Education in a Postfactual World. Patrick M. Whitehead

design, and explanations that the researchers were responsible for. Such a fact requires the scrutiny of hundreds of cases—real people and recorded files. This work cannot be easily summarized into an eighteen-word sentence. A great deal of significant information will be left out.

      We do not need to be more careful stewards of the news. Reputable and non-reputable news-sources will still print articles that have been carefully shaped into attractive stories that protect the way that they interpret the world. What we need to do instead is to teach our students how to think for themselves. In addition to the creativity, curiosity, and insight that this encourages, it also empowers students to realize their own responsibility in their educations. Now when Peter memorizes the fact that LogbMN=LogbM+LogbN for use on his next math exam, he can admit that he is blindly taking his instructor’s word for it because it would take too long to test it himself. If it doesn’t work out for him on the exam or in life, then it was his own poor judgment that got him there (and not the fault of the instructor or textbook or political figure). I’m talking about solving logarithmic proofs, but I’m really talking about important stuff like well-being, happiness, and life-satisfaction.

      In this book, my aim is to convince you of the shortcomings of fact-mindedness. This is going to challenge how you understand yourself and the world around you. It’s also going to challenge the methods that you have learned are the best at understanding yourself and the world around you. This means that I’m also going to suggest that you change these things too. The entire foundation of science, the institution of formal schooling, and even popular culture seem to be opposed to this project. Everywhere there are roadblocks to being (human or otherwise); instead we find instances of what “is in fact.”

      “Is” is an ontological signifier; it amounts to the assumption that something exists in fact, and that this something can be placed neatly into a box. The boxes demarcate one thing from the next. Our world, we have learned, is full of such things. When combined by the verb “is,” we understand that the complicated networks of experience that make up “college professors” and “fisheries biologists” are nothing but the particular box in which they can be found. Facts are profoundly limiting.

      To be sure, something like this has been done before. There has been a century and a half (or more) of men and women like me, every one more ambitious, audacious, insightful, and well-spoken than I. They have argued against the dominant ideology that sought to codify the complicated universe into systems of predictability and manipulability. Moreover, they have done so at times when it was decidedly inconvenient to do so. Their insights were more timely, and in some cases, even prophetic. Unfortunately, these authors seldom trickle down into general education curricula. Instead, they are often dismissed in a de-facto manner. They say “We don’t have time to wait for people to understand the complicated interrelationships between things!”

      This book will look at the problem of habitually replacing experience with facts. German mathematician-turned-philosopher, Edmund Husserl, criticized modern science for requiring that we replace experience with facts. German philosopher and economist Karl Marx criticized capitalism for making it impossible not to do so. English mathematician-turned philosopher Alfred North Whitehead explained that such an approach to science and to learning is “the most useless bore on God’s earth.” German philosopher Martin Heidegger observed that science and philosophy have “left the question of being behind.” There have even been students of these scholars who have written definitive texts on the subject. However, many of these texts have been written in a foreign language; they have seen a small readership from obscure academic presses; and they ultimately remain largely obscured from the lay public. My goal is to connect you with their insights and to beat you over the head with a theme that runs through each of them: you are capable of understanding the meaning that the world has for you—you do not need to take someone else’s word for it!

      I never really decided to write this book. The book chose me. I keep sitting down to write something else and end up working on this instead. I wish I could say that this was annoying because that would make me a serious academic author, but I cannot. I began writing it while I was supposed to be writing my dissertation, continued it as I was drafting my textbook, and again while I was editing my first monograph. Now I’m supposed to be writing articles, conference presentations, book reviews, and hyper-specialized academic monographs, yet here I am punching these words out on the keyboard. This one just seemed like more fun. It is where my intrinsic motivation is directed.

      Finally, I have “decided” to do this now because I’m tired of being empty handed whenever a student, friend, or family member (okay, that one never happens) expresses interest in the idea that we are more complicated than things. I hope to write it in a manner that is comprehensible—simple even. My wish is that you will read it and say to yourself, “no shit, Patrick.” I hope you read it once and that the arguments within quickly become obsolete. I hope the arguments are so obvious that you could hardly believe that you used to reject your own awareness of the personal significance that people, experiences, and knowledge had for you, preferring instead to rely on something your professor told you.

      Introduction

      The Crisis in Science: Where it All Began

      The tendency to replace experience with facts about experience wasn’t always so routine. Indeed, scientists used to compare observations about the universe with experience of the universe throughout their research. But this forever changed in 1934.

      Let me set the stage. It’s 1934 and we’re in Prague for the eighth International Congress of Philosophy. The Congress, which convenes once every five years or so, reviews the continuing relevance of philosophy in the academy and beyond. In 1934, the Congress had much to celebrate. But what sorts of exciting things ever happen at a philosophy congress? In order to understand the gravity of such a meeting, it is important to back up half a century to re-examine the relationship between philosophy and science. At the close of the nineteenth century (1800–1899), philosophy and science were inseparable.

      You see, in the nineteenth century it was understood that philosophy was the cornerstone of the sciences. Most people find this statement to be ludicrous today. We do, however, still have some relics from Philosophy’s heyday. The Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), coined in the middle of that century, is still recognized as the highest degree that can be held in any scientific field. It was the philosophers who examined the methods, questions, and areas of emphasis for scientists to explore. Philosophy is how you determine which questions can be asked and how they might be most meaningfully answered. Philosophy is how you determine how to test a method to determine its validity. It was to philosophy that scientists had to look for direction. Today, philosophy is seldom held in such high esteem—a problem that will be explored throughout the duration of this work.

      Today, students hapless enough to declare a philosophy major are repeatedly tormented with obligatory and unsolicited advice regarding the limitations this would place on their work-résumés. What might one do with a philosophy degree?! What gets accomplished in a philosophy building?! Indeed, the buildings that house the physical sciences—departments of micro-biology, chemistry, and physics, among others—are the buildings where the frontiers of science are being pushed forward. The physical sciences are where the hard work is being done. Now one finds that departments of philosophy are across the quad (if they even get their own building). This is where the ineffable questions are being asked: what is the meaning of life? Which is is the is that I mean when I say that this cup is red or this earth is round? These questions are answered by thinking through an endless variety of thought experiments, carefully engineered haikus, or until patience for such questions runs out. Then it’s back across the quad to do some real work. Philosophy is where we sort through our own shit, but the sciences are where actual work gets done. After all, I’m not going to think my way through my enormous pile of student loan debt. Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math—the STEM disciplines, that’s where the jobs are. Philosophy has been secreted away in the humanities to be spoken of only with the cautious skepticism that was once reserved for the sciences (try to remember what happened to Galileo and other “crazies” in the seventeenth century). We have forgotten that philosophy is responsible for the status of science: philosophy supplies the courage, creativity, and criteria for