Aim of Community of Inquiry

1. Aim of Community of Inquiry Help children to make better judgments.

2. What is a Good Judgment? • Practical Wisdom • Synthetic rather than Analytic • Capacity for integrating vast and changing data • See data as elements in a single patterns • See their implications and possibilities for the future • Highly developed relational consciousness

3. What is a good Judgment? • Sensitivity to Contours and Texture of a situation • Something empirical and aesthetic (working with part-whole relationships) • A feel for the relevant or salient data

4. What is a good Judgment? • Educable • What fits with what • What springs from what • What leads to what • Conscious of how things vary to different observers • What the results are likely to be

5. What is a Good Judgment? • Qualitative rather than quantitative • Capacity to focus on specifics of a situation as well as general • Species of direct acquaintance like a parent knows a child • Practical wisdom as opposed to theoretical knowledge

6. Emotions as Judgments • Nussbaum, deSousa, Soloman, Elgin • Each emotion entails a cognitive appraisal • These appraisals are central features of emotion • To be angry is to make a judgment that one has been wronged

7. Emotions as Perceptions • How I see a situation determines what I think is salient or important in the situation • It determines what I attend to • We determine what is puzzling, saddening, worthy of inquiry.

8. Moral Perceptions as Emotions • If the function of emotions is to assess salience and to communicate it, then education of emotions are central to education. • A person weak in caring thinking will not even notice the moral dimension of an existing situation, and if he does, will choose to ignore it.

9. Emotions as Judgments • Rarely does knowledge of moral principles or moral reasoning alone prompt a child to recognize the existence of a moral problems. • It is our emotions that motivate us to distinguish what is moral in the situation.

10. Emotion as Judgment • It is our emotions that move us to act to correct the situation. • Moral perception takes the form of preoccupation - a caring from the inside. (Weil, Murdoch, Noddings)

11. Emotion as Judgment • The caring we have received from others is often converted into caring thinking on our part.. • What Nodding calls caring is an emotional judgment. • Where it not, it would be difficult to explain why one person allows herself to become involved, and another not.

12. Summary • To recognize a problem as a moral one is a judgments • To recognize a moral problem is also a moment of caring thinking. • Remove the emotion and it is highly doubtful that cognition alone would notice the moral need, much less act on it.

13. A scenario • Upon seeing a hungry child asking for money, one child is disdainful of child’s appearance, another finds herself compassionate and a third is indignant that this situation exists in a wealthy country. • The three emotions, disdain, compassion and indignation rest on a common judgment, something like “This kid is in a miserable condition. I’m not but I could be someday.”

14. One child is threatened by the situation and experiences disdain or disgust as a means of dealing with this terrifying thought. • The second, perhaps recognizing the same threat, is compassionate and by helping the child attempts to combat the threat itself

15. The third child attempts may very well be moved to bring attention of others to the injustice of the situation. • All three are judgments of salience.