Lifelong Learning and Knowledge: Towards a General Theory of Professional Inquiry

Our knowledge is like a map by which we steer our way through the natural (and therefore the social) world. Such maps are better or worse to the extent that they enable us to do better than chance in both formulating good goals and attaining them. The case for lifelong learning resides largely in the fact that in important respects our knowledge goes out of date more rapidly nowadays, either because the world changes in ways that render the map less useful for navigation, or because inquiry leads to new knowledge that renders the old obsolete.

Drawing on work in the tradition of naturalistic epistemology, in general, and cognitive neuroscience, in particular, this chapter attempts to cash out the map metaphor by defending a view of both the representation and the dynamics of knowledge.

Arguing from this perspective, a general thesis about epistemically progressive inquiry across the lifespan is proposed that has the following features: it is holist in that it applies in the same way to a range of different areas of inquiry; it is empirical in that it takes into account feedback from experience; it is coherentist in that knowledge is justified by appeal to coherence criteria of justification; and it is naturalistic in that models of cognitive biological mechanisms are proposed that realize this view of the nature of knowledge, representation, and inquiry.