ABSTRACT
On a very weak conception of this epistemic goal, education is about instilling students with useful information (i.e. true beliefs) and useful cognitive abilities (e.g. how to do arithmetic). This doesn’t seem to capture what educationalists are aiming for, especially now that education is not generally done entirely in terms of passively learning by rote. A more sophisticated epistemic goal would be to instil students with knowledge rather than mere true belief, but even this seems to miss something important about our best educational practices. After all, one can passively acquire lots of knowledge by rote too. It seems that a more plausible epistemic goal is that of promoting understanding, where to understand something involves more than just passive knowledge. Instead, one needs to be able to grasp why something is true, rather than just know that it is true. We compare this conception of the epistemic goal of education with the idea that this goal should be instead concerned with the development of the student’s intellectual virtues, and thus her intellectual character. As we saw, these are not two competing conceptions of the epistemic goal of education, but rather go hand in hand. This is because our intellectual virtues are cognitive traits that lead us to actively seek out understanding where possible, rather than being content to merely know. Plausibly, then, the overarching epistemic goal of education is the development of intellectual character, and thus intellectual virtue, and this is why we want students to understand and not merely know. We examine the relationship between technology and education, and in particular the question of whether our increasing dependence on technology in educational settings is problematic from an epistemic point of view. This leads us to reconsider the possibility of extended cognition, and thus extended knowledge. If these are genuine possibilities, then it could be that the education of the future will be concerned to develop our extended cognitive abilities. Crucially, however, since the intellectual virtues are arguably not amenable to being cognitively extended in this way, it follows that the overarching epistemic goal of education will still be the same even if we become extended knowers in the classroom.
