Education and Science beyond the “Myth of Stability”: Deweyan-Neurathian Notes

This chapter takes its cue from the last volume of the British epistemologist Stephen Toulmin, who invoked a shift from the modern search for unshakeable stability to a more practice-oriented and balanced understanding of reason. Toulmin’s reflections provide us with a valuable backdrop against which to read the contemporary emphasis upon evidence-based education, arguably an instance of that Myth of Stability that he denounces and suggests countering through a theoretical device elaborating on some themes from John Dewey. While Toulmin tends to oppose the Deweyan to the neopositivistic stance (understood as the 20th century heir of the modern Myth of Stability), I will explore the dialogue between Dewey and one of the founders of the Vienna Circle, Otto Neurath, when the latter invited the former to contribute to the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. I will show how, despite undeniable differences (which actually Dewey tended to emphasize, but Neurath was keen to minimize), we can reconstruct a conceptual platform that equips us with an understanding of the circuit education-science remote from any Myth of Stability. In particular, my argument will develop in three steps: first, I will argue that there are significant commonalities between Dewey and Neurath in their understanding of the pivotal role of education when engaging with the question of what unified science is about; secondly, I will show how both – precisely when addressing educational matters – refrain from any idolatry of numbers and quantification; and, thirdly, I will investigate what educational research may look like once we establish an alliance between Dewey’s views on “a science of education” and Neurath’s encyclopedic stance. In this sense, the historical reconstruction of a specific encounter between two important and influential philosophical traditions of 20th century (American pragmatism and Logical Empiricism) could be conducive to the fine-tuning of conceptual tools that can allow us to maintain a scientific attitude in studying education without yielding to the rhetoric of evidence-based research and to the spell of the Myth of Stability