Reading the last few posts on here leaves little room for coming to any other conclusion that science education in the US is in drastic need of root and branch reform.
The reflective judgment is that faculty of increasing our knowledge of things which don't result from experience but which arise from disinterested reflection.
It attempts to reduce the "world" to a synthetic totality.
Experience merely represents points of departure for reflection and not for drawing any subjective conclusions. Reflection reaches over beyond the known to concepts outside of experience.
For example, when discussing the education of minors it is necessary to take some view of the world in which they will, perforce, live and function and prepare them for it. It is bootless to give them what we ourselves have had given us. The times are indeed changing and at a much faster rate than even Bob Dylan realised when he wrote his world famous psalm on the subject of change.
The objective of reflection is to systematise the known and that must be done according to some principle such as that of the example there.
The outcome to be pursued lies beyond experience and thus experience is not a suitable guiding principle. When it becomes so it must make the assumption that these minors will live in the same world we have done and that is too ridiculous to waste a moment's thought upon.
The necessary principle thus comes within the range of the power of judgement because otherwise the judgment would be determinative and not reflective. It is thus necessary to proceed from reflection i.e. from an
a priori quality of the intellect validated only in relation to the process of reflection.
That principle can arise from no other source such as experience, practical reason or subjective personal vanity.
Such a principle is best thought of in terms of the function of it. It generalises on the universal human condition rather than from any particular experience from which anything can be proved.
It is a universal principle that minors are prepared for their future adulthood which is easy enough to manage in a static and simple culture which is unchanged over long periods of time. In a fast changing, dynamic scientific world it ceases to be a simple matter although I recognise that to view it as simple is attractive to mediocre minds as it requires little effort or disturbance of one's fondest beliefs and it can have a large effect as with banging on a dustbin lid.
Hence the exercise of reflection has the job of systematising which is the same as saying to reduce things to an
intelligent order.
That requires the reflection to think things through
as if the laws proceed from an
intelligent cause and Religion provides an agreed and long standing
intelligent cause specific to the culture within which it is accepted and measured against competing cultures and religions on the Darwinian principle of success.
Of course, and it's a little patronising to feel the need to point this out, to think things through as if they proceed from an
intelligent cause is not the same thing as to assume they do proceed from such a source.
It seems to me that any other way forward will result in anarchy due to all the microcosmic experiences setting themselves at war with each other as each stands upon its dignity as a paragon of excellence.
Quote:I know of no case where a man added to his dignity by standing on it.
Sir Winston Churchill.
