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Can students learn something from a teacher who doesn’t believe it herself?

Rowena Abellana Fellow
· 6 replies
Evidence & testimonyAfrican & AfricanaAnalyticDavid Hume#knowledge-and-belief#teaching#testimony#transmission
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Its coordinates: 2.2.4 Testimony

A colleague at a teachers' workshop told me that testimony can only pass on knowledge the speaker already has. It is a tidy principle, and it is how most of us picture teaching: I know something, I tell my students, now they know it too. Knowledge flows like water from a full jar to an empty one.

Then I read an example from the philosopher Jennifer Lackey that has bothered me all term. Imagine a schoolteacher who, for private religious reasons, does not believe in evolution. But she is conscientious. She knows the evidence, she knows it is overwhelming by the standards of the field, and she teaches the theory accurately and well, while never asserting her own doubts in class. Her students come to believe, on her say-so, that modern humans and apes share a common ancestor.

Do the students know it? It seems obvious that they do; they are in exactly the position of every other student taught by a competent teacher. But their teacher does not believe it, so she cannot know it. If testimony only transmits knowledge, there was nothing to transmit. Lackey's conclusion is that we learn from what people say, from the reliability of their statements, not from what is in their heads.

I teach the philosophy of the human person to sixteen-year-olds in Davao, and I teach plenty of views I don't hold. Usually that is knowledge about a philosopher, which I do have. But this case is different, and I find it unsettling. What exactly am I passing on when I teach?

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6 replies

  1. Tomasz Szewczak

    Fellow

    This is the cleanest case against the transmission picture I know. One way to put the alternative: what matters is not whether the speaker knows but whether her statement is a reliable indicator of the truth, given how it was produced. The teacher's statements are produced by her training and the curriculum, which track the evidence, so they are reliable even though her private belief diverges. The jar image fails because the water never passed through her.

    Helpful · 3
  2. Ikechukwu Anyanwu

    Fellow

    I teach my students texts I disagree with. Hume's essay on miracles every year, faithfully. They come away knowing what Hume argued, and I know that too, so that's ordinary transmission. Rowena's case is harder because the teacher asserts the claim itself, not a report of someone else's claim. I'd say she acts as a reliable conduit for the field, a little like a translator who conveys a text he would not have written. Whether we call that "her" testimony is perhaps the real question.

  3. Titilayo Adeyemi

    Fellow

    Oral traditions live with this all the time. My grandmother recited oríkì, praise poetry full of lineage history, and some of the episodes she privately thought were exaggerated, and said so to us later. But she recited them exactly as she had received them, and we learned our history from her. The knowledge, such as it is, belongs to the tradition and its checks, not to the person reciting. The reciter's private belief is almost beside the point, as long as she is faithful to the text.

    Helpful · 1
    1. Rowena Abellana

      Fellow

      Titilayo, that is beautiful, and it describes something I hadn't been able to say. The faithful reciter is not a lesser teacher than the believing one. In a sense she's a purer conduit, because nothing of her own gets mixed in.

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  4. Sana Rizvi

    Fellow

    Journalism has the shadow side of this. When I report that an official said something I doubt, I am careful to write "he said", not to assert it myself. But readers often come away believing the claim, and if it is true, perhaps knowing it. I have passed on knowledge I lacked, through a sentence I did not assert. That frightens me a little, because the same mechanism passes on falsehoods just as efficiently.

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  5. Emeka Anyaoha

    Fellow

    In physics tutoring I teach the Bohr model of the atom, which I know is wrong in important ways, because it is the right first step. My students learn real things from it, energy levels for instance, and some false things they will later unlearn. So I'd add a twist to Rowena's question: what students acquire from a teacher is often a mixture, and the teacher's job is to make sure the true parts are the ones that bear weight.