Kindless Philosophy

 Folk science and the Manifest Image “What then do we see when we look at this bustling public world? Among the most complicated and interesting of the phenomena are the doings of our fellow human beings. If we try to predict and describe them using the same methods and concepts we have developed to describe landslides, germination, and magnetism, we can make a few important inroads, but the bulk of their observable macro- activity-their "behavior"-is hopelessly unpredictable from these perspectives. People are even less predictable than the weather, if we rely on the scientific techniques of meteorologists and even biologists. But there is another perspective, familiar to us since childhood and used effortlessly by us all every day, that seems wonderfully able to make sense of this complexity. It is often called folk psychology. It is the perspective that invokes the family of "mentalistic" concepts, such as belief, desire, knowledge, fear, pain, expectation, inten...

 Do Teachers Care About Truth? : Epistemological Issues for Education Problems with Truth “Teachers have many problems, but it might seem that worries about the nature of truth or knowledge are not among them. Curiosity may be innate, but it is not given to many of us to wonder whether  some of the answers we are given are more reliable than others, or to puzzle over what is involved in something being true. We may ask questions but on the whole we are avid swallowers of answers; the  habit of sorting out better from worse answers and of wondering what makes a good answer has not marked a large part of human history, even in literate societies. It is probably less common than  we like to imagine even in our own practice. Even so, teachers do sometimes have to face questions about truth and knowledge because in our societies the problematic nature of at least some sorts of belief is widely recognized. It is easy to come upon serious difficulties once we begin to refle...