Online tuition is a practice—practised by this writer—in which students form tutorial relationships with a teacher, and in some models with each other, by the modes of email, Web-mediated file exchange and asynchronous computer conferencing (the construction of multiple threads of conversation and dialogue, as in Web chat rooms). It may centrally revolve around an exchange of assignments and comments. It is quite different from simply referring students to the information and activities on various Web-sites. Centrally, tuition is conducted here (...) in personal interaction through the written word. (shrink)

Online tuition is a practice—practised by this writer—in which students form tutorial relationships with a teacher, and in some models with each other, by the modes of email, Web-mediated file exchange and asynchronous computer conferencing (the construction of multiple threads of conversation and dialogue, as in Web chat rooms). It may centrally revolve around an exchange of assignments and comments. It is quite different from simply referring students to the information and activities on various Web-sites. Centrally, tuition is conducted here (...) in personal interaction through the written word. (shrink)

Online tuition is a practice—practised by this writer—in which students form tutorial relationships with a teacher, and in some models with each other, by the modes of email, Web-mediated file exchange and asynchronous computer conferencing (the construction of multiple threads of conversation and dialogue, as in Web chat rooms). It may centrally revolve around an exchange of assignments and comments. It is quite different from simply referring students to the information and activities on various Web-sites. Centrally, tuition is conducted here (...) in personal interaction through the written word. (shrink)

The essay argues that there is no such thing as the epistemology of testimony as it is currently conceived: a subfield of epistemology that concerns itself with a special form of acquiring knowledge, a special kind of justification, a special sort of reason for belief. Rather, the concept of knowledge contains an account of the possibility of knowing from others. We cannot find ourselves in this predicament: we comprehend what knowledge is all right, and yet have difficulty seeing how one (...) may, from the words of another, come to acquire that: knowledge. And if we cannot find ourselves in this predicament, then there can be no need to introduce, in response to it, concepts that currently attract much interest—trust, authority, sincerity, etc. (shrink)

Recent work on testimony has raised questions about the extent to which testimony is a distinctively second-personal phenomenon and the possible epistemic significance of its second-personal aspects. However, testimony, in the sense primarily investigated in recent epistemology, is far from the only way in which we acquire knowledge from others. My goal is to distinguish knowledge acquired from testimony (learning from being told) from knowledge acquired from teaching (learning from being taught), and to investigate the similarities and differences between the (...) two with respect to the interpersonal dimensions of their structures. (shrink)

This paper is a critical notice of Andrea Kern's bookSources of Knowledge. In the first part, I outline some criteria of adequacy I believe any credible philosophical account of knowledge should meet. In the second, I consider how Kern's book measures up to those criteria. Finally, I offer a sympathetic and constructive discussion of a number of key elements of Kern's approach, including the relation of her position to the philosophy of John McDowell, from which Kern draws inspiration; her defence (...) of disjunctivism; her concept of a rational capacity for knowledge and its acquisition; and her understanding of scepticism. (shrink)

John McDowell begins his essay ‘Knowledge by Hearsay’ (1993) by describing two ways language matters to epistemology. The first is that, by understanding and accepting someone else's utterance, a person can acquire knowledge. This is what philosophers call ‘knowledge by testimony’. The second is that children acquire knowledge in the course of learning their first language—in acquiring language, a child inherits a conception of the world. In The Formation of Reason (2011), and my writings on Russian socio-historical philosophy and psychology, (...) I address issues bearing on the second of these topics, questions about the child's development through initiation into language and other forms of social being. In this article, I focus on the first: the epistemology of testimony. After expounding a view of testimony inspired by McDowell, and supplemented by ideas from Sebastian Rödl, I consider how such an account illuminates two issues in philosophy of education: the extent of an individual's epistemic dependence upon others, and the nature of teaching. (shrink)