Truth, Statistics, and the Human Mind: Method and mind...

Running head: TRUTH, STATISTICS, AND THE HUMAN MIND

University Ghent

Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences

Academic year 2012 – 2013

TRUTH, STATISTICS, AND THE HUMAN MIND

Method and mind intertwined in a causal understanding of the world

Master’s thesis submitted for obtaining the degree of Master of Science in Educational

Sciences: Foundations, Theory, and Study of Education

Promotor

Prof. Dr. Paul Smeyers

Student

Jelmen Haaze

TRUTH, STATISTICS, AND THE HUMAN MIND 2

Abstract

As the call for evidence based education becomes louder, statistics are all around in

educational science these days. In this master’s thesis I argue that this is problematic since

statistics bring with a truth-claim which disallows plurality. Moreover, this truth claim is

unwarranted (a) given current epistemological understanding of scientific theory which

falsified the correspondence theory of truth, (b) recognizing that statistical research is not the

detached instrument able to make up for erroneous human perception and understanding it is

sometimes taken for, (c) recognizing that since most statistical research is limited to one

region it is ethnographic in nature rather than “truth finding,” and (d) acknowledging that the

way people evaluate causal claims is culturally influenced, thus distorting their understanding

away from the mechanical causal nexus that statistics suggest. I therefore argue that education

in statistical literacy which allows for ethical judgment is essential. Rather than dealing with

the past and present described by statistics, this should allow for dealing with the to-come,

thus effectively capacitating people for action in an Arendtian, existentialist understanding of

the term: the capacity to begin something new. I conclude with some practical

recommendations for teaching statistical literacy.

Key Words: Truth ∙ Statistics ∙ Postmodernism ∙ Knowledge ∙ Citizenship ∙ Education ∙

Causation ∙ Democracy


Table of Contents

Abstract .......................................................................................................................... 2

Table of Contents ........................................................................................................... 3

Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................ 5

Note on the Text ............................................................................................................. 5

Introduction .................................................................................................................... 6

Method ........................................................................................................................... 9

The Lightning Truth and the Good Citizen .................................................................. 10

The Pedagogical Invitation ....................................................................................... 10

The Ontological Provocation ................................................................................... 12

The Truth, Is It Out There? ...................................................................................... 15

The Truth and Beyond .............................................................................................. 18

Cognizing Causation .................................................................................................... 22

Causation and the Human Mind ............................................................................... 22

Explaining Events .................................................................................................... 24

Social Causation ....................................................................................................... 28

Statistics and Causation ................................................................................................ 31

Statistical “Explanations” ......................................................................................... 31

Contextualizing Statistics ......................................................................................... 34

Statistics, Truth, and Ethics .......................................................................................... 36

Statistical Seduction ................................................................................................. 36

Statistics and Ethical Judgement .............................................................................. 39


The Statistical Curriculum ....................................................................................... 41

Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 44

References .................................................................................................................... 46


Acknowledgements

First of all I thank my parents, for creating context and atmosphere conductive to academic

performance, for challenging my ideas and offering guidance, for encouraging me to think

critically and in freedom. Most of all, I thank them for being there, always. Also, I thank my

promotor, Prof. Dr. Paul Smeyers, who has introduced the inspirational and provocative

theme “Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics.” His work not only laid the groundwork of this

master’s thesis but also proved to be a constant source of ideas and reference. Moreover, he

always took the time to read and comment upon earlier versions of this master’s thesis, and

stimulated personal exploration and development.

Note on the Text

All translations to English are the author’s own. Where appropriate the original is given as

well the first time a term is used. Some words which lack a direct equivalent in English

remain in the original language.


Introduction

The statistic is what John L. Austin would call a performative utterance as it is

difficult to say: “this is most effective” and doing something else. The statistic “forces” you to

act upon it, and this is particularly so because statistical research does not stop at the

demonstration of correlations. The “gold standard” for statistical research is the search for

causation (Imai, Keele, Tingley, & Yamamoto, 2011, p. 766; Vandenbroeck, 2012, pp. 95–

96), which gives the policy maker a concrete handle for intervention as it suggests

manipulability: trough changing the independent variables one can have an impact on the

dependent variables (Pöllinger, 2012; Weber & De Vreese, 2009, p. 3; Woodward, 2012). Or,

in the words of Katrin Schulz (2010) who, introducing a causal notion of consequence,

expresses in a Humean definition what “real” causality should be all about1: “If you’d

wiggled A, then B would’ve changed” (p. 239).

But the leap from the predictive to the causal, thus “conflat[ing] symptoms with

causes” (Smeyers, 2008, p. 70, 2010, p. 176), is often made all to readily. Many researches

claim to have demonstrated causality but fail to explain how such a causal mechanism would

work. “This ‘black box’ approach to causality has been criticized across disciplines for being

atheoretical and even unscientific” (Imai et al., 2011, p. 765). As if this is not confusing

enough, and despite the great importance the scientific world attaches to moving beyond

measuring correlations and demonstrating causation, even in a casual reading of scientific

literature one is immediately confronted with a great variety of definitions of causality, thus

exacerbating the problem.

1 Although Hume was doubtful about the possibility that there exists something more than contiguity

(Smeyers, 2008, p. 72)(Holland, 1986, p. 950).


Today these considerations are relevant for every individual person, as everybody is

urged to take charge of their own lives, and most of all, be able to think critically (Bartels,

2013) and act reasonably, as for example Amartya Sen (2009) argues: “Reasoning is central

to the understanding of justice even in a world which contains much ‘unreason’; indeed, it

may be particularly important in such a world” (p. xix). He defines “unreason” as follows:

“[U]nreason is mostly not the practice of doing without reasoning altogether, but of relying on

very primitive and very defective reasoning.” His hope that, “bad reasoning can be confronted

by better reasoning,” (p. xviii) is a call for the educationalists to come up with a response to

eliminate “bad reasoning” from the world.2

Statistical research seems to have just this very power to distinguish between what

works and what doesn’t. In particular when the research moves beyond the “demonstration of

connections” (Brehm, Kassein, Fein, & Mervielde, 2000, p. 36) of the correlational discovery

setup, and searches for cause and effect. As statistics promise to have the power to distinguish

between what to wiggle and what not and promise to be both a practical tool for decision

makers and a means to move beyond particularistic explanations, it becomes the methodical

norm from which statements are to come if they are ever to get the status of a scientific truth.

In this master’s thesis I attempt to get a better understanding of the relation between

truth, statistics, and the human mind, with a particular focus on causation. The first section,

the Lightening Truth and the Good Citizen, deals with “truth” and the impact the transition

from a modernist to a postmodernist understanding of “truth” has on education, particularly

education for citizenship. In the second section, Cognizing Causation, the causal structure of

language and our world view is discussed. The third section, Statistics and Causation, focuses

on the search for causes with statistics. The fourth and final section, Statistics, Truth, and

Ethics, is an ethical reflection of the position statistics has taken in society in general and

2 Possibly a skill that can be best taught in an informal setting (Bartels, 2013).


education in particular. As the original idea of this master’s thesis lies in the series

Educational Research, Volume 5, The Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics from Paul Smeyers

and Marc Depaepe (2010), it is no coincidence that the first three sections deal with

aesthetical aspects of statistics – why do statistics appeal so much to researchers and policy

makers – and the fourth and final section asks how to relate to the seductive force of statistics;

the ethics of statistics.


Method

The Web of Knowledge was queried on “causality”. The 750 most recent, as well as

the 750 most cited articles were considered. From this initial search, 38 articles were withheld

and organized into two thematic groups. The first group, which could be termed the positivist

group, mainly deals with the methodical consideration of statistics in the search for causation.

The second group will also make use of statistical research but the questions asked are of a

hermeneutic nature, exploring the role of culture, language and psychology in the

understanding of the environment in causal terms. Drilling down from here, considerations,

concepts or important authors which asked for more attention were explored in more detail

whilst some of the original 38 articles were rejected along the way. In the final stage, the

findings were contextualized and applied to issues which are prominent in the educational

environment.


The Lightning Truth and the Good Citizen

The Pedagogical Invitation

Education is a goal-directed – or as some say, teleological – and value-directed – or

as some say, normative – activity (Cuypers, 2012, p. 4).3 “[E]ducators need to see normative

talk as reasonable if they are to avoid either limp agnosticism about values on the one hand or

dogma on the other” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish, 2003, pp. 3–4), something of which

Plato was undoubtedly aware (Arendt, 2006, pp. 130–131). It urged him to conclude that

education needs to install norms and values in children so that they become good citizens. He

even elaborated on about how to tackle this problem. Take for example the following passage

from his Republic where he discusses which stories to tell children. He recognizes that, as

children cannot recognize truth from fiction,4 these stories will have an impact on how

children understand the world and, in particular, on how they understand the organization of

the state. Therefore he concludes that founders of state should be involved in determining the

“molds” into which these stories ought to be cast:

3 Unless one starts either from a positivistic position which “brought with it, as its shadow, a pervasive

skepticism about norms, notoriously marginalized as ‘nonsense’ by the application of any form of the

verifiability principle” (Blake, Smeyers, Smith, & Standish, 2003, pp. 3–4), or from a naturalist position from

which “Aspiration, (…) is not a fit aim of normative advice, which must, first and foremost, offer effective

means to ends” (Leiter, 2012, sec. 4). The two positions disagree but “the extent to which the two schools

disagree, and the location of their disagreement, remains a matter sharply contested” (Bix, 2013, sec. 2).

4 This latter proposition, that children are not able to distinguish truth from fiction, will be further

treated in the section “Causation and the Mind: Explaining Events”.


This quote is interesting for four reasons. (a) Plato’s basic assumption, that children learn

through stories has been dealt with by many authors since Plato, such as for example Kant

(2008, pp. 485–490), Arendt (2006, p. 243), Iovino (2009) and Phillips (2010). In particular,

statistics are understood as being “both a linguistic and a conceptual matter,” (Stadler-

Altmann & Keiner, 2010, p. 131), or as Max Planck formulated it: “the results obtained by

mathematical processes ‘must be translated back into the language of the world of our senses

if they are to be of any use to us’” (Arendt, 2006, p. 266). But, as Judea Pearl (2000) remarks:

“We are witnessing one of the most bizarre circles in the history of science: causality in

search of a language and, simultaneously, the language of causality in search of its meaning”

(p. 135). Which creates a particular problem regarding statistical literacy: the statistic needs

to be translated into a language which lacks meaning. (b) Plato also points out that children

depend on adults to select the stories for them, which makes intervention necessary and

unavoidable, (c) and he continues by saying that this selection must be goal-oriented: children

must become good citizens. As such he introduces performativity in the educational process.

A particularly relevant element regarding statistics, given the frequent calls for evidence

(…) a child cannot discriminate between what is allegory and what is not; and

whatever at that age is adopted as a matter of belief, has a tendency to become fixed

and indelible; and therefore, perhaps we ought to esteem it of the greatest importance

that the fictions which children first hear should be adapted in the most perfect manner

to the promotion of virtue. (...) [Y]ou and I are not poets (...) but founders of state and

founders ought certainly to know the molds in which their poets are to cast their

fictions. (Plato, 1997, para. 378a–379d)


based education (Cummins, 2011, p. 4). (d) Moreover, Plato introduced a concept of truth that

has features of that of the modern purist5 approaches.

Being recognized by some as the first rationalist, Plato bound philosophy to abstract

mathematical reasoning (Brown, 1988, p. 600) as do the positivists (Bourdeau, 2011). There

is however a distinct difference between the Greek concept of science and modern science:

“Greek science was never exact – precisely for the reason that it could not by its nature be

exact and did not need to be exact” (Heidegger, 1976, p. 342).

The Ontological Provocation

Plato was, as Popper (1945) puts it in Aristotelian terms, looking for the essence, “the

virtue or rationale of a thing and for the real, the unchanging or essential meaning of the

terms” (p. 27). This latter idea was something that clearly appealed also to Popper, (1945)

who concluded his section on Plato’s “theory of forms or ideas” (pp. 15-32) with the

following thought:

But this does not mean that one can say that Plato and Popper have the same view of the

philosopher. For Plato the philosopher needed to refute agonism and must present itself in its

most “feminine” form, inviting an already present truth to come out. “Thus Socrates calls

himself a "midwife" of philosophy, one who brings to birth wisdom and truth in others”

(Brown, 1988, p. 600). Few people today would still argue in favor of the existence of an

5 Burke Johnson and Onwuegbuzie argue that after the disputes over the last century between the

advocates of quantitative and qualitative research, purists have emerged on both sides (Burke Johnson &

Onwuegbuzie, 2004, p. 14).

In the social sciences, a discussion of Plato’s methods may be topical even to-day.

(…) I am confining my treatment of Plato’s philosophy to his historicism (…) My

attitude towards historicism is one of frank hostility (…) Although I admire much in

Plato’s philosophy. (Popper, 1945, p. 32)


innate truth as advocated by Plato. Nevertheless, and although he did stress that there is no

unique way, no single path to the truth,6 according to Popper the truth is still attainable. In his

later life “he came to accept Tarski's reformulation of the correspondence theory of truth, and

in Conjectures and Refutations (1963) he integrated the concepts of truth and content to frame

the metalogical concept of ‘truthlikeness’ or ‘verisimilitude’” (Thornton, 2013, sec. 5). He no

longer considered scientific theories merely as instruments but as “’genuine conjectures about

the world,’ (…) (Popper 1983, 110) ” (Hutcheon, 1995). Thus he has always refuted the label

positivist7 and instead argued that “theories with a higher level of verisimilitude (…) approach

more closely to the truth” (Thornton, 2013, sec. 4).

This truth claim, as John Locke already noted in an entirely different context,8 is of

specific concern for education:

He brings forward two issues: in the first sentence he recognizes the coercive power any ‘truth

claim’ holds, in particular in the educational relationship. It challenges all other truth claims.

It challenges not only the others trough the formal school curriculum, but also in the form of

6 A view, personally endorsed by Einstein when he said that: “There is no logical path leading to [the

highly universal laws of science]. They can only be reached by intuition, based upon something like an

intellectual love of the objects of experience” (Thornton, 2013, sec. 2)

9 Bk. I, Ch. iv, secs. 23-25, as quoted by Melissa McBay Merrit (2011) pp. 227-228.

[I]t is no “small power” that one man has over another if he is granted “Authority to be

the Dictator of Principles and the Teacher of unquestionable Truths” (…) Even if we

have been fed true principles, we remain impoverished unless we are able to recognize

their relevance to our own “unprejudiced Experience.” (Locke, 1689)9


the praxis10 of education (the activities in their material context) and in particular in what is

referred to as the hidden curriculum, those elements of the culture that are not made explicit

but are nevertheless part of the school environment such as how to deal with power relations.

Truth becomes a question of power (Agambem, 2007, p. 77; Baumann, 2006, pp. 87–88;

Stadler-Altmann & Keiner, 2010, p. 139), which made Arendt remark that we should not

strike from children’s hands the opportunity to create a new world:

However, the Platonic victory over the Sofists continues to play an important role in both

contemporary philosophy and the praxis of the bureaucracy which have translated the dream

of illuminating knowledge, the lightening truth, into an absolute norm and systematic

regulation of behavior (Enaudeau & Bonnigal-Katz, 2007, p. 1029).

Locke raises a practical concern as well. In the second sentence he recognizes the

problems encountered in transferring ‘true’ approaches and answers to a student. Already

during the educational process there might be a resistance to accept the answers from the part

of the student. But even if the student accepts the authority of the teacher it is still very

difficult to make the transfer from the educational environment to the real life environment.

Moreover, even if the answers worked in one situation, or even in the majority of

circumstances, they might not hold true for the situations the student finds herself in.

8 John Locke opposed the truth claim made by religion.

9 Bk. I, Ch. iv, secs. 23-25, as quoted by Melissa McBay Merrit (2011) pp. 227-228.

10 Praxis is used in the meaning of: “human activity in its material context” (Flynn, 2012, sec. 2).

Education (…) is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel

them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their

hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to

prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world. (Arendt, 2006, p.

193)


The Truth, Is It Out There?

However relevant, these concerns do not do away with the fact that there is but one

reality, and for thinkers as Plato and Popper it was clear: the truth is out there. An idea that,

perhaps not so much in its essence – that there is but one reality – but definitely in its

effectuation has been criticized by the post-modernists. Their critique was inspired both

historically and epistemologically. It was historically inspired, as they recognized that the

grand narratives of modernity11 have all failed to live up to their promises, “and the

11 The grand narratives bestow the world and society with meaning, as such the system can be

understood as total of the social organization and its narrative, which can be understood in three categories. (a)

The traditional rationalization understood society and religion in unity: the social order was divinely created. (b)

During and after the French revolution that idea crumbled and the social structure, and perhaps most of all the

state, needed a new raison d’être (reason for existence) which it found either in the historical narrative of the

German Romanticism (as e.g. in Tsjechoslovakia (Albright, 2012, p. 72)), which understood the nation as being

united through history and of which the great protagonists were Johan G. von Herder and Georg W. F. Hegel, or

(c) in Rationalism which was effectuated in the French Liberalism of the 19th century (Compare with Jean-

Jeacques Rousseau, Baron de Montesqieu, but also Immanuel Kant). In this narrative, the people were not united

in a nation and through history, but in a fraternité (brotherhood) and trough reason, as symbolized by Marianne.

The raison d’être of the state was found in the need to protect the freedoms, which were an essential right of

every individual citizen, including freedom of religion. This meant in effect that people had to give up their

identity as part of a nation (and the possible allegiance to a foreign ruler that came with it) in favor of French

citizenship. This idea is characterized by the call of Stanislas M. A., Comte de Clermont-Tonnere during the

debate on the Jewish emancipation in the French National Assemby in 1789: “To the Jews as individuals we

should grant everything. But to the Jews as a nation – nothing” (Hazony, 2001, p. 88). Note that these three

narratives, which could also be called ideologies (Purvis & Hunt, 1993), imply three very different educational

curricula for citizenship.


postmodern world behaves in accordance with a system that has exiled those grand

narratives” (Munday, 2010, p. 178). 12

Second, the critique was epistemological as the narratives of modernity did not just

vanish into thin air. It began to seem “wrong-headed to think that there are ‘true’ answers,” in

the sense that they correctly depict some pre-existing metaphysical order of the world” that

awaits discovery. “[T]he heart of ontological inquiry lies in construction rather than

description” (Kim, 1993, p. ix) .

Thus, “truth” came to be challenged from three sides. First, it came to be understood

as being “constructed by language rather than being anterior to it” (Munday, 2010, p. 180).

Second, some information cannot even be made explicit as Michael Polanyi recognized.

Third, no general rules can contain all knowledge available to the individual in a specific

situation and at a given time (Hayek, 1945, p. 522). These insights combined have two

consequences of particular relevance for statistics. First, although the generalized theories that

the mathematical methods produce in system equilibrium analysis have its value, they cannot

be recognized as being able to inform decisions where the situation was subject to change. As

Hayek (1945) explains: “Any approach (…) which in effect starts from the assumption that

people's knowledge corresponds with the objective facts of the situation, systematically leaves

out what is our main task to explain” (p. 530). Second, and perhaps even further reaching, he

insists that the statistic cannot be any more than a useful preliminary to a social debate or for a

practical solution. He concludes that

12 Which should not be interpreted as that they have been “replaced” by postmodernism, rather, when a

new idea takes form, the original narratives continue to exist in parallel with the new one added, not always

without conflict.


As Peter Winch argued, it is all about “what is real for us” (Smeyers, 2010, pp. 163–164).

13 This is not to be interpreted as to suggest that there is no such thing as culture or society. Hayek also

quotes Alfred Whitehead as having said "in another connection, ‘It is a profoundly erroneous truth, repeated by

all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of

thinking what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of

important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’ This is of profound significance in the

social field” (p. 528). It is rather to be understood, on the one hand and specifically for Hayek, in the struggle

against communism, and on the other hand, in a quality which he shares with many of his contemporaries (such

as Jürgen Habermas (Masschelein, 2001, p. 101) or Louis Althusser (Masschelein, 2007), in that, borrowing an

expression from Hannah Arendt, he is writing from within the gap between past and future (Arendt, 2006, pp. 3–

15) in which the traditional answers have failed and people are struggling to free themselves from non-legitimate

power, irrational motives, and inequality. The paradox between equality and freedom is not the topic of this

thesis which deals strictly with the epistemological, postmodernist Hayek and his analysis of statistics. The

paradox between culture and individual is touched in the section on social causation.

when it comes to the point where [system equilibrium analysis] misleads some of our

leading thinkers into believing that the situation which it describes has direct relevance

to the solution of practical problems, it is time that we remember that it does not deal

with the social process at all and that it is no more than a useful preliminary to the

study of the main problem. (Hayek, 1945, p. 530)13


The Truth and Beyond

The absence of the “true” principle turned out to be a two sided sword. First, it

emancipated the individual as she is then always the expert of her own life. A direct

consequence from the understanding that, (a) for information to become useful and

operationalized in the form of knowledge, it must be contextualized (Stadler-Altmann &

Keiner, 2010, p. 138). (b) Also, now that mankind has freed herself from the big lies, not at

least the promise of an absolute truth that has held philosophy capture since Plato, there is

room for doxa (Enaudeau & Bonnigal-Katz, 2007; Norris, 1996), which Arendt defined as:

The individual is emancipated, who can give authentic and legitimate meaning to her own

life, finding new and authentic answers as the main criteria governing the choice of an

ontology are no longer those of “truth” or of general acceptance, but those of “utility,

simplicity, elegance, and the like” (Kim, 1993, p. ix). Considerations which might inspire

different answers to suit various activities and contexts. It came to be recognized that the

power that lies with those who can claim the “truth” lies just therein: it is all about who gets to

frame the data (Stadler-Altmann & Keiner, 2010, p. 139). That this power to frame data now

came into the hands of the individual was an immense liberation.

On the other hand, the fact that “truth” is not to be found “out there”, in a stable

picture that corresponds to reality, but rather “in here” and can be freely created amongst men,

means that nothing can be taken for granted anymore. As Hannah Arendt, inspired by Karl

Jaspers remarks: the elite and the tradition have a stabilizing effect. The freedom that came

with these new ideas also meant that there is no more cultural safety net to give meaning to

14 Arendt, H. (1990 Spring). Philosophy and politics, Social Research, 57 p. 80.

the formulation in speech of what dokei moi, that is, of what appears to me. This doxa

had as its topic not what Aristotle calls the eikos, the probable, the many verisimilia…

but comprehended the world as it opens itself up to me.14 (Norris, 1996, p. 170)


one’s life (Arendt & Peeters, 2005; Thornhill, 2011). One can no longer afford to sit back and

allow culture or tradition to stand in for reason. People are assigned positions and roles in

society according to the family in which they are born and the world is bestowed with

meaning according to tradition. A situation which Karl Marx considered a lazy reliance on

culture (Thornhill, 2011). The implosion of traditional answers created an atomized world in

which anybody can formulate an idea which becomes a political opinion the moment it

gathers popular support. Since then, “truth” can no longer be separated from human activity.

It is to be found in what Hannah Arendt refers to as the “inter homines esse” where, as in the

classical Roman understanding, “to live” is inseparable from “to be among men” (Arendt,

1958, p. 7).15 This brings with the great danger that, as there is no more grand narrative to

distinguish between truth and lie, what might be considered a “simple lie” by scholars can

become “truth” trough history, “the moment that the entire marching reality of the movement

back[s] it up and assume[s] to get the necessary inspiration for action out of it” (Arendt &

Peeters, 2005, p. 105).16 “Truth” became a linguistic performance validated by popularity.

15 For Hannah Arendt, true love and care for the world also implies allowing for new interpretations to

emerge so that the world can be reinvented over and over again in a playful dialogue. The only limit there seems

to be those narratives that give rise to action which destroys plurality and must be disallowed for genuine

dialogue requires plurality (Arendt, 2006)(Arendt & Peeters, 2005)(Stuy, 1992), an idea reminiscent of the final

chaper of Jean-Jacque Rouseau’s Social Contract (Bertram, 2012, sec. 3.5).

16 The process in which mass society has taken its form is, with its dangers, depicted by Hannah Arendt

in her Totalitarianism. She argued that since the stabilizing educated bourgeoisie and the class society had

crumbled an “indentity constructing activism” has taken its place in which “you are what you have done,” thus

“validly redefining your identity” which can be used for “a possible escape from the social identification”

(Arendt & Peeters, 2005, pp. 101–102). She reached this conclusion inspired by Karl Jaspers’ commentary Karl

Marx which argued that “German society habitually allowed culture to stand in for politics and defined the

relatively de-politicized educated bourgeois elite [Bildungsbürgertum] as the pillar of social order and the arbiter

of progress. Jaspers responded to this characterization of Germany by claiming that societies which undermine


Since then it is no longer sufficient to be citizen or the reality of the mob might walk

over you and redefine life. One must be able to advance one’s own interests and actively

construe “truth” as an active citizen. On the upside, this identity constructing activism will

validly redefine identity, thus allowing escape from social identification (Arendt & Peeters,

2005, p. 102). In this new context, the state can no longer content herself with providing for

the basic necessities, it must also “address the problem of culture and identity” (Delanty,

2003, p. 598), allowing people to participate in “civil society, community and/or political life

[italics removed]”, with respect for “human rights¸ intercultural competencies and

democracy” (Hoskins et al., 2006, pp. 10–15), and education is to make this possible (Council

of the European Union, 2009, p. C 119/2). Even in a fast moving society where finding

answers and taking up position as an active citizen becomes ever more difficult. In particular

since “the information that is potentially available to an agent is inexhaustible” (Ingold, 2000,

p. 174). Every day new things can be discovered, not by renewing conceptual schemata but

by fine tuning our perceptual system so that we become sensible to new kinds of information,

a process of discovery that defeats all traditional understanding of education as transmission

of information, and contextualizes data in a life-long learning process. As Ingold puts it:

More than “the source of pleasure” which the act of studying is for Richard S. Peters (1973),

life-long learning has become a necessity in a society where “truth” nor culture can validate

life.

the cultural role of the bourgeois elite are inherently unstable, and that the educated bourgeoisie has a primary

role to play in upholding the preconditions of democratic culture” (Thornhill, 2011). For this thesis it is

important to note that since activism has taken the place of the social identification of class society and the

traditional systems of meaning, people are not only asked to account for their actions as they might have

consequences on others, but perhaps even more importantly, people will be identified with their choices now that

the traditional answers are no longer valid.


Novel perceptions arise from creative acts of discovery rather than imagining. (…) In

short, learning is not a transmission of information but - in Gibson's (1979:254) words

- an “education of attention”. As such, it is inseparable from a person's life in the

world, and indeed continues for as long as he or she lives. (Ingold, 2000, p. 174)


Cognizing Causation

Causation and the Human Mind

When trying to understand causal relations, David Hume’s landmark ideas an often

cited starting point for exploration (Goodman, Ullman, & Tenenbaum, 2011; Kranjec,

Cardillo, Schmidt, Lehet, & Chatterjee, 2012; Leslie & Keeble, 1987; Morris & Peng, 1994;

Pöllinger, 2012; Salmon, 1977; Smeyers, 2008, p. 66). However, as Immanuel Kant noted in

his Critique, Hume, fell short of understanding how the mind plays an active role in

structuring the sensory data, a critique that will be dealt with later.

Hume defined a cause to be “an object followed by another” (Hume, 1748, sec. 7). A

definition which is operationalized in his “three basic criteria for causation: (a)

spatial/temporal contiguity, (b) temporal succession, and (c) constant conjunction” (Holland,

1986, p. 950). In the same section Hume introduces the impossible counterfactual

requirement that “if the first object had not been, the second never had existed” (Hume, 1748,

sec. 7). A condition which can never be tested for. Hume concludes that: “it is not empirically

verifiable that the cause produces the effect, but only that the experienced event called the

cause is invariably followed by the experienced event called the effect” (Holland, 1986, p.

950). In other words, ‘causation’ is a relation between experiences rather than one between

facts. Since then, “[t]he concept of causality has been philosophically suspect” (Salmon,

1977, p. 215).

Kant agreed with Hume that all knowledge arises from experience but asserts that he

made “the mistake to think that since all of our knowledge arises from experience, all of our

knowledge is grounded in experience” (Robinson, 2011a). As Kant (2008) realized, a literal

interpretation of Hume’s statement that all knowledge arises from experience has severe

consequences: “According to [Hume’s] conclusions (…) all (…) metaphysical science is a


mere delusion, arising from the fancied insight of reason into that which is in truth borrowed

from experience, and to which habit has given the appearance of necessity” (pp. 32-33).

Kant reasoned that the human mind must possess of a distinct mechanism of causal

perception and termed “[t]he proper problem of pure reason (…) [to be] contained in the

question: ‘How are synthetical judgements a priori possible?’” (Kant, 2008, p. 32). It is a

problem that he credited Hume for having come “nearest of all to” but “he stopped short at the

synthetical proposition of the connection of an effect with its cause (…) insisting that such

proposition a priori was impossible” (Kant, 2008, p. 32). According to Kant, we understand

the manifold of our sensory experience by means of the “principle of the original synthetic

unity of apperception”, which he considered his “‘highest’ and ‘first principle’ of human

cognition”(McBay Merritt, 2009, p. 59). It is from the subsumption of content under Kant’s

necessary and universal categories17 that experiences arise. In other words concepts and

intuitions are synthesized according to a ‘universal rule’ or ‘schema’ by means of Mother Wit

(Robinson, 2011a). The importance of this for the enlightenment will be treated in the section

“Statistics and Ethical Judgement”. For now it is sufficient to note that various researchers

still argue in favor of a distinct mechanism of causal perception (Schlottmann & Shanks,

1992) albeit sometimes only for a “minimal nativism” in which “strong but domain-general

inference and representational resources are aided by weaker, domain-specific perceptual

input analyzers” (Goodman et al., 2011, p. 111).

17 Kant organized his twelve categories into four groups of three: “These conceptions we shall, with

Aristotle, call categories, our purpose being originally identical with his, notwithstanding the great difference in

execution” (Kant, 2008, pp. 66–67). The twelve categories are: 1. Of quantity: unity, plurality, totality 2. Of

quality: reality, negation, limitation 3. Of relation: of inherence and subsistence (substantia et accidens), of

causality and dependence (cause and effect), of community (reciprocity between the agent and patient) 4. Of

modality: possibility – impossibility, existence – non-existence, nessesity – contingence (Kant, 2008, p. 67)


Explaining Events

The causal order in which we cognize the world is reflected in language. Our

everyday understanding of the world is congested with concepts like ‘results’, ‘effects’ and

‘consequences’ (Ferstl, Garnham, & Manouilidou, 2010; Pešek, 2011). And, as Michael F.

Dahlstrom (2010) recognizes, the causal narrative is more persuasive than other narrative:

To this, Dahlstrom adds his own research which shows that: “[I]nformation placed at causal

locations of a narrative result in greater acceptance of information than the same information

placed at noncausal locations within the same narrative” (p. 857). If a picture holds us captive,

it is most likely a causal picture. This causal picture is so important that it is even said that

Causal information has been found to be recalled more than noncausal information

within the same narrative and also receive higher ratings of importance to the narrative

(Bower & Morrow, 1990; Kintsch, 1998; Trabasso & Sperry, 1985), the causal

structure of the narrative has been found to influence how spatial relations between

narrative objects are processed (Sundermeier, van den Broek, & Zwaan, 2005),

inferences that provide causal explanations are generated more often than those used

to predict future events or track spatial locations (Graesser et al., 2002; Graesser,

Singer, & Trabasso, 1994; Kintsch, 1998), and sentences followed by a causal

antecedent are retained more often than other types of sentences (Fletcher & Bloom,

1988; Fletcher, Hummel, & Marsolek, 1990; Kintsch, 1998). In addition, because

causality has been found to also influence other discourse constructs, it is said to serve

as a powerful predictor of comprehension (van den Broek, Lorch, & Thurlow, 1996).

(Dahlstrom, 2010, pp. 859–860)


nothing happens without a cause18 and for many, “to explain an event is to identify its

antecedents” (Smeyers, 2008, p. 80). A maxim that holds not only for scientific research, but

for human development in general.

Already at a young age, everybody begins to form a causal picture of the world. This

becomes obvious to all parents when the toddler asks both the ontological question “What is

there?” and the metaphysical “Why?” However, asking the question is one thing, apart

perhaps from the very simple cases, the underlying models are far from obvious and not easily

understood at a young age. Jean Piaget noticed that young children will come up with

animistic explanations of events, such as for example the wind. Richard Verbist (1947), noted

that the kid might come up with a final explanation in which it saw itself as the reason of

something happening – thus answering the question “Why?” with a “Wherefore?” – but this is

probably not a sign that the ability to think in causal terms does not exist, but that it does not

have the knowledge a more complex answer requires. “As the experiences of the child

become richer, new elements will influence the explanations until the correct explanation will

be given” (pp. 57-59).

Eventually, as Paul Smeyers (2008) remarks, for all questions alike: “What is longed

for is something similar to the law-like explanation and ‘prediction’ of the natural sciences”

(p. 80). It is however a particularity of contemporary language that the main distinction seems

not to be between the empiricists and rationalists. Today, an explanation will only be deemed

rational if there is some general consensus about the validity of the argument, often this

implies that empirical evidence is needed to support the claim that one does not merely put a

particularistic perspective to words. This is exemplified in the fact that rational choice has

become a term of art (Arendt & Peeters, 2005, l. 5) and has taken an important place in

18 Except perhaps the universe itself, as Stephen Hawking notes: “it makes no sense to talk about time

before the universe began, it would be like asking for a point south of the South Pole” (S. Hawking, 2012).


education. To name but two of the most famous examples, first, John Dewey19 wanted to

foster scientific attitudes trough education. For him this was not so much important because

he wanted to develop engineers, chemists or educational scientists. He considered the

scientific attitude and rational thinking to be the precondition for a democratic

communication. According to Dewey, only the rational thinking person can make sense of the

everyday experiences and put them to words, thus allowing for joint sharing and

communicating experiences which were understood as “the common ground to integrate

individuals into a great community” (Grube, 2010, p. 61). This idea is challenged by two

important insights. (a) Particularly since the work of Daniel Kahneman, it is now widely

accepted that more than rational thinking is at play in human behavior: “[E]motion now looms

much larger in our understanding of intuitive judgments and choices than it did in the past”

(Kahneman, 2011, p. 12). (b) And then there is the problem that Nassim N. Taleb refers to as

Platonicity: social signifiers are never fully referential, yet, we have the “tendency to mistake

the map for the territority” (Taleb, 2007, p. xxv).20 The problem with this, Taleb continues, is

that one never knows beforehand where the model is wrong and mistakes made here can have

severe consequences.

Second, Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral development understood the vertex of

maturity to be the Kantian, rational thinking human being (Brugman, 2004, pp. 43–51), an

idea that was criticized by, amongst others, Gilligan and Martin Luther King, both with a

variation on the same argument. Both excoriated the binary opposition created by terming the

rational thinker as the vertex of maturity, and its opposite, the irrational, maladjusted human

being. This is not to be interpreted that they argued that people should not become a rational

19 Dewey’s ”antiformalism and in its emphasis on securing practical solutions to current problems” was

considered “highly topical, at least in legal circles” by his contemporaries (Schlegel, 1995, p. 24)

20 A remark that is also applicable to Karl Poppers verisimilism.


thinker in the Kantian sense, being able to recognize themselves as the source of their own

thoughts (Mcbay Merritt, 2011; McBay Merritt, 2009, p. 233). They objected the association

of “rational thinking” with the imperative to accept the majority culture.

Gilligan asked to account for women’s moral development and judgment which “is

more contextual, more immersed in the details of relationships and narratives.” She

complemented the Kantian “ethics of justice and rights”, with the more feminine “ethics of

care and responsibility” (Benhabib, 1985, p. 403). Martin Luther King from his side

recognized that we all want to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities, but pointed out

that the word maladjusted, a word which was, “probably used more than any other word in

psychology,” was being used in a psychologized racist discourse:

Calling out to make the American Dream reality, he even argued in favor of the establishment

of the International Association for the Advancement of Creative Maladjustment (King, 1963,

p. 18).

By referencing to the tension between individual and society, the freedom/equality

paradox, Gilligan and King enter the social causation debate.

21 Extract from a speech he gave at Western Michigan University on December 18, 1963. As the

transcript from the archives at WMU (King, 1963) is not verbatim this quote is a transcript from the video as

made available on youtube.

there are some things in our society and some things in our world of which I am proud

to be maladjusted (…) I never intend to adjust myself to racial segregation and

discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to religious bigotry. I never intend to

adjust myself to economic conditions that will take necessities from the many to give

luxuries to the few (…). (Buddha7575, 2007) 21


Social Causation

In the search for causes, a distinction can be made between physical (or impersonal)

causality and social (or personal) causality (Mao, Ge, & Li, 2011; Morris & Peng, 1994). In

the former, one looks for explanations of a mechanical kind and “’[s]trict causality’ (…) [id

est] no output before the input” (Toll, 1956, p. 1760) is assumed. In the latter case, it is even

more difficult to discover genuine causation. Not in the least because argued that the

paradigm of causality can only be used at great pains – by incorporating ‘reasons’ – for

explaining human behavior or it remains so piecemeal that it loses its relevance in face of all

the other factors (Smeyers, 2008, p. 80). It is striking that cognitive understanding does not

make a strict distinction between the two. Presented with animated displays of moving shapes,

people will attribute the behavior of these shapes to “internal personal dispositions, such as

intentions, motives and traits” (Morris & Peng, 1994, pp. 949–951).22

In trying to explain human behavior, theorists made a distinction between individual

and environmental causes.

This classification has been crucial for a great deal of social research such as Deci & Ryan

(1985), Miller & Ross (1975), Morris & Peng (1994), and Ryan & Connel (1989).

22 As will be shown in the section Statistical “Explanations”, this becomes problematic when

understanding of probabilistic causation in the exact sciences moves from the frequentist to the dispositionist

position.

Heider (1958) introduced the concept of PLOC (Perceived Locus Of Causality)

primarily in reference to interpersonal perception (…) DeCharms (1968) (…) [made]

a further distinction within personal causation or intentional behavior between an

internal PLOC in which the actor is seen as the ‘origin’ of his or her behavior, and

external PLOC in which the actor is seen as a ‘pawn’ to heteronomous forces. (Ryan

& Connell, 1989, p. 749)


Of particular interest is that the data seems to suggest that the measure by which

behavior is attributed to internal (e.g. ability and effort) or external causes (e.g. luck and

situational factors) is strongly influenced by culture and learning history (Schlottmann &

Shanks, 1992), (Morris & Peng, 1994; Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001).

Morris and Peng (1994), for example, presented Chinese and American participants

with the same article about a murder. The American participants recalled more individual

characteristics and emphasized the individual responsibility. The Chinese participants recalled

more environmental elements and emphasized the environment in explaining the behavior.

They conclude that in Western-Culture there exists a strong tendency to (over)emphasize

internal dispositions, where in Chinese culture situational elements are (over)emphasized.

This difference might correspond to a genuine difference in behavior.

It is important to note that this difference is due to a different cognitive interpretation of the

environment, as their study rules out noncognitive interpretation (Morris & Peng, 1994, p.

965). Moreover, Morris and Peng (1994), noted that this difference disappears when people of

Chinese origin are brought up in America, which suggests a strong environmental and

educational influence.

Especially since people are not such a good judge on their own account when it comes

to estimating the relation of their behavior to the consequences, estimating “a closer

covariation between behavior and outcomes in case of increased success than in the case of

One factor might be the culture of the actor: It is most likely that Chinese behavior is

actually caused by situational factors more than American behavior and vice versa. If

so, then Chinese attributors will be relatively more accurate about Chinese actors than

will be American actors and vice versa. Another factor might be the type of behavior.

Situation-driven behaviors may fall in the blind spot of American attributors. (Morris

& Peng, 1994, p. 968)


constant failure,” moreover, people misunderstand the role of chance, misconstruing “the

meaning of contingency” (Miller & Ross, 1975, p. 213).

As it is shown that the measure to which people expect their action to produce success

will strongly influence their behavior (Miller & Ross, 1975; Pape, 2003), causal narrative and

causal education has a stronger behavioral influence than other language.


Statistics and Causation

Statistical “Explanations”

There are various statistical approaches of testing for causation. Van Hamme and

Wasserman (1994) distinguish between Delta P, Bayes Theorem, Regression, and ANOVA

(p. 130), all relying on inferences about “counterfactuals, transitivity, inference in

probabilistic causation, and manipulating and controlling variables,” (Morrison, 2012) which,

as Keith Morrison shows, are all problematic. Consider for example a child who misbehaves

in school and gets punished. As a result, the child might work harder and get better grades,

but it is hard to argue that her better grades are caused by her misbehavior. “In transitivity

there is infinite regress: everything causes everything in one or more causal chains with no

clear identification where to draw the boundary line of relevance” (Morrison, 2012, p. 19). It

is up to the researcher to draw the line and determine the line, how far back to go in time and

how far out from and into a situation. As Clive W. J. Granger (1980) observed, “the way

structure is imposed will be important in definitions of causality,” but there is “no generally

accepted procedure for testing for causality, partially because of a lack of a definition of this

concept that is universally liked. It is clearly a topic in which individual taste predominates”

(Granger, 1980, pp. 329–330). Which makes Arendt’s understanding that it is impossible to

ascertain “facts without interpretation, since they must first be picked out of a chaos of sheer

happenings (and the principles of choice are surely not factual data)” (Arendt, 2006, p. 234).

A solution, as endorsed by Carl Hempel could be “the requirement of total evidence,

according to which (…) arguments must be based upon all the available evidence”, adding

that “evidence can be omitted when it is irrelevant and its omission does not affect the level of

support” (Fetzer, 2013, sec. 6). Moreover, this, according to Pearl, would correspond to how

we naturally make inferences about cause and effect relations, getting its form trough implicit


use of Bayesian networks (Neuberg, 2003, p. 684) which understand a causal model as a triple

M=<U,V,F> where:

- “U” is a set of mutually independent background variables (or exogenous variables)which

are determined by factors outside the model, it are unobserved, possibly disturbing

influences;

- “V” is a set of observed variables {V1, V2, …,Vn}, (or endogenous variables) which are

determined by other variables in the model;

- “F” is a set of deterministic factors {F1, F2, …, Fn} assigning values to each endogenous

variable V1 by taking as argument only the values of the parent variables PA1 and possible

disturbances U1 such that the value of each variable is given by “vi = f(pai, ui)” (Pöllinger,

2012).

It has been argued that, particularly in Bayesian network models, “the description of the

criteria for class membership is equated to causal knowledge” (Dubois & Prade, 2000, p.

237).23

Regardless of the statistical method used however, the success of the selection and

thus the resulting model is often measured by the proportion of variance explained, which

“enables lawlike sentences of probabilistic form to be subjected to empirical test, on the basis

of relative frequencies, especially by attempting to refute them” (Fetzer, 2013, sec. 6.3).

Perhaps more importantly, the proportion of variance explained, often indicated by

Pearson’s correlation coefficient R2, provides the statistician with a powerful communication

tool, as is the case in the OECD’s PISA studies. Take for example “Figure 1,” which takes

23 Although the different categories can be suggested by e.g. thematic analysis which searches for, and

labels themes which are prevalent in the data (Howitt, 2011, p. 186), it is through statistical research that the

causal nexus in which the categories are placed are reified.


data from PISA 2009 comparing the “variation in reading performance explained by schools’

socioeconomic background” (Center on International Education Benchmarking, 2012).

Yet, as convincing as the tool might be, it obscures more than it illuminates. Although the title

suggests that the variation can be “explained” by the school’s socioeconomic background, it is

not clear what to do with such a statement. As Salmon has observed:

By suggesting “explanation”, one moves beyond the frequentist position – which “cannot

account for singular events that may not even have happened once so far” (Pöllinger, 2012) –

to the dispositionist position which introduces a new ontology and puts forward the concept of

propensity as a dispositional property (Popper, 1959) thus at the same time rendering the

frequency debate secondary and assaulting the traditional ontological and metaphysical claims

which are part of every world view. This assault implies a purist approach to statistic

knowledge, claiming that the implied causal mechanism corresponds to real life situation.

23,2

75,7

55,1

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

Finland USA OECD Average

Figure 1: PISA 2009: Variation in Reading Performance Explained by Schools’ Socioeconomic Background

[T]he distinction between description and prediction, on the one hand, and

explanation, on the other, is that the former can proceed in an extensional language

framework, while the latter demands an intentional language framework. It remains to

be seen whether the intentional logic can be satisfactorily formulated. (Fetzer, 2013,

sec. 6.3)


Although this purist approach to research has been abandoned by many researchers24, data

suggest that this corresponds to intuitive understanding of statistics.25

Contextualizing Statistics

As Popper, Hempel, Salmon argued, the move from the frequentist to the

dispositionist position might have its merits in the exact sciences. It can indeed be said that

even if an individual uranium atom did not decay in the past half-live time, it still has the

disposition to do so, but projecting that logic onto the social sciences leads to serious errors.

Not only are social classes never homogenous, populations as well as their constituent

individuals change over time. This is something that be influenced dramatically by even

minimal information that is kept out of the model, as demonstrated in figure 2, the graph that

inspired Lorentz to develop his chaos theory.

Figure 2: Lorentz experiment: the difference between the start of these curves is only .000127. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, p. 141) as quoted by (Sethi, 2012).

24 Compare Burke Johnson and Onwuegbuzie (2004) who argue that both quantitative and qualitative

purist positions are being abandoned and call for a pragmatic approach of mixed methods research.

25 See the section on “Social Causation”.


It shows that, even if 99.9873 % of the variation is explained, as in Lorentz’

experiment, it is impossible to make long term projections, thus rendering Hayek’s remark

that the statistic does not inform action under changed conditions paramount.

Moreover, when information is brought in that is external to the model by comparing

between different populations, a different light is shed on the statistic. Take for example the

correlation between socioeconomic background and reading performance as mentioned

earlier. Despite the strong correlation found in the USA, it is impossible to make law-like

statements as one would expect from the exact sciences. When interpreting the results of his

meta-analytic review of socio-economic status and academic achievement in the USA, Sirin

(2005) noted that “[i]n the United States, family SES is the most important determinant of

school financing (…) [however] in most cases this outside support fails to create financial

equity between school districts” (p. 445). Thus, when interpreting the results, it is shown that

rather than a disposition of the school, a failing government is the cause of the inequality.

This explanation is strikingly different from the original research question which seemed to be

interested only in the correlation between SES and academic achievement. It shows that

although the statistic can be very informative in pointing out inequality, other data, in this

case information about government funding policy, is invaluable for its interpretation.

Moreover, in the same research it was shown that ethnic background is a mediating

factor. “Socioeconomic status was a stronger predictor of academic achievement for White

students than for minority students” (Sirin, 2005, p. 441). It seems that statistical research

limited to one cultural population is to be considered ethnography rather than the search for

genuine causation and truth.


Statistics, Truth, and Ethics

Statistical Seduction

Not only do we have to justify not acting according to the statistics, we also have to

justify acting according to the statistics since it does not say anything about the particular nor

about the future environment in which children will have to live and work. As such, the

statistic becomes a catch 22. Nevertheless, parents and educational practitioners alike are

being confronted with statistical analysis of their practices and, consequently, even with (the

threat of) government intervention if their situation is considered at risk. As such, it becomes

clear that statistical claims are not merely descriptive statements but do indeed carry with

them a performative utterance. By demonstrating the likeliness of an outcome for any specific

intervention and positing that to alternative interventions, the statistic forces the educator to

justify any choice of intervention (or non-intervention) other than the one which is most likely

to deliver the desired result. It is therefore important to understand the particularities of the

statistic and how it relates to the real world situation in which the educator acts.

This is not an easy task as statistics do grant a new perspective on the world but also

leave a great deal open for exploration. Moreover, this tension between the opening up and

the covering up lies at the very nature of statistics. Stating that truth, whether it be temporary

and local or eternal and universal, can come from statistical research not only implies the truth

of the statistic, but perhaps more importantly, the truth of the method. It further implies that

mathematics, as a means to understand the world is not limited as language is. This however

ignores the fact that it is language that gives meaning to the mathematical symbols:

“Statistical understanding is both a linguistic and a conceptual matter (see Vergnaud, 1998,

explanations for mathematics)” (Stadler-Altmann & Keiner, 2010, p. 131). The statistic is

preceded by language which will frame the debate, not unlike the way the poet is dependent

on language – to the extent that she can only reach those that speak the same language – so is


the statistician. As the statistic is communicated, the audience must have an understanding of

the mathematical concepts and the statistician must translate the statistics to images and

language. But the richness of language does not hold for numbers which are untranslatable.

Although to some this is where the beauty of statistics lies, as it confirms “the view that

numbers achieve an ideal clarity of meaning,” for others this demonstrates that “numbers fall

short of the very qualities of meaning upon which our thought and being and our accounting

for ourselves, are sustained….(Standish, 2010, p. 214)” (Munday, 2010, pp. 182–183). As

Erwin Schrödinger remarks:

Hannah Arendt, remarks that this situation “is of great political relevance. Wherever the

relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what

makes man a political being” (Arendt, 1958, p. 3).

In search for words, the statistic itself is “unterwegs zur Sprache” (Heidegger, 1950, p.

24) and in doing so it creates its own ‘truth’ which must be understood as a linguistic

performance rather than the discovery of a triangular correspondence between the statistic, the

linguistic mark and reality (Munday, 2010, p. 180). Even though the “truths” become

meaningless, Ulrike Stadler-altmann and Edwin Keiner (2010) note that “[t]here are people

who reify empirical concepts viewing them as real objects that exist outside the human brain”

(p. 134). This process-based perception reifies the statistic to a conceptual whole, “a static

state where ‘the concept becomes semantically unified by this abstract and purely imaginary

construct’ (Sfard, 1991, p. 20)” (Stadler-Altmann & Keiner, 2010, pp. 134–135). In other

The “truths” of the modern scientific world view (…) will no longer lend themselves

to normal expression in speech and thought. The moment these “truths” are spoken of

conceptually and coherently, the resulting statements will be “not perhaps as

meaningless as a ‘triangular circle,’ but much more so than a ‘winged lion’”. (Arendt,

1958, p. 3)


words: the interpretant will determine how the sign applies to the object (Van Bendegem,

François, & Coessens, 2010, p. 152). In this process, the interpretant will form an opinion

about the sign and the object thus introducing the personal factor when putting to words how

the statistic appears and relates to her. It is in this translation that taste becomes a humanizing

element giving meaning to the data. “Taste is the political capacity that truly humanizes the

beautiful and creates a culture (…) for the true humanist neither the verities of the scientist

nor the truth of the philosopher nor the beauty of the artist can be absolutes” (Arendt, 2006,

pp. 221–222). Statistics has the nature to close the deliberative space by suggesting Truth and

perhaps even necessity as it invokes the law like understanding of the exact sciences. It is

precisely in this seductive promise to uncover the truth that lies the coercive force of statistics.

It proves difficult to turn away from the lightening truth, yet it is the task at hand. “Cicero

says: In what concerns my association with men and things, I refuse to be coerced even by

truth, even by beauty. (…) As humanists, we can rise above these conflicts between the

statesman and the artist as we can rise in freedom above the specialties which we all must

learn and pursue” (Arendt, 2006, p. 222). Heidegger considered poetry to be the essence of

art, not because it affirms existing truths, but for its capacity to open the deliberative space,

since “the essence of art lies not in the transformation of existing forms, not in the

representation of what already was, but in the design through which something new appears

as a Truth: an open space is being established” (Heidegger, 1950, p. 23). For statistics

however, not the open space but the “concealing refusal” seems to be defining the essence of

its nature as it fails to live up to its promise and fails to even show what is, let alone what

might be.


Statistics and Ethical Judgment

Figure 1, based on Chen et al. (2011), Imai et al. (2011), Mao et al. (2011), and Van

Hamme & Wasserman (1994), shows the relation between causal understanding of the world,

(ethical) judgments, and practical decisions.

It shows how prior knowledge and real world or simulated event data come together

to make causal inferences. The double-lined nodes illustrate the relationship between Max

Born’s four levels of causality reasoning and how they contribute to our general causal

DATA REPOSITORY

Historical event records and visualisations

Global / external event records and visualizations

Known concepts and models

DATA FUSION Real world or simulated event data

INFERENCES

Causal / Dialogues

Logical causation

Causal inference

Probabilistic causation

Fundamental understanding

Quantitative laws

Associative learning

Statistical correlation

ABDUCTION / SUBSUMPTION

(Theory building / adaptation) Hypothesis

support

JUDGMENTS ∙ Responsibility (Credit/Blame)

∙ Framing

DECISION SUPPORT

Figure 3: Flow chart for causality discovery to provide decision support.


understanding.26 (a) Probabilistic causation is based on statistical correlation and is to be

understood as a form of preliminary reasoning which, under “overwhelming evidence” is

abstracted to (b) logical causation. (c) Quantitative laws of nature describe the functional

relationship between measurable attributes of various events and correspond to a scientific

understanding of nature. According to Born, the (d) fundamental understanding of causation

in physics is offered by quantum mechanics but, as Chen et al. (2011) remark: “[N]ew

scientific discoveries will continually redefine what is fundamental.

Together with associative learning (as for example Van Hamme & Wasserman

(1994)) and evidence from statistical correlation new theories are subsumed. It is striking,

and by no means intentional, how this corresponds to Immanuel Kant’s apperception

principle on the one hand and to the way he understood the relation between pure, ethical, and

practical reason on the other.

According to Kant’s principle of the “synthetical unity of apperception”, which he

considers to be “the understanding itself” (Kant, 2008, p. 79), thinking is an “activity of

synthesis – indeed, as an activity involving a priory synthesis” (McBay Merritt, 2009, p. 64)

which understands the synthesis as subsumption under the necessary categories of the mind:

“The manifold in an intuition, which I call mine, is represented by means of the synthesis of

understanding as belonging to the necessary unity of self-consciousness and this takes place

by means of the category” (Kant, 2008, p. 83). Thus, and contrary to Hume, Kant understood

cognition as independent of experience. This is “why the subject can understand herself as the

source of her cognitions [a robust cognitive agency which] is broadly attributed to the

spontaneity of the mind” (McBay Merritt, 2009, p. 77). An important element of the

enlightenment epistemology.

26 Max Bourne’s four levels of causality are taken over from Chen et al. (2011, p. 84).


Moreover, figure 3 corresponds to Kant’s understanding of “judgment,” as “a middle

term between [metaphysical] understanding and [practical] reason” (Kant, 2008, p. 494), each

depending on their a priori. As visualized in figure 4, understanding has the

categories of the mind as a priori, judgment the social contract (which Kant made explicit in

his aphorisms) and practical reason has desire as a priori.

The Statistical Curriculum

Regarding the objectives of education and the curriculum through which to achieve

them, it is particular to today’s pluralistic society, and contrary for example to Locke’s days

or the environment in which Immanuel Kant called for “courage to use your own reason” and

challenge yourself by confronting your ideas to the ideas of others (Kant, 1784, p. 55),27 that a

27 Kant says that not challenging others’ truth claims testifies of “[l]aziness and cowardice”. In order to

avoid subjective answers which might be nothing more than an expression of habit or inclination, one must also

make her own answers ‘public’ by confronting them with others “rather than succumbing to unreflective prejudice

of various kinds. This idea is reformulated in terms of an opposition between mechanism and spontaneity: when we

take things to be a certain way based on prejudice—the sources of which are named as imitation, custom, and

inclination (JL 9:76)” (McBay Merritt, 2009, pp. 61–62). Kant called both for a voluntary move from the individual

and for a political environment which would allow everyone to take up the position of the ‘scholar’ and question

its surroundings without fear of persecution.

A priori

Figure 4: Relation between judgment, understanding, reason, and their respective a priori.

Understanding

Reason

Judgment

Categories of the Mind

Social

Contract

Desire


clash of ideas is rendered unavoidable. Today, the public realm with its diverse truth claims,

of which the statistical research is an element, is brought into the households and schools via

the diverse media which have the particularity of presenting all propositions and theories

equably thus de facto suggesting to the media consumer or student researching on the internet

that all claims are mere opinion and rendering selection a seemingly neutral move depending

merely on personal preference corresponding to the choice between iced tea or lemonade.

Thus it is left up to the media consumer to judge the validity of the different perspectives,

including how and why they are constructed and how they influence beliefs and behaviors in

society.28

One can no longer avoid exposure to different ideas rendering the alternative to the

Kantian approach, which can be summarized in the three maxims ‘always thinking for

oneself’, ‘to think in the position of everyone else’ and ‘to think always consistently, or in

agreement, with oneself’ (Mcbay Merritt, 2011), is no longer, as Kant said, ‘lazy and

cowardly’ but rather an active rejection of the world. Contrary to Kant’s enlightenment

understanding however, Truth with a capital ‘T’ is an unattainable mirage. It is only by

recognizing how judgments and practical reason relate to a causal understanding of the world,

and how that informs decisions that we can cut loose from the mechanical operation of

prejudice or statistical coercion, along the way reasserting mastery of our own minds. In a

world where doxa is to be reinstated Hannah Arendt’s comments on Kant’s critique of

aesthetical judgment are valuable guidelines. She, does not just allow room for every idea, but

pragmatically states that those ideas which inspire to action that makes the world a worse

place should be forbidden. As follows from figure 3 and figure 4, a selecting between ideas

28 Elements of media literacy which are also recognized as essential by for example the ‘Partnership for

the 21st Century’, a coalition made up of education nonprofits, foundations, and businesses (P21, n.d.)(P21,

2011)


should be informed by prior knowledge, (causal) understanding of the world, statistical

correlations, the social contract, and of course, desire. People should be empowered to make

these decisions and statistical literacy is recognized as a “key ability of citizens in

information-laden societies” (Van Bendegem et al., 2010, p. 157). Not only because people

should be able to make informed decisions. As Naomi Hodgson (2010) remarks, in today’s

concept of democratic citizenship, “we are asked to calculate and account for ourselves in

terms of particular renderings of [definitions of citizenship or happiness]” (p. 126) in various

polls. This requires that the citizen has the ability to understand the questions of the pollsters

and is able to relate itself to the question quantitatively.

Teachers should therefore encourage statistical and causal dialogue, recognizing that

“it is inevitable that topics and skills that are normally not stressed in school need to be

addressed (Gal, 2004, p. 73)” (Van Bendegem et al., 2010, p. 156). Van Bendegem, François

and Coessens (2010) distinguish between to elements of statistical literacy. On the one hand

there are knowledge elements, such as literacy skills, statistical knowledge, mathematical

knowledge, context knowledge and critical questions. On the other hand they focus on

dispositional elements such as beliefs and attitudes, and critical stance, which interrelate with

the knowledge elements (p. 157). A concrete approach could include some of the following

recommendations: (a) evoke a priori knowledge, (b) clarify implicit information about

intermediary events in the causal network, (c) account for multiple causality (Montanero &

Lucero, 2009, p. 116), and as Chen et al. (2011) add, (d) there must be a focus on

visualization literacy (for example time-series plots, pie charts, parallel coordinates and tree

maps) (p. 87).


Conclusion

In statistical research, predictive force and truth come together in the search for

causation, thus moving the debate from the ontological question of “What is there?” to the

metaphysical level “How did it come to be this way?”29 But, as is demonstrated in this

master’s thesis, this is not at all a small step. Not only so for methodical reasons, but also

because through the creation of a causal nexus the statistic moves from correlation to

narrative. Richard Smith (2010) observes that: “To ask questions about causality is to search

for [a] bubble [for the Spirit Level]” (p. 197). In the search for causes, a particular view of

reality is created, one which sometimes challenges traditional explanations. The statistic does

not allow for alternative realities. It pertains to merely show what is and sometimes seems to

casually suggest in its “explanations” that a certain population has a disposition of some sort.

Both these qualities of statistics are relevant for educational sciences as the statistic not only

translates in the necessary understanding of children in terms of categories but also in an

assault on the traditional explanatory models existing in society, which might have a different

understanding of children in particular and ontology in general.

Every narrative which includes constructs such as “truth”, “cause”, and “explanation”

should be considered suspect. Not only is it difficult, if not impossible to ascertain the true

cause of social phenomena, the suggestion that the categories concerned have certain

dispositions, comes nothing short of stigmatization. The research also shows that the dialogue

does not end after the suggestion of causation. Ethical and practical judgments must inform

decisions, allowing for doxa and plurality. As the lightening truth can no longer be our

guiding beacon, the pragmatic conception of Lakatos and Laudan who judge scientific

29 Here I deviate from the traditional definition of ‘metaphysics’ which distinguishes in itself between

ontological questions and epistemological questions (Robinson, 2011b), and make use of the more popular

understanding of “metaphysics” as the search for the origin of things.


progress “in terms of the empirical productivity of the general system” (Overton, 1983, p.

197) becomes an emancipatory idea. Together with Hannah Arendt’s demarcation criteria,

allowing to distinguish between acceptable and unacceptable opinion, it provides a powerful

toolbox. One that can inform researcher, student, and every other citizen alike in their

decisions, and in their care for the world.


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