Education, Consciousness and Negative Feedback: Towards the Renewal of Modern Philosophy of Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This article is well-written and makes an important contribution to Educational philosophy and theory, by bringing into focus and extrapolating the significance of PCT and the neglected work of Dewart for the creation of learning theory that could conceivably respond to the global environmental crisis, building nicely on the author’s previous research.  

As I am several days late with this review, and because the content and research of the study is consistently strong, I have focused this review, mostly on minor edits aimed at increasing readability and clarity. 

The final bullet point refers to a possible content-based revision.

The following lines/sections should be considered and possibly reworked:




• Lines 72 and 73. The end of this sentence, since it's so importantly placed in the text-intro, could be minority rewritten (all possible edits in square brackets):

 “In order to understand the forms of learning and how they can be enhanced and directed by teaching, we must consider the existence of living beings and the function of learning [within living processes]”

• Lines 81 and 82: Understandable, but I think this sentence could be written to increase clarity and readability (consider more clearly expressing what the subject of the sentence is, and rephrase in active (not passive) voice):

 
  
  “Two well-known practical problems in  (particularly) human action – perceptual control – are side-effects and especially conflicts.”
  
  
• Line 109-110: 

‘Last but one’ is not a grammatically correct sentence in English, please consider rewriting as [In the penultimate chapter].
  
  “In the last but one Chapter, we will return to the main questions of consciousness.”
  
  
• Line 158. At various times throughout, the concept of consciousness is referred to as ‘the consciousness’, which is an awkward way to say this in English. Remove the article ‘the’ in these instances’: 

    
  ‘That regrettable partiality of [the] consciousness has had many remarkable consequences.’
• Line 716-717: Should be ‘it’ not ‘is’

 :  
  
  “The special benefit of this competence is that [it] enables imagination, planning and choosing between possible alternatives.’
  
  
• Par 728-742, possible consideration: 

The discussion on the relevance of this research to teaching and learning could perhaps be developed slightly further in this paragraph, in terms of making some additional connections and descriptions to related research or providing slightly less general educational accounts. For instance, in edusemiotic discourse, scholars have often spoke about the importance to pedagogy of being able to respond to yet unknown or unfamiliar feedback, often through the notion of indexicality. For instance, Campbell (2016) in “Indexical ways of knowing: an inquiry into the indexical sign and ow to educate for novelty”,  offers examples of how a child responds to negative feedback when learning music by ear in the context of a music lesson. Some level of educational description like this, or at least a little more connection to research that extrapolates these ideas and shows the reader how they manifest in actual teaching/learning events would be beneficial. 
  
  Thank you for the opportunity to engage with an extremely interesting and insightful article!

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This is an interesting and original contribution. The argument is clearly stated and the article is lucid throughout. The author deploys the argument entirely within a specific persuasion and philosophical tradition, which is both a merit and a demerit. It is a merit to the extent that it secures for the article adequate focus, an insiders' comfort zone and the given, supportive background of philosophical research on semiotics and consciousness. It is a demerit to the extent that it limits dialogue with other persuasions and does not offer many opportunities to the author directly to state how the article intervenes in current debates of philosophy of education (e.g., through specific references to other educational philosophers who may have discussed issues that preoccupy this article too). The article adds its own perspective and that is important; but it does not refer to alternative, educational-philosophical accounts either of consciousness or of their relevance to theorizing the climate crisis; it does not engage in dialogue with educational-philosophical discussions of either representationalism or the Western conception of consciousness; it does not show why the more idiosyncratic conceptualization of absent-mindedness through Leslie Dewart would fare better in educational-theoretical contexts than, say, the more virtue-ethical conception of absent-mindedness (e.g. as a virtue when it effects a valuable distraction or as a vice when it echoes failures to pay attention, etc); it does not state why the semiotic basis of Dewart is better than, say, Juri Lotman's; and it does not explain how the author's approach differs, say, from those new phenomenologies (e.g. James Mensch's) which, by drawing from Merleau-Ponty and Patocka, offer a non-representationalist account of consciousness (yet, also a less correlationist and less subjective-idealistic account of the subject's preponderance in consciousness of reality than the one offered by this article in the sections on Dewart).  I mentioned all the above for the author's future research. I am not saying that any such discussions are compelling for the article's publication. Hence, I recommend publication subject only to minor changes such as the following:

Absent-mindedness is too psychological a notion, as it is broadly used, and too semiotic-ontological in Dewart’s philosophy, for explaining the climate crisis, which probably involves many and not just one source of this crisis. As it is presented in the abstract, the whole problem appears to be ontologized, de-politicized and reduced to one explanation/cause. This impression could be mitigated by toning down the article’s claim: instead of stating in the abstract that “the source of the crisis is assumed to be absent-9 mindedness, presented by Leslie Dewart as a distortion of the development of human consciousness”, something far more qualified could be stated, e.g., “one of the sources of the crisis …”. The article, as it proceeds, makes appropriate nuances throughout and becomes more cautious in its claims as its argument gets deployed, so, I think that my suggested change in the abstract would suffice to strike the right note and keep away criticisms/charges of reductivism.   And: Please, for reasons of accuracy, replace the word Chapter (p. 3, also in footnote 24, and, again, p. 16, etc) with Section whenever the issue is a chunk of the submitted article and not any essay within a book.

Author Response

Thank you very much for good advices for my future work as well as suggestions for this article.

Very good point that the abstract makes an exaggerated claim. I corrected it by just changin "The source..." to "One of the sources...".

As you asked, I changed all "Chapter" to "Section" when they refer to the parts of this article. One occurrence (in footnote 15, page 10) I left as it was because it refers to the part of a non-edited book.