativism. They are, first, that the professed relativist is necessarily insincere, because we all wish to except our own beliefs and values from relativism; and, second, that relativism is self-stultifying or self-contradictory, for if all truths are merely relative, so must be that thesis itself. Against the first of these arguments, it may be pointed out that a sufficiently tough-minded account of responsi- bility can dispense with moral absolutes (e.g. Sartre, 1944: 638ff.= 1969: 553ff., though contrast the same author’s suggestion that in choosing for oneself one chooses for everybody, 1946: 29).

The second argument, that relativism is self-stultifying, is less telling a criticism than it may at first appear. Many philosophical doctrines lead to paradox when self- applied (examples: the verification principle; the scholastic Nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu; Kordig, 1983, argues that the same holds for a number of more recent positions), and Gellner has described this as their professional ailment, “virtually written into the terms of reference under which they work” (1 974: 49). The argument, and the notion of self-reference on which it relies, sounds suspiciously like a verbal trick (Russell said that the paradoxes of self-reference had in the past been considered a joke (1918: 262) and that he found working on them “exceedingly

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disagreeable”, partly because “the whole problem struck me as trivial” (1959: 60)). There is indeed an intimate connection between the grammar of the word ‘true’ and the practice of assertion, in that to say of an identified statement that it is true is to make an assertion logically equivalent to that statement (Aristotle Metaph. 26f., Ramsey, 1927: 142), just as there is an intimate connection between our use of the word ‘true’ as applied to statements and our use of those statements as antecedents of conditionals. But since the philosophical authorities on truth either cleave to a schema which appears even to its defenders to be close to uninformative triviality (Popper, 1972: 3 1 3 , or embed that schema into ever more elaborate theories-most recently a transfinite oscillation between consistency and completeness which leaves intuition gasping in its turbulence (Yablo, 1985)-it is unbecoming for philosophers to sneer at anybody else who has difficulty with the matter. Besides, as we shall see, the self-stultifying objection does not apply against the limited relativism which is Wil- son’s real target.

Apart from his brief allusion to these two standard arguments, Wilson also offers four points, agreement about which may, he thinks, defuse relativism (90). They are perhaps offered as a sort of intellectual self-defence kit for teachers and others who may encounter relativists: what one should concede to relativism. If that is their purpose, one must hope Wilson’s readers encounter only tame, pussy-cat relativists, who do not try to show that the concessions themselves are at best only relatively true. Each of Wilson’s four points is, in the form in which he states it, open to obvious objection. I shall quote them in full and after each indicate in parentheses the sort of reply to it which a relativist might make.

“(1) No beliefs are beyond the reach of criticism: all are in principle revisable, none are absolutely incorrigible, we may always be mistaken.” (Can Wilson be sincere here? Does he really mean that we may always be mistaken in believing, say, that seven eights make 56? Even if the arm of criticism does extend to the multiplication table for us, it does not reach everything in many other traditions; a statement on certain topics by a properly appointed authority, made under appropriate circum- stances (from his chair, perhaps) may be beyond criticism. The concept of contempt of court embodies a legal limitation of criticism in common law countries.)

“(2) What counts as ‘true’, ‘a mistake’, etc. is relative to particular frameworks of enquiry, the rules of a particular game, certain methods of verification, certain concepts of what counts as evidence or a good reason.” (Wilson here mentions the alethic terms ‘truth’, ‘a mistake’, but then cites epistemological considerations, en- quiry, verification, evidence, and good reason. It is fundamental to the ordinary concept of truth that something may be true despite lacking verification, evidence, or good reason; even a wild guess may be true. See further: Popper, 1969: 115, 225; Dummet, 1973: 449-450.)

“(3) All beliefs, claims to truth, ‘answers’, and so on, are (of course) produced by people in particular societies. These people have their own particular backgrounds and interests which (of course) affect these products.” (As Popper, 1972: 1 15 has noted, a book of logarithms may be produced not by a person, but by a machine. Many figures in it, which represent mathematical theorems, may never be looked at in the whole history of humanity. Even answers which are produced by people need not be affected (in any substantial sense) by their backgrounds or by their interests. Part of the fascination of the game Trivial Pursuit is that we enjoy finding that we can give answers to questions in which we have never had any conscious interest at all.)

“(4) The question whether we are entitled to impose our views on others is different from the question whether we are entitled to call our views (or anyone else’s) ‘right’ or ‘true’. (We may answer ‘no’ to the first and ‘yes’ to the second.)” (In principle or in the philosopher’s study, the two questions are indeed distinct. But here they are addressed to teachers, who among other things set and mark examinations and thereby

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exclude some aspirants from various careers and stations of life; and in this context, it is by no means clear that the two questions are different.)

Thus Wilson’s more detailed response to out-and-out relativism fails too; to seek to defuse relativism by putting those points for agreement would be unlikely to succeed against a moderately agile relativist, Nor does this failure matter. There are few out-and-out relativists in school common-rooms. People may say things which, when taken out of context, sound like expressions of out-and-out relativism without adopting it as a position. ‘Everything is relative’ is no more about all things or even all statements than ‘Everybody has a copy of the textbook‘ is about the whole human race. ‘Everyone’ is often used to refer to everyone in some group understood in the context (cf. Lewis, I979), for example, the members of a school class; and ‘Everything’ in ‘Everything is relative’ may simply refer to every statement of some kind under- stood in the context, for example, every statement about morality. Few educators wish to dispute Pythagoras’s Theorem or that copper expands when heated.

Limited Relativism Wilson’s real target, we may suspect, is not out-and-out relativism at all, but a more limited relativism about aesthetics, morality, religion, science, history, or whatever. Such a doctrine, whatever its weaknesses, is at least immune to the self-stultification objection, since ‘All aesthetic (or whatever) claims are relative’ is not itself a matter of aesthetics (or whatever), If Wilson is really concerned with this limited form of relativism, that would explain why he does not state the self-stultification objection fully. Limited relativism has a pedigree if anything more illustrious than that of its wholesale cousin. It was expressed by the answer of the Delphic oracle which, when asked which rites are most pleasing to the gods, replied that in each city, the rites of that city; and this answer was praised by Socrates (Xenophon Mem. I iii 1) and by Hume (1757: ix, p. 65).

Wilson’s argument against this limited relativism is that there are some enter- prises (or as he also calls them, forms of thought) which are “too closely bound up with what it is to be a human being to allow much scope for opting out altogether” (90). His explicit examples are science, history, and morality, though he also discusses aesthetic questions as if they too were of this unavoidable kind. As well as being inescapable, one who seriously engages in one of these enterprises “is logically driven to use certain procedures” (91). Thus we must examine the extent to which different forms of thought are indeed inescapable, and whether the inescapability of a form of thought is an objection to relativism about it.

Some forms of thought are indeed inescapable. But their inescapability does not imply that they are as distinct from one another in practice, or each as uniform in procedure, as Wilson seems to presume. Everybody, and every community, must have some kind of account of their environment, of what things are in it and of how those things behave and interact. Natural science, in that sense, is inescapable. It by no means follows that everybody’s natural science must contain doctrines, or even procedures of inquiry, much like ours; nor that every community must have a division of labour betwcen scientists and others, nor that communities must themselves distinguish between science and other forms of thought. Parts of a community’s scientific knowledge may be regarded by them as associated with witchcraft, other parts with hunters’ or healers’ or women’s lore. Again, every community must communicate, but not all appoint advocates or spokesmen. (Wilson’s relativist is too agreeable in conceding, “Ifone wants to discuss and communicate then no doubt one has to obey the law of non-contradiction . . .” (90): for even in our own society there are doubts about that law, Rescher & Brandom, 1979: 160n.2, Priest, 1979). The inescapability of science and communication, and likewise of history, mathematics,

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and morality, may be admitted; but it must be remembered that while other communi- ties engage in those forms of thought they may do so in quite different ways from ours.

Nor need their procedures and methods of inquiry be comparable to ours. “One is led by logic from an initial position of wanting to be reasonable, via the differentiation and understanding of certain questions.. ., to the use of certain frameworks and procedures, . . .” Wilson tells us (9 1). But this is not so. In each of the forms of thought Wilson singles out, history, mathematics, science, and morality, there are marked disagreements about frameworks and procedures.

In history, to try to identify people and events in the Chinese classics with those in the Pentateuch does not appear to us to be a reasonable method of inquiry; but it did appear to be perfectly reasonable to some of the Jesuit missionaries in China from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. (The Middle Kingdom, they thought, must have been founded by some immediate descendant of Noah; Rule, 1986: 99, 1 18, 135, 152ff., 168, 172, 187.) Nor can we forget the controversies among historians over oral history, or the Annales school, or the use of sociological, or archaeological, or economic techniques. Frameworks and procedures in history are if anything less agreed than specific findings.

In mathematics, it is notorious that the problem we write as ‘x2=2’ was insoluble for the Greeks: nothing they recognised as a number would satisfy it. For us the problem is soluble, for we, unlike the Greeks, regard postulation of a new kind of number as a reasonable procedure in mathematics (under certain conditions: Frege, 1884: $0 94 (105f.), 96 (107f.), and 102-4 ( 1 11-16)). Nor do such conflicts occur only between the modem world and the ancient. There are schools of thought in philosophy of mathematics which reject the use of certain inferences in proof; perhaps the most celebrated of them is the intuitionist school, which grew out of the work of Brouwer and others in Holland, Heyting, 1956. The intuitionists question the general applica- bility in mathematics of double negation and the law of excluded middle. (Either the law of excluded middle holds, or it doesn’t-or I’m a Dutchman.) Mathematicians nowadays simply note of a proof whether it is valid intuitionistically or merely classically, thereby adopting a strictly even-handed attitude to the question of which procedures of inquiry in mathematics are valid. Relativists could not ask for more. What theorems you can prove is relative to the forms of inference you accept.

In science, Wilson says that he “summarise[s] a lot of history brutally” in attributing to Galileo the view that if “you want to know how objects in the phenomenal world behave, and want to predict things, then it’s reasonable to use telescopes and things” (92). This is not brutal summary but caricature. Even then, everybody knew that looking through curved bits of glass was likely to distort vision; and Galileo’s opponents used this and more technical arguments to try to show that it was not reasonable to look through his telescope to explore the phenomenal heavens. (For references to Galileo’s opponents and their arguments, see Feyerabend, 1975: 107-8, 1 1 5-9, 123-7, 134n.44, 137n.54, 148-1 53.) And they certainly regarded that exploration (not Wilson’s “obedience to the words of Aristotle and the sacred scrip- tures”) as their task. They thought, and had reasons for thinking, that telescopes were unlikely to help them in it. Again, it is not at all ‘contradictory’ to say “I want to know whether such-and-such is true of the physical world, but I do not want to use my senses or conduct experiments” (9 1). Einstein may be understood as having found out that, whatever the physical world may be like, it cannot be one in which the principles of the relativity of motion and the constancy of the velocity of light in vacuo are true without a variety of other, rather surprising, things also being true in it; and as having found this out by pure reasoning and calculation. Nor, of course, are observations and experiment sufficient; see Gould’s perceptive sketch of the history of the continental drift theory, which was initially rejected even though supported by empirical evidence because no adequate driving mechanism for drift could be imagined, and later

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accepted not because of new observations but because a mechanism had been suggested (1978: 160-7). Procedures for inquiry in science are very varied.

Morality, too, is inescapable; but that does not imply that there are absolute moral values, only that they are needed. Mackie argues in his first chapter that there are no objective moral values, though “moral thought traditionally and conventionally-and, I have suggested, very naturally and comprehensibly-includes a claim to objectivity” (1977: 63). MacIntyre holds “that the language and the appearances of morality persist even though the integral substance of morality has to a large degree been fragmented and then in part destroyed” (1 98 1: 5) , and that though virtue is objective (1 74), the “substance of morality [has become] increasingly elusive” since the time of Jane Austen (226). Both Mackie and MacIntyre concede the inescapability of morality without admitting absolute values to which we have access, and hence constitute prima facie evidence that Wilson’s inference from the inescapability of morality to absolute values is invalid; and neither Mackie nor MacIntyre deserves to be over- looked or dismissed without comment. Nor, of course, do moral positions agree with one another about procedures; whether anything other than the consequences of an action are relevant to its evaluation, for example, is a well-known cmx.

Thus history, mathematics, science, and morality are each inescapable in that from any human way of life we can construe the participants as having beliefs of each of those kinds. But this inescapability is neither sufficient to rule out relativism for that kind of thought, nor sufficient to ensure agreement about the procedures of inquiry to be adopted in it.

Other forms of thought, such as aesthetic ones, are less clearly inescapable. It is certainly possible to ask how well someone tells a story (99, but we need not do so. For example, we rarely ask how well scientists tell their stories (and when that question is asked, the answer seems to be ‘Badly’; cf. Medawar, 1967: 15 1). Still less should we concede that questions of aesthetic worth are inescapable if we insist as Wilson does that they be understood in a sense which deems irrelevant to aesthetic worth an interest “in the social provenance of [the] writing, in the author’s intentions, in the work‘s relationship to other cultural features, and so on” (94). By “and so on”, Wilson presumably means the work‘s literal truth (contrast Horace Ep. I ii 3-9, its conformity to “the dulcis et utile canon familiar to classical, medieval, and renaissance writers alike-with a good deal greater emphasis [than they placed] on the utile, to be sure” (Culpepper, 1964: 53), its life-affirmingness, and all the other commonly invoked criteria of aesthetic evaluation which require the critic to go beyond the work itself. If none of these is relevant to aesthetic worth, then many critics, let alone the rest of us, are not concerned with aesthetic worth; in which case aesthetic worth so understood is quite escapable.

It may be as Wilson says that “whether we are or are not at war with Germany has no bearing on the merits of German music” (91), if one is talking only about absolute (in contrast to programme) and rather highbrow music, such as Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Brahms’ First Symphony. The dictum is not so obviously true if one considers a work with strong associations, Brahms’ Song of Triumph or (at the very end of the spectrum) the Horst Wessel Song. The Marseillaise is inseparable from its political meaning, which is why composers can routinely use fragments of its melody to refer to France and its Republic. To try to evaluate such a work independently of what Wilson calls its “relationships to other cultural features” (94) would be to miss the whole point of the work. The legendary theatre-goer who disliked Hamlet “because it is full of quotations” erred by getting those relationships the wrong way round; but with many works of art-parodies, for example-it is just those relationships which are essential to the aesthetic content.

Most of the poems in the two Alice books are parodies of poems or popular songs that were well known to Carroll’s contemporary readers. With few

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exceptions the originals have now been forgotten, their titles kept alive only by the fact that Carroll chose to poke fun at them. Because much of the wit of a burlesque is missed if one is not familiar with what is carcicatured, all the originals will be reprinted in this edition. (Gardner, 1965: 38n.4, emphasis added)

We may accept with Wilson that “the weight, size, price on the open market” of a painting (91) are irrelevant to its aesthetic worth (though Rubens and Michelangelo have both been praised for the scale of their pictures, a characteristic perhaps connected with size), But can the same be said for sculpture or architecture, where the massiveness or lightness, the grandeur or daintiness, the preciousness of the materials, are recognised categories of aesthetic evaluation? (The market price of the finished product, taken as including a value for workmanship, cannot be an ingredient of aesthetic worth on pain of circularity, since it presupposes the opinions of the market on aesthetic worth.) The requirements Wilson makes for aesthetic judgements are so restrictive that his contention that aesthetics (in his sense) is inescapable is quite implausible.

The suggestion that religion is inescapable is even less plausible. Religion is inescapable only if defined so widely as to include the view that the forms of life usually called religion are all delusory or (what is worse) incoherent (Ayer, 1936: 11 6; see also his 1977: 15 1). Then indeed religion is unavoidable; but is it, when so defined, a form of life or of thought at all?

To sum up, Wilson’s argument from the inescapability of forms of thought does nothing to refute, or even to impair the plausibility of, relativism, whether out-and-out or limited. For two important cases, aesthetic appreciation and religion, the premise of inescapability fails; and for those cases in which a form of thought is inescapable, it by no means follows without far more argument than Wilson has given that relativism about those forms of thought is untenable. In none does logic drive or lead us to use particular procedures of inquiry and no others. Had she been familiar with Hirst & Peters (1970) the Pythian priestess might have commended to each city the forms of thought of that city.

This is not to say that relativism strictly so-called, whether out-and-out or limited, is irrefutable. It is a piece of advice, a recipe for dealing with our cognitive predica- ment. As advice, it can be refuted because it can be shown to be vacuous:

To work as a recipe, relativism requires the existence of identifiable ‘cities’, i.e. units in terms of which the alleged relativity is to work. The extreme case of such possible units would be single individuals, or even moods of indivi- duals, if truth were to be defined as relative to individuals or to moments of their lives. But it is an essential feature of our current situation that there are no such ‘cities’ inscribed into the nature of things, and even individuals possess no given identities. If your problem is, precisely, the location of your city, or the selection of yourself or the adoption of a mood, then a recipe which presupposes that these are already given, is worthless. (Gellner, 1974: 49, emphasis original)

This refutation of relativism (that truth is, or that truths of some particular kind are, relative to traditions, individuals, moods, or whatever) does not refute a more generalised scepticism (that truth is, or that truths of some particular kind are, rather hard to get). But scepticism in that sense, far from being a hindrance to cognitive education, is a condition for it. Only if we consider new practical applications of (Feynman, 1985: 21 1-219), and objections to (Mill, 1859: 287, quoted below) what we are studying can we come to understand it properly. (Note also the ‘critical experience’ reported by Dibley, 1986: 88.)

Wilson on Relativism and Teaching 125

Relativists Cannot Teach

From his attempted refutation of relativism, Wilson draws two conclusions for subject teaching. The first is that “education itself becomes impossible” for thoroughgoing relativists, “For what would be the point in spending time, money, or effort merely in changing our pupils’ beliefs and attitudes, if we have no reason whatever to believe that we are changing them in the direction of reason and truth?” (95, Wilson’s emphasis).

In reply, the relativist could resort to the position of the original sceptics and submit to the “tradition of customs and laws” (Sextus Empiricus, Pyrr. Hyp. i 24); for what reason has the relativist to oppose them? The political powers that be have decreed that chemistry and Latin literature, but not voodoo or the tea ceremony, are to be taught; and they have the power of the purse and ultimately of the sword. We should render first aid according to the advice of the current Ambulance Association handbook and not according to other medical traditions: not from any belief in the superior effectiveness of the handbook’s advice, but from concern lest we have an uncomfortable time in the witness box should our conduct become the subject of litigation before a court which accepts the evidence only of conventionally accredited experts. This position is spineless and irresponsible, but morally loaded abuse will hardly worry a relativist.

In fact, the relativist has another, less irresponsible, reply, one which accords precisely with Wilson’s dictum “we do not have to know the right answers in order to educate” (95). We do not, contra Wilson, even need to believe that there are right answers (in some transcendent realm) to engage in teaching. It is not clear what role the existence of these answers, which are unknown to the teacher, could play in the teaching process; and hence, why they are needed for it. We may simply wish to let pupils work out their own answers for themselves. The relativist may try to provide pupils with opportunities to consider various alternative principles, to consider thoughtfully the consequences of each, and to choose one among them, a choice which they prize, which they are willing to affirm publicly, and which they act upon in repeated situations. Readers of Raths et al. (1978: 27ff.) will recognise in this defence their seven conditions for being a value; the relativist could engage in Values Clarification.

Simpson remarks, “Values Clarification included a more widely accepted set of doctrines than its inadequate efforts at self-defense could suggest. The doctrines were produced by gifted educational practitioners who were neither trained nor practiced in fashioning arguments acceptable to philosophers and scientists. Their ideas could nevertheless powerfully express the dictum that the unexamined life is not worth living” (1 986: 271). Values clarification may be open to very damaging objections, as Simpson himself goes on to argue. But Wilson’s rhetorical question, quoted above, does not refute the Values Clarificationists; it simply ignores their existence.

Or again, the teacher faced with religion classes in a religiously divided commu- nity may simply invite the different religious and anti-religious groups one by one to send a representative to explain that group’s position and engage in discussion with the students, the teacher adopting the limited role of organising the schedule and invitations and maintaining discipline and orderly discussion in the class. Teachers taking this approach may but need not believe that right answers are possible on religious questions. They need accept only that actually meeting representatives of groups other than their own and hearing them present their points of view is an educationally beneficial experience for children in that community.

Nor is it enough that he [the pupil] should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations. That is not the way to do justice to the

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arguments, or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest, and do their very utmost for them. (Mill, 1859: 287)

Thus it would not follow from Wilson’s refutation of relativism, even had it been successful, that relativists cannot be teachers. There are familiar, even common, approaches to teaching in controversial areas (Values Clarification; guest speakers) which do not presuppose the falsehood of relativism.

The Forms and the Curriculum

The second educational consequence Wilson draws from his attack is that:

Our job as educators is to connect pupils with truth and reason, by initiating them into the proper procedures of various forms of thought and life. Each of these forms exists in its own right, as a kind of amalgam of facts, procedures, and certain types of competence and indeed motivation: we cannot make any logical separation between, for instance, scientific ‘facts’, ‘concepts’, ‘skills’, ‘method’, and other things. All this has been well expressed by Peters (1 966) and Hirst [& Peters] (1970), and ought by now to be common ground. (Wilson, 1986: 94)

These forms [I] it seems we are to identify with traditional subjects, English literature, science, mathematics, history, Latin, and so on (95). That is, Wilson argues that since relativism is false, we must respect the boundaries between traditional subject areas.

This conclusion by no means follows. One can reject relativism without accepting traditional subject divisions. Indeed, one who rejects relativism for Wilson’s own reasons of the inescapability and differentiation of forms of thought ought also to reject those divisions. Let me give two illustrations of this. Of the forms of thought which Wilson mentions, the two for which there are most clearly logical and epistemo- logical differences from other forms are morals and mathematics. Moral discussion is distinguishable because it includes categorical imperatives, which no other kind of discussion does. Mathematics is distinguishable as a form of thought because of its independence from empirical considerations; it alone could be conducted without delving into the reliability of observational knowledge. But the more seriously one takes what Wilson says about the inescapability of these two forms and the need to keep them separate, the more dubious one must be about traditional subject struc- tures.

Moral education is not one of the traditional subjects; traditionally, moral development is to be promoted by religion and by English literature (and in earlier times by history, especially British and imperial history, and by physical education). Anyone convinced by Wilson’s argument against relativism from the distinctness and inescapability of forms of thought should conclude that these traditional approaches to moral education are mistaken just because they involve crossing Wilson’s boundaries. If Wilson is right, moral education should be taught on its own, and its categorical imperatives kept out of literature classes (though Wilson is here disagreeing with Hirst & Peters: “All understanding of moral problems does not have to be pursued in a context devoid of any concern for aesthetic appreciation, just because the two modes are of radically different kinds. The two can indeed both be developed, at least in part, by the use of certain works of English literature”, 1970: 69). Noticing the ineffectiven- ess of a didactic presentation of moral principles (see Hare, 1963: 45-6, Raths et al., 1978: 42; “. . .however true it may be, if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will bc held as a dead dogma. not a living truth”, Mill, 1859: 285), the teacher persuaded b> S’ilson that forms of knowledge are distinct and should be

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taught separately could well adopt something not very different from the Values Clarification approach.

Considerable amounts of essentially mathematical knowledge are included in the traditional physics curriculum, and it is difficult to see how physics could be taught without them. And of course important mathematical discoveries have been made by people working on problems in physics, most famously Newton’s discovery of what he called the calculus of fluxions. Wilson’s distinctions between forms of thought by no means offer the support to traditional subject distinction which he seems to think they do.

Independently of Wilson’s rejection of relativism, his conclusion that the curricu- lum should be structured around the forms of thought is not acceptable. For what kinds of curriculum structure does it exclude? Those which do not reflect in their divisions the forms of thought. It is a standard practice in many of the vocational varieties of higher education to use an approach of exactly the kind Wilson excludes, one organised not about truth and reason but about the telos of a practical profession. Thus intending engineers and architects work on design-projects and cases (Henderson et al., 1983) and case methods of various kinds are widely used in schools of medicine (Barrows & Tamblyn, 1980), law (Barnhizer, 1979), social work, and business (Pigors & Pigors, 1961: 18-29). Whether any or all of these professions constitute forms of thought in the sense Wilson is discussing is not entirely clear: veterinary medicine and hospital administration are forms of life, but neither is itself a form of thought. Rather, each employs many forms of thought. The telos of a practical profession is the doing of a particular kind of good (not the finding of truth), and the professions use whatever forms of thought and whatever procedures are fit for their ends. It is this that design projects and case methods seek to implement educationally: the students will acquire the various (cognitive and other) capacities required in the profession, in relation to one another, by practising them together. A simple bridge design will call on and develop the students’ knowledge of mathematics, physics, materials science, aesthetics, sociology, economics, ethics, politics, and human relations; and also their skills of argument, persuasion, calculation, drawing, and co-operation. The project or case approach is precisely to run together what Wilson wishes to be kept apart. Even the actual content of some of the forms of thought may be distorted: notoriously engineering encourages ‘brute force’ approximation techniques which have no place in mathematics as such; navigation employs the geocentric assumption which astronomy abandoned long ago.

The case study approach is also sometimes used in more purely academic disciplines (e.g. the course in medieval social history at Monash, based entirely on the study of the correspondence of a family in East Anglia; Morgan 1981). The extent to which such methods can be introduced into primary and secondary schools is an interesting question; but Wilson does not contribute to the discussion of this question because he fails even to consider it [2].

Wilson’s attack on relativism, both out-and-out and limited, fails. Even if it did not, the consequences for educational practice which he draws from it would not follow.

Correspondence: Jim Mackenzie, Centre for Human Bioethics, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia 3 168.

NOTES

[ I ] Though Wilson does not refer to it, there has been considerable discussion of the forms of knowledge thesis, some of it in this very Journal, and some powerful criticisms of it (e.g. Even & Walker, 1983; for a reply, see Mackenzie, 1985). The connection between the thesis and the structure of the curriculum has

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also been considered by various writers. Indeed, Hirst, the originator of the forms of knowledge thesis, was careful to point out “But from none of this [scil., the thesis] does it follow that a curriculum must or ought to be divided into subjects that mirror distinctions between the forms of knowledge” (1974: 140); and in one of the very works Wilson cites it is stated, “Because our experience and knowledge is differentiated into a number of distinct forms it does not at all follow that the best way of developing such knowledge and experience is to organise a curriculum in terms of these forms” (Hirst & Peters, 1970: 69).

[2] These two paragraphs owe much to discussions of case studies and similar methods with N. S. Paget, and to his 1985.

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