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Engagement, Expression, and Initiation

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A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education

Abstract

According to what has been called a “Transformational” account of education , a child comes to possess rational and conceptual capacities as a result of initiation into culture or a “form of life.” I consider how we must understand the engagement with other minds involved in education if we are to make sense of the Transformational view. I argue that Wittgenstein’s discussions of perceiving and mimicking other minds provide the resources to respond to worries one might have with the idea that a genuine meeting of minds can occur in education prior to the acquisition of sophisticated capacities for reasoning.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Readers of Wittgenstein who attribute the Transformational view to him include McDowell (1994), Williams (1999, 2010), Huemer (2006), Stickney (2008a, b), Smeyers (2008), and Bakhurst (2011). This attribution is challenged by Luntley (2008, 2009). I won’t address the interpretive question here.

  2. 2.

    According to Luntley , a Rationalist , we must “acknowledge that the learner can only respond to training if they already possess sufficient mental equipment to generate the appropriate responses” (Luntley 2008: 695). Luntley (2009) uses the labels “Empiricist” and “Rationalist ” in a similar way.

  3. 3.

    Luntley (2009) and Bakhurst (2011) also frame the question facing the Transformative view in terms of the child’s entrance into the space of reasons.

  4. 4.

    The Transformational view should not be interpreted as holding that all concepts are socially constructed, though. See Bakhurst (2011), Chap. 3 for a helpful discussion.

  5. 5.

    See Bakhurst (2011), Chap. 1 and Williams (1999) for further discussion of this process.

  6. 6.

    It won’t help to insist that, according to its advocates, the analogical and theoretical reasoning involved are implicit. If education is a meeting of minds, then it involves personal level awareness on the part of the pupil . If minds are hidden, as Inferentialists hold, then this awareness must be mediated by inferences.

  7. 7.

    Following convention, titles for Wittgenstein’s works are abbreviated (PI = Philosophical Investigations, BB = The Blue and Brown Book, OC = On Certainty, RPP I = Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I, RPP II = Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology II, Z = Zettel), with section (§) or page number (p.), with full citation and initials in the References.

  8. 8.

    I do not read Wittgenstein’s harsh use of the word “training ” to commit him to a version of Empiricism , but, as mentioned, I won’t take up the point here.

  9. 9.

    See also PI §244, PI §284, RPP1 §1070, Z §225, Z §472, for a start.

  10. 10.

    The idea that expressions of emotion serve as a commentary on the shared environment is mentioned by Roessler (2006).

  11. 11.

    If this is Wittgenstein’s view, then he must think that the same capacity at play in initiate learning is exercised in our mature knowledge of other minds , which is an intriguing suggestion.

  12. 12.

    The place of primitive , animal reactions in education is emphasized in Stickney (2008a).

  13. 13.

    Thanks to Jeff Stickney for drawing my attention to the relevance of this passage.

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  1. St. Hilda’s College, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Casey Doyle

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Correspondence to Casey Doyle .

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  1. University of Waikato, Hamilton, Waikato, New Zealand

    Michael A. Peters

  2. Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

    Jeff Stickney

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Doyle, C. (2017). Engagement, Expression, and Initiation. In: Peters, M., Stickney, J. (eds) A Companion to Wittgenstein on Education. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-3136-6_31

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