Pär SegerdahlMuch debated issues tend to be about how we should view important matters that are also multi-faceted. The school system is important. But there are many ways of thinking about the importance of education; many ways of reasoning about how it should be designed to carry out the important tasks that we think it has.

So how should we think about it?

The question is reflexive. It is about the matter, but also about how the matter should be described. How should we reflect important things in our ways of reasoning about them? It is in this reflexive dimension that we are debating school, health care, freedom of speech, or the ethics of stem cell research. It is a difficult to navigate dimension. We easily go astray in it, but we can also try to find our way in it and become wiser.

Philosophers have felt particularly responsible for this reflexive dimension. They have been thinking about how we think about things, if I may put it that way. They have been thinking about thinking. I do it now, by trying to understand debated issues in terms of a difficult to navigate reflexive dimension. I do not know how successful my attempt is. The risk is that what I call a reflexive dimension appears like a separate realm of pure ideas about things (absolute principles for how we should think).

I do not want to reinvent Platonism. I just want to point out that when we debate something, we reason not only about the matter, but also about how we reason about it. We work on ourselves. Debates that lack such self-awareness tend to be dogmatic and less fruitful.

A name for work on self-awareness could be self-criticism, or thinking. I believe it makes a difference if conversations in a society are marked by the attitude that “the matter” also includes ourselves. Responsibility has its origin in that attitude.

Pär Segerdahl

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The Ethics Blog - Thinking about thinking