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Abstract
Though concerned with knowledge, this article begins with unknown political events that are ignored by the culture and educational practices of the societies in whose name the events took place. The questions that these events raise indicate a relation of epistemology with ethics and education that complicates some theoretical and managerial attitudes to knowledge. This relation, along with Richard Smith’s notion of knowingness, will frame an exploration of virtue-epistemologies that contests epistemic exaggerations of the knower as accomplished virtuous character. The article emphasizes the need for a normative epistemology that critically invigorates the educational aim of transmitting knowledge and submits it to ethico-political considerations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Despite its being questioned as too uniform, this designation, for good reasons and too many to account here (Kennedy Citation1996), resists facile assumptions of being entirely deconstructible or too pluriform to be operative.
2. Various not-known events constitute a challenge well beyond the ethico-political realm. They can be conducive to revealing deep flaws in many current philosophical accounts and treatments of epistemology, its status and its relation to ontology and affectivity. But this challenge cannot be further indicated, let alone dealt with here, for reasons of space.
3. Mark Curtis employs in his relevant books archival proof that corroborates the claim that this was a pretext known to be false by the British officials. For such books, see http://markcurtis.info/.
4. Here, I mainly rely on Curtis’s (Citation2004) essay so as to limit the length of the article. But there have been very many other and newer studies of the Chagos case. Those by D. Vine, P. Sand and P. Harris are included in the references list of this article but many more have been left out for reasons of space.
5. ‘The US and UK governments have evaded accountability by way of a persistent “black hole” strategy, contending that some national laws and international treaties for the protection of human rights and the environment do not apply to the island – a position confirmed by a controversial appellate judgment of the House of Lords in October 2008, essentially relying on “prerogative” colonial law’ (Sand Citation2009, 113). Some of Peter Sand’s claims and charges have been contested in the relevant literature by one governmental source and corroborated by other sources. For this exchange and for Sand’s excellent response, see the relevant issue (21, 1) of The Journal of Environmental Law.
6. I deliberately allude to Rawls’ theory of justice so as to indicate its cosmopolitan deficits through such a twist of the meaning of the veil of ignorance. A justice that deserves the name requires epistemic awareness of ethico-political debts.
7. It is true that not all cases of human rights violations on the part of big powers are glossed over. Some are known and well debated. Yet, this may be significant as such. Here is Curtis: ‘Britain’s invasion of Egypt in 1956 is the only British military intervention over the past 50 years that has been severely criticized and government motives questioned in the mainstream. Why is this? The reason is obvious – Britain lost’ (Curtis Citation2004, 278).
8. This lacuna is all the more worrying, if we consider, for instance, how the case of Chagos and Diego Garcia offers material for much philosophical-political and educational work on issues of a nuanced sense of exile, on states of exception, camps and encampments pace Giorgio Agamben; on adding nuance and more political sensitivity to notions of roots, rhizomes and de-territorialization drawn from Deleuze; and on ecological and educational cosmopolitanisms – all fashionable trends in educational philosophy now, but totally unexplored in the light of issues such as Chagos. Chagos also provides possibilities of challenging the modish wholesale indictment of human rights discourses and of showing that gestural privilege of responsibility to the Other over rights is discursively and politically exclusivist in a very un-cosmopolitan fashion.
9. OECD, About PISA. http://www.oecd.org/pisa/aboutpisa Downloaded: 15 February 2015.
10. I am not saying that the transmission-metaphor is adequate, nor that it is devoid of complicities; what I am saying is that it has some hidden ethical potentialities that have not yet been adequately acknowledged or theorized.
11. See, for instance, publications related to the trend in action research that reflects John Elliott’s and Wilfred Carr’s treatment of the ‘theory vs practice’ binary opposition.
12. I am extracting this phrase from Dunne (Citation1993, 240). The full passage reads as follows: ‘If the ethical life which is taken up with these human affairs now appears, by contrast with the godly life of theory, almost as a cave-like mode of existence, then one begins to ask whether phronesis, for all its suppleness and flair, does not appear, from the vantage point of theory, much as a dog’s great sensitivity in smelling and sniffing might appear from the vantage point of phronesis itself’ (ibid., emph. mine).
13. In fact, the place Rorty occupies in Badiou’s pantheon of thought is that of a ‘minor sophist’: ‘We can and we must write a Republic and a Symposium for our contemporaries. Just as, for the major sophists, there were a Gorgias and a Protagoras, so must there be a Nietzsche and a Wittgenstein. And, for the minor sophists, a Vattimo and a Rorty. No more nor any less polemical, no more nor any less respectful’ (Badiou Citation1999, 137).
14. Christopher Norris gives a different interpretation of Badiou’s position on propositional knowledge and hence doubts his proximity to either postmodern epistemology or virtue-epistemology, arguing that affirmations of ‘propositional knowledge’ epistemology are everywhere implicit in Badiou’s account of scientific advances. Elsewhere, I argue (Papastephanou Citation2011) that, despite such implicit affirmations, Badiou (explicitly as well as a result of some of his ontological and political assumptions) dismisses this epistemology without reformulating it in ways that do justice to his implicit take on it. Still, an unpacking of this point is reserved for further and lengthier works.
15. On my more general discussion of the epistemological significance of operations of concepts with quote-marks and concepts minus the quote-marks see Papastephanou (Citation1999).
16. In my view, the disjunctive ‘or’ connecting anchors and criteria facilitates a placing of them together as equally expendable epistemic notions. I believe that criteria and anchors should be treated separately, as the latter’s expendability (which is also debatable) does not entail an expendability of the former.
17. So far, virtue epistemology has been transferred to the philosophical-educational debates that mainly reflect either (post-) analytic or neo-Aristotelian perspectives. The present article attempts to associate virtue-epistemology and some related Aristotelian ideas with ‘continental-philosophical’ sensibilities regarding knowledge and ethical education. Furthermore, the article challenges the received connection of virtue epistemology with educational philosophy that has been carried out through modalities that evoke ‘one-way’ transfers and ‘application to/implications for’ education. Smith’s notion of knowingness offers us the critical tool for posing questions to virtue epistemology from an education-philosophical point of view.
18. Still, scoring better does not mean, in my view, explaining fully. In fact, the psychological tint of the ‘virtue/lack of virtue’ explanation may obfuscate other, more ‘material’ explanations, e.g. socio-political ones, that should also be taken into account.
19. Chagos is a case which, by the way, has never come up in any political-liberal textuality (Rawlsian or other, acclaimed or not) as an example inviting a theorization of application of principles.
20. Within Realpolitik frameworks, a semantic precariousness is constructive when each side in a dispute construes the meaning of the precarious idea or measure in convenient ways and thus is drawn into an agreement without insisting on finding truly common ground. This is supposed to lead to a modus Vivendi that suits the purposes primarily of the third party, the referee or arbiter of a dispute.
21. Belief-based epistemology considers beliefs the primary objects of epistemic evaluation. As evaluations of beliefs, knowledge and justification become fundamental epistemic concepts and properties. In contrast, ‘in virtue epistemology, agents rather than beliefs are the primary objects of epistemic evaluation’; as evaluations of agents, intellectual virtues and vices become ‘the fundamental concepts and properties’ (Battaly Citation2008, 640).
22. In Book III (1233b, 25) of Eudemian Ethics, Nemesis is one of the additions to Aristotle’s list of virtues and graces of character that is found in Nicomachean Ethics. https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus-data/L285.pdf.
23. Such are cases of wrong-doing which belong to the very distant past (e.g. human sacrifice in Aztec culture) and whose involved parties are beyond ‘redirection’ and beyond any such benefits from our condemning judgement. Critically judging such cases is always appropriate, but exaggerated lingering, without concern for issues that are still pending or whose involved parties should be affected by the judgement, simply produces facile and ‘harmless’ exemplarity, moralistic psychic discharge and politics of no high stakes.
24. Human frailty points to the ephemeral character of knowledge that should always be taken into account, but it cannot render ethical decisions on grounds of knowledge less pressing. It only puts them in a different perspective and a different temporal frame. It does not cancel the epistemological urgency of the question: how should the student ponder the moral knowledge that the Chagos handling by her government is wrong and that the ignorance of the event is also morally wrong?
25. Compare here Oedipus’s exchange with the herdsman when Oedipus is about to hear the truth from the herdsman. ‘Herdsman: O God, I am on the brink of frightful speech. Oedipus: and I of frightful hearing. But I must hear’. Sophocles, 1341–1342. http://abs.kafkas.edu.tr/upload/225/Oedipus_the_King_Full_Text.pdf.
26. They are ‘complex states, exemplified situationally, which draw on an appropriate feeling and capacity to act in the right way, at the right time, for the right reasons. This requires an alignment of cognition, affection and volition’ (ibid.).
27. Admittedly, the degree to which knowingness can be theorized or not within the confines of virtue-epistemology as an intellectual vice cannot be argued out here. But this does not block the use of knowingness as a conceptual tool for critiquing virtue-epistemology here anyway. Smith’s notion of knowingness can also provide the following nuance to Badiou’s thesis about truth and knowledge: instead of claiming that ‘truth makes a hole on the body of knowledge’ I suggest that we claim that ‘knowledge of truth (sometimes) makes a hole on the body of knowingness’.