The Status of Rational Nouns: A Pragmatist Perspective

Abstract

Introduction:  Epistemology has always carried on an uneasy affair with politics, as philosophers have so often attempted to justify political practices by means of a theory of knowledge. Scientists are prosecuted for heresy. Inalienable human rights are grounded in truths we take to be self-evident. Education, too, is a political practice; and so, predictably, we find proponents of educational policy bringing epistemology to their defense. Cultural conservatives urge curricula for critical thinking and character education as means of shoring up rational and moral truths being undermined by today’s rampant relativism. Cultural critics, on the other hand, challenge not only the objectivity of the standard curricula but the very norms of objectivity used to justify it, as instruments of hegemony. They call for social restructuring but recommend multicultural curricula as an interim antidote.