Cogito, ergo sum...

Monday afternoon we met with Torbjörn again for a rather theoretical lesson. We were presented the philosophical roots of Popper's way of thinking starting with Plato and his "cave" tale. The guiding question in traditional philosophy: "How can we reach the truth (or also Truth when refering to the one and only truth)?" was answered by Plato with the assumption that truth can't be found when looking at the world. One of Plato's students, Aristotle, devided truth into three parts:

1. episteme (logical truth (scientific truth))
2. techne (used knowledge (technology, art,...)
3. phonesis (wisdom to make good choices (behaviour))

With Christianity the traditional philosophy lost its importance due to God's absolute truth. Only with the renaissance, reformation and enlightenment the absolute truth of the church was again put to the question. Two different schools of philosophy developed out of this primordial soup: the French school (Descartes) going from theory to observation (deduction) on the one hand and the English school (Locke) going from observation to theory (induction). The latter was challenged by Hume who stated that for example not all swans are white.
Popper finally furnished a new approach. He answered the traditional guiding question with a denial. In his opinion we can't reach the truth, or at least we wouldn't know we are there. His new guiding question was then: "What mistakes do we make and how can we avoid them?" His idea of teaching deriving from this question focused on the pupil comming up with a theory and trying to falsify it. He stated that criticising theories is an important step in the education of innovative and democratic pupils. In this context it is necessary to mention that inductive and deductive teaching-learning-processes do not take part seperated from each other. Whenever the teaching is inductive (student-centred) the learning process is deductive (problem based learning). One the other hand, when the teaching is deductive (monologue) the learning is inductive (observation -> theorie).
The problem with Pooper's theorie is that he also talks about three different worlds:

world 1: everything you can touch (e.g. books, tables, pictures,...)
world 2: the world actual persons perseive it (personal impressions)
world 3: general knowledge of mankind (e.g. what's written in the books)

Pupils can only get access to world three when guided by teachers. This indicates one of the paradoxes of the Popperian philosophy. It is impossible to let the pupils come up with their own theories when they need guidance to world three at the same time. The solution then has to be a mixture of teaching-learning-practices.