124. WHEN DOING PHILOSOPHY ISN'T DOING PHILOSOPHY - Exams Aren't Everything

Last week my Year 12 students did their mock exams. They haven’t had them back yet but we’ve marked them and, although there’s lots to improve, there are no serious worries. They’ll make a fine set of predicted grades and, with a year to go before the final exams, there’s plenty of time to be where they need to be for the real thing. So, in theory, my Year 12 students are pretty decent philosophers on paper. At least according to the exam mark scheme and grade boundaries.

But I’m one of those teachers suspicious of so-called exam “data”. I’m the sort of person who sometimes sets my younger students a knowledge test the same day they get their marks back from an essay they wrote the week before with lots of time to prepare, to see if the essays demonstrated knowledge they actually hold in their heads still or if more needs to be done to really get the information to stick. The sort of person who does a knowledge test first, and then sets a more probing question that requires deeper understanding than just memorised fragments regurgitated by rote. My “data” is all over the place because different assessments assess different things and rather than my students obsessing about arbitrary numbers or letters written in red pen on their paper I’d rather they focused on whether they actually do feel like they know something or not and if they actually can apply appropriate skills or knowledge to reach a successful outcome in a diversity of different scenarios.

So this week, after the mocks, I did one of my annoying things.

Next term they will be starting a new topic: Metaphysics of Mind. I wrote that phrase on the board: “Metaphysics of Mind”. I then made a lame philosophy joke: “let’s see if the innatists are right. You haven’t been taught any of next year’s content yet but do you already know what philosophy of mind is?”

The task they are then set is to simply “do philosophy” to try and work out what they think next year’s course will cover, simply from the phrase “Metaphysics of Mind”. I give them a blank sheet of A3 paper and ask them to fill it with all the questions, issues and answers they think they will be studying from September.

The trick here, of course, is that the students have to know how to “do philosophy”. But happily their mock results tell me that, theoretically, they do. I stand and wait for the magic to happen.

And I wait…

“We did that stuff in Year 9 about whether the mind is the brain so write that down” says one of them.

“I saw somewhere the words ‘dualism’ and ‘physicalism’.” says another.

“Wasn’t there that thing about the beetle in the box in Year 9 too?” the first one remembers and adds it to the page.

“And that thing about swapping brains?” said another.

Maybe they were innatists, in the purely Platonic sense, remembering not original forms imprinted on their soul in a world of forms beyond the cave but their Year 9 introduction to philosophy classes from three years before? But remembering what they already knew about philosophy of mind wasn’t exactly “doing philosophy”, it was just recalling words and phrases they had experienced at some point in the past that happened to coincide with mind.

“Is this philosophy?” I asked, “or just remembering?”

A good philosopher might have challenged me: why can’t remembering be philosophy? What is it to remember? What is it to do philosophy? But these students (good philosophers according to their mocks) said “no.”

I tried to give them some help, modelling an example using something different.

“OK,” I said, “imagine I was you and on the board it said ‘aesthetics’, and aesthetics was something I’d never studied before. Like you, I was told it was a type of philosophy we’d be studying next term. The first thing I’d need to know is what the word means. You guys, for example, seem to have some idea of what ‘mind’ means and are using that knowledge to jumpstart your memory to any areas of philosophy dealing with mind you may have experienced in the past. So I need to know what ‘aesthetics’ means. Luckily, like you with ‘mind’, I have heard the word before. Though I maybe don’t know an exact definition, I have heard people describe things as ‘aesthetically pleasing’ and have seen a beauty salon called ‘aesthetics’. I have watched some TV competitions about baking and about sewing where they have talked about the ‘aesthetics’ of the finished product so I think it has something to do with appearances and what we decide looks good or bad. Beauty and ugliness. I have also heard the word in art galleries and museums, and believe that it must be something to do with the philosophy of beauty. Even this thought process shows me that one big issue I would imagine studying next year is ‘what is aesthetics?’ Is it about beauty or is it about art? Is it about meeting a specific criteria of some sort, like in those reality shows, or is it about a certain feeling, subjective to each individual like when I go to the art gallery with my wife and I love a painting and she doesn’t? If I assume aesthetics is philosophy of art and beauty, then what follows? What are the sort of questions I might ask? Well, I might ask whether beauty is something real or whether it is in the eye of the beholder? You’ve done meta ethics, right? Are aesthetic statements cognitive or non-cognitive? I might ask whether the same standard of beauty would hold for different sorts of potentially beautiful object: a painting, a piece of music, a person, a movie. Does what is beautiful change depending on the sort of thing we are talking about? And if there is a standard of beauty, who sets it? Can something ‘beautiful’ today be ‘ugly’ tomorrow? And if aesthetics is about art and not just beauty - what is art? Why is it art to pick certain colours and paint them on a canvas in a certain order, but not art to select certain ingredients from a supermarket and cook them into a particular meal? Or is cooking art? What difference is there between a chef we consider a culinary artist and a person who cooks their meal at home each night?”

After the stream of consciousness I took a breath. Truthfully, I have never formally studied aesthetics at all. I genuinely had no idea if any of what I said is involved (though being familiar with the odd bit of aesthetic philosophy here and there, I think it might be).

“That’s just me talking to myself,” I said. “But you have a bunch of other people to bounce ideas off - so what do you need to do to ‘do philosophy’ and think about what ‘metaphysics of mind’ will be?”

One student finally started speaking.

“I guess we need to think about what metaphysics is and what mind is and then use that as our starting point?” he said unsurely.

Better.

“So what is metaphysics?” I asked. They had, after all, already studied meta-ethics.

“I think it’s about existence?” they replied, again relying on (inaccurate) memory instead of ‘doing philosophy’, thinking about the ‘meta’ of meta-ethics and applying it to physics (which they had all studied at GCSE).

“Anyone else?” I asked.

“I think he’s right.” One said. “I think I read it somewhere.”

“OK,” I said, thinking about those mock papers. Thinking how little philosophy was going on in a room full of students supposedly good at philosophy. “So if it is about the existence of the mind, what follows from that? What sort of questions might you be asking?”

I was expecting ideas to start flowing. They already had the big question: is the mind the brain. All they needed to do was take each one of those horns and run with it. Slowly, they did:

“If it’s the brain,” asked one, “why do people think it’s something else?”

Good.

“If it’s not the brain and the mind is ‘me’ does my body not matter at all?'“

Excellent.

And…

And…

Back to silence.

Back to remembering.

“That’s like the brain swap thing I talked about that we did in Year 9. If I put my brain in your body and your body in my brain would I be my brain or my body?”

Good…but just a memory.

Is remembering ‘doing philosophy’?

I guess it was good enough for Plato. And this is meant to be philosophy too and all I’m doing is remembering a philosophy lesson from last week. Maybe remembering things is philosophy? Certainly the A-level thinks that it is: remembering arguments, remembering objections, remembering which historical (usually white, usually male) thinker said what?

“How about this chair?” I asked, thinking about panpsychism. “Every good philosophy topic has an example with a chair.”

“A Zargonian hat!” remembered one student, smiling. A Philosophy for Children lesson from Peter Worley’s The If Machine we had done years ago.

“We had chair examples in epistemology,” I continued. “How do I know if the chair is ‘really’ there or not? I’m sure you had them in ethics too? As a wrestling fan I am always wondering whether it’s right or wrong to hit someone over the head with a chair. And of course next year you’ll also do ‘metaphysics of God’ and ask the question of whether the fact that we know the chair has a chair-maker has any bearing on whether the world needs a world-maker. What could a chair be used for in philosophy of mind?”

I thought about the question myself. As well as panpsychism (not on the A-level course), I thought about AI. How if the mind had to be something non-physical or something organic consciousness could never be artificially produced out of materials like the plastic the chair was made out of. Though, of course, AI isn’t really covered on the A-level course either. Which is why I liked to do this exercise. In the past, with classes who definitely could “do philosophy”, some of the questions they raised by themselves, unsullied by the exam board’s limiting specifications, allowed us to have some great summer discussions about issues the exam itself never addresses. It shows students that there is far more to the subject than the exam board lets on.

But there was me remembering again, when I should have been “doing philosophy”.

Meanwhile the students looked at the chair in my hand blankly.

I realise, now, that this had got very meta. For here I was, using a chair to try and prompt a discussion about how a chair might be used as an example in metaphysics of mind, in a lesson about metaphysics of mind. This was the chair example! It was happening right now.

And if that was “meta”, then did “metaphysics” really mean “something about existence”?

I remember what happened next: the students saw that the chair was blue, remembered the idea of brain swaps and asked if A swapped brains with B they would see the same colour blue.

“Nice try,” I told them, “but that’s just remembering issues with perception from epistemology.”

It didn’t have to be though. Inverted qualia is a big issue in philosophy of mind so, like Socrates, I prompted: “could that same question be made more about the mind than about perception?”

The bell rang before we could get to an answer.

I was left alone with the exam papers that told me this was a class of good philosophers, and the A3 sheet of their notes from this lesson that told me that they might not be. As I’m leaving the school at the end of the year I won’t be around to see. But through this post I will always remember them: my last A-level class at the school. And through remembering them, I shall, perhaps, be “doing philosophy”. Doing philosophy about “doing philosophy”. How very meta.

Author: DaN McKee

My book - AUTHENTIC DEMOCRACY: An Ethical Justification of Anarchism - is available HERE , from the publisher, and from all good booksellers.  Read my Anarchist Studies journal paper on Anarchism and Character Education here. For everything else DaN McKee related: www.everythingdanmckee.com