Some of the SLAPs from yesterday suggest a fairly fundamental confusion about the actual position Siegel is arguing for in his final chapter. Perhaps this is due to a few more Santa's elves (excuse me, subordinate clauses) than you are used to interpreting.
Here's the frame: Some educational theorists (including some postmodernists, feminists, and postcolonialists) argue that taking inclusion seriously requires us to reject Enlightenment Liberal ideology. Siegel attempts to show that, to the contrary, this inclusive project relies directly on liberal moral/political analysis of why people who have been unfairly excluded deserve the special attention required to include them, as well as why such inclusion is a worthy goal. Thus to reject liberalism in promoting inclusion is like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, if you'll pardon the cliche.
One could of course contend that he has not adequately made his case, or has in other respects overstated the implications of his argument, as he does perhaps in his denial that inclusion has important epistemic implications. It would be unfair, however, to criticize him for claims he does not make. Siegel is not always a graceful writer, and he may sometimes repeat himself more than necessary, but he is really an exceptionally clear writer and thinker, when we pay attention to his actual words.
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3 comments:
I side with Siegel agsinst the postmodern project here:
http://chss.montclair.edu/inquiry/summ95/johnson.html
Fair enough; if Hume actually intended his proscription on is-ought inferences to apply only deductively, he's right, though somewhat trivially so, since it's the inductions that generally count in daily life. (Hume famously thought there was a fatal difficulty with inductive reasoning generally, though David Stove, Stephen Post and others show convincingly that this is an error.)
To speak to the issue in hand, we argued in class that, though Siegel is correct that inclusion does not necessarily yield better epistemic outcomes, there are good (inductive) reasons to think that it may frequently do so, and to take reasons of this sort seriously is very much in keeping with the principles of Critical Thinking he articulates elsewhere in the book.
That is an awful, awful yuletide pun Matt.
On the issue of inclusion, I think we correctly elucidated the issues that we had, and Seigel's waffling on the standards used to decide the epistemological virtue of inclusion. He makes a clear mistake in his switch from "necessity" to "likelihood" and back over the course of his argument.
At the end of the day, I am more than willing to give him some interpretive charity, though I find his final positions frustratingly ephemeral.
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