ABSTRACT
Educating people involves giving them knowledge and, to the extent that knowledge is a form of justified true belief, in educating people one is, to a large extent, imparting true beliefs. The question arises as to whether it matters what conception of truth an educator should subscribe to. Those who dispute whether truth is a proper goal of education would reject the question. They might, perhaps, see education as more concerned with the imparting of values and attitudes or with practical skills. Or, like Plato, they might consider the pursuit of truth to be only appropriate for a small elite. Few educators reject truth per se as an educational goal; it is more
common to see it redefined in such a way that a true proposition is no longer validated independently of human purposes. Such writers, largely from postmodernist, constructivist and pragmatist backgrounds, question whether it is ever possible to know objective truths. We cannot be acquainted with propositions that are true for all time, apart from those of mathematics and logic, because we are constantly acquiring new information, more reliable than the old, which also contradicts it. Rather than say that we are constructing the curriculum on the basis of falsehood, it would be better, it is argued, to construct it on the basis of what works for us, or what is viable (James 1910; von Glasersfeld 1989). The tendency to think in this way is strengthened by the belief that learning takes place through hypothesis testing, and the view of Popper (1959) that hypotheses can never be proved to be true. The best that can happen, on this view, is that one has access to long-standing but unrefuted positive hypotheses, whose status is not that they are true but that they are unrefuted and thus, for present purposes, utilisable. It is argued that the danger with such proposals is that they cannot
avoid making truth subjective. A true proposition is one that is viable for me; it may not necessarily be viable for you. It is then hard to see how education could be a process of introducing people to knowledge that is common to a community. One reply to this is that truth is relative to a conceptual scheme within which propositions are verified. Since conceptual schemes are invariably held in common by members of communities in order that individuals can communicate with each other, these communities have a common stock of viable propositions that ensure a common understanding and a robust set of procedures for assigning truth or falsehood to them. On this proposal, truth is relativised to communities rather than to individuals and a distinction is drawn between individual belief and communal
knowledge on the basis of the viability-determining procedures of that community. Education as a form of initiation into knowledge still has a place in such a community. An objection to this approach is that conceptual schemes may
prove to be unviable and the ‘knowledge’ held by the community may turn out to be nothing more than communally held falsehoods. The issue then turns on the rigour of the criteria that are used to admit a system of inter-subjectively held, communally viable beliefs to the status of a conceptual scheme. At the limit, there is only one unchangeable conceptual scheme. A less extreme position is that even the most viable schemes have to revise opinions of the truth of propositions over time and make changes to their verificatory procedures. On this view, education can still be concerned with objective truth, but not necessarily solely concerned with timeless and universal truths. It may be necessary to distinguish between what is true, determined by criteria held by a community or communities, and what is real; which may, to an extent, remain unknowable (Ellenbogen 2003). If this account is correct, then educators should not have any qualms about teaching propositions as objectively true where it is appropriate to do so; they should rather caution students that the degree of certainty admissible in different areas of knowledge is likely to vary, a point made long ago by Aristotle.
