Emotion Education without Ontological Commitment?

Abstract

Emotion education is enjoying new-found popularity. This paper explores the 'cosy consensus' that seems to have developed in education circles, according to which approaches to emotion education are immune from metaethical considerations such as contrasting rationalist and sentimentalist views about the moral ontology of emotions. I spell out five common assumptions of recent approaches to emotion education and explore their potential compatibility with four paradigmatic moral ontologies. I argue that three of these ontologies fail to harmonise with the common assumptions. Either those three must therefore be rejected or, if we want to retain one or more of them (for instance, Jesse Prinz's recent rebranding of hard sentimentalism that I explore in detail), we need to revise our assumptions about the practice of emotion education in ways that are both radical and, I argue, ultimately unacceptable.The tenuous relationship between theory and practice continues to haunt practical disciplines. A psychotherapist uses cognitive behavioural therapy while questioning behaviourism as a psychological model. A school administrator abhors the subjectivist definition of quality underlying Total Quality Management but still decides to apply its practical tools and techniques. An educational practitioner sets out to develop a 'praxis' of teaching irrespective of any established theory. Are these better understood as cases of undue inconsistencies or of healthy pragmatism? There is much talk among academics of 'guilt by association', where reservations about underlying theories carry over into related practices or vice versa; there is less mention, for some reason, of 'pride by association', although that seems to be the other side of the same coin.

Pity: a mitigated defence

“…Emotion also has a more general epistemic role in Aristotle’s virtue theory as it provides the overarching intellectual virtue of phronêsis – which oversees, integrates and adjudicates the whole virtue repertoire – with the required sensitivity to, and proper perception of, morally relevant features of the circumstances at hand (see Roberts 2013, 201). Although emotion does not create moral value from scratch – this is not a sentimentalist account but a soft rationalist and a soft realist one (Kristjánsson 2010a, 2010b) – the assumption is that without emotions, the moral enterprise would never have gotten off the ground in the first place as we would not have learned how to track the morally relevant features of situations.…”

There is Something About Aristotle: The Pros and Cons of Aristotelianism in Contemporary Moral Education

“…Education of the emotions has, of course, become a buzzword in many recent approaches to moral emotion. Aristotelianism offers the additional bonus of supplying those approaches with an ontology of ‘soft rationalism’ that makes full sense of the role and salience of emotions, without buying into unsavoury forms of sentimentalism about emotions as arational and independent creators of moral value (Kristjánsson, 2010b).…”

From the Ontology of Interaction to the Semiotics of Education

“…They all consider ontology extremely important to philosophy and also to practice of education, up to suggesting exactly the phrase "ontological turn" in their texts or even titles (Barnett, 2004;2009;Dall'Alba & Barnacle, 2007;Pio & Varkøy, 2012;Rømer, 2013). Common themes in these papers are: values and aims of education (Ibid, Bonnett, 2000;Brook, 2012;Kristjánsson, 2010), ontological commitments of educational research (Wegerif, 2008), and especially the concept of dialogue and its ontological bearings in education ( , 2012;Wegerif, 2008). A very strong shared influence is from Heideggerian phenomenological and existential ontology of human existence, being-in-the-world (Dall'Alba & Barnacle, 2007;Pio & Varkøy, 2012).…”