193

INDOCTRINATION AND THE SPACE OF REASONS

Chris Hanks
School of Education
Indiana University

ABSTRACT. The ‘‘paradox of indoctrination’’ has proven to be a persistent problem in discussions of the
cultivation of autonomy through education. In short, if indoctrination means instilling beliefs without
reasons, and if children lack the rational capacity to evaluate reasons, how can that capacity be cultivated
without indoctrination? Some educational theorists have relied on a transcendental justification of
rational autonomy that avoids indoctrination, while others have accepted that some indoctrination is
inevitable, focusing instead on defending acceptable forms of indoctrination. In this essay, Chris Hanks
draws on a conception of rationality, mind, and nature developed by John McDowell to suggest an alter-
native understanding of the relation between indoctrination and autonomy. He argues that McDowell’s
notion of the ‘‘space of reasons’’ defuses standard debates about indoctrination. Here, rationality is under-
stood in both a naturalistic sense, whereby the development of autonomy is the process of being awak-
ened to the space of reasons, and in a sui generis sense, whereby reason cannot be reduced to mechanistic
principles or relations. The implications of this view for education point us to the notion of Bildung as
the process that cultivates rational autonomy.

In educational thought, the concepts of autonomy and indoctrination seem to

be inextricably linked, like opposite sides of the same coin. This connection has pro-
ven to be a persistent problem in discussions of the proper purposes and means of
education. Without rehearsing the many forms the problem has taken, the dilemma
may be simply put this way: if ‘‘thinking for oneself’’ (autonomy) is a fundamental
aim of education, and if children lack the full capacity to think for themselves, as
many assume, then the process of cultivating that capacity must necessarily involve
instilling particular beliefs, values, and skills, regardless of the child’s own motives,
reasons, or preferences (indoctrination). Of course the concepts involved here need
to be fleshed out in much greater detail. Most importantly, the constitutive role of
rationality must be acknowledged. Thus, ‘‘thinking for oneself’’ must be understood
to include, at the very least, ‘‘holding beliefs and acting on the basis of (good) rea-
sons.’’ Conversely, indoctrination minimally includes inculcating beliefs and
actions without regard to, and furthermore impervious to, the force of reasons.
The dilemma faced by those committed to cultivating autonomy without
coercion or manipulation has been called the ‘‘paradox of indoctrination.’’1 One
possible response to the dilemma, recognizing that rational thought is embedded
in biological and social processes, accepts that some indoctrination is inevitable
(perhaps going on to make a distinction between benign and harmful forms of
indoctrination). Others, viewing such quietism as a threat to the epistemological
and normative force of reason, seek to overcome the dilemma by appealing to a uni-
versal or transcendent justification of rationality. I view both avenues as unsat-
isfactory, even as I find the intuitions motivating each inescapable. A new approach
is required.

1. C.J.B. MacMillan, ‘‘On Certainty and Indoctrination,’’ Synthese 56, no. 3 (1983): 363–372.

EDUCATIONAL THEORY j Volume 58 j Number 2 j 2008

Ó 2008 Board of Trustees j University of Illinois
194 E D U C AT I O N A L THEORY VOLUME 58 j NUMBER 2 j 2008

Every account of autonomy and indoctrination is embedded in a particular

understanding of rationality. This essay is an attempt to clarify the meaning and
relevance of indoctrination to education by exploring underlying epistemological
and ontological assumptions. My central claim is that certain key disputes about
indoctrination (and, by extension, autonomy and other important notions) could be
avoided by reframing our understanding of the relation of reason to the natural
world. I begin, in the next section, by highlighting difficulties that emerge in a par-
ticular context in which the issue of indoctrination seems the most troubling: sit-
uations involving ‘‘pre-rational’’ individuals. In the following section, I attach
these difficulties to a broader debate involving two rival conceptions of rationality.
Tracing deep disagreements about reason to their ontological roots, I note a shared
understanding of nature underlying both views. This shared perspective, combined
with divergent epistemological commitments, I argue, forces the dilemma that
leads directly to the paradox of indoctrination. Then, by introducing John
McDowell’s notion of ‘‘the space of reasons,’’ I suggest an alternative account that
avoids this dilemma, opening a new avenue for understanding the relation between
autonomy and indoctrination. I sketch some implications of McDowell’s view in
the concluding section.
INDOCTRINATION AND THE PRE-RATIONAL SUBJECT
In a classic characterization of indoctrination, T.F. Green argues, ‘‘Indoctrina-
tion aims simply at establishing certain beliefs so that they will be held quite apart
from their truth, their explanation, or their foundation in evidence.’’2 For Green,
teaching practices aimed simply at bringing students to an answer, without con-
cern for its justification, fall under this description. We may debate the extent to
which justification must be an explicit component of education, as opposed to
merely available to students along the way. Those debates aside, the basic sound-
ness of Green’s formulation follows directly from the typical conception of belief
as, at a minimum, a disposition to assent to a certain proposition.3 The inseparable
link between beliefs and propositions ties their very meaning to their rational rela-
tions to other beliefs and the world. Justification, however we go on to formulate
that idea, is the context for belief.
Unfortunately, this observation only pushes the issue of indoctrination to a
deeper level, which can be described in at least two ways. One way to approach
the underlying question is by invoking W.V.O. Quine’s notion of a ‘‘web of belief.’’4
If the meaning of any belief is (at least partially) constituted by its location within a

2. Thomas F. Green, ‘‘Indoctrination and Beliefs,’’ in Concepts of Indoctrination, ed. I.A. Snook (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), 25–46.
3. Paul K. Moser, ‘‘Belief,’’ in The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 2d ed., ed. Robert Audi
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 78.
4. W.V.O. Quine and J.S. Ullian, The Web of Belief, 2d ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).

CHRIS HANKS is Teaching Fellow at Indiana University/Purdue University–Columbus, 4601 Central

Avenue, Columbus, IN 47203; e-mail \chanks@indiana.edu[. His primary areas of scholarship are epi-
stemology, philosophy of mind, and social theory.
HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 195

system of interconnected beliefs, the question of justification is salient on the level

of belief systems, or conceptual schemes, rather than applying to individual beliefs
in isolation. Along these lines, one might respond that at least we have shifted the
discussion wholly into the realm of rationality, thereby leaving the question of
indoctrination behind. I think this would be far from the end of the matter, but a
second way of formulating this question keeps indoctrination more clearly in the
picture. This line of thought approaches the question in terms of a child’s initial
process of belief formation, the stage at which one becomes (or fails to become) a
rational agent in the first place.
Perhaps we can accept that efforts to instill beliefs that simultaneously lead a
person to ignore the force of reasons for or against the belief, or to believe counter
to the weight of evidence and reason, are clear-cut instances of indoctrination. But
what about situations involving children who have not yet developed the capacity
to recognize and evaluate reasons? We might describe such individuals as ‘‘pre-
rational,’’ and a significant portion of the indoctrination literature addresses their
circumstances. It seems that in these cases we must unavoidably instill belief
without justification, since any reasons given would be lost on the child. Even
staunch defenders of rationality and critical thinking acknowledge that this is so.
Harvey Siegel writes, ‘‘we sometimes have no alternative but to teach children, or
at least to inculcate beliefs, without providing them with reasons which serve to
justify those beliefs.’’5 For Siegel, the reason this need not be considered indoctrina-
tion is that we can inculcate such beliefs in a way that encourages rationality and
critical thinking later on. Instilling a belief is not indoctrinative, then, provided the
belief will be open to critical reflection once the child acquires the capacity to
assess reasons. Ultimately, Siegel’s response depends on the notion that rationality
is ‘‘self-justifying,’’ in the sense that asking whether one should affirm the value of
rationality already commits one to the practice of giving and assessing reasons.6
Siegel’s response is intuitively plausible, but it raises at least two further
issues. First, it seems open to the charges of circularity and question-begging. Rea-
son as self-justifying seems circular because it presumes a skeptic who finds the
question ‘‘Why be rational?’’ to be a meaningful one in the first place. Question-
begging comes into play because Siegel takes the self-justifying nature of rational-
ity to be decisive against the charge of indoctrination. In doing so, he takes for
granted a conception of rationality as universal, overriding any belief or set of
beliefs that does not claim a rational foundation. Someone holding an instrumen-
tal view of rationality, for instance, might view the use of reason as secondary or
subservient to some more fundamental interest.7 These issues will be taken up in
the next section. The point I want to make here is that resolving the problem of
indoctrination depends centrally on the conception of rationality one holds.

5. Harvey Siegel, Educating Reason (New York: Routledge, 1988), 89.

6. Ibid., 167, n. 24.
7. See Jim Garrison, ‘‘Dangerous Dualisms in Siegel’s Theory of Critical Thinking: A Deweyan Pragma-
tist Responds,’’ Journal of Philosophy of Education 33, no. 2 (1999): 213–232, for both a statement of this
criticism and an articulation of the instrumentalist view of rationality.
196 E D U C AT I O N A L THEORY VOLUME 58 j NUMBER 2 j 2008

A second issue regarding Siegel’s response to the indoctrination objection is

raised by Stefaan Cuypers and Ishtiyaque Haji in a recent article that seeks to extend
Siegel’s conception of critical thinking. Whereas our discussion so far has focused on
the capacity for rationality, Cuypers and Haji address the motivational component
of critical thinking. Accepting Siegel’s defense of nonindoctrinative belief-inculca-
tion, they argue that motivational elements of critical thinking, the habits of rea-
son-giving and acting on the basis of good reasons, must also be instilled in a
nonindoctrinative fashion. The image they present as problematic is of a
proto critical thinker who is a slave to reason. Such an agent may acquire and possess beliefs,
desires, evaluative principles, etc. on the basis of good reasons, may be disposed to act on these
critically acquired elements of intentional action but will not be autonomous with respect to
the relevant cluster of motivational elements, such as the desire to subject beliefs to rational
scrutiny.8

The most interesting hypothetical example offered by Cuypers and Haji is of a per-
son who has been conditioned in some way (say by use of electrical shocks) to com-
pulsively evaluate and act on the basis of reasons, such that she is subsequently
unable to shed this disposition, even if she rationally concludes that doing so would
be best (in the example, the individual concludes that her life would be better if she
were accepted into her community, which requires renouncing rational scrutiny
concerning certain religious beliefs). Their solution to this problem is to buttress
Siegel’s response to the challenge of indoctrination with a requirement that the
inculcation of habits in pre-rational children be ‘‘relationally authentic’’; they must
include those elements that lead to responsible moral agency and must avoid meth-
ods that subvert such agency.9 This Criterion of Authenticity seeks to legitimize the
inculcation of habits and desires that sustain critical thinking by virtue of their con-
tribution to the subsequent formation of a morally responsible person.
In one sense this move simply runs parallel to Siegel’s own thinking regarding
the inculcation of belief. Just as instilling beliefs can avoid the charge of indoctri-
nation provided that those beliefs foster and are open to subsequent critical reflec-
tion, so does instilling habits and desires avoid the charge by fostering and being
open to subsequent revision of those habits and desires. The need for such a sup-
plement to the theory is embedded in Siegel’s original inclusion of both cognitive
and motivational elements in the notion of a critical thinker.
At the same time, Cuypers and Haji’s formulation of and solution to this prob-
lem shift the context of rationality in a way that I think Siegel would be loath to
accept. Whereas Cuypers and Haji place constraints on the means employed to
instill beliefs and dispositions, Siegel emphasizes the way in which beliefs are held.10
Specifically, he insists that critical thinkers must have an evidential style of belief.11

8. Stefaan E. Cuypers and Ishtiyaque Haji, ‘‘Education for Critical Thinking: Can It Be Non-indoc-
trinative?’’ Educational Philosophy and Theory 38, no. 6 (2006): 727.
9. Ibid., 739.
10. This is not to imply that Siegel would countenance any method of instilling belief. Rather, I think he
would say that criticisms of method are moral, not epistemic, criticisms.
11. Siegel, Educating Reason, 80.
HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 197

Where Cuypers and Haji go wrong, from Siegel’s perspective, is in formulating

an epistemic principle, the Criterion of Authenticity, in order to rule out certain
methods of habit formation (they label these methods ‘‘authenticity subversive’’). In
fact no such methods could definitively be categorized in this way. Consider one
example given by Cuypers and Haji, ‘‘extreme paternalism.’’ Provided we could
clearly distinguish this method from a ‘‘mild paternalism’’ that we may view as an
inherent component of education or child rearing, is it the case that such paternal-
ism ‘‘undermin[es] fulfillment of necessary conditions of responsibility’’? The
answer is not merely that empirical evidence is required, as the authors acknowl-
edge. The answer is likely to be ‘‘sometimes no, sometimes (perhaps most often)
yes.’’ Or, even more likely, ‘‘it depends on the circumstances.’’ I hope the point is
clear: this move obliterates a vital distinction between an analysis of the necessary
and sufficient conditions for rational autonomy, and the messy business of cultivat-
ing that autonomy in actual situations.
The issue here is how to understand the relation between motivating desires
and habits and the cognitive exercise of reason. I think Siegel’s approach to the
issue would echo his rebuttal to an earlier attempt by Cuypers to raise similar
issues:12
On the views that Cuypers considers, the normative and motivational forces of practical rea-
sons go together. I think an adequate account of reasons, both practical and theoretical, must
pull them apart. On the view I favor, the normative force of reasons is determined wholly by
their epistemic quality. But their motivating force is dependent on a wide range of considera-
tions, including the degree to which the person whose reasons they are is disposed to act in
accordance with them — i.e. on the degree to which that person has the ‘‘critical spirit.’’13

Siegel demurs from going on to offer a defense of this separation of normative and
motivational issues. More importantly, his response leaves open the issue raised
by Cuypers and Haji regarding whether the practice of inculcating habits in pre-
rational children can be nonindoctrinative. Given Siegel’s reply just cited and the
structure of his theory of rationality, I suspect that his attempt to address this
question would begin with a challenge to the causal theory of action on which
Cuypers and Haji depend.14 This commitment forces them to explain actions and
decisions in terms of the causal history of beliefs and desires possessed by the
agent. Siegel’s view of rationality as universal and (in some sense) transcending
particular contexts leads him to insist that we also consider the epistemological
and normative force of reasons, which lie outside the causal chain of events. This
divergence will return to play a role later in my analysis.
A different grounding assumption that leads to the present dilemma is one
shared by Siegel and Cuypers and Haji. Both positions rely on a sharp dichotomy
between pre-rational and rational stages of human development. Indoctrination of

12. Stefaan E. Cuypers, ‘‘Critical Thinking, Autonomy, and Practical Reason,’’ Journal of Philosophy of
Education 38, no. 1 (2004): 75–90.
13. Harvey Siegel, ‘‘Neither Humean Nor (Fully) Kantian Be: Reply to Cuypers,’’ Journal of Philosophy of
Education 39, no. 3 (2005): 536–547.
14. Cuypers and Haji, ‘‘Education for Critical Thinking,’’ 733.
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the kind considered by these authors concerns interferences with children’s devel-
opment in the pre-rational stage. For Siegel, and probably for Cuypers and Haji,15
this distinction relies on a more fundamental dichotomy between rationality and
truth, on one hand, and experience and the world, on the other. This distinction
opens Siegel to the charge of Cartesian dualism often leveled against him. Dissolv-
ing such a dualism, I will argue, has the potential to simultaneously dissolve the
problem of indoctrination. Next we compare Siegel’s views to Jim Garrison’s
attempt to do just that.
TWO CONCEPTIONS OF RATIONALITY
AUTONOMOUS REASON
In the preceding summary, I have not given a thorough treatment of issues
surrounding the issue of indoctrination. For instance, I have not surveyed the vari-
ous attempts to delineate criteria of indoctrination, involving intention, method,
content, or outcome.16 Instead, I have sought to highlight the intimate relation
between the question of indoctrination and conceptions of rationality. Further-
more, in raising the issue of habit formation and the notion of pre-rational children,
my intent is to bring to the fore the relevance of how one conceives the relation
between rationality and nature to how one understands indoctrination.
Siegel’s defense of his notion of critical thinking is centrally concerned with
responding to critics of the Enlightenment project and understanding of rational-
ity, including those who challenge the legitimacy of epistemology as a field of phil-
osophical and educational interest. Before exploring one such challenge in depth, I
want to emphasize two key (and especially controversial) components of Siegel’s
wide-ranging defense.
First, Siegel argues that a commitment to critical thinking, and indeed any
attempt to justify reasons or beliefs, demands an absolutist conception of truth
and a rejection of epistemological relativism.17 Relativism is incompatible with
critical thinking, according to Siegel, because it leaves no room for judging some
reasons better than others or for criteria that could form the basis for such judg-
ments. It should be said that Siegel repeatedly and forcefully advocates fallibilism
in the development and application of rational criteria. That is, evaluations of rea-
sons must always be open to revision based on further evidence, new arguments, or
additional criteria. All this depends, though, on a conception of absolute truth,
independent of any arguments or justification. Such a conception, for Siegel, is nec-
essary if the practice of weighing and evaluating reasons is to make any sense.

15. The ‘‘probably’’ clause is motivated by their apparent acceptance of the basic framework for under-
standing rationality advanced by Siegel. I qualify it because their embrace of a causal theory of action
may suggest a different conception of rationality, more in line with Garrison’s, described later in this
essay. If that is the case, it is unclear to me why the question of indoctrination is salient to them in the
way that it seems to be.
16. These elements, prominently debated in the literature, date back at least to Green, ‘‘Indoctrination
and Belief,’’ 25–46; John Wilson, ‘‘Indoctrination and Rationality,’’ 17–24; and other contributors in
Snook’s collection, Concepts of Indoctrination, published in 1972.
17. Harvey Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? (New York: Routledge, 1997), 19–23.
HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 199

A related, but distinct, component of Siegel’s defense of critical thinking is

that rationality must, in some sense, transcend context. Acknowledging that all
rational claims and judgments take place within a particular social context (in
keeping with the fallibilism noted previously), he argues that this fact does not pre-
clude at least some of those judgments from having universal application, extend-
ing beyond the particular circumstances from which they emerge.
The strength of these arguments aside, the upshot of them for our purposes is
this: Siegel’s notion of rationality stands, in a fundamental way, outside the empir-
ical realm, populated as it is by particular circumstances, cultural traditions, and
the messy contingencies of everyday life. His fallibilism wisely acknowledges that
any specific application of critical thinking must take place under such conditions,
but staunchly insists that rationality itself must involve criteria that stand inde-
pendent of particular circumstances. The implication I want to draw out of this
picture is the way it maps onto the case of pre-rational individuals. Whereas indoc-
trination broadly speaking may involve various intricacies of good versus bad rea-
sons, belief with or without justification, and so forth, the situation of pre-rational
children stands in just the same relation to rationality as do all the natural and
social factors that make up a ‘‘context.’’ They lie on the opposite side of a dichot-
omy from universal reason and absolute truth. I lay down this marker here as a
vital question to be addressed: What can indoctrination mean in such a situation?
Siegel’s view of critical thinking and rationality has been challenged from
many sides, especially for its universalistic claims. One particularly strident critic
is especially helpful in bringing out the question that concerns us here. Jim Garri-
son’s evaluation of Siegel’s work takes issue with both of the key components
identified here. In Garrison’s estimation, ‘‘Siegel’s absolutism begins to turn into
something strongly resembling Kantian transcendental idealism. Transcendental-
ism resonates also in his rejection of contextualism, his admitted fondness for
metanarratives, and his denial of the ultimate epistemological relevance of differ-
ences and otherness.’’18 Though sharing his fallibilism, Garrison thinks Siegel goes
wrong in arguing for general epistemic criteria that stand outside both a given
social context, with its norms and truth claims, and a critique that challenges
some of those norms or claims (from the perspective of a different community, for
instance) (RL, 326).
From Garrison’s perspective, at least two problematic implications follow
from Siegel’s insistence on the necessity of independent criteria of rationality.
First, it constructs a set of untenable dualisms, which can be formulated in various
ways. Thus, Garrison criticizes Siegel for preserving a sharp distinction between
philosophical and causal questions, between criteria and contexts, and between
reason and nature (RL, 324–325). Additional versions of the dichotomy could be
added (thought/action, mind/body, necessity/contingency, and on and on), and

18. Jim Garrison, ‘‘Reclaiming the Logos, Considering the Consequences, and Restoring Context,’’ Edu-
cational Theory 49, no. 3 (1999): 317–318. This work will be cited as RL in the text for all subsequent
references.
200 E D U C AT I O N A L THEORY VOLUME 58 j NUMBER 2 j 2008

these are the familiar dualisms associated with Cartesian epistemology. Garrison
must read these dualisms into Siegel’s work, because the latter grants a ‘‘weak con-
textualism,’’ qualifies many of his claims (for instance, by reiterating his fallibilist
commitments), and refuses to explicitly attach his epistemological claims to meta-
physical presumptions. For Garrison, these tactics merely obfuscate such under-
lying assumptions, while they simultaneously mask real differences among people
and communities, suppress marginalized perspectives, and unnecessarily restrict
genuine, creative dialogue.
A second difficulty Garrison sees in Siegel’s view of rationality is its funda-
mental incoherence. Siegel acknowledges that the practice of reasoning always
takes place within contexts, but insists that some rational criteria must have the
potential to extend beyond particular circumstances. He champions fallibilism, so
that any criterial or justificatory claim must be criticizable and potentially revis-
able, but adheres to the Kantian view that the grounding of philosophical (rational)
truths must stand outside the causal, contingent realm of experience. These com-
mitments provoke an insurmountable dilemma, however: Kantian idealism forces
rationality into a transcendent realm that, from a naturalistic perspective, cannot
exist (RL, 327). And if it did, we might add, it could have no connection with the
actual world in which all our actions and reasoning take place. Aside from this
inherent dilemma, idealizing reason in this way, says Garrison, leads to a deep mis-
understanding of the role of reason in our lives by hypostatizing truth claims and
concealing the role of context.
NATURALIZED REASON
Context is of fundamental importance to Garrison. His account of rationality
stands in stark contrast to the transcendental idealism he sees in Siegel. Rooted in
Deweyan pragmatism, Garrison’s view is firmly naturalistic, locating practical rea-
son (the only kind of reason we have, by Garrison’s lights) entirely within the
strong contextualist frame to which Siegel is so resistant.19 Tracing the contours of
Garrison’s perspective will allow us, in the following section, to evaluate it side-by-
side with Siegel’s account. There I will defend the counterintuitive claim that the
two views share a fundamental presupposition that underlies and perpetuates
dilemmas surrounding the issue of indoctrination. First, though, I need to spell out
the contrast.
I have said that Garrison’s view is firmly naturalistic. More specifically, it is
rooted in Darwinian evolutionary biology: ‘‘Whenever folk become lost in their
efforts to understand Dewey’s theory of practical reasoning, they should think of a
biological creature whose habits of action have been disrupted. The creature’s task
is to determine means whose consequence is the restoration of smooth habitual
functioning’’(JDT, 293). Here we encounter not only the naturalistic frame, but also
the action-based orientation of pragmatism as well as the means-end view of
rationality Dewey advanced. Put another way, it is within the context of organisms

19. Jim Garrison, ‘‘John Dewey’s Theory of Practical Reasoning,’’ Educational Philosophy and Theory
31, no. 3 (1999): 294. This work will be cited as JDT in the text for all subsequent references.
HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 201

responding to and interacting with their environment that the activities of inquiry
and deliberation emerge, and within that setting that those activities — including
associated concepts such as logic, justification, and truth — must always remain.
For Siegel, insisting on this contextual constraint totally undermines the
autonomy of rationality, reducing it to a mere consequence of determinate nature.
Compare my preceding description of Garrison’s view with Nicholas Burbules’s
similar account: ‘‘rationality is a substantive achievement; it takes shape in the
activities, decisions, and judgments of persons who possess the skills and formal
knowledge of rationality, but who apply these in real contexts of belief and
action.’’20 To the extent that Burbules’s statement follows Garrison, Siegel finds it
problematic:
If ‘‘takes shape’’ is to be read as ‘‘manifests itself’’ in the opening sentence, then I see no prob-
lem with this passage; but if it is to be read rather as ‘‘is constituted by,’’ so that the sentence
suggests that what rationality is is determined by the actual activities, decisions and judg-
ments which people make, then I see a big problem: namely, there is no room on this view for
actual activities, decisions and judgments to fail to be rational, for there is no role for criteria
to play in assessing specific activities, decisions and judgments as rational (or not).21

Whether or not this ‘‘strong contextualist’’ view is Burbules’s, it is certainly

Garrison’s. So his account faces the challenge of explaining the relative validity of
rational criteria, such that meaningful judgments can be made about the reason-
ableness of an action, decision, or belief.
Here Dewey’s consequentialism does the work for Garrison. ‘‘Pragmatists who
reject neo-scholastic criteriology,’’ he argues, referring to the position he attributes
to Siegel, ‘‘would point out that one might determine the rationality of activities,
decisions, and judgments by their consequences. Indeed, they would suggest that
rational deliberation involves trying to imagine these consequences creatively
before acting’’ (RL, 323). Garrison fills out this notion of deliberation in his account
of Deweyan practical reasoning. On this view, deliberation is what distinguishes
intelligent action from mere behavior. The deliberative process involves creatively
transforming a problematic situation, imagining consequences of various actions,
and modifying one’s own motivations and desires. In this way Garrison embeds his
understanding of rationality in a naturalistic frame while ‘‘creating the conditions
for intelligent, although situated, freedom’’ (JDT, 301). In this free exercise of prac-
tical reason, oriented toward reflective judgment regarding consequences of imag-
ined actions, Garrison would presumably locate his answer to Siegel’s challenge of
assessing activities, decisions, or judgments as rational or irrational.
Does Garrison provide a satisfactory response here? In his brief reply to Garri-
son’s critique, Siegel asserts that Garrison has merely reasserted a kind of criterion
in the guise of consequences.22 In light of my presentation of the issue here, we
could put the point a different way. Garrison’s account submerges the question of
rationality within the notion of ‘‘reflective deliberation.’’ Here Garrison faces the

20. Nicholas Burbules, quoted in Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? 105.

21. Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? 105.
22. Harvey Siegel, ‘‘Afterwords,’’ Educational Theory 50, no. 1 (2000): 131.
202 E D U C AT I O N A L THEORY VOLUME 58 j NUMBER 2 j 2008

question he poses to Siegel: Where do the principles, criteria, or standards of delib-

eration permanently reside? Since any notion of autonomous, context-free ration-
ality is his explicit target, Garrison seems committed to a response given in terms
of biological processes. Indeed, he speaks of reasoning as the integration of many
organic functions in a holistic process (JDT, 302).
Garrison’s biological account of rationality makes sense out of his placement
of reasons in the causal change of events (JDT, 303). At the same time, though, it
throws rationality back into the deterministic, and ultimately relativistic, sphere
that Siegel confronts. Garrison’s account of creative problem solving and coordi-
nated action as tools of practical reasoning is a fruitful one. But ultimately, the
justification of reasons, on this view, can only amount to an appeal to shared back-
ground and interests. In this sense Garrison’s view echoes Richard Rorty’s notion
of ‘‘solidarity.’’ When we are pressed to justify our arguments (about language, jus-
tice, or whatever), Rorty asserts, we can only say something like ‘‘these views
seemed to cohere better with the institutions of a liberal democracy than the avail-
able alternatives do. When the value of such institutions is challenged.no direct
answer can be given, because there is no neutral ground.’’23
This view poses serious problems for any account of intercultural dialogue,
which I cannot address here. Instead, I want to point out that it undermines any
charge that a particular practice of instilling beliefs may be indoctrinative. In fact,
this ethnocentrism (Rorty’s term) puts the coherence of any concept of indoctrination
in doubt.24 Garrison’s view successfully breaks down the sharp dichotomy between
pre-rational and rational individuals, which I identified with the theories of Siegel and
Cuypers and Haji. If rationality is a natural capacity (or set of capacities) on the order
of sense perception, then its cultivation, on an organic level, is merely an engagement
with existing, though underdeveloped, functions. A similar picture emerges in cul-
tural terms. Belief formation and rational judgment must be understood as part and
parcel of the process of induction into social practice. The forms they take are relative
to social context and can only be judged from within the conceptual frame belonging
to a given society (or within a shared cultural space where cultures can interact).
Where does this leave indoctrination? It seems that strong contextualists such
as Garrison have two options, depending on their understanding of the concept.
They may deny the relevance of the term, noting that all notions of rationality,
autonomy, and the like are culture-bound and therefore cannot provide an inde-
pendent perspective from which to judge a practice to be indoctrination. This
seems to be the approach of Alven Neiman in an article whose title sums up the
position nicely: ‘‘Indoctrination: A Contextualist Approach, or There’s No Such
Thing as Indoctrination.’’25 Alternatively, contextualists could acknowledge that

23. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
197.
24. This is the source of the concern I expressed in note 15.
25. Alven Neiman, ‘‘Indoctrination: A Contextualist Approach, or There’s No Such Thing as Indoctrina-
tion,’’ Educational Philosophy and Theory 21, no. 1 (1989): 53–61
HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 203

indoctrination is a necessary part of socialization, but claim that in this sense it

need not be harmful. Garrison, in his only publication that I know of on the topic,
takes this approach.26 From this perspective, Garrison argues that, while indoctri-
nation is necessary in bringing a child into a linguistic community, subsequent
steps can be taken to alleviate negative consequences of indoctrination. Specifi-
cally, the cultivation of critical reflection and the introduction of plausible alter-
native worldviews into the child’s experience can stimulate a healthy spirit of
doubt in order to keep vibrant the capacity for inquiry and intelligent deliberation.
In many ways these recommendations, on a practical level, mirror Siegel’s
treatment of indoctrination. Both view critical reflection as an important antidote
to early belief inculcation, and in the following section I will argue that their views
overlap a great deal more than it initially appears. For one thing, they both seem to
understand the natural world (represented in the debate by the term ‘‘context’’) in
causal and mechanistic terms. The challenge for both, then, becomes how to
understand rationality in relation to that world.
Here, though, I want to emphasize serious differences between their views.
First, whereas the later cultivation of reason, for Siegel, overcomes the charge of
indoctrination, for Garrison it merely ‘‘inoculates’’ children against the harmful
effects of necessary indoctrination. This is more than a semantic difference. For
one thing, Siegel’s claim is universalistic: reason justifies itself regardless of social
context. Garrison’s defense of reflective intelligence, it seems, only makes sense
within a community where such a practice is already valued. Also, Garrison’s
acceptance of (benign) indoctrination is necessary because there is no categorical
difference between the socialization of young children and the social interactions
of ‘‘rational’’ adults.
Garrison and Siegel, and contextualists and rationalists in general, often seem
to talk past each other because their differences exist on an ontological, not an
epistemological or ethical, level. In the final section I argue that, in the present
case, rethinking certain assumptions at this level can dissolve the tensions leading
to these differences and refocus the issue of indoctrination.
NATURE AND THE SPACE OF REASONS
I have noted that Garrison’s commitment to Deweyan pragmatism leads him
to advance a biological, evolutionary theory of rationality. Garrison’s Darwinism
runs deeper than biology, though: ‘‘as a Darwinian naturalist, I believe that we are
participants in an ever-evolving universe’’ (RL, 318, emphasis in original). Within
this ontological framework the ideas of absolute truths and autonomous reason
have no place, and this explains his account of Deweyan rationality:
Rationality, for Dewey, is an individual and cultural achievement requiring continuous
reworking in an ever-evolving universe. Hypostatized meanings, truths, or rational laws are
usually placed in some transcendent Platonic heaven, the transcendental Understanding
(Kant), or the structure of Nature (Herbert Spencer) beyond time, chance, and contingency.
Dewey the neo-Darwinian thought nothing eternal, immutable, or necessary. (JDT, 292)

26. Jim Garrison, ‘‘The Paradox of Indoctrination: A Solution,’’ Synthese 68, no. 2 (1986): 267.
204 E D U C AT I O N A L THEORY VOLUME 58 j NUMBER 2 j 2008

The key observation I am trying to bring out is that Garrison’s ‘‘strong contextual-
ism’’ is a consequence of a particular understanding of nature, one that sees it in
stark opposition to the idea of an autonomous sphere of rationality.
That Siegel clings to a kind of Kantian transcendentalism prompts the charges
of Cartesian dualism so often made against him. It should be noted that Siegel does
distance himself from certain Kantian notions — for instance, the rationally auton-
omous noumenal self27 — and that he consistently declines to defend a Kantian (or
any other) metaphysical or ontological perspective. Yet, while he acknowledges the
inevitable contextuality of persons, situations, judgments, and actions, his argu-
ments in defense of rationality itself always point beyond these contingencies. For
Siegel, the capacity to exercise reason, to have any legitimacy, demands that we
have a conception of absolute truth and that we search for the best metanarrative
that captures that truth.28 That we, bound by social contexts, may never fully grasp
truth is no argument against its existence.
These contextualist and rationalist views share a conception of nature as causal,
physical, and deterministic. Garrison maintains a fundamental commitment to nat-
uralism, which motivates him to adopt an understanding of reason that fits within
this causal frame. Siegel maintains a commitment to rational autonomy, which
motivates him to argue for reason’s transcendence of the natural frame. I believe
both insights are worth preserving. However, the ontological presupposition they
share makes the claims incompatible. I turn to John McDowell’s reconceptualization
of nature, and its relation to rationality, for a way to avoid this impasse. In his influ-
ential book Mind and World, McDowell offers a sustained and detailed treatment of
human consciousness and reason that is both naturalistic and nonreductive.29
McDowell’s goal, in its most basic form, is to carry on the Kantian project of
defending a notion of ‘‘spontaneity’’ that overcomes Cartesian dualism. Spontane-
ity, for Kant and McDowell, is the autonomous exercise of human reason upon the
material of experience. In a natural world governed by laws and relations of causal-
ity, however, it is difficult to make sense of the influence of reason in any way that
does not amount to some kind of supernatural, transcendent force. The contro-
versy generated by Siegel’s defense of rationality provides a clear example of this
problem. What is at stake, then, and the broader focus of McDowell’s concern, is
the nature of mind’s relation to the world. If I am correct that the issue of indoctri-
nation (and one could imagine here other epistemological concepts of special con-
cern to educators) is inextricably tied to our understanding of the nature of
rationality, then McDowell’s work may help us gain clarity on the questions that
we have been exploring.
One way of presenting the philosophical problem of mind and world is in
terms of ‘‘the Given.’’ When we consider the activity of human perception

27. Siegel, ‘‘Neither Humean Nor (Fully) Kantian Be,’’ 543.

28. Siegel, Rationality Redeemed? 18 and 136.
29. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1994).
HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 205

alongside the mental activity of using concepts, the question emerges at what
point objects of raw perception — say, particular wavelengths of light — acquire
the concepts by which we know them — say, ‘‘red.’’ The problem is that if we say
that concepts are constructed in the mind and imposed on experience, it is difficult
to defend any type of constraint or rational justification for some judgments over
others. Conversely, if our conceptual understanding of the world is simply caused
by our perceptual experiences, there seems to be no room for anything like rational
autonomy. Now, philosophers have parsed this dilemma in many ways, but the
same challenge continues to come up any time the world of experience and the
realm of rationality are thought of as distinct spheres. Even Kant, despite his
attempt to overcome dualism, did not challenge this assumption.
McDowell’s answer to this dilemma hinges on ‘‘the space of reasons,’’ a con-
cept borrowed from Wilfrid Sellars. The space of reasons operates as a metaphor
for the context in which concepts operate. It is a sphere of logical justification and
implication between beliefs, intentions, and other mental categories.30 So far this
is not a radical conception. McDowell’s key insight, though, has to do with the
relation between the space of reasons and ‘‘the realm of law.’’ In this phrase ‘‘law’’
is used in a scientific sense to indicate the context of mechanistic causal processes
governing physical reality. This is the arena of perception, the Given, and deter-
minism. While these two spaces are in a sense autonomous from each other, fol-
lowing their own rules and characterized by unique sorts of relations, McDowell
also claims that they are thoroughly interpenetrating. So, for instance, when I have
an experience of seeing a green pen on the table in front of me, the conceptual con-
tent of that experience (greenness, penness, tableness) is a basic and integral part of
that experience. There is no possibility of separating out raw perceptual contents
from the concepts and categories that give them shape and sense in my mind.31
Consider an example with more obvious educational implications. A boy and
his father, walking down a city sidewalk, pass a disheveled, shabbily clad man sit-
ting on a low wall and shivering in the face of a brisk early-winter wind. The man
is crying. ‘‘What’s the matter with that man?’’ the boy asks when they have con-
tinued down the block. His question is met with the reply, ‘‘Don’t worry, son, it’s
not our problem.’’ What is the best way to describe the boy’s experience here?
Someone trying to reduce all conceptual relations, social meanings, and the like to
mechanistic and causal terms would have to produce, at least, a complex account
of the origin of language and culture within the realm of physical and biological
laws.32 In this case, for example, the father’s actions might be explained as a mani-
festation of a genetic drive toward self-preservation. McDowell’s central point is
that such an account, far from bringing us closer to the essence of this episode,
leaves out elements (namely, concepts) basic to the experience as experience.

30. Maximilian de Gaynesford, John McDowell (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 23–24.
31. This argument is a recurrent theme in Mind and World. See one concise version of it on 56–60.
32. See Daniel Dennett, Freedom Evolves (New York: Penguin, 2003), or Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs,
and Steel (New York: Norton, 1999), for two popular contemporary examples of such a project.
206 E D U C AT I O N A L THEORY VOLUME 58 j NUMBER 2 j 2008

Learning processes, such as the boy’s formation of moral concepts related to

human suffering and need, drop out of the explanatory picture, except possibly as
symptoms of deeper biological drives.
We can grasp the inescapability of the space of reasons in a different way, as
well. The mechanistic approach attempts to explain away the conceptual content
of the event, treating it as a manifestation of underlying, ‘‘natural,’’ forces. When
we reflect on the impetus of such a project, we quickly recognize that the whole
point is to organize events in the ‘‘natural’’ world into a conceptual framework.
Far from being reduced to mechanistic causal relations, the space of reasons is the
context for this (or any other) way of understanding experience and the world. Cau-
sation is a concept.
This interpenetration of the conceptual and perceptual should not be taken as
a denial of the existence of external reality. In fact, McDowell is equally insistent
on the point that the space of reasons is always and everywhere intertwined with
the realm of law. So McDowell is not making a radical coherentist or constructi-
vist claim that the meaning of any concept is dependent entirely upon its role
within a web of related concepts. Rather, all conceptual content is enmeshed in
both rational relations and relations of reference to the world. The boy in the pre-
ceding example is a perceiving creature constrained by natural laws, and he does
inherit biological traits resulting from his evolutionary history. McDowell’s point
is that there is no simple boundary between that world, the realm of law, and the
space of reasons. To be human, to be a rational animal, just is to be the sort of crea-
ture for whom our dealings with the realm of law are inevitably conducted in con-
ceptual terms.
This is a delicate point that requires further clarification. McDowell situates
his view against two rival conceptions of the relation between mind and world,
which he labels ‘‘bald naturalism’’ and ‘‘rampant Platonism.’’33 It is tempting, but
incorrect, to say that McDowell stakes out a position between these views. Rather,
he seeks to dissolve the conflict by undermining an assumption shared by both per-
spectives. The bald naturalist takes the view that conceptual content can be ade-
quately described in mechanistic terms (as operations of physical or biological
laws, for instance). McDowell challenges this claim, arguing that such descriptions
cannot capture the web of meaning and rational relations characteristic of the
space of reasons. He does not, however, make his case by arguing for an independ-
ent structure of the rational world, distinct from human activity and experience.
That would be to fall into the view McDowell calls rampant Platonism, a view that
Kant seemed to have held with his description of the noumenal world. This
impasse, says McDowell, arises as a result of the Enlightenment conception of
nature as the realm of law. Rather than return to a pre-Enlightenment, mythical
understanding of nature, McDowell urges us to resist confusing insights into the
realm of law with comprehensive knowledge of nature as a whole. He wants to pre-
serve a broader understanding of nature that can include the space of reasons. The

33. Ibid., 76–78.

HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 207

core of this effort is McDowell’s insistence that ‘‘exercises of spontaneity belong to

our mode of living.’’34 We can acknowledge that humans are rational animals and
hold that reason can be exercised autonomously without placing this process out-
side of nature and setting up a dualism between mind and world.
It should be clear by now where I see Siegel and Garrison fitting into this
picture. Siegel’s commitment to a notion of rationality that transcends specific
contexts indicates his similarity to those McDowell labels rampant Platonists.
Undoubtedly Siegel would resist the label, but one need not espouse a Platonic
theory of Forms or envisage a Kantian noumenal realm to fall into the Myth of the
Given. Gareth Evans, a prominent interlocutor of McDowell’s, makes only the
slightest concession to a division between empirical reality and conceptual activ-
ity, arguing that experiences include nonconceptual content, which rationally
interacts with beliefs, judgments, and the like once it takes conceptual shape
through the working of Kantian spontaneity.35 Even this minimal separation, by
McDowell’s lights, takes the teeth out of rational autonomy, either by constructing
a gap between mind and experience that cannot be bridged, or by making sponta-
neity passive in its response to experience. In any case, we see at least this much
separation between reason and experience in Siegel’s account of absolute truth, in
his defense of metanarratives, and, I would add, in the distinction between rational
and pre-rational individuals.
Taking up this last distinction, we can return to the question posed earlier:
What can indoctrination mean in the context of a pre-rational individual? Empiri-
cally, we have no means of identifying a clear-cut developmental stage or achieve-
ment marking the emergence of rationality. Reasoning is not like walking. It is
gradual and diffuse (as are motor skills, but at least we can roughly identify ‘‘first
steps’’). Let us assume it is safe to consider a newborn pre-rational. When the
child’s mother coos and sings to her, offering love and reassuring promises, we
would find it ridiculous to hear her accused of indoctrination. But why? Not
because the mother’s words (‘‘Mama will never let anything bad happen to you’’)
could be supported with reasons if necessary. Rather, the intuitive response is that
this situation just does not have anything to do with beliefs, reasons, or concepts
at all. If the child is pre-rational, that kind of response seems required.
How about our young boy on the street, encountering the crying man? This
case is clearly different from that of the infant, in that conceptual categories and
relations are explicitly part of the picture. Those worried about the boy’s cultiva-
tion of a vocabulary of emotions or a sense of social justice may see potential
indoctrination operating in the exchange. It is also plausible, though, to interpret
the father’s actions as unrelated to any systematic effort to shape beliefs or instill a
worldview. Maybe he just wants to get to the bank on time. To explore the ques-
tion of indoctrination, we would want to know more about the father’s intentions,
as well as the larger context of interactions between father and son. But once we

34. Ibid., 78.

35. Ibid., 50–54.
208 E D U C AT I O N A L THEORY VOLUME 58 j NUMBER 2 j 2008

take this wider perspective, the case is not so different from that of the newborn
after all. The space of reasons is at work there, minimally through the mother’s
understanding of the situation, but also as part of the context of the child’s emerg-
ing conceptual understanding. The pervasiveness of the conceptual renders the cat-
egory ‘‘pre-rational’’ highly problematic. That notion implies that rationality is an
extraneous capacity, somehow tacked on to the preexisting physical, biological,
and (it comes to seem) natural organism. If, as I am arguing, McDowell offers a
more satisfactory picture of reason and nature, nothing central to Siegel’s position
is lost by dropping the pre-rational/rational distinction and adopting McDowell’s
view.
Garrison’s position seems more clear-cut, and firmly within the bald naturalist
camp, as his uncompromising Darwinian worldview suggests. Here a careful dis-
tinction is in order. Bald naturalism, as presented by McDowell, reduces notions
of mind and rationality to the realm of mechanistic law. Garrison tries to avoid
this simplistic view. For one thing, his understanding of evolution stresses the
emergent, such that new values and configurations of reality constantly come into
existence.36 Furthermore, the importance of creativity in Garrison’s account of
practical reasoning could make room for something like spontaneity as Kant, and
especially McDowell, understand it. Yet in the end Garrison does not exploit these
openings to reexamine his understanding of nature. Seeing no escape from the
causal frame, Garrison follows Donald Davidson in arguing that rational concepts
and relations are always translatable into mechanical laws, and thus that judg-
ments and actions can always be described in causal terms.37
It will be useful to explain more clearly the claim that McDowell’s account of
mind’s relation to the world is naturalistic yet explicitly nonreductive. It is a cen-
tral tenet of his view that the activities of minds, operating within the space of
reasons, are fully entwined with the mechanistic realm of law yet unique and dif-
ferent in kind from the scientific conception of nature. McDowell achieves his nat-
uralistic perspective by stepping back from common assumptions about reality
and seeking to articulate a view that accounts for the existence and peculiar expe-
riences of consciousness.
This view relies on the intuition that there is nothing paradoxical or transcen-
dental about saying that mechanistic descriptions of reality may be accurate and
thorough without capturing the whole of nature. Specifically, the experience of
being human is not adequately conveyed by even the most detailed and systematic
description of the physical motions and biological processes occurring in a human
body. Talk of meanings, beliefs, ideas, and reasons is just as essential, and natural.
This is the key insight to which McDowell introduces us. It means that, in cases
like the example given previously, involving a boy and his father, raising the issues

36. Jim Garrison, ‘‘Identifying Traces of Hegelian Bildung in Dewey’s Philosophical System’’ (paper pre-
sented at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Columbia,
South Carolina, March 2007), 11.
37. Donald Davidson, ‘‘Mental Events,’’ in Essays on Actions and Events (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1980), cited in McDowell, Mind and World, 75.
HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 209

of belief formation, reason-giving, and indoctrination do matter, in their own

terms. Whether or not the father is systematically distorting his son’s rational
capacities by stifling critical reflection or failing to expand his understanding of
the range of human emotions38 is both a matter of cause, effect, culture, and biol-
ogy, and a matter of reasons, beliefs, and concepts. Mechanistic and conceptual
explanations of experience should neither be thought of as competing accounts,
nor as descriptions of sharply differentiated spheres. Rather, they are best under-
stood as distinct perspectives on the same reality, differing in what is brought into
view and what must be held stable as assumptions.
I have emphasized McDowell’s concern to make room for the Kantian notion
of spontaneity. Perhaps this approach gives the impression that McDowell’s views
would be more congenial to Siegel than to Garrison. However, in addressing
the question of how participation in the space of reasons actually comes about,
McDowell emphasizes a different dimension of his theory. To describe human
activity in the space of reasons, he draws on Aristotle’s notion of ‘‘second nature.’’
This two-part notion involves, first, the idea that virtuous action is a natural
capacity of human beings and, second, that people must be educated for virtuous
action through the practice of social interaction.39
McDowell extends this notion to all conceptual activity, emphasizing the edu-
cational component with the provocative phrase ‘‘having one’s eyes opened to rea-
sons at large by acquiring a second nature.’’40 This process McDowell elucidates by
way of the concept of Bildung. Fleshing out this elusive educational concept in the
present circumstances would launch us on a whole new inquiry. Still, the affinities
between McDowell’s approach here and Garrison’s view are notable. First, they
both blur the distinction between pre-rational children and fully autonomous
agents. Though ‘‘acquiring a second nature’’ may seem to suggest a dichotomy, it
should be evident that the naturalism shared by Garrison and McDowell requires
that this be a gradual process involving the harnessing and coordination of capaci-
ties intrinsic to human beings. A fuller account of the process would include some-
thing like Ludwig Wittgenstein’s imagistic assertion that ‘‘light dawns gradually
over the whole.’’41 Furthermore, both adopt (with modification) Aristotelian
notions of practical reasoning that link ethics to epistemology and theory to
action, and what emerges for both is an understanding of education as Bildung, a
holistic process of self-formation and social formation.42

38. I am thinking here of the often-noted tendency for girls’ socialization to involve much greater capaci-
ty to recognize and interpret a wider range of emotions than boys. For an articulation of this argument,
see Dan Kindlon and Michael Thompson, Raising Cain (New York: Ballantine, 1999).
39. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), bk. 2.
40. McDowell, Mind and World, 84.
41. Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper, 1969), 21. While I think both Garrison and
McDowell would accept this formulation, their interpretations of Wittgenstein vary. This would be the
topic of a separate inquiry, but, in brief, I suggest that their differing understandings of this passage reflect
the different views of nature discussed here.
42. For Garrison’s recent move in this direction, see Garrison, ‘‘Identifying Traces of Hegelian Bildung in
Dewey’s Philosophical System.’’
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The critical difference between Garrison and McDowell involves the autonomy
of reason. Garrison’s resignation to the inevitability of indoctrination, I believe, is a
direct result of his subsuming reason within a mechanistic view of nature. Once this
move is made, no matter how much one admires good reasoning, in the end that
admiration can be nothing more than a cultural bias or biological trait. Garrison
may be tempted to suspect that McDowell is smuggling in, under cover of the space
of reasons, something like the Kantian noumenal realm, or a Platonic world of
Forms, where the demands of reason reside independent of the natural world. But
recall that this is exactly the picture McDowell seeks to avoid. The demands of rea-
son must arise in nature, and remain ‘‘essentially within reach of human beings.
This should defuse the fear of supernaturalism. Second nature could not float free of
potentialities that belong to a normal human organism. This gives human reason
enough of a foothold in the realm of law to satisfy any proper respect for modern
natural science.’’43 In response to Garrison’s inevitable question, ‘‘Where does the
space of reasons lie, if not in the natural world?’’ McDowell would challenge the
premise and suggest that Garrison reconsider his understanding of nature.
As it happens, this is almost Siegel’s response: ‘‘My view, in any case, is not
that truth is ‘beyond’ space, time, or context, but rather that it is typically
independent of these things.’’44 What he does not do is specify what he means by
‘‘independent,’’ if not something that transcends nature, or take issue with the
parameters of nature presumed by the bald naturalist mindset. My contention here
is that such a move would go far toward reconciling the views of rationality held
by Siegel and Garrison.
CONCLUSION: INDOCTRINATION IN THE SPACE OF REASONS
In this essay, the concept of indoctrination has served as an exemplar of the
kinds of educational issues that are deeply intertwined with fundamental concep-
tions of rationality. My primary purpose has been to urge a particular way of think-
ing about that concept: in a phrase, rationality as naturalistic and nonreductive.
The impetus for this effort is the hope of gaining clarity on the issue of indoctrina-
tion (and, potentially, other aspects of the educational process). Several observa-
tions can be made in this regard.
First, understanding rationality as inhabiting its own autonomous sphere of
nature recaptures the salience of debates about indoctrination. I think it is a seri-
ous mistake to reduce ‘‘induction into the space of reasons’’ to merely one element
within a broader process of socialization. Though reason is always and everywhere
enmeshed in particular cultural and physical contexts, the position I am defending
shares Siegel’s ‘‘rejection of ‘strong contextualism’, [which] amounts to just the
rejection of the claim that rationality is determined or constituted by the actual
activities, decisions, and judgments that people make.’’45 This is to say that

43. McDowell, Mind and World, 84.

44. Siegel, ‘‘Afterwords,’’ 130.
45. Ibid.
HANKS Indoctrination and the Space of Reasons 211

education for rational autonomy can go wrong, because the demands of reason are
distinctive to it, not mere consequences of mechanistic, causal relations. Explora-
tions of how it can go wrong are the stuff of debates about the methods, intentions,
content, and outcomes of indoctrination.
McDowell’s picture of nature also gives us guidance regarding a particularly
troubling scene of potential indoctrination. I have argued that this view challenges
the idea of a pre-rational child, the potential subject of indoctrination, as a distinct
category. This is not the absurd claim that infants are born as full-fledged rational
agents, and we need not enter psychological or cognitive-scientific debates about
when and how rational capacities emerge to make the point. The idea is rather
that beliefs, judgments, and reasons occupy, along with language and relations
among concepts, the space of reasons. If indoctrination involves these notions, as
opposed to behavioral conditioning, then it too only makes sense within this
sphere. Thus the distinction between indoctrination and legitimate teaching
should be made in terms of the process itself. There is no need to legitimize cer-
tain acts of belief inculcation in terms of some later achievement.
Now we can see the problem with Cuypers and Haji’s example, introduced ear-
lier, of the slave to reason who has been conditioned into compulsive critical
reflection. The hidden assumption in the example is that rationality is merely a
behavioral response or habit, with the primary questions being whether or not, to
what extent, and in what manner it should be instilled. McDowell’s view urges
two observations here. First, rationality is natural, an aspect of our second nature
and part of what it means to be human. Indoctrination is not so much about instil-
ling anything, behavioral responses or beliefs, but rather involves stunting or dis-
torting development in the space of reasons. Clearly, instilling certain beliefs is
often a central aim of such distortions. But what makes a particular effort indoc-
trinative (or not), as Siegel rightly claims, is the manner in which such beliefs are
held.
Finally, though a distinction between skills and motivation may be helpful in
a general definition of rational autonomy or critical thinking, these do not repre-
sent separate problems of education. To acquire a second nature is to awaken to
the demands of reason, a process which involves both the ability to grasp those
demands and the disposition to respond (a process which is always incomplete, of
course).46 Insisting on this linkage from the outset suggests a holistic approach to
pursuing rational autonomy as an educational aim, both attending to inter-
connected networks of meaning (as opposed to isolated beliefs) and developing a
full-bodied account of conceptual activity (as opposed to a narrow focus on ‘‘crit-
ical thinking’’).
This line of thought indicates what, from my perspective, is crucially correct
about Garrison’s view. Rationality cannot be neatly extracted from everyday life
and behavior. Just as experience is conceptual ‘‘all the way down,’’ reason is always

46. This is why, as one observant reviewer of this essay noted, my emphasis has perhaps focused more
on the autonomy of reason, and less on rational autonomy, than one might expect.
212 E D U C AT I O N A L THEORY VOLUME 58 j NUMBER 2 j 2008

and everywhere manifested in actual situations, bound up with habits, emotions,

and all the rest. This is the point my examples of the infant child and the boy on
the street are intended to make. In the latter case, to make a judgment about
indoctrination, we need a much fuller picture of the boy’s conceptual development
and the father’s willingness to engage in reason-giving, understood in the context
of their lived experience. I have suggested Bildung as a promising way of thinking
about such a project.
Advancing a theory of Bildung requires a more substantive account of second
nature than I can begin to offer here. Fortunately the notion has a rich history,
stretching from Aristotle through the German philosophical tradition. Among con-
temporary thinkers, one might look to the ideas of Martha Nussbaum on human
capabilities and emotional intelligence,47 or to Garrison’s own work connecting
imagination, emotions, and reasoning. Perhaps these concluding remarks raise
more questions than they answer. If I have successfully introduced a fruitful way of
thinking about rationality, indoctrination, and education, then I hope others find
those questions worth exploring.

47. For discussion of human capabilities, see Martha Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice: Disability, Nation-
ality, Species Membership (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2006), 69–81. For a detailed explo-
ration of emotional intelligence, see Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of
Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).