doi: 10.12957/childphilo.2019.43353
the richness of questions in philosophy for children
dina mendonça1
universidade nova de lisboa, portugal
orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6757-2327
magda costa-carvalho2
universidade dos açores; universidade do porto, portugal
orcid id: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8539-5061
abstract
This paper argues that the various approaches within philosophy for children should
purposefully integrate the exploration of questioning by children, instead of only
presenting children with prepared questions as starting points for an inquiry session. This
is particularly relevant since philosophy for children is one of the few educational settings
that offer a space for children to question, as well as to explore the variation of their
questions and the impact their questions have in their lives. We state that this purposeful
integration of questions made by the children does justice to the inheritance of different
philosophical traditions. It also reinforces questions as a privileged way for human beings
to relate to the world. Thus, more than simply a methodological step in the design of a
community of inquiry session, we claim that questions are a fundamental educational
resource. Questions are also a central part of thinking and inquiry in a philosophical
session with children. Therefore, the paper proposes a new way to leverage these tools,
arguing that defining philosophy as an obsession to overcome opacity and aim for
transparency (Caeiro, 2015) can help participants of the community of inquiry to identify
questions that may empower dialogue in a philosophical way.
keywords: community of inquiry; questions; opacity; transparency.
a riqueza das questões filosóficas para crianças
resumo
Este artigo defende que as variadas abordagens dentro da filosofia para crianças
ganhariam em integrar, de forma intencional, a exploração do questionamento, em vez de
apenas apresentar às crianças perguntas já preparadas como pontos departida da
investigação. Esta ideia torna-se particularmente relevante uma vez que a filosofia para
crianças é um dos poucos ambientes educativos que oferecem às crianças um espaço para
que elas possam questionar e explorar as variações das suas perguntas, assim como o
impacto que essas perguntas podem ter nas suas vidas. Desta forma, defendemos que a
integração intencional, numa sessão de filosofia para crianças, de perguntas feitas pelas
próprias crianças faz justiça à herança das diferentes tradições filosóficas e reforça que as
perguntas são formas privilegiadas de os seres humanos se relacionarem com o mundo.
Mais do que um simples passo metodológico no encadeamento de uma sessão de filosofia
para crianças, as perguntas representam um recurso educativo fundamental. As
perguntas são também uma parte central do pensamento e da investigação que se
produzem numa sessão de filosofia com crianças. O artigo propõe, então, uma forma
inovadora de lidar com esta ferramenta que são as perguntas, defendendo que a definição
da filosofia como uma obsessão para ultrapassar a opacidade e uma obsessão pela
transparência (Caeiro, 2015) pode ajudar os participantes numa comunidade de
1
2
E-mail: md@fcsh.unl.pt
E-mail: magda.ep.teixeira@uac.pt
childhood & philosophy, rio de janeiro, v. 15, jun. 2019, pp. 01 - 21
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
investigação a identificarem perguntas que poderão potenciar o diálogo de uma forma
filosófica.
palavras-chave: comunidade de investigação; perguntas; opacidade; transparência.
la riqueza de las preguntas en filosofía para niños
resumen
Este artículo defiende que los variados enfoques dentro de la filosofía para niños ganarían
si integrasen de forma intencional la exploración del cuestionamiento, en vez de sólo
presentar a los niños preguntas ya preparadas como puntos de partida para la
investigación. Esta idea se vuelve particularmente relevante porque filosofía para niños es
uno de los pocos ambientes educativos que ofrece a los niños un espacio para que puedan
cuestionar y explorar las variaciones de sus preguntas y el impacto que estas preguntas
pueden tener en sus vidas. De esta forma, defendemos que la integración intencional, en
una sesión de filosofía para niños, de preguntas hechas por los propios niños, hace justicia a
la herencia de las diferentes tradiciones filosóficas y refuerza que las preguntas son
formas privilegiadas de que los seres humanos se relacionen con el mundo. Más que un
simple paso metodológico en el encadenamiento de una sesión de filosofía para niños, las
preguntas representan un recurso educativo fundamental. Las preguntas son también una
parte central del pensamiento y de la investigación que se producen en una sesión de
filosofía con niños. El artículo propone, entonces, una forma innovadora de lidiar con esta
herramienta que son las preguntas, defendiendo que la definición de la filosofía como una
obsesión para superar la opacidad y una obsesión por la transparencia (Caeiro, 2015)
puede ayudar a los participantes en una comunidad de investigación a identificar
preguntas que podrían potenciar el diálogo de una forma filosófica.
palabras clave: comunidad de investigación; preguntas; opacidad; transparencia.
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
Asking questions has always been a fundamental part of philosophy
because questioning is a crucial part of thinking and of inquiry. Describing this
centrality of questioning to philosophy, Bertrand Russell writes in The Problems of
Philosophy:
Philosophy, if it cannot answer so many questions as we could
wish, has at least the power of asking questions which increase the
interest of the world, and show the strangeness and wonder lying
just below the surface even in the commonest things of daily life.
(Russell, 2012, p. 6)
Consequently it is no surprise that Philosophy for Children (P4C)3 is
recognized as an approach to education that places questions at the heart of the
classroom. Thus, one of P4C founders, Gareth Matthews, commented: “[a] parent
or teacher who doesn't hear the questions, or doesn't understand that they are
more than, and different from, a mere request for information, misses a chance to
do philosophy.” (Matthews, 1992, p. 73). The P4C literature has provided
practitioners a wealth of convenient tools for triggering and maintaining dialogue
in a community of inquiry because P4C “takes questions seriously and offers
multiple points of entry for deconstructing the nature of the question.” (Turgeon,
2015, p. 284)
This paper proposes that since P4C is one of the few educational settings
that offer a space for children to question and explore the variety and impact of
their questions (as well as of other people’s questions), P4C’s various approaches
to questioning should purposefully integrate exploration of the activity of
questioning. Doing so will do justice to the inheritance of the philosophical
tradition and reinforce the way in which questions are a privileged place for
human beings to relate to the world. We will show that questions are educational
resources that go far beyond a mere methodological step of asking questions
3
With the expression Philosophy for Children (and the acronym P4C) we refer to various models for
philosophical inquiry with children using the community of inquiry approach introduced by Matthew Lipman
and Ann Margaret Sharp.
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
within a P4C session; rather, in reality they are a central part of thinking and
inquiry.
The paper begins by reviewing how P4C experts have discussed the role of
questioning and the tools designed to help practitioners master questions in
philosophy sessions. Then it proposes an innovative way of leveraging these tools.
By introducing the notion of opaqueness and thickness, we argue that defining
philosophy as an obsession to overcome opacity and an aim for transparency
(Caeiro, 2015) can help guide facilitators and participants to identify questions that
may be philosophically effective and to gauge the impact these questions have on
dialogue.
After briefly reviewing how various approaches to philosophical work with
children handle questions, the paper points out that an approach based solely on
ready-made questions is rendered more effective philosophically if complemented
by moments that enable children to raise, discuss and evaluate their own
questions. Depriving children of the tentative and experimental activity of asking
their own questions (in their own words) during a philosophy session is both an
educational and a philosophical loss, for it neglects an opportunity to actively
engage with the school’s educational process, and fails to adequately honor one of
philosophy’s
fundamental contributions
to thinking. Finally, the paper
demonstrates how the art of questioning requires a community, stressing that the
crucial role of questions in both philosophy and P4C highlights the way in which
excellence of thinking demands a community of thinkers (Peirce, 1868).
questions and questioning in p4c
One of the most important features of Matthew Lipman and Ann Margaret
Sharp’s P4C program, based on the community of inquiry setting (Sharp, 1987), is
the presence of questions. When, in a 1999 interview, Lipman was asked which
were the basic tools that philosophy could provide to children, his answer was
very straightforward: “The most important tool is to get the children to question.”
(Kohan & Wuensch, 1999, p. 169)
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Ann Sharp also made this observation in an article about the process of
curriculum development and the role of philosophical novels. She described how
her involvement in the writing of manuals revealed that a large part of doing good
philosophy was having the ability to ask the right question at the right time in the
right circumstances (Sharp, 2017). This is why after spending a long time writing
manuals and developing pedagogical resources to support teachers, Sharp felt the
need to reinforce that philosophical activities are much more about cultivating a
certain ability (to question), rather than to just implement and execute previously
designed procedures or exercises. Exploring questions, experiencing how they feel
when posed at different times, and examining them within a community of
inquiry cultivates a philosophical sensibility that cannot simply be substituted by
theoretical descriptions of the right question (at the right time and in the right
circumstances).
Questioning does not necessarily lead directly to an answer, however,
because questions open up new means for a community of inquiry to defy
assumptions and discover errors, enabling new perspectives to reshape previous
assumptions about the world. Lipman stresses the importance of the ability to
pose a question when he writes, “[t]o question is to institutionalize and legitimize
doubt and to invite critical evaluation.” (Lipman, 2003, p. 99)
In the practice of P4C inspired by Lipman and Sharp, two moments for
questions appear during an inquiry: first, the community sets the agenda after
reading an episode of a philosophical novel (or short story) specially designed to
be used in a philosophical session; and second, the facilitator starts managing
follow-up questions during dialogue. These are also called Socratic questions
(Fisher, 1995) and serve as a model for the community to incorporate the habit of
exploring and fostering thinking thorough inquiry. In Lipman’s approach, the
very first questions are entirely the responsibility of the participants, for it is
crucial that the agenda be settled by the questions raised in community. This
provides the group with a cognitive map of its own philosophical interests and
needs (Lipman, 1997, p. 18). The text thus encourages the appearance of questions
and works as a springboard that prompts the community to formulate their own
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
questions about what they hear (or read) as well as questions that are suggested
by what they heard (or read).
According to Lipman, every question has an individual questioner, and the
facilitator should make this clear by writing the name of the participants who
formulated the question after it is written (on the board or a flipchart). The
question is not an abstract search for knowledge because it belongs to a specific
person and thus bears the hallmark of their unique context.
After collecting this set of questions, the community of inquiry is invited to
reflect on them. The community identifies possible hierarchies and the different
foci of the questions, so as to give participants the most possible information to be
able to decide which specific questions to select for inquiry.
However, in Lipman’s model for conducting P4C, the moment of selecting
a specific question for the session (or sessions to follow) can be quite difficult to
manage, in terms of both respecting the community of inquiry’s interests as a
whole, as well as promoting philosophical thinking. Voting often can be used to
reach the final decision. The facilitator may find herself struggling with the need
to allow the community to express their questions freely and, at the same time, her
desire to proceed to a moment in the session when she feels that the conversation
is heading toward something approaching a philosophical question. Still, giving
the community time to refine their ability to raise questions, and even to think
(meta-cognitively) about different types of questions, is a fundamental way to
foster growth of philosophical insight and depth in questioning.
Ultimately, what counts as a philosophical question is a philosophical topic
in itself (Floridi, 2013), and in a P4C session this is intimately connected to the
continuity of philosophical practice. Ideally, the community should be given the
time to inquire about what counts as a philosophical question. Therefore it is a
philosophical hallmark how the selection of a question for dialogue is one of the
hard tasks of a session, both for the facilitator and for the community since it is
grounded in criteria and meta-criteria which cannot be easily and quickly shared.
In the community of inquiry, questions are not static or sacred entities that
the hearers must accept passively, for after the agenda is set, every individual
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question belongs to the group, and consequently the group may at any time
reconstruct questions by sharpening them. This means that refining a question is
also a part of communal philosophical work because reconstructing the question
plays a fundamental role in the metacognitive practice nurtured by the
community of philosophical inquiry. This promotes the group’s self-regulation in
determining what constitutes a fruitful area for inquiry, as well as cultivating the
philosophical skill of refining thinking in community.
Once the dialogue’s focus has been established, a second moment for
questions begins, as the facilitator is encouraged to raise additional questions
designed to deepen its thinking processes, thus enabling the community to
“follow the argument where it leads in the dialogue” (Lipman, 1997, p. 7). Many of
these are procedural questions and can be posed concerning the content under
discussion, while maintaining the facilitator’s role of bridging arguments and
triggering conceptual transformation (Kennedy, 2004, p. 757). This use of
questions and questioning may also be difficult because “the notion of following
an argument where it leads has been a perplexing one ever since Socrates
announced it as the guiding maxim of his own philosophical practice.” (Lipman,
1997, p.7)
In general, the facilitator will ask participants to provide examples, present
evidence supporting their opinions, and establish consequences that follow from
their positions in order to facilitate the dialogue and to develop the argument. The
difficulty for the facilitator here is to know how and when to ask for certain
procedures
without
dominating
the
dialogue,
simultaneously
offering
opportunities for deepening inquiry that can be adopted by all members of the
community of inquiry.
There are some pitfalls that the facilitator must guard against, such as a
“canned” approach to questions (Gardner, 1998, p. 104), which might lead to
instrumentalization, as well as the bureaucratization of questioning (Freire &
Faundez, 1985, p. 27), a patronizing attitude in which children are allowed to
briefly ask questions before moving on to what more “substantial” content (by
getting to the answers previously established by adults). To prepare for this
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
moment of questioning, the facilitator can get acquainted with the discussion
plans and exercises in the manuals that accompany each of Lipman’s
philosophical novels. However, this is by no means infallible. Certainly the reader
can recall an occasion when a very promising follow-up question ended up
closing off the dialogue much more than opening it up.
Thus, posing and selecting questions at the beginning of a session, as well
questioning to guide and deepen dialogue, are easy to talk about but hard to carry
out with precision in the context of a session. It seems to require experiential
insight. Materials have been designed (for both the first, and second moments of
questioning) to help facilitators acquire and critically examine the use of questions
and questioning in philosophy sessions. These materials aim to overcome the
difficulty, already identified by Lipman, that “[p]rospective teachers of
philosophy at the elementary school level repeatedly want to know what it is that
makes a discussion philosophical,” (Lipman, 1996, p. 64), and many P4C experts’
efforts have been focused on establishing criteria for distinguishing questions that
are philosophical from those that are not (Cam, 2006, p.63).
Indeed, the need to identify the cornerstone of a philosophical session is a
focus shared by most P4C experts and practitioners, especially regarding
newcomers. And even if the questions are not the sufficient condition to warrant
describing a session as philosophical, one can at least say that there is something
about a certain way of questioning that seems to prompt an inquiry that is
philosophically fruitful for the community. This is one of the reasons why P4C
requires a continuous practice of refinement, both by watching others facilitate
philosophy sessions and by doing them and critically reflecting on the process.
Nevertheless, in Teaching for Better Thinking: The Classroom Community of
Inquiry (1995), Splitter and Sharp describe how one should take the distinction
between open and closed questions as a good guiding principle for establishing
which questions can more fruitfully enhance philosophical dialogue. It is a
common assumption in philosophical circles that empirical and logicomathematical questions are closed, while philosophical ones are open because
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“philosophical questions are not answerable empirically or mathematically with
observations or calculations” (Floridi, 2013, p.200).
For Splitter and Sharp, however, the distinction also entails another
criterion of a more nuanced nature. They write,
Our preferred criterion for distinguishing between open and
closed questions has a different focus. Irrespective of the subject
under consideration, or the ages of those involved, what really
produces closure is neither the question, nor the answer, nor again
the epistemic state of those involved, but the environment in
which questions and answers are considered. If the environment
encourages the formation of questions as an important activity in
its own right, and if it encourages those involved to bring to bear a
range of strategies and dispositions for treating both questions and
putative answers as grist for further inquiry, then and only then,
should we say that the questioning is open. (Splitter & Sharp, 1995,
p.55)
Thus, Splitter and Sharp’s proposal is not to use the open versus closed
distinction as an absolute rule, but rather that it should be seen as a tool to guide
experience, emphasizing that the practice requires a specific sort of questioningfriendly environment.
This idea was also stated by Lipman: when asked how to teach children to
question, he answered “Well we don’t insist to them dogmatically and say, ‘Look,
you’d better question or...’ [...] but we create an environment in which the
questioning is carried on by all the members as a part of the distributive thinking
that’s going on...” (Kohan & Wuensch, 1999, p. 169). Indeed, in philosophical
inquiry there are certain ingredients that produce closure, while others encourage
the opposite and, according to the quoted authors, P4C should nurture, much
more than a set of open questions, open questioning.
Nevertheless, as all facilitators have at one time experienced, the above
classifications are insufficient to ensure that the first moment of a session will
provide good questions for philosophical discussion. According to Phillip Cam,
The problem is that all too commonly students ask questions that
are not very deep and do not readily lead to the kind of discussion
that is desired. If only we could teach them to ask better questions
– really meaty inquiry questions – we would be off to a far better
start. (Cam, 2006, 32)
To overcome this problem, Phillip Cam developed a supplementary tool –
The Question Quadrant – to help facilitators classify students’ questions (Cam,
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
2006, p. 32-36). The Question Quadrant is a highly practical approach, echoing the
oppositional quadrant in Aristotelian logical tradition. This P4C quadrant is a
resource included in an introductory toolkit level designed by the author to
organize discussion in keeping with the need to encourage questions that lead to
effective inquiry.
The scheme is divided into four types of questions: reading comprehension
and factual knowledge questions (labeled as closed questions) and literary
speculation and inquiry questions (labeled as open questions). The goal is to
enable facilitators to better master the selection of a particular question for
stimulus because it connects questions with specific capacities fostered in the
school setting and distinguishes philosophy from comprehension or verification of
general knowledge, as well as from exercises of imaginative speculation. Over the
years, the Question Quadrant has undergone several adaptations and was rapidly
incorporated into P4C training materials around the world as a tool for teachers to
easily improve their facilitating when conducting philosophy sessions in their
classrooms.
While the famous Question Quadrant has been very useful in guiding
facilitators and participants in the discussion of what constitutes a philosophical
question, it remains insufficient to capture all that is at the heart of a philosophical
question. Thus, in an attempt to refine the use of the Question Quadrant as a tool
for practitioners, Peter Worley has discussed certain subtleties and nuances within
types of open and closed questions that one can find in a philosophical inquiry
(Worley, 2015). Worley elaborates the distinction between open and closed
question by showing that there is a difference between questions that are
conceptually and grammatically closed (Do you like honey?) and questions which
are conceptually closed and grammatically open (What can you tell me about
Paris?), and that these again differ from questions which are conceptually open
and grammatically closed (Is the mind the same than the brain?) and questions
which are conceptually open and grammatically open (What is the mind?). This
effort to extend the possibilities beyond a rigid and narrow way of classifying
questions in the binary open-closed scheme further testifies to the complex nature
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of a philosophical question. “Philosophical Questions, like empirical and logicmathematical ones, come in a whole variety of degrees of value, importance,
relevance, seriousness, difficulty, and so forth.” (Floridi, 2013, p. 206)
Consequently, issues will arise, and teachers and facilitators will not always
be sure of what constitutes a philosophical question because, as Lipman writes,
What makes a question philosophical rather than nonphilosophical may lie more in the function than in the form. What
makes a question philosophical rather than non-philosophical may
lie not in the verbal form of the sentence but in the circumstances
under which it is uttered, and it is only through the repeated
exposure to the doing of philosophy that such circumstances come
to be recognized. (Lipman, 1996, p. 64)
Thus, the distinctions and schemes to guide the use of questions in inquiry
do not solve all the problems that arise in a session. Building on the above-quoted
authors, we can stress that from the very beginning of P4C the recommendation is
to look beyond a simplistic categorization of questions. More importantly, using
tools such as the Question Quadrant in a strict and mechanical way can diminish
the philosophical tone even when the community faces a compelling question,
because “There is no methodology or formula that can be applied to teach
someone how to ask philosophical questions, or that can be used to provoke
someone to enter into a philosophical relationship with questions.” (Kohan, 2014,
p. 107)
Therefore, to enable people to overcome a mechanistic way of interpret the
proposed distinctions, it is important that the questioning be embedded in the
notion of community of inquiry. That is, to ensure that distinctions do not block
inquiry but instead work to promote thinking, it is important to have an approach
to questions that is “of a more nuanced and contextual view of both openness and
inquiry,” (Splitter, 2016, p. 19). This implies that questions and questioning should
not be abstractly considered, but rather embedded and associated with certain
dispositions and attitudes that motivate thinking in community. This will require
searching for ways to create a philosophical dialogue in which people respond “to
a question by attempting to ascertain the meaning of the question.” (Brandt, 1988,
p. 36)
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
More than 20 years after writing Teaching for Better Thinking with Sharp,
Splitter once again takes up the subject of questioning to stress this nuanced and
contextual view of openness and inquiry (Splitter, 2016, p. 19). Splitter argues for a
dispositional ground for inquiry based on the willingness of practitioners to go
from unsettlement to settlement. This means that what prompts inquiry, according
to Splitter, are questions associated with dispositions such as curiosity,
puzzlement and wonder (Splitter, 2016, p. 22-23). We will argue, however, that
these dispositional ingredients can more easily be understood by considering
Barbara Weber and Arthur Wolf’s overview of the issues at stake when one
considers philosophical questions (2017).
In light of Gadamer’s writings, Weber and Wolf show that it is important
to also acquire a psychological, as well as an epistemological, dimension that is
reflected in the way the experience of thinking upon a question “emphasizes the
importance of anchoring the question in the concrete lifeworld context.” (Weber &
Wolf 2017, p.80). This means that linking the specific question “to the specifics of
the situation is important in order for one to know what classifies as an answer”
(Weber &Wolf, 2017, p.78), and to establish the meaning of a question and how it
is to be lived and experienced in a community of inquiry. This is why it can never
be fully captured by a method, even though methods can help build and scaffold
the experience of thinking philosophically and turn it into an ongoing attitude.
“And while it can’t be taught – the authors argue –, it can be role-modeled”
(Weber & Wolf, 2017, p.80).
To sum up, P4C experts have helped shape the way a facilitator should
approach questions and questioning during a P4C session in order to enable
practitioners to overcome a rigid, mechanical way of looking at distinctions, such
as closed and open, introducing subtleties and nuances and calling our attention
to the need to understand the practice of questioning as something that is refined
by the regular and continuous experience of philosophical thinking. Therefore,
openness and “closed-ness” are no longer simple adjectives with which to sort the
questions, but acquire a psychological as well as an epistemological dimension
which contributes to cultivating dispositional ingredients for inquiry (Splitter, 2016),
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to create the proper mindset surrounding dialogue (Worley, 2016) or to promote
the philosophical attitude as an hermeneutic experience (Weber & Wolf, 2017), similar
to a type of adventure where we do things with questions, but we also let questions do
things with us (Kohan & Kennedy, 2017, p. 499).
The above description offers a coherent and unified interpretation of the
place of questions and questioning in P4C’s literature. However, it is important to
add that “even within the movement collectively known as P4C we find active
disagreement and debate over the proper role and nature of the question in
philosophical inquiry” (Turgeon, 2015, 284), and consequently there continues to
be interest in better understanding how to approach the questioning process.
Therefore, there is still more work to be done to refine and articulate how the
central place of questions in philosophical inquiry should be mirrored in the
various settings of P4C.
In the following pages, we offer two suggestions that might contribute to
fostering a philosophical environment and practice for inquiry accordingly.
two additional suggestions to foster philosophical questions and questioning
The first suggestion is that taking the nature of philosophical inquiry as a
guide can help establish which questions might promote philosophical dialogues.
This is because one of the ways to better guide and conduct questioning in
philosophy sessions, and to grasp what “following the argument where it leads”
means, is to adopt a philosophical attitude that must be lived and experienced (as
opposed to instrumentally mastered). And though the nature of philosophy is also
a topic of debate among philosophers (Mulligan, Simons, & Smith, 2006), and
different philosophers have different conceptions of philosophy, we propose that
the assumed nature of philosophy from the Ancient Greek could help facilitators
better promote philosophical thinking by serving as a guide for facilitators and
participants.
It is well known that “philosophy” is a word with a Greek origin, coming
from philos (loving) and sophos (wisdom), and it is commonly described to mean
the love of wisdom. However, this notion of “love of wisdom” may not provide a
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clear track for facilitators and participants to follow. We all love to know from the
moment we decide to sit in an inquiry circle. But what does this really mean? Or
where can that statement lead us in terms of deciding what counts as
philosophical inquiry?
A different translation of the Greek components of the word “philosophy”
can better accomplish this. In an interview about the word, Prof. Antonio Caeiro
says:
The term philosophy is usually translated as “friendship towards
knowledge,” but in Greek all compounds of “philo,” like
philology, mean an obsessive compulsion. Therefore philo means
a kind of behavioral reaction to a fixed idea. Sofia in Greek
encompasses several adjectives and nouns that mean
transparency. Therefore if the philosopher is the one who has a
compulsive reaction to the lack of transparency and therefore a
bad relation with opacity, philosophy is what happens under the
pressure of this need for transparency. And it is under the
pressure of opacity that we try to clarify: What does anyone want
to say? How do we feel good or bad?4
Adopting this translation and definition of philosophy as an obsession for
transparency is another possible way to guide facilitators to encourage attention
to, as well as questioning about, issues that are opaque. This would provide an
environment more conducive to inquiry and a less mechanistic use of questions as
simple tools.
We argue here that by accepting this definition of philosophy as the
obsession for transparency, we can better grasp the practice of philosophy than if
we started from the commonly-accepted definition of philosophy as the love of
wisdom. First, because it seems easier to identify what is opaque, than to know
what is wise. Since the philosopher’s defining characteristic has always been
feeling and being ignorant (and knowing that he knows little about everything),
opaqueness offers a path to practice: whatever most demonstrates our ignorance
about a certain issue or that prompts in the community cognitive repulsion. It is
also a definition that offers degrees of ignorance, allowing practitioners to situate
themselves in between opacity and transparency. It is not simply that after delving
4
Consult: <http://www.tvi24.iol.pt/videos/palavra-de-escritor/palavra-de-escritor-convidado-antonio-decastro-caeiro/556041330cf2ab4fe7cc781c> Accessed on July 2th, 2017.
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into a question everything becomes transparent, but more that some areas are
clearer, while other still require new questions.
It is not always easy to see the nature of the question, nor to establish its
philosophical nature, which is why Lipman’s approach to the community of
inquiry includes a moment to investigate the meaning of the questions set by the
agenda. This would be the moment for the community of inquiry to evaluate what
the question is searching for. Of course, Lipman’s novels, and any other story
written in the same manner, aim to promote a certain type of strangeness and
opacity precisely to stimulate the raising of philosophical questions. However, the
use of philosophical novels does not guarantee the appearance of philosophical
questions, and, in addition, some practitioners of philosophical work with
children use stories from children’s literature, which were not written to have that
effect (Murris & Haynes 2002; Wartenberg 2009).
The criterion of opaqueness and the search for transparency may even help
facilitators explore questions that, at a first glance, appear to not be philosophical
and apply the philosophical gaze to them. Of course, sometimes this is easier to do
than at other times. Examples of smooth sessions come from dialogues in which
children ask questions that are similar, or even equal, to questions placed in the
past by philosophers, echoing common questions from the philosophical tradition.
For instance, the question, “What is it like to be an ant?” may immediately remind
a facilitator with philosophical training of the question, “What is it like to be a
bat?” from the famous essay by Thomas Nagel, just as the question, “How do we
know what is the right thing to do?” echoes the entire Ethical philosophical
tradition, or even, “How do I know that I am not dreaming?” hearkens to some o f
Descartes’ work. However, at other times, a question may sound philosophical,
even though it is not clear that its direction is philosophical. In this case, it is
useful to ask for clarification about the nature of the question in order to uncover
what type of opacity it is aimed at.
It is possible that children might identify different kinds of opacity, and
therefore the facilitator has to be insightful to recognize it, or at least to act bearing
it in mind. For example, the question “Why is there this?” may simply be asking
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
why a certain object was invented, or it can signal the awe at the fact that there is
existence. This is similar to how the odd question about why all babies are born
bald might indicate a recognition of the strangeness of some of nature’s
regularities.
And even though with practice, a facilitator can ultimately help the
community of inquiry find an interpretation of a question that reveals an
opaqueness worthy of philosophical investigation, if the question appear to be
straightforwardly non-philosophical, the practice requires that in the process of
doing sessions, the community of inquiry discover what counts as philosophical.
Adopting the definition of philosophy as an obsession with transparency
and non-opacity can thus help to show the community of inquiry the type of
questioning that will provide a richer and philosophically transformative
experience, as opposed to thinking about questions that do not have the same
effect. In addition, taking philosophy as this obsession for transparency can guide
facilitators without the need to use philosophical novels because it will help
teachers select which stories (or other pedagogical resources) are more likely to
promote philosophical sessions. For example, if a story does not leave anything for
opaqueness to reveal, if it tells more than it conceals, than it is probably a narrative
with which children will not easily engage philosophically.
To summarize, once the definition of philosophy in Ancient Greek is
translated as “obsession for transparency,” it becomes clearer why questions have
such a fundamental role in philosophy. Part of philosophical work is to identify
the questions that should be asked to promote thinking and distinguish them from
the questions that trap inquiry in dead ends. As Daniel Dennett explains:
We philosophers are better at asking questions than at answering
them, and this may strike some people as a comical admission of
futility ⎯ “He says his specialty is just asking questions, not
answering them. What a puny job! And they pay him for this?”
But anybody who has ever tackled a truly tough problem knows
that one of the most difficult tasks is finding the right questions to
ask and the right order to ask them in. You have to figure out not
only what you don’t know, but what you need to know and don’t
need to know, and so forth. The form our questions take opens up
some avenues and closes off others, and we don’t want to waste
time and energy barking up the wrong trees. (Dennett 2006, 19)
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In other words, philosophical research about questions establishes the type
of transparency that should be fostered and aimed for. Our second suggestion is
aimed at practitioners who promote the practice of philosophy in the classroom by
offering philosophical questions at the beginning of sessions. This is sometimes
viewed as a way to overcome the problem identified by Cam of having to deal
with non-philosophical questions, since children are not familiar with the
expected inquiry questions. That is, given that one cannot absolutely guarantee
the appearance of philosophical questions in the session, some practitioners have
designed materials that offer ready-made philosophical questions to begin a
session with as a way to overcome this problematic issue (Worley 2011; Law 2003)
On the one hand, this supposed methodological refinement overcomes the
difficulty of passing philosophical criteria on to the community of inquiry, and
even the difficulty of training teachers how to select a question so as to safeguard
a session`s philosophical nature. But on the other hand, it removes from practice
the lived experience of testing, evaluating and creating awareness of the
philosophical tone of questions, as well as the process of discovering the meaning
of questions from scratch. That is, when following this option, there is no given
moment at which the community of inquiry can live cognitively and explore
metacognitively the discovery of asking questions, and in the process of dialogue
address the philosophical tone underlying the questions.
The shared experience of finding and discussing criteria for the
philosophical nature of inquiry, when done within P4C practice where children
pose their own questions, is fundamental, for it provides myriad scenarios that are
philosophically promising for building the community. It shows how some
questions invite thinking in an open way that is not philosophical, how other
times questions invite thinking philosophically and how at still other times
questions may appear to invite philosophical dialogue but still hide a certain
obscurity that requires refinement of the question by the community.
That is, beginning a philosophical session with questions offered by the
participants promotes an experience and experimentation with questioning that
help participants understand how questions come with assumptions, how
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the richness of questions in philosophy for children
modifying the question can turn a murky subject into a clearer inquiry, how
sometimes questions are repeated in interesting ways over the course of a school
year or even that a question might not be a means to an end (the answer) but an
end in itself. Understanding a question is an important part of thinking, and in a
P4C session the community soon discovers that philosophically the most
interesting thing that one can do with a question goes beyond just answering it.
The exploration of questions also helps better understand what is meant by
a certain type of philosophical opacity, which is not always immediately visible or
identifiable in resources such as the Question Quadrant. For example, if a child
asks the question “Why does this exist?” a lack of practice on understanding
questions or a hasty procedure to label them can interpret it as simply asking why
some specific thing comes into existence. A deeper investigation of the motivation
of the question can reveal the metaphysical tone of wonder about the ontological
nature of things in the world and astonishment at their existence.
Our suggestion is that providing moments to ask questions and
deliberately investigating the nature of questioning can overcome this lack of
experience that occurs in approaches that do not start sessions with questions to
set the agenda for inquiry. One possibility is to ask at the end of a philosophical
session for participants to share their own questions to be debated. This can be
done simply by asking the community to share these questions out loud or by
giving participants pieces of paper to write down questions and collect them to
share them later.
Another possibility is to hold a session to collect questions in communities
of inquiry that have had previous philosophy sessions. The facilitator may write
on the board the beginning of a story that requires questions for completion. For
example, she may write: “Daisy was on holiday. If someone had asked her what
she was thinking about she wouldn’t have been able to say... She would have only
remembered the question that occurred to her. What question do you think could
have occurred to Daisy?”
Another possibility is to collect questions in the classroom at various other
moments during the school day and then organize a session in which participants
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can analyze and debate what they might do with their questions and why
questions require different treatments5.
In conclusion, a proper understanding of philosophy and questioning
implies recognizing that excellence of inquiry requires a community.
questions and the community of inquiry
A proper understanding of philosophy as an obsession for transparency is
to recognize that thinking is a situated, embedded and embodied activity that
underlies the practice of philosophical inquiry, and consequently depends on a
broader posture that sees questioning as an activity that requires a community
(Peirce, 1868). As Daniel Dennett describes:
Eventually, we must arrive at questions about ultimate values, and
no factual investigation could answer them. Instead, we can do no
better than to sit down and reason together, a political process of
mutual persuasion and education that we can try to conduct in
good faith. But in order to do that we have to know what we are
choosing between, and we need to have a clear account of the
reasons that can be offered for and against the different visions of
the participants. Those who refuse to participate (because they
already know the answers in their hearts) are, from the point of
view of the rest of us, part of the problem. (Dennett, 2006, p. 14)
That is, even when there are people who do not want to participate in the
community of inquiry, they must be taken into consideration by imagining which
questions they could pose and how they would engage in the questioning. This is
captured by how the notion of community of inquiry stands as a regulative ideal
that is deepened and clarified by experiencing being part of communities of
inquiry (Costa-Carvalho & Mendonça, 2017), in which participants learn that even
those that are not part of a specific community of inquiry are included, and
become an integrated part of it in the struggle to overcome issue’s opaqueness.
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5
And many other games and activities with questions can be found in second chapter entitled “Questioning”
by Robert Fisher Teaching Children to Learn (1995).
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received in: 23.05. 2019
accepted in: 18.06.2019
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