Learning to communicate or communicating to learn? A conceptual discussion on communication, meaning, and knowledge

Abstract

As the conditions for students’ prospects of acquiring knowledge in school often are thought of as something that must be improved in the political rhetoric, it is also urgent, as Michael F. D. Young has argued, to ask what kind of knowledge should be the basis of the curriculum and to recognize the question of knowledge as central to the curricular debate. This article examines the grounds for a relational and communicative understanding of education. Drawing on John Dewey’s reconstruction of the concept of experience and Donald Davidson’s meaning theory in terms of three varieties of knowledge, the emphasis is on an inter‐subjective conceptualization of meaning and knowledge and its implications. Central themes in the analysis are communication as a condition for the acquisition of knowledge; a shared, but not identical, world as a point of reference; and an approach to specialized knowledge as judgement formation. As a conclusion it is argued that one condition for acquisition of knowledge, in terms of meaning, is to participate in and be influenced by conversations with a shared purpose, within and between different groups.

Keywords:

• curriculum theory
• knowledge
• meaning
• communication

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Jim Garrison and his written comments; and to Professor David T. Hansen and Professor Megan Laverty, and the doctoral students in the Programme of Philosophy and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, for their helpful comments when I presented an initial version of this paper at a colloquium at Teachers College in November 2008. I am also grateful to The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education for its financial contribution to my stay as a visiting scholar in the US.

Notes

1. In this paper I use the concept of ‘knowledge’, alongside with ‘meaning’, since knowledge is a more usual term within the educational policy rhetoric. My aim in using the broader concept ‘experience’ is to understand knowledge in relation to meaning. Dewey did not develop a theory of knowledge in an ‘ordinary’ sense; instead he stressed the process of inquiry (within experience) and the term ‘warranted assertibility’ (cf. Hickman 1998: 166).

2. Richard Rorty often referred to both Dewey and Davidson, albeit maybe not so often in the same context. It should be said at once that Rorty did not think that Dewey’s concept of ‘experience’ was a satisfactory philosophical concept (cf. Rorty 1992: 373, 2003: 72–89). Rorty admired Dewey’s way of breaking free from the conception of philosophy as foundational (Rorty 1980: 5), but he did not think that Dewey’s understanding of ‘experience’ contributed to that project. Instead, Rorty argued, Davidson was the one who brought ‘the naturalism, the holism and the antidualism characteristic of both Dewey and Quine’ to its logical conclusion (Rorty 1992: 373). Following Davidson, sentences were now thought of as ‘strings of marks and noises’ used by human beings in their striving for achieving their ends within social practises (op.cit.). To develop a truth‐theory for a given language is to give a systematic theory of meaning for the language, but it is about all that can be said about truth from a philosophical point of view, according to Rorty (2003: xxvi).

3. For this clarifying formulation, I am thankful Professor Jim Garrison’s written comments.

4. This way of understanding meaning corresponds largely to what George Herbert Mead conceives as the ‘significant gesture’ or the ‘significant symbol’ within social psychology. With reference to Mead, language merely brings out a situation which is already, logically and implicitly, imbedded in the social process. Mead comments: ‘Dewey says that meaning comes into existence through communication’ (Mead 1995: 74; my translation). Mead interprets Dewey’s statement as a statement assigned to the content of which the social process gives rise to. The logical structure of meaning lies, according to Mead, in the triad relation between the gesture, the adapted response, and the result of a given social action (Mead 1995: 74).

5. For a discussion on diversity and difference, cf. Biesta (2002: 346–347). For a discussion on a shared but not identical world, cf. Biesta (2004: 16).