METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 21, No. 4, Oct. 1990 0026-1068 $2.00

RESPONSE TO PROFESSOR KITCHENER

MAlTHEW LIPMAN

Prof. Kitchener argues that children cannot do the demanding work required of adult philosophers because children lack the cognitive apparatus for so doing. They have a logic, he acknowledges, but not a meta-logic; an epistemics but not a meta-epistemics; cognition but no meta-cognition. They can infer, he tells us, but they lack theories of formal inference; they can cite evidence when necessary, but they lack theories of evidence; indeed, they do not even possess “an under- standing of hypothetical possibility.”

Whether some children, or all children, have or lack this set of skills or that, 1 simply do not know. But Prof. Kitchener has produced no evidence (let alone a theory of such evidence) to show that the meta- skills he is talking about are essential to doing philosophy. He holds up to us, to be sure, Hume on causality, Aristotle on substance and Kant on the Categories of the Understanding, as if to compel us to recognize the presence of the high-powered cognitive apparatus he thinks all real philosophers must possess. But he has not proven that all, or even a large proportion, of this particular group of people possess these meta- skills, nor has he shown that philosophy cannot exist in their absence.

There are those who are paid to do philosophy - professional philosophers -but presumably not all of them do it well. In most fields, some good amateurs are better than some of the poorer professionals. So the line between amateur and professional is a blurry one when it comes to cognitive prowess, as it is when it comes to athletic prowess.

When children play sandlot baseball, they play it as skillfully as they can and they adhere to the rules of the game. That they follow the rules is sufficient to make them baseball players: they do not have to play the game expertly. It seems to me it would be lacking in a philosophical sense of proportion to deny that they are playing baseball simply because they are not Babe Ruths. I do not make the claim that children are “natural philosophers”: that was Kohlberg’s claim. I merely say that many adults are capable of doing philosophy, and so are many children, that some adults are capable of doing it well and that some children are likewise.

It is to me altogether understandable that when a genteel profession conceives itself to be at bay, it may begin to make claims of exclusiveness which would never have been countenanced in heartier periods. These claims are put forward modestly enough, so that they are not to be understood as defenses of the professional practices in one or

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two countries as against those in other countries, or as defenses of some areas of professional specialization against other areas. If pushed to the wall, one might be conciliatory and magnanimous by invoking a distinction (such as that between “concrete” and “abstract” philosophy), even if in the absence of a meta-theory of distinction-making.

If the not too distant future, I suspect, we will look back to arguments like those of Prof. Kitchener in favor of preserving philosophy for adults in the way we now look back to pre-World War I celebrations of the excellence of the vanishing Victorian world. It is also my suspicion that, in the years to come, philosophy will have an increasingly heavy responsibility to bring together and make comfortable with one another the diversity of perspectives of those of different nationalities, genders and age levels, a diversity presently so rampant and robust as to make communication difficult and misunderstandings inevitable. With the help of shared philosophical inquiry, we can reach across the table to one another and convert our precarious associations into well-founded communities. Our job now is to prepare for that time to come, and not to fancy ourselves the Major Leagues of philosophy, with everyone else sitting around on the sidelines watching, and enjoying the games vicariously, if at all.

Montcluir State College Upper Montclair, NJ USA