Critical Thinking and Epistemic Injustice by Alessia Marabini

Author:Alessia Marabini
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030957148
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

4.3 The Siegel–Williams Debate on the Value of Critical Thinking

An even more recent debate about Siegel’s positions arises from the critical reflections of Emma Williams. In her article “In Excess of Epistemology: Siegel, Taylor, Heidegger and the Conditions of Thought” (2015), Williams raises some radical objections against Siegel’s thinking by proposing an alternative to the classical view of critical thinking. Williams examines the conception that she defines as hyper-epistemological of critical thinking proposed by the philosopher.

While Siegel refers to a conception of critical thinking based on reasons, critical thinking does not appear like this within a Heideggerian and Taylorian vision such as that defended by Williams, focused on a different and ‘non-technical’ vision of thought.

In the first place, Williams criticises the clear separation that Siegel places between truth—understood as the aim of knowledge—and rational justification. For Siegel, while always aiming at the truth, justification may never come to coincide with the truth, given that a justified belief can nevertheless be false. While truth figures as an absolute and independent notion, justification, on the contrary, is always relative to the beliefs or point of view of the agent. Nonetheless, Siegel’s thesis predicts that belief may be—albeit fallible—an indicator of truth. In this way Siegel characterises critical thinking as a practice built on the justification of our beliefs as attempts to arrive at the truth. A use of this version of critical thinking, based primarily on a methodological approach has, however, for Williams substantial implications for the theories of knowledge that should not be underestimated.

Starting from an analysis of the underlying notions, Williams supports a conception of thought inspired by the ideas of Charles Taylor (1997). In addition to being an alternative method of understanding thought, Taylor’s theory provides an image of the human being that starts from Heidegger’s positions. Only through a review of critical thinking in this sense would it be possible to do justice to the conditions of receptivity and responsibility that characterise human thinking (Williams, 2015, p. 143).Williams re-introduces Taylor’s project with the intent—although not exclusive—of ‘challenging’ classical epistemology and some of its classic issues. The challenge is addressed, even earlier, to a certain system of metaphysical assumptions that have always inhabited the territories of epistemology. Firstly, the fact that classical epistemology includes a representational conception of human thought; secondly, the excessive emphasis on the methodological and technical aspect as a tool to reach the truth; finally a vision of the human being as an autonomous and self-reflective subject. At the basis of these ideas, according to Williams, there is the further assumption that there is a correspondence between thought and the world, easily reachable through a series of steps that would give a correct order to thoughts. Taylor, drawing inspiration from Heidegger, proposes on the contrary a conception of critical thought capable of eluding the problematic aspects of this methodological assumption. Siegel, after a previous response to Taylor (Siegel, 1998, p. 28), argues that the objections raised by the philosopher are harmless or irrelevant because they leave epistemology “as it is” (Williams, 2015, p.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.