Objectivity and rationality in epistemology and education: Scheffler's middle road

Abstract

A concern about objectivity and rationality has been a major impetus to the development of philosophy in the West. Students of Greek philosophy are well aware of the effect that new currents of thinking about custom, knowledge, and belief had in motivating the inquiries that Socrates first undertook, inquiries about objectivity and truth that were codified and transmitted into our philosophical culture by his student Plato. As the society of the Athenians opened up both to dissident voices from within and to new perspectives from the nonAthenian world, common sense modes of justifying thought and action were questioned. A slight but significant awareness of the role of history in human affairs led to an inkling among some Athenians that modes of life that had previously been taken as divinely revealed and established might actually be simply the result of time and chance. The very notion of common sense was then questioned as the certainties of one's own culture were seen to clash with those of other cultures. In response to these destabilizing currents, some simply insisted on the incorrigible veracity of common sense or custom; through ostracism and sometimes force some elements of the status quo fought to close Athenian society to currents of change. Others, including many of those called Sophists, took the new knowledge about history and other cultures to imply a sort of relativism or subjectivism; combined with a proto-Nietzschean view of power and belief these Sophists taught the pursuit of influence rather than the acceptance of custom. Philosophy takes root in the West when Socrates enters the fray to oppose both the common-sensists and the relativists in the name of objectivity, and in so doing to engage in a radically new kind of thinking. Socrates' legacy to future philosophers is contained in his insistence that objective inquiry into the nature and worth of our most basic beliefs and practices is possible, and that rationality is a central part of any human life worth living. He rejects, then, both the 'head in the