Harvey Siegel

The issue of the proper goals of science education and science teacher education have been a focus of the science education and philosophy of science communities in recent years. More particularly, the issue of whether belief/acceptance of evolution and/or understanding are the appropriate goals for evolution educators and the issue of the precise nature of the distinctions among the terms knowledge, understanding, belief, and acceptance have received increasing attention in the 12 years since we first published our views on these subjects. During that time, our own views about these issues have evolved, and this article presents a reconsideration of both these distinctions and the propriety of these goals. In particular, the present paper continues our discussion of the nature of belief as it relates to science education, and more specifically to evolution education. We extend that work to consider the import of the distinction between belief and acceptance.

Emma Williams’ ‘In Excess of Epistemology’ admirably endeavours to open the way to an account of critical thinking that goes beyond the one I have defended ad nauseum in recent decades by developing, via the work of Charles Taylor and Martin Heidegger, ‘a radically different conception of thinking and the human being who thinks’, one that ‘does more justice to receptive and responsible conditions of human thought.’ In this response I hope to show that much of Williams’ alternative approach is compatible with my own; that, where incompatible, the alternative is problematic; and, finally, that there is a risk of talking past one another, talking at cross-purposes, that all sides must work to overcome.

Emma Williams’ ‘In Excess of Epistemology’ admirably endeavours to open the way to an account of critical thinking that goes beyond the one I have defended ad nauseum in recent decades by developing, via the work of Charles Taylor and Martin Heidegger, ‘a radically different conception of thinking and the human being who thinks’, one that ‘does more justice to receptive and responsible conditions of human thought.’ In this response I hope to show that much of Williams’ alternative approach is compatible with my own; that, where incompatible, the alternative is problematic; and, finally, that there is a risk of talking past one another, talking at cross-purposes, that all sides must work to overcome.

In this review of Christopher Winch's new book, Education, Autonomy and Critical Thinking (2006), I discuss its main theses, supporting some and criticising others. In particular, I take issue with several of Winch's claims and arguments concerning critical thinking and rationality, and deplore his reliance on what I suggest are problematic strains of the later Wittgenstein. But these criticisms are not such as to upend Winch's powerful critique of antiperfectionism and 'strong autonomy' or his defence of 'weak autonomy'. His account of autonomy as an educational aim is important and in several respects compelling.

A major virtue of the Pragma-Dialectical theory of argumentation is its commitment to reasonableness and rationality as central criteria of argumentative quality. However, the account of these key notions offered by the originators of this theory, Frans van Eemeren and Rob Grootendorst, seems to us problematic in several respects. In what follows we criticize that account and suggest an alternative, offered elsewhere, that seems to us to be both independently preferable and more in keeping with the epistemic approach to arguments and argumentation we favor

In his recent work in social epistemology, Alvin Goldman argues that truth is the fundamental epistemic end of education, and that critical thinking is of merely instrumental value with respect to that fundamental end. He also argues that there is a central place for testimony and trust in the classroom, and an educational danger in over‐emphasizing the fostering of students’ critical thinking. In this paper I take issue with these claims, and argue that (1) critical thinking is a fundamental end of education, independently of its instrumental tie to truth, and (2) it is critical thinking, rather than testimony and trust, that is educationally basic.

This paper is a response to van Haaften's attempt to build ‘a natural bridge from “is” to “ought”’ and in doing so to provide a general account of how, in developmental theory, a claim that ‘a later stage in conceptual development is somehow better or more adequate than preceding ones’ can itself be justified. The account by van Haaften violates the ‘seems justified/is justified’ distinction and embroils him in a problematic form of relativism. This paper offers an alternative account of such claims in terms of stage-independent criteria of adequacy.