Stephen Bloch-Schulman
Elon University
Philosophy

On Philosophical Evidence-Mindedness and Its Development

Original Statement:

I teach philosophy at the college level and find that students do not understand (or do not fully understand) how to read, write and think in an evidence-minded way and that, because argument and the evaluation of evidence is the central schema of doing philosophy, that learning how to teach it better is essential to the most effective teaching of philosophy.  But what it is, how it looks, and the various stages of its development are still only hazily or theoretically known, and I want to explore philosophical evidence-mindedness as a concrete phenomenon. The guiding question in this project, therefore, is: How can we better teach philosophical evidence-mindedness?

Answering that requires coming to better understand evidence-mindedness, what is unique about philosophical evidence-mindedness, and how to teach philosophical evidence-mindedness, which are subsidiary questions that must be answered before I can answer the guiding question.

Subsidiary to these subsidiary questions are the following: What is philosophical evidence-mindedness?  What separates philosophical evidence-mindedness from other forms of evidence-mindedness?  Are there stages in the development of philosophical evidence-mindedness and, if there are, what are they?  What would philosophical evidence-mindedness look like in practice, what signs are there that it exists or is absent for a particular person at a particular time?  How can I teach it, and how can I teach it in a way that transfers outside of the philosophy classroom into other classes and into extracurricular life?

Questions of methodology are central to this entire endeavor, as the very questions I am asking focus on what counts as evidence.  Doing this work in a philosophical way is a particular challenge, as, all too often, when philosophers do SoTL research, they use methods that are foreign to them and this often leads to unconvincing and sloppy or shallow work.  I am interested in thinking about teaching and learning philosophy philosophically—which means, for me, from a critical theoretical/phenomenological perspective informed by race/gender and political considerations. 

That is, I need to create or discover a method for doing this work.  There are many models of methodology that will not do.  In fact, if I knew how to analyze the evidence philosophically, I would not need to do the project.  So, the answer will have to emerge from the data itself, rather than being something that gets imposed from outside, through a hermeneutic of reading and analysis, where I will begin with a sense for what I am looking for, begin to look, and as I look, what I am looking for and how I am looking for it will be refined so that I am looking better and so that I know better what I am looking for.  There are some examples of texts that take up the questions of methodology, none more explicitly than Feminist Inquiry: From Political Conviction to Methodological Innovation by Mary E. Hawkesworth.

Methods used so far

I have written a think aloud prompt, have administered it and have worked with students who have administered the think aloud prompt to three philosophers, one graduate student in philosophy, two faculty members outside of philosophy (one in English and one in Computer Science), and to members of my Reclaiming Democracy class (8 students, of different ages, only one of whom is a philosophy major).  I have focused almost exclusively on the think alouds by philosophers, and almost exclusively on the think aloud of Ann Cahill.  I began to analyze it, but, as I did, I found that a tremendous amount of the careful work I was doing was for naught: Sam Wineburg’s exceptionally good, Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts had already seen what I was seeing, and he describes it better than I could.  For example, he describes the kind of “cultivating puzzlement” that is the hallmark of Cahill’s think aloud.

In addition, I continue to be stumped by the methodological questions that involve how to analyze the think alouds in a way that is both philosophical and convincing to others both within and outside of the humanities.  Wineburg’s methodologies are fairly traditional, doing coding and using largely qualitative data (with some quantitative measures) to analyze the think alouds he has done.  But this leaves the questions I am interested unaffected: these are not philosophical methodologies.  While some philosophers might use something that utilizes these same methodologies (as philosophers are a wildly diverse group and some use just about any methodology one could name, including the strictly scientific, the ethnological, the social scientific), these are not the methodologies I have been trained in and these are methodologies I have significant concerns about.

In conversation with Kelly Flannery, who is doing an undergraduate research project in tandem with my own project here, we have come to focus on one question in particular, which is both the question I will be focused on as I am analyzing in think alouds (from here on in, for a while) and in regard to the methodologies that I am using in analyzing the think alouds, namely, what is commonly called the question of theory.  For example, see Pat Hutchings and Mary Hubers’ short editorial, “The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in the Humanities: The Place—and Problem—of Theory.” (1)

But this formulation is not quite right, either, as the word theory itself is problematic, and its problems have been analyzed quite convincingly in the work of, among others, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt.  These philosophers point to the link between the term theory and its Greek origins in the term “theoria” which means “a looking at, viewing, contemplation, speculation, theory, also a sight, a spectacle.”  Furthermore, the modern use is, as the OED writes, probably a Latin translation from Aristotle’s use of the term. (2) 

What both Heidegger and Arendt find problematic in the use of theoria is, in a large part, its contemplative emphasis, an emphasis that takes it force from Plato’s use of theory in a way that lays down the real/apparent distinction in a way that they (and I) reject.  As these philosophers describe it, theoria is an attempt to gain a grasp of the whole in a single comprehensive vision.  But, as they point out, we are already in the world, and therefore we cannot and ought not attempt to/pretend to be able to gain a grasp from the outside, though we have dreamt of doing so since Plato. (3)

The question, then, is: when Cahill refers to Foucault’s conception of power, what is she doing and why? 

In their work, “On the Evidence of Theory: Close Reading as a Disciplinary Model for Writing about Teaching and Learning,” Randy Bass and Sherry Linkon take up the role of theory in the scholarship of teaching and learning, writing that “In literature, theory substitutes for data, in that it is theory (literary and educational) that makes the interpretation of practice (the ‘reading’) possible and valid.”  When I wrote to her and asked for a clarification—because, as I wrote, “while we can see how theory does allow a kind of validity (intersubjective, I might call it, rather than some other kinds of validity), and does make interpretation possible, it seems that there are key ways in which it plays different roles than data plays in other fields”—she wrote back, explaining: “We simply talk about reading the text, and that is governed by theory. Literary scholars do use data -- the text itself as well as contextual data, most commonly -- but what gives an argument validity is not that the data is good but that the theory that connects it is persuasive.”  She then writes that “Theory provides the explanatory framework through which a reading makes sense.” 

I agree, and this opens up the questions I am now interested in asking, about the nature of the validity offered through this type of analysis and about the role of (what others call) theory in helping us make sense of what we are reading, and of our lives.  In part, I am wondering what role (what others call) theory plays in freedom, in both the respect and the resistance that is named in the title of Rabinowitz and Smith’s work, Authorizing Readers: Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature.