Conceptual engineering has taken off as a philosophical methodology. This book asks what happens when conceptual engineering is applied to philosophy of education. The first section of the book focuses on arguments for and against conceptual engineering in education. The second section comprises chapters that illustrate what conceptual engineering looks like in practice when applied to educational issues. The end result is an exploration of conceptual engineering in relation to education, and simultaneously of what it means to engage in analytic philosophy of education more generally.
Analytic philosophy of education was first advocated for in the 1940s by Charles D. Hardie, but more broadly pioneered in the 1960s by, among others, Richard S. Peters, Paul Hirst and Israel Scheffler. This was in response to an emerging analytic focus in philosophy departments, mostly in the United Kingdom and United States. Mirroring what was happening in these departments, analytic philosophy of education represented a break with a more synthetic or continental tradition of philosophy. It also represented a break from German idealism and a move towards realism and empiricism.
To illustrate this move from what might be called synthetic philosophy, to analytic philosophy, Peters explains that
There was a time when it was taken for granted that the philosophy of education consisted in the formulation of high-level directives … These expectations of philosophy still persist in ordinary language. They are as implicit in the question ‘What is the philosophy of education?’ as they are in the question ‘What is the philosophy of life?’ Professional philosophers, however, are embarrassed by such expectations. (Peters, 1966, p. 15)2
The move outlined by Peters is from an expectation that philosophy is concerned with synthetic philosophy of life type questions that make broad claims, to technical work on words and concepts that makes narrower claims.
A similar move from synthetic to analytic philosophy was evident in philosophy departments at the time. Dorothy Emmet’s striking response to a UNESCO questionnaire about teaching philosophy in schools hits many of the same notes as Peters’ embarrassment with more synthetic expectations:
I ought to say, I think, that most of my colleagues felt rather indignant that an alleged fact-finding questionnaire should be framing questions in a way which suggested continually that philosophy ought to be ideologically directed. We cannot share this view, not because we disagree with the democratic ideology, but because this is to us a false view of the nature of philosophy … the impact of philosophy on the community at large must be largely indirect; the philosopher or philosophers cannot usurp the function of the priest or the preacher, the doctor or the psycho-analyst. (Emmet, in MacKinnon, 1953, pp. 119–120)
In contrast, the philosopher of education, L.A. Reid, a contemporary of both Emmet and Peters, pushed back with the view that a philosophical enterprise that does not ‘guide humanity’ is misguided. Instead, ‘the proper function of analysis is the better understanding of the wholes which are analysed; it is servant and not master … if synthesis without analysis is empty, or at least muddled, analysis without synthesis is blind, or at least pointless or feckless’ (1965, p.24). For Reid, broader answers to bigger questions ought to guide philosophy of education. Conceptual analysis is excessively narrow.
This division between a more synthetic vision of philosophy, and a more analytic vision is still at play in philosophy of education. Education departments are heavily influenced by learning sciences, which are focused on how to streamline learning outcomes. At a more philosophical level, the influence of the discipline of sociology is evident. Here, there is a tendency to draw on and contribute to continental, postmodern, and synthetic philosophical traditions. When analytic philosophy of education is added to the mix, the different philosophical traditions tend to end up running somewhat in tandem. These can be hard to square with one another.
For example, in the 2008 edition of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Philosophy of Education, D.C. Phillips writes that ‘it is sobering to reflect that only a few decades have passed since practitioners of analytic philosophy of education had to meet in individual hotel rooms, late at night, at annual meetings of the Philosophy of Education Society in the USA, because phenomenologists and others barred their access to the conference programs’ (Phillips, 2008). While this is no longer the case, it is still often true that ‘the differences in backgrounds and assumptions means that there is much mutual incomprehension’ between different philosophers of education (Phillips, 2008).
One of the aims of this book is to try to shed light on what it is that analytic philosophers of education are doing and why. Clearly stating aims and methodology for conceptual analysis in education, rather than presenting it as a movement or an -ism, might go some way towards building bridges with other philosophical traditions in education. It seems likely that analytic philosophers of education share overlapping concerns and aims with their colleagues. It would thus be a shame if mutual incomprehension about the aims of different philosophical styles stymied potentially fruitful collaboration.
Another aim of this book is to address a second problem for analytic philosophy of education- that it is sometimes seen as isolated from philosophy proper, and thus provincial in nature. Philip Kitcher prefaces his 2022 book The Main Enterprise of the World with the claim that ‘philosophy of education is viewed not only as a narrowly applied subfield, but also as one in which work is humdrum and unsophisticated’ (2022, ix). He quickly corrects this misconception by naming ‘a significant number of scholars … who are doing work in philosophy of education that meets the highest professional standards’ (2022, ix), but the slight persists. From the perspective of someone working in a philosophy department, philosophy of education can present itself as an island of its own. It has its own journals, conferences, and often takes place in seemingly distant education departments.
Where there is a paucity of engagement with philosophy of education from departmental philosophy, this is a shame. Philosophy of education is a particularly rich area for applied philosophical study. Education plays a central role in almost everybody’s life. It is possibly the largest state mandated intervention into large swathes of a population’s time and liberty. Philosophy of education asks questions about institutions, policy making, educational practices, childhood, curriculum, ontology, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and a vast range of social justice issues. Studying education can furnish philosophers with in-depth case studies to develop more abstract philosophical theories.
What Does Conceptual Engineering Have to Offer?
It is our view that exploring the role of conceptual engineering in education can begin to address the issues arising in the previous section of this introduction. First, it is true that there is a tendency in some analytic work to emphasize detail rather than the bigger picture, and this demands some explication. A conceptual engineering methodology can provide some rationale. By focusing on concepts, analytic philosophers are not shirking bigger picture issues, but addressing the bigger picture issues through conceptual analysis. Conceptual engineers see their work as clarifying the concepts we ought to use; and it is this ‘ought’ that links concepts to the bigger picture.
The most cited paper by authors in this collection is Sally Haslanger’s Gender and Race: (What) are they? (What) do We Want Them to Be (2000) she identifies three different ways of answering the conceptual question “What is X”. Using the example of ‘knowledge’ she points out that we might ‘be asking: What is our concept of knowledge? (looking to apriori methods for an answer). On a more naturalistic reading one might be asking: What (natural) kind (if any) does our epistemic vocabulary track? Or one might be undertaking a more revisionary project: What is the point of having a concept of knowledge? What concept (if any) would do that work best?’ (2000, p.33). If applied to asking which concept would work best when pursuing educational ideals, Haslanger’s revisionary methodology introduces questions of value into conceptual analysis. The role of conceptual analysis in education is to ask how concepts ought to be understood to better suit the world we want to live in. There is an explicit emphasis on the bigger picture: what do we want from education?
However, Haslanger is not insensitive to the importance of established aspects of conceptual analysis. According to Haslanger, we are already situated within a tradition of linguistic practices that, to a large extent, is out of our control. It would be a mistake to ignore those practices: ‘We are situated inquirers, and the question is how we should go on, given where we have been, where we are now, and where we are trying to go’ (2020, p. 246). While Haslanger embraces the value of carefully examining concepts, a purely descriptive approach either ignores the normative question of which concepts we ought to employ, ‘or assumes implausibly that the […] concepts we do employ are the ones we ought to’ (2012, p. 351).
This subtle shift from analysis for the sake of analysis, to analysis for the sake of normative concerns, has several advantages. First, the shift in focus demonstrates why philosophers of education should be interested in concepts. The interest lies not only in providing clarity and accuracy about educational concepts, but also in working with educational concepts to shape educational policy and practice for the better. Like any educational researcher, the analytic philosopher of education cares about what happens in the world. Conceptual engineering, with its emphasis on the sorts of concepts we ought to use, makes educational values a transparent part of the analytic methodology. Second, and in response to Kitcher’s comments in the previous section, philosophy of education keeps abreast of trends in departmental philosophy. This helps to bridge the gap between departmental philosophy and philosophy of education; two fields which ought to be closer than they are.
What is Conceptual Engineering?
Haslanger’s account of revisionary conceptual analysis is by no means the only way of understanding conceptual engineering. Other accounts are mentioned and put to good use in the chapters of this book.
Michael Hand’s chapter starts from Chalmers’ account of conceptual engineering as ‘the process of designing, implementing and evaluating concepts’ (Chalmers, 2020, p.2). Hand draws an analogy with structural engineering where there are two options: ‘De novo engineering is building a new bridge, program, concept, or whatever. Re-engineering is fixing or replacing an old bridge, program, concept, or whatever’ (2020, p. 6). Both of these forms of conceptual engineering are discussed at various points in this book.
Mark Pinder describes conceptual engineering as ‘the process of improving our conceptual and linguistic repertoires. This may involve introducing new concepts or terms, replacing existing concepts or terms, revising the content of existing concepts or terms, or eliminating defunct concepts or terms’. He describes conceptual engineering as ‘commonplace’, and something that takes place ‘when researchers introduce or refine technical terms, when lawyers and policymakers construct formal definitions of terms, when the rules of new board games are codified with bespoke concepts, when oppressed groups reclaim slurs, when parents try to stop their children from using new slang, when politicians or journalists coin new terms, and so on’.
James Andow similarly describes conceptual engineering as ‘a broad camp’. He says that it ‘is concerned with evaluating extant and proposed conceptual resources for use by a population, as well as the design and implementation of improved conceptual resources for them. Understood thus, conceptual engineering could take many forms and be employed in many domains by many kinds of actors to many purposes and with respect to many different kinds of populations of end concept users’.
Gerry Dunne starts with Nietzsche, who he describes as having ‘a radical scepticism about all inherited concepts’. According to Dunne, conceptual engineering can be read as a response to Nietzsche’s scepticism. Rather than accepting ordinary concepts, paradigmatic conceptual engineering projects ‘comprise: (i) an inquirer or community of inquirers focusing on the meaning of a specific term (typically regarded as proxy for the concept the term expresses); (ii) arguing for such meaning’s defectiveness along a certain dimension, and (iii) proposing a change they deem conducive to some form of representational progress’. Dunne cites Cappelen, Plunkett and Burgess’ paper A guided tour of conceptual engineering and conceptual ethics (2020) as a useful introduction to what conceptual engineering is.
Christian Norefalk adds the idea of ‘applied conceptual ethics’ to how conceptual engineering is understood. In any linguistic repertoire, ‘some concepts are better–in some sense or other–than others’ and part of the philosopher’s role is to act as guardians when concepts are being hijacked with ideological purposes in relation to our normative concerns. In his chapter, he examines two examples where the intention of ameliorating the concept ‘education’ goes wrong; one from Jack Marley Payne and one from Gert Biesta. Norefalk concludes that both suggestions should be rejected.
Conceptual engineering is nowhere presented as a single, refined and rigid methodology. This is true of the field of conceptual engineering as a whole too. Instead, it constitutes a set of analytical tools that consider the roles that concepts play, and explicitly builds normative concerns into conceptual analysis.
Among the chapters in this book, Gatley, Dunne and Norefalk present the case for conceptual engineering in education. The first chapter is an abridged version of Gatley’s 2022 paper. We felt it was worth including as it has been cited throughout the book. She argues that philosophy of education is replete with concepts that would benefit from ameliorative analysis. Dunne uses the example of how evidence is understood and used in educational practice to argue that teachers would benefit from engaging with conceptual analysis and conceptual engineering. Norefalk argues for what he calls ‘piecemeal’ engineering to ensure that concepts are not radically revised to their detriment.
Hand, Andow and Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley provide arguments against conceptual engineering. Hand raises concerns about what is lost when the meanings of words are deliberately altered; in particular he is worried about a loss of clarity that would be detrimental to fruitful educational discourse. Mountbatten-O’Malley takes a Wittgensteinian starting point and makes the stronger claim that ordinary concepts are not open to the sort of revisions proposed by some conceptual engineering projects. Andow points to the dangers of engineering concepts without due diligence to potentially wide-ranging real-world harms that conceptual engineering might bring about. It is worth noting that all of these chapters draw on examples from educational practice and policy to illustrate their points.
Conceptual Engineering in Practice
The second part of this book consists of chapters that apply conceptual engineering to specific issues in education. These include Pinder’s chapter on critical thinking, Alice Monypenny’s chapter on safety in the classroom, Ruth Wareham’s chapter on indoctrination, Kevin William’s chapter on mental health and Alexandros Nikolaidis’ chapter on educational justice. In doing so, these chapters add to arguments for using conceptual engineering in education by illustrating how it can contribute to educational thinking.
The applied chapters are an important feature of this book. While abstract arguments for or against conceptual engineering may be persuasive, whether or not the methodology can make headway when put into action needs to be demonstrated. Philosophy of education is an applied field, and educational concepts play an important role in the social world. Education is thus a promising testing ground for conceptual engineering as a methodology.
This is illustrated by Monypenny’s work on what safety should mean in the classroom. Her chapter starts with the claim that the concept of ‘safety’ pertains to central applied issues such as ‘freedom of speech, censorship and the role of the university in contemporary society’. Furthermore, ‘since the early 2010s numerous commentaries on safe space policies and their effects have been published by academics, journalists and student activists’. Familiar media discussions about safety in the classroom and accusations of pandering to a “snowflake” generation show the importance of clarifying what ‘safety’ should mean in the classroom.
Similarly, Nikolaidis examines the concept of educational justice. He points out that ‘the pursuit of and advocacy for particular education policies – whether these be associated with leftist (e.g., public schooling, cultural responsiveness, restorative practices) or rightist (e.g., market-based school choice, strict standards, orderly classrooms) political ideologies – is usually couched within the discourse of educational justice’. He examines three possible concepts of educational justice and uses an engineering methodology to provide reasons for preferring what he calls ‘an alternative conception of educational justice as epistemic empowerment and developmental enablement’.
Wareham highlights what she calls ‘the harms of indoctrination discourse’. Here, ‘indoctrination’ is often used as a ‘pejorative stick for users to beat their perceived opponents in an ongoing culture war’. One example that she uses is the case of reforms to Relationships and Sex Education: ‘In this context, parents who are opposed to such teaching often complain that compulsory lessons on sex and relationships constitute indoctrination, particularly … when the subject seeks to include same-sex relationships and diverse gender identities’. The content of the concept ‘indoctrination’ shapes discourse, and discourse can shape policy.
The concepts of ‘safety’, ‘educational justice’ and ‘indoctrination’ play active roles in society. How they are understood alters very public discussions about what education should look like. These discussions can potentially alter the lives of anyone exposed to educational policy. Monypenny, Nikolaidis and Wareham discuss how conceptual engineering can help to ensure that educational concepts play a valuable, rather than harmful role in society. The authors provide careful analyses that pay attention to traditional analytic standards such as conceptual clarity and ordinary usage. However, they also highlight the roles that concepts actually play in practice, and work to ameliorate the more harmful of these roles by considering what it is that we want these concepts for.
Pinder’s chapter, ‘Conceptual engineering in, and of, critical thinking’ is an applied chapter in a slightly different sense. While Pinder does offer an engineered concept of critical thinking, he simultaneously illustrates the place of conceptual engineering as an essential element of critical thinking. According to Pinder, good thinking includes ‘concept assessment’, something that is a part of conceptual engineering methodology. Since critical thinking is something that many schools teach for, this alteration in how critical thinking is understood implies the need to change critical thinking lessons. Pinder thus provides another example of how conceptual engineering can play an active role in the field of education. He also illustrates how considering an applied educational issue can further develop abstract concepts. Analyses of critical thinking and related concepts such as rationality and intellectual virtue can be developed by considering what they might mean in a classroom.
Williams’ chapter on mental health in education argues that conceptual engineers would do well to draw on literary resources to ‘promote conceptual enhancement’. Mental health is yet another concept that plays a central role in educational policy and practice. It is difficult to grasp and prone to harmful misconceptions. Williams starts with R.S. Peters’ (1971) account of the concept of mental health and then proceeds to illustrate how depictions of mental health in literary sources can refine and enhance an educational concept by grounding it in vivid depictions of the world. This illustrates a potential role for the use of literary examples to inform conceptual engineering.
Together these chapters illustrate how conceptual engineering for educational purposes can work. They provide reasons to think that conceptual engineering can be both rigorous and constructive. The applied chapters demonstrate how normative concerns are central to educational concepts, and how educational concepts shape educational policy and practice. Through examining different possible analyses of concepts, they show that engineering approaches can provide the sorts of tools needed for arbitrating between competing concepts whilst keeping a firm focus on educational concerns.
Conclusion
A vision for analytic philosophy of education was set out by its pioneers in the 1960s but its methodology has seldomly been revisited in-depth. In the meantime, progress has been made in how analytic philosophy is understood in philosophy departments. We hope that this book re-ignites a discussion about what analytic philosophy of education is, and why it is valuable.
We also hope that this book provides a positive vision for analytic philosophy of education going forward. As conceptual engineers, analytic philosophers of education pursue conceptual clarity, but not at the expense of normative concerns, questions of value, or the real-world effects of educational concepts. Achieving this balance can involve engineering new concepts, ameliorating existing concepts, eliminating problematic concepts, or arbitrating between competing concepts. While checks and balances are needed to avoid over-engineering, harmful engineering, inappropriate engineering, or loss of clarity, we hope that the book provides examples of how this can be done in its carefully considered applied chapters.
Finally, we invite those based in philosophy departments to consider exploring philosophy of education further. Philosophy of education covers issues central to many areas of philosophy. If these issues themselves are not of interest, questions about education provide a valuable test for what happens to abstract concepts when they are released into the social world. Rather than being a provincial backwater, philosophy of education sits at the heart of social philosophy and can provide a rich testing ground for philosophically central concepts.
References
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Gatley, J. (2022). Ameliorating educational concepts and the value of analytic philosophy of education. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 55(4), 508–518. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131857.2022.2117029.
Haslanger, S. (2000) Gender and Race: (What) are they? (What) do we want them to be? Nous. 34(1), 31–55. https://doi.org/10.1111/0029-4624.00201.
Haslanger, S. (2020). Going On, Not in the Same Way. In Burgess, A. Cappelen, H, Plunkett, D. (Eds.). Conceptual Engineering and Conceptual Ethics. (pp. 230–260) Oxford University Press.
MacKinnon, D. (1953). The Teaching of Philosophy in the United Kingdom. In Canguilhem G. (Ed.). The Teaching of Philosophy: an international inquiry of UNESCO (pp. 119–148). Paris: UNESCO.
Peters, R. S. (1971). Mental health’ as an educational aim. In Hollins T. H. B. (Ed.). Aims in Education: The Philosophic Approach, (pp. 21–90). Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Peters, R. S. (1966). Ethics and Education. London: George Allen & Unwin.
Phillips, D. C. (2008). Philosophy of Education. In Zalta, E. (Ed.). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. (Fall 2008), https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/education-philosophy/.
Reid, A. L. (1965). Philosophy and the Theory and Practice of Education. In Archambault, R. (Ed.). Philosophical Analysis and Education. (pp. 17–38), London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
See chapter 1 for a more complete version of this passage.