This
post discusses epistemology – first the sorts of questions we might
ask when applying epistemology to education, and then a general taster
of the areas epistemology covers (which is by no means comprehensive).
If you want to comment, click on a paragraph and use the comment
box to the right. Comments can also be viewed in this way. For a
more detailed story re: relationship between epistemology, pedagogy
and assessment (and learning analytics) see [our paper]1 (Knight,
Buckingham Shum, Littleton, 2013), or my [SoLAR talk]2 and the
citations within them.# If you are here from the#category/conference/LAK13 mooc… 1. I
would definitely suggest reading the first section to get a flavour for
the issues well tackle. 2. Some of you may also want to read the rest of the post 3. Finally, if youre still interested, there
are a few further references on epistemology (generally), and the
references from the whole post at the bottom – you could follow up with
those. If youre still interested then, do get in touch (here or in the forums so we can share with everyone) and Ill have a look for
other material.# Epistemology and Education – so what?# When I
talk about epistemology, what do I mean? Well, epistemology is
fundamentally concerned with the status, acquisition, and
characteristics of knowledge – that is: 1. What distinguishes
knowledge from other things (such as true beliefs, understanding, etc.)
2. How does one come to know 3. What are the characteristics of
knowledge: including those arising from the above questions; and its
structure (e.g. propositional knowledge v. knowing how); the status of
truth, meaning and belief, etc.# Applying it Educationally I think
this stuff is interesting. Why do we want students to have
knowledge rather than true belief, what does it take for them to
instantiate that knowledge, and how true a representation of that
knowledge do assessments give (how good at ensuring knowledge rather
than true belief, or ensuring students can give their knowledge rather
than thinking they have none, etc.)? 1. When we assess, what are we
assessing? What emphasis should be placed on skills v facts, 2. What
does it mean to “know” a fact? Recall, explanation, connection – to what
extent? 3. What is the role of external artefacts (open book exams,
calculators, [the internet – as in Denmark]3) in knowledge? (My
[MA]4 was broadly on this) 4. Where does knowledge reside
when learners collaborate, or learn from teachers (their
testimonial knowledge) (see Suthers (2006) on the first) 5. How
reliable and valid are assessments of knowledge (or
competence), what is the impact of increased reliability
(through standardisation) on the view of epistemology implied in
assessments (see any of Andrew Daviswork on this – refs at end) 6. At a more abstract level we might worry about what fixes propositions astrue, perhaps particularly where assessment systems might instantiate a particular take on knowledge at the exclusion of other ways of knowing. Im less interested in researching this area
(although I think it is important), but Id highly recommend Gipps (1999) (sadly closed access) 7. How do we compare qualitiesandquantitiesof knowledge? (e.g. how do we measure knowledge (Treanor, 2013 – a version of which I first heard at a Mind Network meeting at Cambridge). ## Some issues in Epistemology ## True Belief A key pursuit of epistemology has been to distinguishknowledgefrommeretrue belief. One suggestion is that we want people to becreditworthy` for knowledge, while true beliefs may be
accidentally true. This has bearing for education – what does it take
for a particular token of knowledge, or skill to be ‘credited’ to the
individual? The motivations behind this pursuit are explained below.
Justified True Belief? A couple of problems have been raised with
the notion of knowledge as simply true belief. Ill talk about one here. Many people will also be familiar with more general concerns such as Descartes sceptic and the cogito, or more recent brain in vat arguments – Id encourage you to look those up separately (and say I think people like Edward Craig and his naturalised pragmatist epistemology (Craig, 1999) deal well with them). The reason true
beliefis problematic is because in some circumstances simply holding a belief that is true does not seem to be enough to credit an agent withknowledge`. Gettier cases show this rather nicely, for
example: * imagine walking past the door to the Oval Office, seeing an
Obama like figure at the desk, and saying “Oh, Obama is in the office”
- unbeknownst to the speaker in fact what was seen was a dummy made to
look exactly like Obama * however, Obama is indeed sitting in the
corner – unseen by the speaker In this case, the belief “Obama is in the
office” is true, but it is not clear the speaker has knowledge of this
because the belief is based on false information – that the dummy seen
by the speaker was Obama.
By Szczepan1990 12:59, 23 July 2006 (UTC) (original submission); FrostyBytes, 13 December 2006 (resubmission, minor aesthetic changes) (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
What justifies knowledge?Various suggests for how to
fix the concept of knowledge exist, including: 1. Calls to the
need for evidence (evidentialism) 2. Calls to the need for reliable
methods for coming about truths (reliabilism) The specific type of
evidence (infallible, indefeasible, etc.) or method (defined by social
practice, defined by virtue, etc.) is a topic for discussion in
epistemology. For the purposes of this post Im not going to go any further into it than that (sorry). ## Types of Knowledge ### Source of Knowledge Whether knowledge comes from internal (a priori, positivism, coherentism?) or external (a posteriori, empiricism, correspondence?) sources, and how knowledge is built up (from necessary knowledge or certain foundations e.g. foundationalism, or from a blank slate e.g. empiricism) are large debates in epistemology. Im less interested in
these areas in education, although they may well have implications. How
one acquires knowledge, though, is of interest and how we assess this in
particular – for example some sources might be: 1. Perception – but do
we have direct access ([naive] realism) or not? On what grounds can I
assume sensory information is true? 2. Introspection – but surely this,
too, is fallible 3. A priori knowledge – logically derived knowledge,
but this a) can only give us logical truths (all bachelors are unmarried
men) and may still depend on experience of the [social] world 4.
Testimony – knowledge that p because being told (by
someone/thing) that p is the case – but under what circumstances
should we take testimony at face value?# Structure of knowledge
Another strand of epistemology discusses the nature of knowledge with
respect to its atomic structure, with some claiming that knowledge can
be thought about in terms of discrete propositions (“Snow is white”)
while others claiming that the use of such expressions is bound up in
dynamic, and inextricable ways with other terms – and thus that
knowledge should be thought about in a holist way. In philosophy
of education Andrew Davis has suggested (e.g. Davis 1998, 2002, 2005 )
that educational assessment should respect holist epistemology and
explore knowledge in action, and as connected, rather than seeking to
identify discrete tokens in highly reliable ways. See also Donald
Davidson# Knowledge that, knowledge how, and knowledge by
acquaintance In addition to propositional knowledge (e.g. knowledge of
facts) or knowledge that, epistemology has discussed
knowledge how which can broadly be construed as skill or
ability, knowing how to do some thing (e.g. multiplication, writing an
essay, etc.).# Truth: Coherence v. correspondence Epistemology is
also concerned with how we decide whether something is true or not –
this relates to how we conceptualise the world; can we map ‘facts’ to
‘things’, or do we require something else (perhaps justification…). Some
theories (e.g. pragmatism) reject this discussion of truth in favour of
seeking meaning this in part motivated by a concern that theories of
truth result in a regress or presumption (there must be some first thing
on which we can base all subsequent claims) and/or that we end up caught
between the horns of coherence and correspondence theories of truth…
Coherence theories of truth suggest that knowledge is like a web – that
the truth of ones propositions rests in their accord with other propositions you hold, that is – ones beliefs must cohere to be
true. Correspondence theories of truth suggest that for a proposition to
be true (e.g. snow is white), the proposition must refer to some state
in the world (e.g. the snow is white).# Epistemology and Assessment –
My further links So why do I care about this, working in education and
computing? Well, particular views on knowledge are implicated in a range
of policies, practices, and pedagogies – including those related to
assessment. For more detail see the [epistemology posts on this
blog]5, my LAK13 paper on epistemology and learning analytics, and
perhaps also take a look at this video re: use of the internet in Danish
exams – the policy documents on this explicitly outline a different
epistemological stance to that discussed in many other countrieseducational policies (e.g.[history shall be taught as
fact]6). The work of Andrew Davis has been a great source of inspiration – although unfortunately it is (as far as I can tell) _all_ behind paywalls… ## Further Resources Id recommend: *
Keith DeRose`s (at Yale) [general introduction to
epistemology]7 (with bibliography) * or for a much longer article
the [Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy entry on epistemology]8
Bibliography Craig, Edward. _Knowledge and the state of nature : an
essay in conceptual synthesis_. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Davis, Andrew. “3: Understanding and Holism.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 32, no. 1 (1998): 41–55. >Davis, Andrew. “The Measurement of Learning.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Education, edited by Randall Curren, 272–284. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2005. http://www.blackwellreference.com.libezproxy.open.ac.uk/subscriber/uid=59/tocnode?id=g9781405140515_chunk_g978140514051522. Davis, Andrew, and K. Williams. “Epistemology and Curriculum.” In The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Education, edited by N. Blake, P. Smeyers, and R. Smith. Blackwell Reference Online, 2002. http://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=J_9WaYKxEygC&oi=fnd&pg=PA253&ots=DTsa4HxNxP&sig=DFNFobZy4E4227Up2K_CgqvE3DM. Gipps, Caroline. “Socio-Cultural Aspects of Assessment.” Review of Research in Education 24 (1999): 355. doi:10.2307/1167274. Knight, Simon, Simon Buckingham Shum, and Karen Littleton. “Epistemology, Pedagogy, Assessment and Learning Analytics.” Leuven, Belgium: ACM Press, 2013. http://oro.open.ac.uk/36635/. Suthers, Daniel D. “Technology Affordances for Intersubjective Meaning Making: A Research Agenda for CSCL.” International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning 1 (August 30, 2006): 315–337. doi:10.1007/s11412-006-9660-y. Treanor, Nick. “The Measure of Knowledge.” Noûs (2012): no–no. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0068.2011.00854.x.XFRDC22 [UPDATE 19/03/2013] For anyone interested, there are 2 Andrew Davis chapters available on google books in part. I’m afraid they’re not complete but I can’t find ‘open access’ copies, and these at least give a flavour. Direct links:http://goo.gl/pkfsk Epistemology & Curriculum google books Davis and Williams http://goo.gl/vc65L The measurement of learning – Andrew Davis
Footnotes
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http://www.slideshare.net/sjgknight/so-lar-epistemology-pedagogy-assessment-v2 ↩
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http://sjgknight.com/finding-knowledge/ma/ “MA Thesis” ↩
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http://sjgknight.com/finding-knowledge/category/epistemology/ ↩
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http://sjgknight.com/finding-knowledge/2013/01/history-shall-be-viewed-as-factual-not-constructed-stub/ ““History shall be viewed as factual, not constructed” [stub]” ↩