Inferentialism at Work: The Significance of Social Epistemology in Theorising Education

Abstract

In connecting educational theory to a neo‐pragmatist social epistemology, we set out to understand education as knowledge practices that yield ‘the cultural world again’ by retelling culture or by making explicit what is implicit in culture. Recent trends in German educational studies towards holistic understanding of education demonstrate that such a holistic, non‐representationalist framework is deliberately placed outside the traditional procedure of merely applying knowledge gained in the so‐called foundational disciplines such as philosophy, sociology or psychology to the field of education. By constructively relating Brandom's non‐representational inferentialism to a re‐reading of Mollenhauer's distinction of the presentation and representation of culture in and through education, we try to show that Brandom's philosophy can also be used to point out an inferentialism that is already at work in educational theory. Together, this strengthens a social theoretic account of education that explores how to conceptualise the role of knowledge in educational processes in terms of a holistic epistemology.