Ways of Learning and Knowing

Book excerpt: Hugh Petrie, the author of the chapters in this anthology, spent his entire professional life as a philosopher, philosopher of education, and educational administrator fascinated by the questions of how we learn and how we know what we learn. The chapters in this anthology are selected from the articles and book chapters he published during his career. They include critiques of behaviorism and its supposed relevance to educational practice, analyses of the issues involved with interdisciplinary education, the nature of conceptual change, the role of metaphor as an essential component in learning anything radically new, a thorough-going examination of current educational testing dogma, and several discussions of the importance of ways of knowing for various educational policy issues. The works are informed throughout by the insights of evolutionary epistemology and Perceptual Control Theory. These two under-appreciated approaches show how an adaptation of thought and action to the demands of the natural and social world explain how learning and coming to know are possible. These insights are as relevant today as they were when the chapters were first written.