Inquiry-based Education and the Method of Discussion. On Dewey, Post-Truth and Trump’s pragmatism

Fake news and post-truth are burning issues in contemporary public debate, which also philosophers of education and educationalists have been addressing (Peters et al., 2017). In this paper, I will investigate the topic from the perspective of educational pragmatism. This choice could be slippery in some respects. Indeed, in November 2016, after interpreting the Trump phenomenon in terms of the dominance of post-truth, the philosopher Pascal Engel drew a remarkable conclusion: precisely due to his “bullshitting” (in the philosophical meaning that Frankfurt [2005] has given to this phrase) Trump “is a pragmatist” (Engel, 2016). From his article it is clear that Engel means by pragmatism a conflation of the (possibly misunderstood) versions of James and Rorty and that his criticism was a continuation of his confrontation with Rorty (Engel & Rorty, 2005). In the proposed paper, I would like to explore what a Deweyan engagement with this issue could look like. I will do so in three steps. First, since Frankfurt (2005) sees in the passage from inquiry to sincerity a factor in furthering a cultural climate hospitable to “bullshitting,” I will endeavour to recapture this idea within the conceptual device of Democracy and Education (Dewey, 1980[1916]). Secondly, I will elaborate on a remarkable line of argument of Dewey in Liberalism and Social Action: “There was a time when discussion […] was thought to be sufficient in discovery of the structure and laws of physical nature. In the latter field, the method was displaced by that of experimental observation […] But we still depend upon the method of discussion, with only incidental scientific control, in politics […] Intelligence in politics when it is identified with discussion means reliance upon symbols. […] But symbols are significant only in connection with realities behind them. […] Popular literacy, in connection with the telegraph, cheap postage and the printing press, has enormously multiplied the number of those influenced. That which we term education has done a good deal to generate habits that put symbols in the place of realities” (Dewey, 1987[1935], pp. 50-51). It is this that, in Dewey’s opinion, makes the citizenry particularly exposed to propaganda. By replacing “the telegraph” with “the internet” (Standage, 2014) and "propaganda” with “post-truth,” we could update Dewey’s argument as follows: as long as our education is predicated upon the method of discussion and ‘mere’ literacy, we will not be able to cultivate those experimental habits which can prevent us from lapsing into gullibility. Dewey is inviting us to see how education oriented to discussion is not only an inadequate bulwark against the raging of ‘bullshitting’ but can even contribute to it within contemporary socio-technological scenarios. I will show how this distinction between the methods of discussion and of inquiry parallels that between the third and fourth stage in the development of logical thought as it is presented by Dewey (1976[1900]) in his experimental logic and I will discuss this in terms of its educational implications. Thirdly, I will explore the relationships between this stance of Dewey and that of Arendt: in opposition to Richard Bernstein (2006), I will follow Axel Honneth’s (1998) interpretation of Dewey, which contrasts Arendt and Dewey and concludes that, for the latter, “[t]he political sphere is not […] the place for communicative exercise of freedom but the cognitive medium with whose help society attempts, experimentally, to explore process, and solve its own problems with the coordination of social action” (p. 775). The question I want to explore, in conclusion, is whether Dewey’s theoretical device is adequate to counter educationally ‘Trumpian pragmatism’ or whether an Arendtian perspective is necessary to complement it (Biesta, 2006).