Intellectual freedom for intellectual development - Featured Topic

Liberal Education, Summer, 2003 by David Moshman

INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT, the development of the intellect, is the emergence of increasingly sophisticated forms or levels of cognition, the progress of understanding, reasoning, and rationality. We can describe the outcomes of intellectual development by specifying steps, stages, or levels of development for cognition as a whole and/or for various cognitive domains. Fundamentally, however, intellectual development is an ongoing process of reflection, coordination, and social interaction that begins in early childhood and continues, at least in some cases, long into adulthood.

Liberal education, however defined, includes the promotion of intellectual development as a primary goal. There may be specific facts, skills, and values we want students to learn in specific courses and contexts, but above all we want to foster intellectual progress. To encourage intellectual progress, we must promote reflection, coordination, and social interaction, the basic processes of development. There are many ways to do this, but the fundamental context for all of them, I argue, is one that encourages students to consider, propose, and discuss a variety of ideas--that is, an environment of intellectual freedom. I conclude with a set of principles of academic freedom that, I suggest, are foundational to the promotion of intellectual development.

Advanced cognition as metacognition

If cognitive developmental theorists and researchers in the last quarter of the twentieth century had a motto, it was something like, "Anything adults can do, young children can do, too." Reacting to Player's earlier account of preschool children as "preoperational," developmental researchers devised ingenious ways to show, for example, that four-year-olds have "theories of mind," and theorists proceeded to argue with each other as to whether the tantalizing insights and skills of children not yet four might suffice for us to credit even the three-year-old mind with a theory of itself (Flavell, Miller, and Miller 2002). There is, to be sure, plenty of evidence for cognitive abilities common or universal among college students that are rarely or never seen in very young children (Moshman 1998, 1999, 2003). The developmental literature challenges us, however, to be more clear about just how advanced cognition differs from childish cognition, which apparently is not as childish as we thought. My response to this challenge, in a word, is metacognition.

By metacognition I mean knowledge about cognition itself and control of one's own cognitive processes. Let me be clear: I am not suggesting that children lack metacognition or that adults are always metacognitive. Adolescents and adults, however, often achieve levels of conceptual knowledge about the nature and justification of knowledge and reasoning that are rarely or never seen in children. It is in this regard that later developing forms of cognition are most clearly advanced.

From logic to metalogic

Imagine a very young child who is presented with two boxes--one red and one blue--and is told there is a ball in one of them. Failing to find the ball in the red box, she immediately infers that it is in the blue box and looks for it there. We may conclude that her behavior involves a disjunctive inference of the form: p or q; not p; therefore, q (where p = the ball is in the red box, and q = the ball is in the blue box). To explain the fact that she routinely makes disjunctive inferences, we may even suggest that she in some sense "has" an inference schema of this form. However, there is no reason to assume she is aware of such a schema, or deliberately applies it for the purpose of reaching justifiable conclusions, or understands the logical necessity associated with deductive conclusions. Explicit understanding of the logic of disjunction exists only in the mind of the psychologist who is explaining her behavior. The child herself is probably not even aware that she has made an inference.

Consider now the following arguments, each consisting of two premises and a conclusion:

1. Elephants are plants or animals. Elephants are not plants. Therefore, elephants are animals.

2. Elephants are animals or plants. Elephants are not animals. Therefore, elephants are plants.

Even a young child would readily endorse the first argument as logical. Children as old as age nine or ten, however, reject arguments such as #2 as illogical. Most adolescents and adults, on the other hand, especially given sufficient opportunity to consider their responses, recognize in cases of this sort that the two arguments have the same logical form and are both valid. The second argument has a false second premise and a false conclusion, which is why children reject it, but it is nonetheless a valid argument in that the conclusion necessarily follows from the two premises. If the premises were true, the conclusion would necessarily be true as well.

This age difference, it should be emphasized, does not reflect an inability of children to make disjunctive inferences. As we saw in the first example, very young children routinely make instantaneous disjunctive inferences without even realizing they have done so. But that's precisely the problem. Lacking awareness of inference, they cannot explicitly evaluate arguments. Only as they approach adolescence do they sufficiently distinguish form from content to be able to recognize valid inference even in the case of arguments containing (what they deem to be) false premises and/or a false conclusion. What develops in the domain of logical reasoning, then, is not the basic ability to make logical inferences but the level of metalogical understanding about such inferences.