ABSTRACT
The primary function of the classroom community of inquiry, which has become the primary pedagogy of Philosophy for Children (P4C), is the practice of a system of thought (Lipman 2003: 103) that constitutes an education in thinking. That practice is informed by certain epistemological commitments, on the one hand, and by pedagogical commitments on the other. In this chapter I will consider the relationship between those epistemological and pedagogical commitments and how, together, they constitute an approach to an education in thinking. In the first section of this chapter, I will show that the epistemology at the heart of P4C is pragmatic, drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey, and explain how that epistemology relates to the kind of thinking practiced in the community of philosophical inquiry. In the next section I will argue that the pragmatic epistemological commitments of P4C fulfill the characteristics that Harvey Siegel has set for any kind of education in critical thinking. In the final section I will argue that both the epistemological and the pedagogical commitments of P4C would be strengthened by incorporating the practice of ‘inquiry values’ such as clarity, precision and coherence, many of which were identified by Thomas S. Kuhn as central to scientific inquiry. Learning to think well involves identifying, understanding and applying a range of values which collectively provide the language through which we transmit our learned experience of inquiry. I will show that these values are consistent with the pragmatic epistemology informing P4C practice.
