The Wittgensteinian therapy as clarifying the fundamental concepts of the educational field

• Main Author: Cristiane Maria Cornelia Gottschalk
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Asociación Latinoamericana de Filosofía de la Educación 2015-12-01
• Series: IXTLI
• Online Access: http://ixtli.org/revista/index.php/ixtli/article/view/43

With the “linguistic turn” starting from the late nineteenth century, retaken in an unprecedentedway by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in the writings of his second phase, much of the epistemological questions are “dissolved”, with implications for educational research. Outstanding among them, is the grammatical description of the fundamental concepts of the field of education carried out by analytic philosophers of education. I intend to point out to other possible implications from Wittgeinstein’s philosophical therapy that, in my view, allows a different treatment from the analytic branch to the philosophical issues of education. While this analytical  movement continues to be tied to a referential conception of language, Wittgensteinian therapy takes into account the multiplicity of the functioning of our linguistic expressions, clarifying confusions arising from the dogmatic use of concepts such as teaching, learning, comprehension and evaluation, among others, thus preventing dogmatic attitudes in the educational field. For example,  relativizing the epistemological assumptions underlying pedagogical practices, as well as clarifying the uses that are made of these concepts within theories that are guided by the myth of efficiency, which reduce teaching to problems solving demanded by a society that is not even problematized. As if there were no “values” behind these demands, which can lead the world to ruin and that could be others. One of the results of therapy, therefore, is to reveal the conventional nature of the rules we follow to use our concepts in general, since we are the ones who attribute necessity to them. Particularly in the field of education, this conceptual clarification that stems from the philosophical therapy points to pedagogical practices that are not reduced to initiating the student to our cultural heritage, but that has as their central concern the formation of a critical student who is be able to invent new rules, thus avoiding the prejudices coming from a dogmatic use of our concepts.