ABSTRACT
In this chapter Philip Cam explains how the concept ‘community of inquiry’ ties Philosophy for Children to the American philosophical movement of pragmatism. Sharp’s interpretation of this concept applies Peirce’s and Dewey’s method of fixing belief modeled on scientific inquiry to the context of philosophical inquiry as an open-ended process of examining and reconstructing one’s beliefs and experience in collaboration with others. The process recalls Rorty’s notion of lower-case-p ‘philosophy’ as the ongoing attempt to make comprehensive sense of our world and our lives. This conception of education is not relativistic because Sharp, like Putnam, is committed to the restraint that comes from reliance on the tools of inquiry to correct error, improve conceptions, and subject opinions and ideas to criticism. For Sharp, the community of inquiry is also an introduction into a democratic way of life involving the sharing and interplay of varied interests. It is also a kind of moral education that cultivates dispositions of respect for persons, tolerance, mutuality and compassion. Sharp’s understanding of the community of inquiry as a practice of self-formation may also be regarded as an educational application of Mead’s theory of self-consciousness.
