We develop an account of societal democratization that synthesizes cultural sociology and deliberative democracy. Cultural sociologists emphasize the symbolic inclusion of marginalized groups into the civil sphere. Deliberative democrats stress growth in the deliberative capacity of society. We argue that democratization entails the co-evolution of culture and reason. The basis of co-evolution is the performative construction of an inclusive demos, which requires a deliberative background but is also a source of the moral emotions that motivate deliberation. Since moral emotions can (...) also sweep people up and make them do reckless things, they must in turn be redeemable in inclusive deliberation. This synthesis sharpens a normative position for the evaluation of episodes of inclusion, extends current accounts of the place of emotion in cultural sociology and deliberative democracy, and provides a frame for comparative analyses of democratization. We illustrate with an examination of the exclusion and inclusion of Indigenous Australians. (shrink)

Divine Providence and Human Agency develops an understanding of God and God's relation to creation that perceives God as sovereign over creation while, at the same time, allowing for a meaningful notion of human freedom. This book provides a bridge between contemporary approaches that emphasise human freedom, such as process theology and those influenced by it, and traditional theologies that stress divine omnipotence. This volume offers an important contribution to the debate of the doctrine of God in the context of (...) an evolutionary universe. (shrink)

Researchers are increasingly interested in the impact of philosophical dialogues with children. Studies have shown that this approach helps realise dialogic ideals in learning environments and that Philosophy with Children significantly impacts children’s cognitive and social skills. However, other aspects of this approach have attracted less attention – for example, given the focus on children’s thinking, voices and perspectives in Philosophy with Children, surprisingly few studies have examined how children experience philosophical dialogues. The aim of this study was to help (...) fill this research gap by describing how children perceived a week of online philosophical dialogues. We conducted 58 dialogues in emergency teaching during the COVID-19 lockdown in Denmark and asked the children questions about their experiences of the dialogues – for instance, about their overall impressions, their perceptions of meaning and the facilitators, and their sense of community. We found that the children generally enjoyed the dialogues and understood their rationale even though the rationale had not been explicitly discussed with them. We also found that the children’s opinions were diverse and complex, that some of their descriptions were surprising and that their experiences, in general, matched influential descriptions of dialogic teaching ideals. Our findings confirm that it is important to examine children’s perspectives; therefore, we emphasise the need for further attention to the experiences of children participating in philosophical dialogues. (shrink)

Organizational change surrounding the security of identifiable health information has become imperative. This is a significant challenge for managers who are held responsible for loss of privacy through faulty security procedures. Management cannot completely secure the organization and still provide employees and customers with the information and services they need. Organizations must decide how much and what type of security they need, how to assign priorities, and how to manage security as the organization evolves in a competitive environment.

Sustainability problems often seem intractable. One reason for this is due to difficulties coordinating actors’ efforts to address socially responsible outcomes. Drawing on theories of bounded ethicality and incorporating work on communicating shared values in coordinating action this paper outlines the lack coordination as a matching issue, one complicated by underlying heterogeneity in actors’ moral values and thus motivation to address socially responsible outcomes. Three factors contribute to this matching problem. First, we argue it is not actors’ simple cognitive awareness, (...) but their moral awareness of social issues that explains why certain actors move to address problems while others do not. In other words, actors may recognize sustainability problems, but are not motivated to solve them as they are not understood as moral problems. Second, we posit that progress requires alignment in issues that some actors find worth addressing whereas others do not, thus explaining how heterogeneity in moral perceptions interrupt coordination towards socially important goals. Finally, we propose that progress is undermined if actors myopically focus on level-specific outcomes in ways that elucidates why institutional responses often fail to address individual outcomes and vice versa. We use the existing literature on the socially important issue of food waste to examine our theoretical contribution and develop a typology that explains conditions that inhibit coordination. Thus, our work proposes a psycho-structural view on matching and coordination toward sustainable outcomes, highlighting how psychological and structural constraints prevent effective coordination in addressing sustainability goals. (shrink)

Increasing interest in applying the theory and practice of deliberative democracy to new and varied political contexts leads us to ask whether or not deliberation is a universal political practice. While deliberation does manifest a universal competence, its character varies substantially across time and space, a variation partially explicable in cultural terms. We deploy an intersubjective conception of culture in order to explore these differences. Culture meets deliberation where publicly accessible meanings, symbols, and norms shape the way political actors engage (...) one another in discourse. Fuller understanding of political deliberation requires comparative and historical studies of particular contexts. We look at one case from Egypt in some depth and provide shorter illustrations from Botswana, Europe, India, Japan, Madagascar, the United States, Yemen, and elsewhere. Cross-cultural learning can enrich the theory of deliberative democracy, and give democratic theory a more universal reach. (shrink)

The aim of this study was to investigate the ethical dilemma of prioritising financial resources to expensive biological therapies. For this purpose, the four principles of biomedical ethics formulated by ethicists Tom Beauchamp and James Childress were used as a theoretical framework. Based on arguments of justice, Beauchamp and Childress advocate for a health care system organised in line with the Danish system. Notably, our study was carried out in a Danish setting.

This paper presents the idea of a decision-support system for a livestock farm, called “ethical accounting”, to be used as an extension of traditional cost accounting. “Ethical accounting” seeks to make available to the farmer information about how his decisions affect the interests of farm animals, consumers and future generations. Furthermore, “ethical accounting” involves value-based planning. Thus, the farmer should base his choice of production plan on reflections as to his fundamental objectives, and he should make his final decision only (...) after having seriously considered the various consequences for the affected parties. (shrink)

The later works of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1913) offer an extended metaphor of mind and a rich conception of the dynamics of knowledge and learning. After a ‘rhetorical turn’ Peirce develops his early ‘semiotics’ into a more general theory of sign and sign use, while integrating his pragmatism, phenomenology, and semiotics. Therefore, in this article I bring Peirce's notion of semiosis—the sign's action—to the forefront. In doing so, I hope to disclose how Peirce's rhetorical turn not only opens up towards (...) a richer conception of the dynamics of knowledge and learning, but also invites a shift of perspective from the psychological processes of learning to the semeiotic processes that characterizes the very dynamics of knowledge production. (shrink)

What is a woman? And what does it mean to be a feminist today? In her first full-scale engagement with feminist theory since her internationally renowned Sexual/Textual Politics (1985), Toril Moi challenges the dominant trends in contemporary feminist and cultural thought, arguing for a feminism of freedom inspired by Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. Written in a clear and engaging style What is a Woman? brings together two brand new book-length theoretical interventions, Moi's work on Freud and Bourdieu, (...) and her studies of desire and knowledge in literature. In the controversial title-essay, Toril Moi radically rethinks current debates about sex, gender, and the body - challenging the commonly held belief that the sex/gender distinction is fundamental to all feminist theory. Moi rejects every attempt to define masculinity and femininity, including efforts to define femininity as that which 'cannot be defined. In the second new book-length essay, 'I am a Woman', Toril Moi reworks the relationship between the personal and the philosophical, pursuing ways to write theory that do not neglect the claims of the personal. Setting up an encounter between contemporary theory and Simone de Beauvoir, Moi radically rethinks the need, and difficulty, of finding one's own philosophical voice by placing it in new theoretical contexts. A sustained refusal to lay down theoretical or political requirements for femininity, and a powerful argument for a feminism of freedom, What is a Woman? is a deeply original contribution to feminist theory. (shrink)

McDowell recently renounced the assumption that the content of any knowledgeable, perceptual judgement must be included in the content of the knowledge grounding experience. We argue that McDowell’s introduction of a new category of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge is incompatible with the main line of argument in favour of conceptualism as presented in Mind and World [McDowell, John. 1996. Mind and World. 2nd ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press]. We reconstruct the original line of argument and show that it rests on (...) the assumption that a specific model of justification, the Comparison Model, must apply to all cases of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge. We then show that the Comparison Model cannot be applied to McDowell’s new category of non-inferential, perceptual knowledge. As a consequence, McDowell is in need of an alternative model of justification and an alternative argument for conceptualism. We propose such an alternative model of justification based on McDowell’s reading of Sellars, but argue that the model only serves to make the need for an alternative motivation for conceptualism more urgent. (shrink)

Wim Wenders' film Wings of Desire tells the story of an angel who wishes to become mortal in order to know the simple joy of human life. Told from the angel's point of view, the film is shot in black and white. But at the very instant the angel perceives the realities of human experience, the film blossoms into colour. In this article, I use this film to illustrate and explore Peirce's notion of experience and his claim that ‘experience is (...) our great and only teacher’. In his 1903 Harvard lectures, Peirce placed phenomenology at the heart of his philosophy, while outlining a notion of ‘experience’ that clearly integrates his semiotics, phenomenology and pragmatism. To Peirce, experience is a ‘brutally produced conscious effect’ that comes ‘out of practice’ and is a ‘forcible modification of our ways of thinking’. But as this modification is generated by the actions and flows of signs, it is pertinent to read Peirce's notion of experience in relation to his notion of semiosis. Consequently, a Peircean reading of Wings of Desire not only helps to explore how experience teaches, but also the ways in which the rudeness of experience cannot be fully understood without considering the sign's action. (shrink)

With his _An Interpretation of Nietzsche’s "On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life_", Anthony K. Jensen shows how 'timely' Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" really is. This comprehensive and insightful study contextualizes and analyzes a wide range of Nietzsche’s earlier thoughts about history: teleology, typology, psychology, memory, classical philology, Hegelianism, and the role historiography plays in modern culture. _On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life_ is shown to be a ‘timely’ work, too, insofar as it weaves (...) together a number of Nietzsche's most important influences and thematic directions at that time: ancient culture, science, epistemology, and the thought of Schopenhauer and Burckhardt. Rather than dismiss it as a mere ‘early’ work, Jensen shows how the text resonates in Nietzsche’s later perspectivism, his theory of subjectivity, and Eternal Recurrence. And by using careful philological analysis of the text’s composition history, Jensen is in position to fully elucidate and evaluate Nietzsche’s arguments in their proper contexts. As such Jensen’s _Interpretation_ should restore Nietzsche’s second "Untimely Meditation" to a prominent place among 19 th Century philosophies of history. (shrink)

Cet essai biographique sur Kierkegaard permet au lecteur de cheminer dans sa pensée au fil de ses oeuvres et de découvrir qu'elle se concentre autour de deux thèmes majeurs : l'amour et de la foi. Ils sont comme deux horizons qui reviennent constamment sous sa plume sous des éclairages les plus divers. Tout ce que Kierkegaard a écrit ne se rapporte pas directement à ces deux notions mais on peut risquer l'hypothèse que l'essentiel de ce qu'il a publié est une (...) longue méditation sur celles-ci. L'auteur présente aussi l'angoisse et le désespoir qui ont contribué à rendre le nom de Kierkegaard connu en dehors du monde des philosophes et des théologiens. Durant toute sa vie Kierkegaard a connu les veilleurs de nuit qui arpentaient les rues silencieuses de Copenhague. Le veilleur confortait le sommeil des habitants de la ville par son chant. Kierkegaard. au contraire, en choisissant le pseudonyme Vigilius Haufniensis espérait réveiller ses concitoyens à l'humain et à l'éthique chrétienne en déployant une activité littéraire presque surhumaine. À l'époque cependant, sa réussite fut limitée. Ce n'est qu'au XXe siècle que sa voix commença à être entendue dans son pays et ailleurs et aujourd'hui, presque deux cents ans après sa naissance, on peut légitimement penser qu'elle continue à surprendre et à déranger. (shrink)

How does perception provide reasons for our empirical judgements? This volume offers a set of new essays which in different ways address this fundamental question, and investigate the implications for our understanding of perceptual experience.

INTRODUCTION HUTCHESONS LIFE AND WORKS The history of philosophy includes the names of many persons, famous in their time, whose contributions to human ...

Nietzsche stands alone among the great nineteenth-century philosophers of history to have been trained and employed as an historian. As a classical philologist, he was trained not only in Ancient languages, but also in the methods of critical hermeneutics, textual genealogy, and cultural theory. Despite this there has been comparatively little scholarly attention paid to Nietzsche's most pointed reflection on history: _On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life _, the second of his _Untimely Meditations_. In this monograph, Anthony (...) K. Jensen demonstrates how ‘timely’ this work of Nietzsche’s is, revealing a text that offers insight into the most important aspects of Nietzsche’s then-contemporary philosophy of history, including teleological theories, Hegelianism, Positivism, romantic historiography, classical philology, and the role of history in education and politics. Using a straightforward and conversational approach, Jensen contextualizes the figures and movements that serve as Nietzsche’s interlocutors, and situates this text within Nietzsche’s larger philosophical project. Through an examination of Nietzsche's views, the author argues for the contemporary philosophical relevance of _On the Uses and Disadvantage of History for Life_, and advances the scholarly discussion of this oft-overlooked but nevertheless essential text. (shrink)

This essay first tries to answer two questions: Why did the question of the woman writer disappear from the feminist theoretical agenda around 1990? Why do we need to reconsider it now? I then begin to develop a new analysis of the question of the woman writer by turning to the statement `I am not a woman writer'. By treating it as a speech act and analysing it in the light of Simone de Beauvoir's understanding of sexism, I show that (...) it is a response to a particular kind of provocation, namely an attempt to force the woman writer to conform to some norm for femininity. I also show that Beauvoir's theory illuminates Virginia Woolf's strategies in A Room of One's Own before, finally, asking why we still should want women to write. (shrink)

Agent Relative Ethics asks what the world would look like if we adopted agent relativity wholeheartedly, clinging to no shred of absolute morality. Alastair MacIntyre's haunting image of a post-apocalyptic world, in which our knowledge of ethics has been fragmented, poses a contrast between modern morality and ancient ethics. The two stand divided along the fault line of the nature of the good. Modern ethics has placed its stake in the absolute good, while ancient ethics rests upon the foundation of (...) the relative good. Following the lead of Bernard Williams, Agent Relative Ethics identifies alienation as a disturbing symptom of the present focus upon absolute goods. It then completes the diagnosis of the malady afflicting modern moral theory by clarifying the difference between absolute and relative goods. The remainder of the book explores how agent relativity can overcome the modern fragmentation of our ethical knowledge. Not just any relative goods can rectify the modern disorder. Only shared goods, belonging to a union of individuals, are sufficiently robust to overthrow the contemporary despotism of neutral goods. These shared goods exhibit many parallels with common sense morality, including partiality, impartiality, punishment, and an antagonism toward harmfully using others together with a more lenient attitude toward foreseeing harm. The final chapters probe the conditions, often unpalatable to the modern mind, by which ethics might be restored. Agent Relative Ethics will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in ethics and moral theory, ancient ethics, and the history of philosophy. (shrink)

I here explore the educational potential of cinema and TV-series through the eyes of the French philosopher Alain Badiou. To illustrate, I read the Norwegian web-based TV-series Skam, which reached out to millions of Nordic teens by a broad distribution, easy access and speaking a language young people could relate to. The series portrays the many faces and ambiguities of shame and shaming embedded in Nordic youth culture. In bringing the question of the pedagogy of cinema and TV-series to the (...) forefront, I here read Skam on three analytical levels. First, to explore the TV-series capability to captivate the viewers through a doubling of the real. Second, to examine Badiou’s idea of cinema as an ontological art, revolving around the question of the relationship between being and appearing. Third, I read Skam analytically, to consider Badiou’s claim that cinema is a democratic emblem. In sum, what may be the series’ potential for shaping the viewers’ ethical–political awareness? (shrink)

I must confess that I found [Calvin] Bedient’s account of Kristeva’s theories quite shocking. Since, on the whole, critical essays rarely upset me, my own reaction was quite puzzling to me. What is there in Bedient’s prose to unsettle me so? It certainly can’t be his style or tone: he has produced a perfectly even-tempered essay. Refraining from imputing selfish or dishonest motives to the theorist he wants to disagree with, Bedient never argues ad feminam, and takes much trouble lucidly (...) to explain why he disagrees with Kristeva. There is every reason to commend him for his honest style of argumentation. There can be no doubt that his essay is produced purely by his concern to take issue with a theory he truly believes to be incapable of accounting for the way in which poetry—and particularly modern poetry—actually works.What causes my unease must therefore be something else. It may of course be the fact that Bedient’s account of Kristeva’s theory of language in Revolution of Poetic Language is wrong. His is not a somewhat skewed, or slanted, or one-sided presentation of her views, but—as far as I can see—a total misreading. Briefly put, Bedient’s mistake consists in taking Kristeva’s account of the sentence process in language for a complete theory of poetic language. He does not seem to have noticed Kristeva’s account of the symbolic, her repeated insistence that language—the signifying process—is the product of a dialectical interaction between the symbolic and the semiotic, or even her definition of the “thetic.” Toril Moi, professor of comparative literature at the University of Bergen and professor at Duke University, is the editor of The Kristeva Reader and the author of Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory . Her most recent book is Feminist Theory and Simone de Beauvoir. (shrink)

Anthony K. Jensen - Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:4 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.4 671-672 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Anthony K. Jensen Emory University Lawrence J. Hatab. Nietzsche's Life Sentence: Coming to Terms with Eternal Recurrence. New York-London: Routledge, 2005. Pp. xix + 191. Paper, $24.95. In his latest book, Lawrence Hatab brings together several threads from his previous writing into (...) an elegant expression that examines a wide range of Nietzsche's thought through the single prism of his notoriously obscure conception of "Eternal Recurrence." The opening chapters establish the affirmation of becoming and the "tragic" view of the world (which Nietzsche had already articulated in his earliest.. (shrink)

Abstract: In this article, I offer a proposal to clarify what I believe is the proper relation between value maximization and stakeholder theory, which I call enlightened value maximization. Enlightened value maximization utilizes much of the structure of stakeholder theory but accepts maximization of the long-run value of the firm as the criterion for making the requisite tradeoffs among its stakeholders, and specifies long-term value maximization or value seeking as the firm’s objective. This proposal therefore solves the problems that arise (...) from the multiple objectives that accompany traditional stakeholder theory. I also discuss the Balanced Scorecard, which is the managerial equivalent of stakeholder theory, explaining how this theory is flawed because it presents managers with a scorecard that gives no score—that is, no single-valued measure of how they have performed. Thus managers evaluated with such a system (which can easily have two dozen measures and provides no information on the tradeoffs between them) have no way to make principled or purposeful decisions. The solution is to define a true (single dimensional) score for measuring performance for the organization or division (and it must be consistent with the organization’s strategy), and as long as their score is defined properly, (and for lower levels in the organization it will generally not be value) this will enhance their contribution to the firm. (shrink)

This radically original book argues for the power of ordinary language philosophy—a tradition inaugurated by Ludwig Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin, and extended by Stanley Cavell—to transform literary studies. In engaging and lucid prose, Toril Moi demonstrates this philosophy’s unique ability to lay bare the connections between words and the world, dispel the notion of literature as a monolithic concept, and teach readers how to learn from a literary text. Moi first introduces Wittgenstein’s vision of language and theory, which (...) refuses to reduce language to a matter of naming or representation, considers theory’s desire for generality doomed to failure, and brings out the philosophical power of the particular case. Contrasting ordinary language philosophy with dominant strands of Saussurean and post-Saussurean thought, she highlights the former’s originality, critical power, and potential for creative use. Finally, she challenges the belief that good critics always read below the surface, proposing instead an innovative view of texts as expression and action, and of reading as an act of acknowledgment. Intervening in cutting-edge debates while bringing Wittgenstein, Austin, and Cavell to new readers, Revolution of the Ordinary will appeal beyond literary studies to anyone looking for a philosophically serious account of why words matter. (shrink)

In contrast to positivistic assignations of influence in Nietzsche-studies, this article considers the possibility of “conversational” reconstructions of contexts, where the focus is less on “whether” and “when” Nietzsche read a text, and concentrates instead on “how” and “why” he read it. This method is exemplified by the case of Philipp Mainländer, a contemporary about whom Nietzsche says almost nothing of philosophical importance. This article shows that six key leitmotifs of the Zarathustrazeit happen to form direct solutions to dangers entailed (...) by Mainländer’s system: the Death of God, the Übermensch, the Last Man, Will to Power, Eternal Return, and Amor Fati. That each of these tropes serves as a neat solution to Mainländer suggests that Nietzsche was engaged in a sort of competitive intellectual conversation with his philosophy. And as such, Mainländer’s influence on Nietzsche, even if mostly negative, should not continue to be neglected. (shrink)

Through an exegetic reading of Peirce’s minor texts on higher education, I find that Peirce’s conception of a “Liberal Education” is close to the Herbartian conception of Bildung. Peirce calls for a general education with the ambition of qualifying critical thinkers with the capacity to go beyond the strict rules and narrow borders of the artes liberales, – the different subject matters or sciences taught at a university. Thus, Peirce’s conception of a liberal education is closely linked to his interpretation (...) of common sense – or sensis communis – as a critical commonsensism. To him, it is urgent to educate and nurture “the first rule of reason,” described as a will to learn, a curiosity, a dissatisfaction of what you already incline to think, and an intense desire to find things out. The nurturing of this “first rule of reason” is thus about educating an intellectual community of critical thinkers who are able to question authoritative beliefs, knowing how to debunk them, and how to turn away from obiter dictum. (shrink)

The philosophical situation at Copenhagen University in the 1960’s was dominated by two positivists. Th elogical positivist Jørgen Jørgensen – who had written the history of the “movement” – and the legal positivistAlf Ross. There were also two “outsiders”: Peter Zinkernagel, who did more analytical philosophy of language in the British style, and K. Grue Sørensen who was working in the traditions of neo-Kantianism. In 1955 Grue-Sørensen was hired as the first professor in education – after a long controversy about (...) the scientific status ofeducation as a discipline – but with a focus on the history of education. He had received a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1950 with a dissertation on refl exivity as a philosophical concept and a thesis about the reflexivity of consciousness. He was also an objectivist in ethics, and had been critical of the prevalent moral relativism and subjectivism found in recent philosophy. Jørgensen and Ross had done important work on moral argumentation with more technical work on the logic of imperatives and norms. Moral objectivism was not only wrong but in a way also “immoral” because it undermined their belief in democracy. Especially Jørgensen also thought that the idea of reflexivity was wrong when applied to consciousness. Neither statements nor consciousness could be reflexive – that is refer to themselves/itself. The reflexivity of consciousness is – according to Jørgensen – simply not an empirical psychological fact. Grue-Sørensen tried to establish the foundation of a theory of education based both on conceptions of consciousness and of the relation between scientific knowledge – facts – and moral values – in a neo-Kantian fashion. For him the interplay between ethics and knowledge was a central part of a theory of education – a belief due to which he never became a professor of philosophy – having tried many times. These debates in philosophy and in education were superseded in the 1970’s by the rise in influence of the German inspiration from Critical Theory and the demise of logical positivism. (shrink)

In the past decade, the meaning of Hegel's idea of a ‘science of logic’ has become a matter of intense philosophical debate. This article examines the two most influential yet opposed contemporary readings of the Science of Logic—often referred to as the ‘metaphysical’ and ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretations. I argue that this debate should be reframed as a contest between logic as ontology (LAO) and logic as metaphysics (LAM). According to Stephen Houlgate's interpretation of logic as ontology, the science of logic is (...) a progressively explicit unfolding of the categories of thought, which is at the same time the process by which being itself determines what it is to be. A second interpretation has been pursued by Sebastian Rödl and Robert Pippin, who read Hegel's logic as metaphysics. On this reading, the science of logic is a progressively coherent unfolding of the categories of thought, which articulate all that it could intelligibly mean to be. This article intervenes in this debate in three key ways. First, I argue that Houlgate's ontological approach undermines his attempt to establish the objective validity of the categories. Second, I show that the LAM emphasis on the crucial idea of apperception enables it to succeed where Houlgate fails by doing justice to the rational necessity with which the Logic unfolds. Third, I argue that, despite this success, the LAM program remains unrealized because of its neglect of Hegel's understanding of cognition as a form of life. While LAM has compellingly unfolded the ‘thought of being’, it has ignored the inverse question of the ‘being of thought’. I attempt to fulfil the LAM program by elaborating Hegel's account of what it means to be a thinker. (shrink)

This article contends that Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) may enhance our understanding of educational beliefs and that Peirce’s logic may be a tool to distinguish between a dogmatic and a pragmatic justification of such beliefs. The first part of the article elaborates on Peirce’s comprehension of beliefs as mediated, socially situated and future-oriented. The second part points to how Peirce promotes his “method of inquiry” as an ethos of science. The method is not judged by the conclusions it lead to (...) or by the knowledge it may produce. Contrary, as the results are unavoidably provisional and rectifiable, Peirce holds the method productive due to the norms guiding the inquiry: (1) the pragmatic principle, (2) the social principle, (3) fallibilism and (4) abduction. In sum, when adopting a peircean conception, educational research, theory building and practice should be characterized as a mutual commitment towards shared processes of joint learning. In that, Peirce’s method of inquiry may be fruitful in sorting dogmatism from pragmatism. (shrink)