1.3. Pragmatism: an epistemology to take pluralism into account
Pragmatism is a philosophical school developed at the turn of the 20th century in the United States by Charles Sander Peirce, William James, John Dewey and George Herbert Mead. Pragmatism acknowledges the fact that humans as well as ecological systems are not static but change over time (Dewey, 1939). As such, our knowledge of the world is never complete nor perfect: it is rather a fallible and perfectible outcome of our experience and practices, related to our actions, at a given moment.
In this perspective, practicing science
through a CS pedagogic project and exchanging their experiences of the world could lead to changes among the participants (students and their teachers). Such an evolution may be analyzed thanks to a pragmatist epistemology.
The objective of this subsection is to introduce a few concepts that you could find relevant to build your own CS pedagogic program. In order to help you to related those theoretical elements to practical projects, you may find at the end of each paragraph an example derived from the hypothetical research projects presented in Exercise 1 (subsection 1.2.C) and a question that relates to your own previous experience. In the next section, we will provide further examples.
1.3.B. Values' plurality : reflecting on what matters and who for
For pragmatism, values amount to practical ways of taking care of things and emerge from transactions between individuals and their environment. As such, the very first step of value attribution consists, simply and mainly, in giving attention to something, may it be an event, a situation, an object or a person. For some authors, values are therefore « what matters » to people (Renault, 2016) and what they consider to be good (Thompson and McDonald, 2013).
Pragmatism rejects the conception of values as pure emotions or pre-existing qualities of objects, situations, persons… Instead, it considers them as the result of both an immediate appreciation coupled with a reasoned and experience-based judgment, performed in a particular situation and relying on previous personal experiences and exchanges with other people. Valuation is thus a reflective activity that intends to determine what is desirable through exchanges with other perspectives and compared with other situations, events, objects and potential pre-existing experiences.
Thus, far from being overreaching and absolute qualities of objects or fixed and superior moral principles, values are the result of relations, connections and transaction between personal attitudes and extra-personal situational elements.