Here is the plain text version of the PowerPoint slides (or Google Slides slides) for my July 11 presentation, “Between Indoctrination and Neutralism: Pedagogy Under Occupation,” to be given at the NASSP Conference at Creighton University.
Here is an unstructured list of some of the key formulations from the paper.
(Unstructured) List of Key Formulations (these are all in the slides, as well)
Indoctrination: A’s attempt to induce belief p in B, where the attempt bypasses the requirements of B’s being epistemically justified in believing p. As far as the philosophy classroom is concerned, I take B’s being in reflective equilibrium to be a necessary condition for B’s being epistemically justified in believing p.
Malign Indoctrination: Indoctrination such that, all things considered, it would be wrong of A to induce B to believe p by bypassing the requirements of epistemic justification.
Pedagogical Neutralism4: The principled refusal to avow one’s own substantive beliefs about controversial matters in the classroom (or to one’s students qua classroom instructor).
Destructive dilemma for Neutralism4:
- Suppose a student demands a justification for the structure of the class as a whole (the material, the policies, the aim, the expected value).
- Either the instructor responds affirmatively to the challenge or not.
- If so, she violates Neutralism4.
- If not, she indoctrinates students with respect to the structure of the class as a whole.
- Since (3) is self-refuting and (4) is counter-purposive, then if a practitioner of Neutralism4 faces a structural challenge, Neutralism4 fails.
A good instructor would encourage the challenge.
Occupation and the dilemma of engagement
- It’s puzzling whether or not a teacher of political philosophy should engage the Israeli occupation when teaching under it.
- Engaging seems to turn the class into a how-to manual for dealing with the occupation, which courts the dangers of indoctrination.
- But failing to engage the occupation seems to demand wholesale evasion of obvious, politically relevant realities, which courts the dangers of neutralism–irrelevance through self-neutralization.
- Either one engages or fails to engage; either way, one is led to extremes.
Solution: One does both–engage and disengage. If occupation is students’ doxastic preoccupation, then total refusal to engage is incompatible with putting their beliefs in reflective equilibrium (hence incompatible with the requirements of epistemic justification). But some disengagement is required to preserve the reflectiveness of reflective equilibrium.
Reconceiving the classic texts for pedagogy under occupation
- Plato’s Republic: Is the occupation harmful to the occupiers?
- Aristotle’s Politics: Is an Aristotelian common advantage possible in Israel-Palestine?
- Machiavelli’s Prince: Can Machiavelli’s blueprint for occupation be reverse-engineered by the victims?
- Locke’s Second Treatise: Is Lockean liberalism the root of the occupation or the way out?
- Marx’s Communist Manifesto: Is class conflict relevant to the occupation?
- Mill’s On Liberty: What are the taboos of Palestinian life today, and what effect do they have?
Policy of Truth 
Step 4 isn’t obvious to me. Why does the teacher’s answer have to be one that bypasses the requirements of epistemic justification?
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Step 4 of the first argument.
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Reference to indoctrination at 4 doesn’t seem necessary for deriving 5 anyway.
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I’m assuming a context in which the instructor regards the structure of her own class as justified, and wants to induce the student to believe the same. Adoption of Neutralism4 prevents her from responding to a challenge to justify the structure. By default, she’s obliged to indoctrinate: she has to induce the student to believe in the justifiedness of the structure of the class, sans the first-personal avowal of a justification. That’s indoctrination.
If it’s the kind of class where justification is so intrinsic to the subject matter that it’s wrong to indoctrinate, then it’s malign indoctrination.
As I say in the slides (and will explain in the talk), my characterization of indoctrination is a buck passing one. Most of the work of picking out cases of indoctrination is pushed onto an account of epistemic justification: you’re indoctrinated when you’re induced to believe something without the other person’s worrying about whether you’re epistemically justified in believing what they want you to. We then need an all-things-considered account of when it’s wrong to do this. That’s malign indoctrination. The intended implication is that some instances of indoctrination are benign or neutral. I don’t bake wrongness into the definition.
That account is meant to be entirely general. But a philosophy classroom is a very specific context, and the epistemic demands are different (higher) there than elsewhere. The scope of benign indoctrination is considerably narrowed. What you see in the post is just a list of key formulations. The missing steps have to do with what I regard as the specifically pedagogical obligations of a good philosophy instructor. If the aim is to get students into wide reflective equilibrium, that can’t be done by punting on obvious, legitimate justificatory challenges to what the class is trying to accomplish, and how. I’m assuming that if a student asks structural questions like, “Why are we studying these authors in this class? What is the point of putting them in the syllabus and insisting that we read them?”, the instructor needs a sincere, affirmative answer.
She can’t answer sincerely compatibly with the strictures of what I’m calling Neutralism. But if she refuses to answer, she can’t promote (and really, can’t be interested in promoting) the students’-being-in-reflective equilibrium with respect to the basic structure of the class (no pun intended). Nor can she plausibly just disavow the idea that the class has any basic structure, e.g., insist that it’s just a hodge-podge of random elements thrown together so that the question can be dismissed. A good instructor takes some care in putting the class together, which is to say, takes some care in structuring the class as it is. Even if all she says is, “Well, this is the standard way such classes are taught,” a good challenger will put her on a justificatory regress: why are they taught just that way? It’s her job to have an answer. Neutralism makes it impossible to give the answer she has. And yet the answer implicitly guides the class. At a bare minimum, the instructor has to think that the class has some determinate point. But if she refuses to disclose the point in response to a challenge, she has to induce students to believe there is one even if she won’t justify it. That’s indoctrination. Yet the rationale for Neutralism is the avoidance of indoctrination. That’s why I say it’s counter-purposive.
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Oh, I see. I was misunderstanding the structure of the argument.
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Yeah, what you see in the post is just an unstructured list intended specifically for conference participants: some of the formulations I list are too long to read out, or too hard to process, so I threw them into a list. Since the conference participants will have the slides, I dispensed with giving them a printed outline. And since the formulations are on the slides, the unstructured list well might seem superfluous, but I think it helps to look at complex verbal formulations “on their own,” separate from other surrounding stuff. By the same token, doing that can be misleading.
On reflection, I think your objection has a point. It now occurs to me that there’s more to unpack in (4) than I first realized. So it may well be that my dilemma has to be turned into a trilemma. If the Neutralist instructor is called on to justify the structure of the class, then if she makes the attempt, she must, on pain of self-contradiction, abandon Neutralism4. If she refuses to offer a justification, then if we make certain assumptions about good pedagogy, she engages in malign indoctrination. But if she herself rejects the assumptions I make about good pedagogy, then I would have to say she has a deeply defective conception of pedagogy. I guess from her perspective, this may not seem like a trilemma at all, but I would say that it is.
Just think: if I manage to give this paper at the Eastern APA, you too will be privy to all the super secret inferences involved in it! I might even show you the illustrated version of the Power Point presentation….
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