ABSTRACT
In Chapter 5 we examine the relationship between pedagogy, pragmatist epistemology which rests on fallibilism, and inquiry. We draw attention to genuine doubt as an important part of the community of inquiry and argue that philosophy for children has underplayed its importance as an experiential feature essential for classroom practice, particularly for recognising epistemic bias and prejudice which inhibit open inquiry. Teachers, therefore, need to cultivate collective doubt. To illustrate how the process is enacted in the classroom, we introduce the notion of ‘lucid teaching’, sustained awareness of the tension between fallibility and the desire for certainty., which can facilitate the tension between the experiences of genuine doubt and belief, thereby providing pedagogical guidelines to inform teachers’ understanding of the epistemic dynamics of communal inquiry and how to mediate between the narrow-sense and wide-sense communities of inquiry. We then introduce the concept of epistemic violence to show that the community of inquiry is a kind of peace education that develops students’ abilities to turn conflict into inquiry. To this end, lucid teaching requires teachers to cultivate traitorous identities, to resist the epistemic assumptions and institutional practices of their own culture to mitigating epistemic harm caused to marginalised others.
