The Two Forms, the Two Attitudes, and the Four Kinds of Awareness
E. P. BRANDON
This paper addresses some suggestions made by Robin Barrow in Common Sense and the Curriculum.1 These suggestions are contained in a section criticizing Hirst's 'forms of knowledge', and perhaps this location, and their somewhat perfunctory presentation, account for their surprising neglect among philosophers of education and philosophically minded curriculum theorists. The neglect is surprising, I think, because Barrow's view represents a signal advance on Hirst's problematic, though, as I shall try to show, it is by no means the final word on these matters.
Whatever else curriculum theorists may want to include in a curriculum, they can hardly avoid bodies of thought, belief, knowledge, or opinion: the sorts of thing that get labelled subjects or disciplines. Doings as well as thinkings can, of course, be labelled subjects (cookery, art, swimming, etc.) and we should not forget that a kind of thinking is inextricably bound up with such doings; but it is with bodies of thought divorced from action that schools, for better or for worse, are mainly concerned, and likewise curriculum theorists. As is well known, Hirst's position with respect to such bodies of thought is that they can all be analyzed into a limited number of 'forms of knowledge'. They are all rightly called knowledge, but we can recognize seven or eight distinctive approaches to the validation of such knowledge. While Hirst insists on the differences, and indeed disparages attempts to generalize across the forms, his assurance that everything here fits into a form of knowledge creates an extreme feeling of claustrophobia, and allows a much too easy passage for his curricular proposals. While Hirst himself explicitly links his curricular proposals to the development of mind, I think he also relies implicitly on some very general beliefs we have about the propriety of passing on the truth. Items that count as knowledge are ipso facto true; Hirst's items are at least all candidates for truth — he can admit that at times we have failed to sort out all the falsehoods in an area. While we may think some truths too recondite, difficult to grasp, or otherwise unsatisfactory for a particular curriculum, we do at least give all truths an entry visa, as it were: since they are truths, they could appear in the class-room. If we suspect that something is not a truth, we require some extra support for introducing it, for teaching it; it is a prima facie undesirable alien. Since Hirst puts everything in an ordinary school subject into some form of knowledge or other (acknowledging that few items fit exactly into just one form) he can be seen as absurdly generous about the entry requirements for his curriculum by anyone impressed by the amount of ideological obfuscation humans promote who is yet determined to take seriously the attitudes to the inculcation of truth and error that I have mentioned above.
Everything belonging to a body of thought, everything propositional, as I shall say, belongs to a form of knowledge, according to Hirst. We can say that his view, for all the various forms, is one dimensional. Barrow's advance is to insist on the multi-dimensionality of our propositional thinking.2 He gives us more space, more distinctions to invoke, for characterizing curricular materials of the broadly cognitive, propositional, kind. His position, alluded to in my title, is that while there are only two forms of knowledge as such, we can also distinguish two interpretative attitudes and at least four kinds of awareness permeating our thought and providing potential materials for a curriculum.
In this paper I shall attempt to expound and criticize Barrow's proposals, as a framework for discussing curricular contents. I shall not be concerned with reasons, his or anyone else's, for including some particular item or subject in a curriculum, though I shall suggest that in some cases the nature of the item or subject is such that a particular approach should be adopted, if it is decided to include it. I do not pretend to have the last word myself on the matters raised by Barrow's taxonomy; I wish to indicate the sort of foundations for such work that are needed and that Barrow fails to provide; but my proposals are tentative and intended as contributions to the further development of Barrow's perspective, not its supersession.
Barrow's Taxonomy
In the first place and as regards propositional knowledge, Barrow offers us a venerable dualism: truths of fact and truths of reason, or in his own terms, "those that are partially dependent on empirical considerations … and those that are not". He sees this as the only adequate distinction between kinds of knowledge, or kinds of criteria for evaluating knowledge claims, though he acknowledges within each kind a variety of more specialized procedures — a voltmeter may help you in physics but not in geology, an algorithm for quadratic equations in mathematics but not in philosophy. Barrow's examples suggest that he would place the natural sciences, the social sciences, and history squarely within the empirical form of knowledge, while allocating mathematics and philosophy to the other form. He acknowledges a doubt about the status of moral and aesthetic claims but asserts that "the fact remains that whether it is true that Michelangelo's David is beautiful is at least partly a philosophical question."3 While suggesting that in some areas (religion and morality, for instance) there may be no criteria for determining truth or falsehood, he would categorize such claims as non-empirical on the grounds that if there were criteria they would not involve empirical investigation.
Having reduced Hirst's collection to this exiguous pair, Barrow goes on to remark that all the same "there does seem to be something fundamental about most at least of Hirst's eight forms of knowledge"4 and suggests that the distinctions Hirst is pointing to may be based on factors other than kinds of knowledge. At this point he introduces his attitudes and kinds of awareness.
Barrow suggests that there are again only two fundamentally different interpretative attitudes to the world. One is a scientific, secular, view to the effect that "there is no mystery, merely a degree of ignorance which is in principle capable of final resolution by scientific enquiry", or crudely, seeing "life as a whole as something that is entirely in man's hands, to make what he will of". Barrow calls the other a religious attitude and says that it requires some ultimate explanation beyond science, that it "depends upon fundamental axioms that are not scientifically demonstrable". Besides the standard gods of religion, Barrow also mentions Hegelian or Marxist laws of development as possible components of a religious interpretation.
Uncertainty creeps in with the kinds of awareness. Barrow neither likes his terminology nor knows how many distinct kinds of awareness there are, but he tells us that he is trying to refer to "different kinds of feeling or sentiment that contemplation of some phenomena may arouse". He sees a clear case for distinguishing moral from aesthetic awareness. He thinks there is a religious awareness, and presumably an opposing scientific awareness, "marked by a concern for the facts of the matter". He tells us that the attitudes are not to be confused with the kinds of awareness — "one may have a religious interpretative attitude, yet contemplate a particular situation scientifically." He suggests but dismisses a possible biological awareness and leaves unsettled the question of a historical kind of awareness.
Criticism
The fundamental flaw in Barrow's exposition is that his categories are presented as unmotivated; they come out of a hat, or rather out of Barrow's intuitions, and we are given no more reason than Hirst usually offers us for accepting his distinctions as peculiarly important. Indeed, both authors seem susceptible to the ad hominem charge that they are merely finding bad reasons for what the English grammar school traditionally served up to its pupils, a fare that now appears to them to be the deliverance of pure reason. Whereas most critics who make this charge against Hirst go on to some self-indulgent relativism, I think some things can be said to support something like Barrow's structure. I think he can be seen as groping after objective, logical or epistemological foundations for his categories; in showing this, I shall, however, argue that the picture that emerges from a self-conscious search for such foundations differs in important ways from Barrow's own.
Before proceeding to an examination of what Barrow has said, I wish to indicate why logical foundations are worth finding, and a little of what is involved in stressing them. Our ordinary thinking and ordinary practice may well ignore logical distinctions and logical accuracy; but the distinctions are there and we ignore them at our peril. If we persist in treating "the average height of As is less than the average height of Bs" as if it licenced what "all As are shorter than any B" licences, we shall undoubtedly go sadly astray sooner or later. If the sorts of explanation employed in biology are logically different from those used in mechanics then if we teach biology and mechanics in the same way, we are likely to confuse both ourselves and our students. Logic gives us something objective on which to base our claims for similarities and differences; logic is assuredly not in the eye of the beholder.
In contrast to the hard edges that logic gives us we have the much more indeterminate categories that appeal to the content or the style of thought. Logic concerns the form, the structure, it is supremely indifferent to subject-matter. We can classify and re-classify subject-matters, contents of thought, in countless different ways for different purposes. We are not likely to find here one classification that serves for all our curricular purposes, and so I would suggest that we try to avoid such classifications, at least at the level of our fundamental categories. To say this is not to belittle content, or contrasts between contents; it is only to acknowledge the diversity of cross-classifications that can be sensibly proposed at this level, the contingent, historically and socially conditioned bases for many particular disciplinary divisions or movements of thought. A less situationally specific basis for philosophizing about the curriculum can be found if we move, as I suggest, away from substantive differences to formal differences and similarities.
The Two Forms
While Barrow's originality lies in the attitudes and kinds of awareness, let me begin with some comments on his view of knowledge simpliciter. For many, it will seem much too positivist or verificationist: too close to the notorious trichotomy, factual, logical, or meaningless. But for me, the positivists' errors about the meaning of language are less important than their "robust sense of reality", as Russell phrased it, their grasp of where genuine knowledge is to be found. I am, then, sympathetic to the motivations of Barrow's programme, though critical of its implementation. Barrow's fundamental omission, and one that I should admit is shared with most other philosophers working in the analytical tradition, is ironically a realization of the complexity of questions about meaning, and thus about the truth of claims. Without entering now into the philosophical niceties,5 it is perhaps possible to see what I am getting at by considering the question whether it is true that priests (Roman Catholic, say) have the power to forgive sins. Leaving aside theological details about who actually forgives sins, we can on the one hand say that the claim states truly what Catholic priests are supposed to be able to do, but on the other query whether there is such a thing to be done and anyone empowered to do it. While truth may be simple, just things being as they are said to be, as Mackie has it, there are times, many of them philosophically interesting times, when, as he also says, we need considerable sophistication in answering the question, "How, in this utterance, are things stated to be?" Barrow's approach ignores the need for this kind of sophistication, or at any rate does nothing to indicate how it is to be implemented.
Barrow notices that there are, for instance, empirical questions such as whether certain people believe in Ormuzd and supposedly non-empirical ones such as whether Ormuzd exists, both of which are in some sense in the same sphere. My point is that this perception needs to be brought to bear on the individual claims themselves. Suppose someone says that an action is courageous. Barrow tells us this must either be an empirical claim or what he curiously calls a philosophical one. On the one hand it is obviously empirical — for an action to be courageous it must have some restricted set of descriptive features, some things must be true of it rather than others; these things will no doubt be complex, relational matters but their holding is necessary for the claim to be acceptable, and checking the claim would involve investigating whether they or similar facts did hold of the action in question. But equally obviously our speaker is endorsing a value and holding it up for approval and possible emulation, he is promoting a value, not simply describing the facts.6 That the descriptive standards invoked by courageous should be admired is, by my lights, clearly not a fact at all, though it is presented as one and is embedded within a complex factual-cum-evaluative claim. I would here endorse Mackie's 'error theory' of such terms, the view that they are intended to convey an objective prescription, but that there aren't any such objective evaluations to be conveyed. What is, I think, evident even if Mackie's approach is rejected is that Barrow's either/or is here quite out of place: it distorts our reflective perception of the nature of the issues involved. It leads either to a much too simple-minded assimilation of ordinary evaluations to ordinary factual claims or it throws together such utterly dissimilar items as the fact that there is no largest prime number with the nuanced judgments of a George Eliot. The rational structures of logic and mathematics and the austere lineaments of a disenchanted world may be all there is to have knowledge of; we need to admit the many other things our thought is up to if we are to grasp the status of ordinary thinking. But lest we dwell too long on these much discussed matters, let me turn now to Barrow's comparatively original suggestions that there are two more dimensions to ordinary thought besides kinds of knowledge.
The Two Interpretative Attitudes
As we have seen, Barrow claims that there are only two fundamental interpretative attitudes to the world, which he labels scientific and religious. His first characterization of the difference between them certainly suggests a solid foundation in epistemological and logical facts, since that first difference is a matter of what kind of explanation is looked for — the kind offered by science or some other, presumably more profound and ultimate, kind of explanation.
I shall comment on this contrast in due course, but first I wish to note that Barrow's crude characterization of the difference between the attitudes seems not to have any logical connection with this question of mode of explanation. The crude contrast is between seeing "life as a whole as something that is entirely in man's hands, to make what he will of" and seeing it as somehow outside our control. These are both factual-cum-evaluative attitudes; their contrast is a contrast of substantive content of the sort I have suggested we eschew. One weakness of such an absolute distinction is clear: factual support exists for both sides. The possessive individualist, voluntarist view which Barrow equates with a scientific interpretation of the world clearly depends on some possible sorts of scientific theory (and no doubt many other factors as well). Other theories, equally scientific, give us no grounds for such brash confidence in our powers — Chomsky tells us that humans are simply not programmed to learn most possible languages; many sociological views suggest that we cannot live in an egalitarian community without hierarchies and exploitation, and it hardly needs a biologist to tell us that we cannot, unaided, fly. It is indeed only too obvious that there is much that no one (reasonably sane, of course) has ever supposed to be entirely "in our hands, to make what we will of". There is then no factual, scientific basis for either of these attitudes, thus characterized, in its pure form. The opposing evaluations erected upon such shaky foundations are certainly important, but in the light of the facts it might appear that again good sense is to be found in a careful via media rather than in the extremes.7 The extremes are caricatures, justifiable neither in practice nor in pedagogy.
For different reasons, a similar judgment of pedagogical unworthiness awaits the contrasting attitudes as Barrow first explains them. His contrast is supposed to be a matter of explanation, a matter of logical structure; but here he makes two mistakes — he supposes first that science can dispense with mystery, or less picturesquely, can in principle explain everything in the last resort; and second that there is some coherent alternative to whatever science offers us by way of explanation. Barrow's scientific attitude is flawed by impossible hubris, his religious one by irremediable confusion. He also slides over into a related but distinct issue, not of mode of explanation, but of the reliability of our knowledge.
While there is, as usual in philosophy, much disagreement about the details of the nature of scientific explanation (or, probably rather, the kinds of explanation offered in the sciences) there is also a fair amount of agreement on some fundamental matters; and it is simply these that we need to correct Barrow. Characteristically, a scientific explanation of an individual event will require a statement of some other individual events ('initial conditions') as well as some laws of nature relating the events; an explanation of a law itself will require further laws. Any explanation will therefore involve items — laws, and very often individual events — that are not, in this explanation, explained. Any of these items may be explained in another explanation. There are no privileged items, as far as possible explanation goes. But at any time in the history of science there are provisionally privileged items, the ones we cannot as of then explain. In the case of events this may seem to be put in question by our present creation myth, the 'big bang', but even here, as far as I understand it, we have to assume quantities, amounts of matter-energy and its distribution, which are not derivable from the theory alone. We can, then, always ask for an explanation of something that is not presently explained; at any time we cannot answer all such questions. While then Barrow is right that there is nothing exempt from standard scientific explanation, he is wrong in thinking that, even in principle, there might one day be nothing left to query. And this is so, whether or not one indulges in the sort of query underlying what has become known as the cosmological argument for the existence of a god, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" The relativistic equations for the big bang do not tell us why there is a universe at all, but equally they do not explain themselves, or the initial conditions for the kind of universe we find around us; and these last two are both unimpeachable candidates for strictly scientific explanation.
The cosmological argument furnishes a standard example of the sort of demand made by Barrow's religious interpretative attitude: the demand for genuinely privileged explanatory items, items that are perhaps self-explanatory or that clearly need no further explanation. The very basic problem with items of this kind is to see how they could do the job. In whatever way they are supposed to explain something, why is there not a similar explanation to be had for them themselves? Baptizing an entity self-explanatory or causa sui is not enough; we must see how these properties come about, and there simply is no account available. It is true that people tend not to ask for explanations once their curiosity is satisfied; the concept of the intrinsically self-explanatory seems to be a reification of this pragmatic fact into something that must block the possibility of asking for an explanation. Barrow's religious interpretation is then conceived in confusion — we surely need some weighty reasons for teaching it as one among equally respectable attitudes,
God, as usually conceived, is an entity, and a self-explanatory one to boot. The class struggle or the future communist society is hardly taken as a causa sui by Marxists, but Barrow is not alone in seeing a recognizably non-secular, non-materialist commitment in many Marxists' faith in their eschatological prophecies. What is at stake in his claim that they too exhibit a religious interpretative attitude? It is, I think, the epistemological attitude to the fundamental laws and predictions which one accepts, rather than the content thereof, which is now being used to distinguish the religious attitude. Religious faith can be held with respect to the most abstruse theorizing. Reactions to Copernican or Einsteinian theorizing reflect such entrenched attitudes towards accepted theories; not that their claims are self-explanatory, but an inductively unlikely assurance that they cannot be wrong. Kant, after all, was driven to reflect by the apparent a priori certainty of Newtonian mechanics. Ironically, Barrow's own talk of "demonstrating scientific axioms" betrays a pre-Popperian, nineteenth century epistemological attitude, more fitting the religious than the scientific.8
It is perhaps worth noting that in divorcing epistemological attitudes from content I am allowing, as Barrow did, for both scientific and religious Marxists and for scientific and religious theists. There may not be many who consistently treat the existence of god as a scientific hypothesis, and indeed there may not be much reason to persist with such an approach, but my point is that it is consistent, it is a possibility, and I am not ruling it out.
The upshot of our discussion of the attitudes, taken cognitively, is that there is a correct view of what explanation9 can achieve and some confused views; there is also a just appreciation of the insecurity of much theorizing opposed to tendencies to invest current beliefs with an altogether unwarranted assurance. To get these matters right is not easy; indeed, with respect to the fallibility of our knowledge, it is strictly speaking impossible; but we can do better or worse at it, and recognize what we are doing, and much too often we do very badly indeed.10 While it may be necessary to introduce our students to confusions, it would seem, unless there is strong counter-argument, that we should introduce them as confusions, not as equals. I suggest, therefore, that we may need to qualify Barrow's bland endorsement of his two attitudes as necessary parts of a curriculum.11
Kinds of Awareness
To conclude I turn to Barrow's plus or minus four kinds of awareness. These are important, since we do not want a curriculum producing only knowers of the pretty austere worldscape that survives philosophical criticism, and thus it is the more regrettable that our thinking about these matters is still so uncertain of itself. Barrow says he is concerned with "different kinds of feeling or sentiment" aroused by contemplation. There are such feelings — sunt lacrimae rerum — but it is doubtful that he is really concerned with the feelings as such, but more with the thoughts that accompany and infuse them. So at any rate I hope, since thinking is at least fairly obviously exposed to rational pedagogical influence, thrills or a lump in the throat may not be.
I have suggested that we play down the 'feelings' aspect of kinds of awareness and concentrate instead on the propositional elements involved. While this may seem to lead us into questions of the content of such thought, I think we can salvage some of Barrow's distinctions and intuitions here by attending to the point of various ways of thinking, of various modes of awareness. I do not suppose that the question of what point some intellectual activity may have is going to deliver very precise and incontrovertible answers, but I do suggest that it allows us to make some distinctions without too many hostages to matters of substantive content. Thus, we can distinguish between thought that seeks to tell it like it is, to describe, to characterize, or at another level, to explain, and thought that is focussed on what should be, what ought to be done, what values are to be promoted or obstructed. That is to say, we can distinguish the point of factual, empirical, and theoretical enquiry from that of ethical, political, or aesthetic questioning and judgment. And we can do this, whatever the associated feelings and emotional concomitants may be. Hard and fast distinctions, clear characterizations of differences, may not be easy to come by, but it is enough for our present purposes that we can in practice distinguish factual from evaluative, ethical from aesthetic.
When we concentrate on thought about what should be done, we may wish to isolate some modes of thinking that can operate without specific appeal to ethical or aesthetic considerations. On one side we may wish to place the sort of means-end thinking so beloved of economists and decision-theorists: on another, the sort of expressive action that flows from a conception of one's personality, such as voting because one believes in such a system of social decision-making rather than because one supposes one's vote will make a difference to the outcome, or going out to a talk because one has an interest in some subject rather than because one expects some specific pay-off.
These are rough-and-ready distinctions, well-known in other fields (as my examples indicate), but which rest, I believe, on genuine foundations. Whether they are all appropriate matters for a curriculum is another question, and one I shall here avoid, but we can note that they correspond to some extent at least with some of Barrow's kinds of awareness. We have kept distinct focal points for morality, aesthetics, and empirical knowledge: the good, the beautiful, and the true, in traditional terms. I have already voiced my profound distrust of anything specifically religious, though if we choose to stress the feelings, as unfortunately Barrow seems to be doing, there is certainly a place for the varieties of religious experience. We might even be able to find ways of teaching people "to see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower" or to feel the agonies of the dark night of the soul — certainly we could offer them the ersatz experiences of hallucinogens — but I should like to see a good reason why we should try in the first place. The quasi-cognitive aspects of such experiences seem to me to have the same point as ordinary empirical thought — telling it like it is and trying to comprehend it — so much in religious awareness should be subsumed under that category. (There are, of course, many ways of thinking about the world, 'seeing' it this way or that, besides our commonsense or science.) While disallowing religions, I have, however, suggested other focal points for thought that might deserve comparison with those we have preserved: means-end practical thinking, and the ordinary thinking through of 'my station and its duties'.
My suggestion that we stress the propositional aspects of Barrow's kinds of awareness at the expense of their non-propositional accompaniments is not made just because logic can then get a grip on the questions. There is also, I believe, an important question of priority in teaching that needs to be faced — it can matter, I think, where one places one's emphasis among the different components of, say, moral awareness. A scene may provoke moral awareness, says Barrow. Let us ask what exactly is provoked. For some, it might be feelings of guilt or shame, feelings quite possibly out of proportion to the scene, situation, or occurrence involved. For others, it might be feelings and imaginative portrayals of vicarious suffering; while for yet others, it might be thought that this or that should have been done, should now be done, etc. All these could, I think, come under Barrow's umbrella of moral awareness; but it is not clear to me that they are all equally valuable items, equally the sorts of things schools, or people generally, should be promoting, There may be a place for all of them, but it is obvious that there can be, and usually has been, a distorted emphasis among such factors. The potentially self-indulgent, experiential emphasis in this part of Barrow's thought is somewhat surprising in a self-confessed utilitarian — where is the moral awareness provoked by the simple thought that vast numbers of the world's population are chronically hungry? Moral awareness is many-faceted; pedagogically what is important, I think, is that the facets contribute towards thought about what should or should not be done, about what kinds of people we should or should not be. There may not be right answers to these questions, but nonetheless this kind of thinking can be promoted, and other general aims (notably critical appraisal of the facts, and the exercise of a disciplined imagination) can be applied to doing so. I would suggest, then, that Barrow's apparent emphasis on the non-propositional side of moral awareness could lead us astray.
It may not only be dangerous to overemphasize the non-propositional aspects of kinds of awareness, it may also diminish what chances we have of effectively teaching them. To use Wittgenstein's phrase, moral or aesthetic awareness is a result of thinking participation in a 'form of life'. The exercise of responsible aesthetic judgment, like direct aesthetic production, is a matter of interaction with other people and works of art; it is not just some Dionysian intoxication of feeling. Barrow knows this,12 but in our present context he seems to forget it. What he puts in its place can hardly be taught, can hardly be promoted by rational interaction between people. It is questionable whether schools can do much to foster the forms of life required for art or literature in our societies, but at least the medium of such life is within their grasp, whereas there is no knowing how to begin to promote aesthetic exaltations.
No more than Barrow do I wish to claim finality for the suggestions I have made in this section. I have a little more confidence in the final contribution I wish to make, since it clearly relies once again on a logical distinction. The distinction in question is that between first-order and second-order claims, languages and meta-languages, crudely speaking, talk and talk about talk. While this might (especially if we embraced the over-narrow conceptions of philosophy that have been prevalent in recent decades) give us a way of re-introducing philosophy itself as typically second-order thought about the content of thought, it is not this that I wish to put up for curricular consideration. Rather I think we can characterize some very important cognitive attitudes as second-order attitudes, combinations of beliefs about and evaluations of ways of thinking, ways of learning about the world, and so on. We thus link up with the second theme we uncovered in Barrow's interpretative attitudes, the attitude to the reliability of knowledge which naturally leads to second-order prescriptions for methodology and theory construction.
A lot of educational talk about the aims of various programmes is in fact couched in second-order terms — we want to promote problem-solving rather than an appeal to authority, flexibility rather than rigidity, open society rather than closed, and so on. But the logic of these aims is not clearly recognized, and too often they are taught as rigidly as anything in the bad old days. I think we might do well to recognize explicitly the second-order nature of many of the intellectual virtues and vices that most concern us. I suggest that this might be one fruitful direction in which to extend Barrow's taxonomy, on the sort of logical bases I have been recommending, so that it can facilitate curricular decision making.
REFERENCES AND NOTES
1. Barrow, Robin Common Sense and the Curriculum, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1976, ch. 2 section iii, pp. 41-52. All quotations from Barrow are from this section unless otherwise noted.
2. It should be noted here that in saying Barrow represents an advance I assume, with him, that we can discount the reasons Hirst offers for his own view. As Barrow himself notes, most commentators on Hirst discuss his conclusions but fail to examine his arguments for them, but Barrow shares this intellectual vice. Indeed, I do not know of any satisfactory discussion and rebuttal of Hirst's specific arguments in print, though of course general philosophy is full of critical discussion of the related theses of the later Wittgenstein.
3. It is not clear whether Barrow is distinguishing a second-order philosophical question ("Is there any way in which it is a matter of truth or falsehood that the David is beautiful?") from the first-order question of art criticism whether the David is beautiful rather than grotesque. Answers to the first question may well be arrived at by largely non-empirical methods; it is perhaps not clear that this is true for the second question. The view I would adopt gives a much more complicated account for both questions than Barrow's crude dichotomy.
4. Barrow's discussion of Hirst's forms uses a set of putative examples drawn from Mathematics, Physical sciences, History, Human Sciences, Fine Arts, Morals, Religion, and Philosophy. Hirst has, of course, suggested some modifications to this list of distinctively different forms of knowledge but these are not germane to our present discussion.
5. The source for the views I adopt here is Mackie, J.L. Truth, Probability, and Paradox, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1973, esp. chs. 1 and 2. Mackie stresses the need for sophistication in dealing with the paradoxes, in ch. 6, p. 293, but I believe the point is more general. Mackie applies his view to moral claims and explains the resulting 'error' theory in Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977. I have outlined the approach employed here in an article, "The Philosophy in Philosophy of Education", to appear in Teaching Philosophy. For a thoughtful discussion from a slightly different perspective and focussed on a different kind of problem, see McGinn, Colin, "Modal Reality". in Healey, Richard (ed.) Reduction, Time and Reality, C.U.P., Cambridge, 1981.
6. I run together distinct issues here: on the one hand what the speaker is doing, what speech-acts he is performing, and on the other what is meant by what he says. The 'error' theory I go on to mention gets the distinction right, so I believe, by saying that the meaning of what is said is gerundive in nature, whatever speech-acts might be involved in actual utterances. For our purposes the laxity may perhaps be forgiven, especially since there is still much debate about the precise evaluative component of moral terms. For all that, the distinction is worth bearing in mind, as I argue in connection with the concept of need in an article, "O Reason not the Need", Education for Development, 6, 1980, pp. 18-25.
7. The slipperiness of content-based classifications emerges if one asks exactly what Barrow is getting at. There are, I think, contrasts between a reverence for life and the natural world, exemplified by much in Chinese civilization or some modern ecological movements, and the wholesale pillage and destruction thereof that has been one of our most conspicuous achievements and a feature of some elements in the Christian tradition. Perhaps equally important as the attitudes directed outwards are corresponding attitudes to, and beliefs about, our own nature — the limited, complexly and precariously integrated thinking animal that Mary Midgely presents (Beast and Man, Harvester, Sussex, 1979) or the hideous caricature of unceasing egoism of Hobbes and the capitalist tradition. In a different context there is also a contrast between voluntarist political and social programmes and impotent acquiescence. The importance of these various contrasting attitudes is in no small way dependent upon the extent to which they are self-fulfilling — the lust of power after power is no uncommon thing, and humans have lived both in Taoist intimacy with nature and in Coketown — and this indicates, if their obvious evaluative aspects did not already, the small part appeal to the facts is going to play in adjudicating between them. But it is often adjudication rather than tolerance that is necessary, as far as I can see, though as my remarks should indicate, the verdict I would favour is not that endorsed by the economy in which I live.
8. There is clearly an 'elective affinity' between self-explanatory items and theories that have got to be right, that are more than provisionally the best guesses we can make. Both are epistemologically impossible, often the creatures of confusion, though a dispassionate survey of human error needs must examine them carefully. A link is made, for instance, in John Anderson's characterization of the standard philosophical contrast between empiricism and rationalism in terms of those who can, and those who can't, live with just one sort of reality: Anderson, J., Studies in Empirical Philosophy, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1962, ch. 5; cf. also Mackie, J.L., "The Philosophy of John Anderson", Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 40, 1962, pp. 265-282.
9. For the sake of the argument I have gone along with Barrow's talk of one kind of scientific explanation: any further explorations within this approach would need to consider the prima facie different kinds of explanation encountered in the sciences and history. Similar remarks apply to the other issues which I have left at a level of extreme generality; the philosophical literature can easily supply useful distinctions within such categories.
10. For a few remarks on these matters with especial reference to the teaching of science, where they should be particularly clear, see my article, "Logic in the Laboratory", School Science Review", 62, 1981. pp. 762-765.
11. Barrow's precise claim is that we should "indicate the existence" of both attitudes, seek to explain their natures, and "enable people to decide for themselves which one they feel the need to adopt" (p. 130). If that is teaching, I'm a Dutchman. Why any teacher, rather than, say, a pander, should be concerned with what people may feel they need beats me; teachers should be concerned to pass on some parts of the truth and should be very concerned for the welfare of anyone who "feels he needs" error or confusion.
12. Cf. his remarks on pp. 132-137 regarding the teaching of the arts or his thoughts about creativity in Moral Philosophy for Education, George Allen and Unwin, London, 1975, ch. 10.