Doubt and Educational Possibility

Nicholas C. Burbules

Department of Educational Policy Studies

University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign

For several years now, I have been exploring the possible educational significance of such themes as doubt, tragedy, aporia, and other cheerful subjects. For me, considering these interrelated themes has provided a way to respond to the intellectual and moral challenges of various postmodern literatures, some of which pose, I believe, a profound critique of the traditional grounds on which we have tried to justify the educational endeavor. Yet in each of the essays in which I have addressed these critiques, I have tried to suggest that these apparently grim topics (doubt, tragedy, aporia) do provide us with a way of thinking constructively, hopefully, about what education can be. In this essay I wish to focus on the question of doubt, and to suggest that it provides a way of thinking within a postmodern sensibility about education.

For reasons I have spelled out elsewhere, I am suspicious about the category of "postmodernism," and I think it is a term frequently misused by friend and critic alike. First, and most important, the term is used to refer to such an enormous diversity of authors and philosophical points of view — many of whom explicitly reject the label of being "postmodern" or "post" anything — that I cannot imagine an overarching set of principles or themes uniting them all (indeed, such an endeavor itself seems out of step with the postmodern sensibility). Second, phrases such as "postmodern sensibility," or "postmodernity," or "the postmodern mood," — as opposed to "postmodernism" — usefully suggest that, to the extent that anything can be said that comprises this menagerie of perspectives, it will have more to do with a broad orientation, attitude, and set of issues than with any common theoretical tenets. And, third, the very relation of postmodernity to modernity is often misunderstood. Postmodernism cannot be a refutation or surpassing of modernity: for one thing, because it is self-consciously a product of modernity, and for another, because the idea of "refutation" or "progress" that such a characterization assumes cannot be sustained on postmodern grounds. Probably the clearest authority on this point is Jean-François Lyotard: "What then is the postmodern?...It is undoubtedly part of the modern. Everything that is received must be suspected." As I will discuss in more detail below, this ambiguous and ambivalent relation to the modern is as close to a "core" idea as one can find within the postmodern sensibility — yet it is one that many celebrators of postmodernism, especially those who engage these ideas at second-hand, seem to miss. Their sense of superiority or impatience toward "outmoded" ways of thinking, their reassured sense of belonging to the latest intellectual/political vanguard, the ease with which they offer pronouncements to others about what education can and cannot, must and must not, be, all seem decidedly out of step with the reflexively self-critical stance — the difficult and disturbing attempt to question the firmness of the ground under one’s feet — that typifies the most profound postmodern reflections. Finally, and most directly to my purposes here, I think that there are serious reasons to think that a "postmodern theory of education" is a multiply oxymoronic phrase: that there is no single position called "postmodernism," that whatever it is, it does not offer comprehensive "theories," and that taking its various literatures seriously one can only question the activities of "education" we take for granted, and doubt whether it is possible to engage in such activities with a clear, easy, conscience.

What, if anything, can be said generally about the range of positions often characterized as "postmodern"? I have elsewhere pointed out the significance of the term "incredulity" in Lyotard’s oft-quoted definition, "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodernism as incredulity toward metanarratives." Incredulity is not a refutation, a rejection, a surpassing, but an inability to believe. Postmodernism is a manifestation of modernity at doubt with itself. Since Bacon and Descartes, certainly since the Enlightenment, the dominant line of thought in the West has been concerned with the discovery of procedures for seeking true knowledge, for resolving ethical dilemmas, and for adjudicating the political affairs of society. The range of solutions that have been proposed within each of these three areas — from empiricism to rationalism; from utilitarianism to ethical reasoning; from liberalism to communism, to cite just a few — cover an enormous sweep of possibilities, and the differences and the disputes among them are far from trivial. Yet they share the aspiration that a method, a set of rules and procedures, a style of rational thinking, a cluster of principles, can be established that will become the regulatory standards and the unifying norms around which a community of people can come together, solve their problems, and manage their affairs. The contribution of postmodern critiques of these efforts has been to show, not only that they have not succeeded (as any human endeavor might fall short of its ideals), but that they have consequences that are destructive and counterproductive of their own ends. The attempted defense put forward by many of these approaches, that despite their failures they can be "self-corrective" over time, is seen from this perspective as simply another mechanism of legitimation: that the solution to a medicine that does not work (that cannot "work") is to take more of it.

Hence the mistrust, suspicion, incredulity that postmodernism holds toward these "metanarratives" is against the fundamental idea that there are or can be such regulatory standards and unifying norms, standing outside the narratives and practices through which people conduct their affairs, constitute their identities, and construct their sense of reality. Yet it is crucially important to see that the most thoughtful and reflective postmodern writers are quite aware that they are themselves also situated within these modernist traditions: that what one suspects or doubts are not those foolish ideas to which only anachronists or reactionaries subscribe, but assumptions that underlie the very effort of critique itself. The endeavors to reflect on history, to engage the ideas of others, to offer arguments and contrasting points of view, to seek to promote the value of human freedom and diversity, to write, to quote, to teach — all presuppose traditions of epistemology, ethics, and political thought that have given rise to those particular practices; and to engage in such practices is to endorse at some level a kind of nostalgia for the possibilities that those practices originally aspired to. Yet it is also to question these practices, to seek new ways to enact them, and to see in them not self-correcting solutions to our problems, but sources of problems themselves. Most typically, postmodernism means using these very practices to reveal their own limits, to turn them against them/our selves (for Jacques Derrida, for example, this sometimes takes the form of erasure: of crossing out the words he uses to express certain ideas, but in also allowing them to remain, as crossed out, in the text).

It is for this reason that I find the following quotes from Gayatri Spivak and Judith Butler so compelling:

It is in light of such reflections that I see within postmodernism a profoundly ambiguous and ambivalent stance toward its own status: not as smug, but as troubled; not as the latest "new" intellectual fashion, but as a stance that suspects the proclamation of "newness" itself; not as the end of history and the surpassing, "post-ing" of all that has come before, but a manner of inhabiting a particular intellectual and political period of time, one in which the limits of possibilities and the self-undermining nature of our modern sources of hope (science, law, reason, education) have become to many of us increasingly apparent.

And it is for this reason that the favored images of postmodernism are those of two-sided, hybrid identities (cyborgs, creoles, mestizas, transvestites, monsters), containing difference within them, living in conflict, in-between, and across the margins of ostensibly incompatible and contradictory aspirations.

"Doubt" is a central theme in these reflections, and is closely affiliated with the idea of "incredulity." I would like to explore what I see as several different kinds of doubt, and to consider further the relation of doubt to education. Most educators seem to view doubt in one of two ways: as something "bad," frustrating and discouraging, something to help students get rid of; or as a state of emptiness, waiting to be filled with new learning that replaces doubt with knowledge.

But there are positive conceptions of doubt as well. One sort of doubt I would call skeptical doubt, the doubt of the scientist — it is empiricist in nature, seeking evidence and reasons, and suspending belief until the facts are all in. It is the sort of doubt that some call a "b.s. detector," the spirit of the "Show Me" state. This type of doubt seeks to ground belief on reliable, valid evidence, and expects satisfaction in that pursuit. Cartesian doubt, on the other hand, is a doubt that seeks to strip away opinion and conjecture, down to the most basic, irrefutable, certain beliefs one can hold; from this stance, even empirical belief is subject to suspicion. It is the sort of doubt that seeks indubitable premises (e.g., "I think therefore I am"). Plato had, in many respects, the same attitude: seeking absolutely certain knowledge, which could not be doubted, and rejecting everything that fell short of that standard as mere belief. Both the Platonic and Cartesian stances are doubt in the pursuit of certainty; certainty grounded in firm epistemological foundations. Deweyan doubt, as exemplified in The Quest for Certainty, is the apparent abandonment of the hope for such foundations, the acceptance of the provisional, the contextual, and the practically useful as the sole grounding one can have for any belief or value — and much of this perspective is compatible with the sense of doubt I am exploring here. Yet Dewey, too, I would argue, escapes at last into a faith in scientific method and a trust in the potential for liberal consensus that end up underwriting his pragmatist provisionalism with a Peircean confidence that there will be convergence around the Truth. All of these sorts of doubt seek to satisfy themselves, to make doubt go away.

Wittgenstein’s doubt is a more complex, troubling, interesting problem: for he was a philosopher who had a profound nostalgia for grounded belief and certainty, expressed in his early work in the Tractatus, which was so influential upon the early Logical Positivists. Yet in the second half of his strange, sad, beautiful career, he came to reject that aspiration almost totally. He still sought "complete clarity," but continually found the resources of language inadequate to provide it. He manifested, in the way in which he practiced philosophy, a relentless questioning, continually re-examining his ideas and never quite feeling that he had arrived at the "complete clarity" he sought. In his final book, On Certainty, Wittgenstein argues, against Descartes, that one cannot doubt everything; that in order to doubt certain things other beliefs must be taken for granted. The questioning and critique of certain norms or beliefs requires holding others as given; sometimes it simply enfranchises those others all the more firmly. In other words, the reflexive recognition of the limits of critique challenges the idea that anything, and everything, can be subject to critique — indeed, to look at this in a two-sided way, the very process that seems to be scrutinizing the object so rigorously must remain blind to its own limits and exclusions. It can be viewed as rejecting or questioning the dubious; but it can also be viewed as instantiating and reinforcing what is not open to doubt, its own methods and assumptions. And lest it be thought that, well, those other matters could be scrutinized in their turn: the same problem arises in that process, and the next, and the next.

I believe that in this latter, more Wittgensteinian doubt, we see some of the elements of a postmodern doubt that poses a deep challenge to the educational endeavor. From a teaching standpoint, the condition of doubt may contain educational potential. Indeed, the ultimate aim of education may not be to eliminate doubt, but to sustain inquiry and effort in the face of doubt; to find the educational potential within doubt; and, sometimes, to create doubt.

Briefly, I would like to distinguish doubt from some related, but distinct educational notions: difficulty, error, and uncertainty. Difficulty is not simply the challenge of a problem to be overcome, but sometimes the lingering difficulty of a problem never fully solved, a mystery never fully untangled. Error is not only the direct spur to learning that Karl Popper, among others, cherishes (make a mistake, then try to correct it and learn from it); it is, rather, a dimension of every learning moment. Error is not usually a simple falsehood, replaced by the truth — it is more often an unacceptable version of an idea or value, thoroughly entangled with many other ideas and values that we are not prepared to abandon altogether. Change, then, even in the face of error, is harder than philosophical accounts of learning often acknowledge. Uncertainty is not only a transient state of puzzlement, but an acceptance of the provisional and contingent in much that we believe and do. Alexander Nehemas makes a related point:

Here difficulty, error, and uncertainty come to be seen, not as flawed states to be overcome, but as ongoing conditions of the educational process itself — indeed, as educationally beneficial conditions, when they can serve as correctives to complacency or arrogance.

But I think that the issue goes deeper than this. The concerns of difficulty, error, and uncertainty — even most of the theories of doubt reviewed earlier — are usually expressed as epistemic concerns, concerns about the possibilities and limits of certain knowledge. They often arise from encounters with insufficient information or ambiguous evidence. They are moments that, if people could resolve or avoid them, they would. Here I am trying to push our views further, beyond a recognition of the imperfect state of our knowledge or the recalcitrance of facts that don’t fit our expectations or theories. Doubt, in this sense, isn’t just a recognition of a flawed reality; it is a deeper shift in attitude toward the very expectation of coherence and order, a shift away from a certain sort of knowledge orientation entirely. Yet doubt also is not just an intellectual posture, but an experience, and it is not triggered just by questions, however troubling they might be: it comes with a recognition of the limits of our questions, of the questions we don’t know how to answer, or the questions we don’t even know how to ask.

Deborah Kerdeman, in an excellent essay on Gadamer and hermeneutics, explains these ideas in terms of the way that we are sometimes pulled up short by encounters with difference, with a world that exceeds our attempts to make sense of it:

What does this approach to education look like? In this final section, I would like to sketch several dimensions of this sort of pedagogy. As you will see, they do not provide an overall "theory" or "method" of education — far from it — but more suggest an attitude or style with which we might approach thinking about educational choices. They suggest at most a way of educating, an approach, not a method.

The first educational idea is a healthy regard for dilemmas. A typical response to dilemmas is seeking a way to resolve or reconcile them; I would like to consider a few of the more common ways of attempting to do so. The simplest and least abstract is simply to allow one perspective to dominate one’s understanding, and to try to ignore the other or rationalize it away. There is no dilemma because one views the issue with one eye covered. Another is to seek some sort of "compromise" or middle ground, which assumes that the terms of the dilemma fall upon a single continuum. Yet another resolution is through a synthesis, Hegelian or otherwise, in which the apparent opposites can be viewed as aspects of a common interactive relation, their tensions reconciled in the genesis of some new form that combines elements of both. Still another approach can be called Deweyan, denying the apparent terms of the dilemma by adopting a third point of view, in terms of which the two opposing alternatives are both rejected. And a final approach: to assume an incommensurability between the alternatives, so that they do not engage one another; this approach does not dissolve or reconcile the dilemma, but elides it.

Each of these perspectives, in particular cases, can cast illumination on conceptual and practical problems. They can provide understanding, a sense of possibility, and a way out of the difficulty. Different dilemmas are susceptible of different approaches. But here I am suggesting another way of viewing certain dilemmas: not to seek a way of making them disappear, but of keeping the tension alive — a dialectic that does not move toward resolution, but that yields creativity out of the sustained movement back and forth between the two (or more) alternatives. In part this creativity arises from respecting the distinct advantages of each perspective and learning to look both ways. In part, too, it arises from the state of uneasiness that accompanies such a stance; never quite being settled into a comfortable, singular point of view. In part, finally, it arises from the essentially open-ended outlook that such an attitude makes possible — not simply in the sense that any belief should be open to new information, challenge, and modification, but in the sense of open boundaries, of unfinished business.

I do not mean to minimize the difficulty, the unsettled state of unease, that accompanies such an orientation to the world. But this discussion suggests that in certain circumstances, creating and maintaining a state of doubt can be a positive educational goal: a doubt that is not resolved, or even resolvable.

The second educational idea is the centrality of questions. Questions stand in different relations to the present status of our knowledge and understanding. Speaking generally, a question is the mediator between what we know and what we do not know; we need to know enough to know how to ask a question, but not know enough that the answer is interesting and important to us. But how does one teach in the realm where the goal of teaching is not to answer questions, but to teach how to ask good questions? Or where questions do not have answers (that is, information that makes the questions go away)? This, I think, represents a crucial insight about teaching — one that Wittgenstein himself tried to heed in his university teaching and writing, so much of which was about trying to frame the right sorts of questions. As we all know, sometimes the best answer to a question is "that’s the wrong question" — but how do we learn to detect this? Learning how to ask a good question is in one sense the central educational task, yet one that is almost never taught explicitly, and rarely taught at all. This sort of inquiry would need to examine what makes it possible to ask questions (when do you know enough to formulate the question?); the different kinds of questions; the different kinds of responses that might "satisfy" a question; the kinds of questions that can’t be answered; and the kinds of questions that can’t be asked. Yet the typical sorts of questions teachers ask are questions to which the teacher already knows the answer (and how strange this is: I sometimes ask students to imagine walking up to someone on the street and asking, "What time is it?" and when they tell you replying with, "Correct!").

Education that emphasizes asking questions, and following questions with questions, resists the finality of assertive positions. Doubt is, in this sense, not a state of emptiness, but a state of suspension within a web of questions that we do not know how to teach, or how to answer — or that cannot be answered. This is the spirit at the heart of Socratic dialogue, but without the search for certain knowledge that Plato overlaid upon Socratic practice. Socrates said that his inner voice told him when he was mistaken, not when he was correct; this suggests a critical intelligence that restlessly resists settling in to final answers or certain knowledge. It portrays a view of learning and teaching that proceed, not toward truth, but away from error — and yet also accepts that avoiding certain errors, answering specific questions, only opens up new ones.

The third educational idea is the process of reflexive critique that Spivak and Butler described earlier: of doubting that which we cannot give up entirely, of questioning the very presuppositions that provide the leverage that allow us to question anything. Take teaching, for example. Our educational practices have effects that inevitably subvert our best intentions and hopes; acknowledging this state is what I have elsewhere called the "tragic sense of teaching." Of course we try to be the best teachers we can, of course we try to do the best for learners. But I think it is intrinsic to educational practice that we cannot know all the effects of what we do, for better or for worse (or, for better and for worse); many of the effects of what we do, don’t show up until long after our connection with the learner may have ended. And, as I have stressed already, it is questionable for us to presume to make the judgment, in many cases, about whether those effects are for better or for worse — the learner may see these advantages and disadvantages quite differently than we do. And there is often even a problem in using terms like "better" and "worse" to judge these complex constellations of consequences.

The perspective on teaching described here problematizes its own methods, its own multiple effects, its own privileges and exclusions. Yet, as with the problem that doubting necessarily entails (by the same act) a reinstantiation of beliefs and values that are not doubted, such an approach to critical teaching, even self-critical teaching, always leaves something important uncriticized. Education within a set of presuppositions, which takes them as givens, is fundamentally different from education that reflects upon itself, upon such presuppositions, and makes them also the occasion for questioning. But I hasten to add that the latter, more reflective and critical, approach to education also has its limits. And ironically, it is also susceptible, maybe even more susceptible, to a certain sense of smugness or self-satisfaction; it may be even more of a trap to imagine that because one reflects upon and questions these presuppositions one is above or outside them. That is why I am emphasizing the two-sidedness of attitude that reminds us that there is no way of engaging in educational practices that is entirely above or outside such dilemmas. This recognition should make us more tentative, more uneasy, in the educational positions that we occupy. This type of doubt is a condition of teaching, not only a state brought about in learners. From this standpoint, the proclamation of good intentions, of being superior to "conventional" practices, of adopting the latest methods of "progressive," or "critical," or "liberatory" pedagogy, can be seen as simply another potential trap of complacency, another way of legitimating to others our own status, authority, credibility, privilege — made all the more seductive because we exercise these, of course, only for others’ "benefit." Scholars such as Elizabeth Ellsworth and Alison Jones have tried to write honestly about teaching as a kind of perpetually self-deconstructing practice. When critical teaching not only reflects its critical gaze inward, but acknowledges even the limits of that auto-critique, it constitutes, as in the work of Levinas, an ethical project that is necessarily unfinished: we are left with a heightened sense of modesty in the face of an existential challenge that we cannot master or solve. Instead, we endeavor to stay engaged, as teachers, in a relation of responsiveness to others, in which their responses call forth the unexpected and the unsettling, as well as the moments of educational "success."

Hence, the fourth educational idea: an emphasis on teaching as a set of practices and relations rather than a focus on outcomes. What justifies our educational efforts, if anything does, is the quality of the relation we seek to establish with our partners in the teaching-learning encounter; the good faith that we bring to this endeavor; and our willingness to adopt a style of teaching that opens up for question the presuppositions that underwrite our own authority, the aims and goals we establish for teaching and learning, the content that we prescribe, and the standards of evaluation to which we hold diverse students. This, more nonteleological view of teaching does not deny our having aims and goals as teachers; but these are problematized, and often put into suspension, as a relation with learners unfolds. This is not just the simple point that teachers must be open to surprises and the unexpected, willing to "shift gears" as the interactive process of teaching and learning takes its own course. More than this, it means that the teacher must recognize that the very dynamics that give him or her the greatest sense of accomplishment and purpose may be at odds with the dynamics and experiences that most benefit students. A recent study of inquiry-oriented classrooms suggests that as student learning increases, teachers’ own sense of effectiveness declines: they feel that they are not doing a good job of teaching (in terms of their notions of what "good teaching" entails), at the very moments when in fact students are learning more (partly though self-guided discovery). When one cedes a serious degree of autonomy to student learning, it suggests that sometimes the best teaching is simply to get out of the way; yet such a recognition is profoundly troubling to the heroic, goal-driven view of teaching that inspires many of us to believe in the value of what we have to offer.

Finally, a fifth idea, which has run across all of the aspects of teaching already discussed: doubt as a state of suspension, the feeling of being in-between. The two-sidedness of the postmodern stance, of being neither here not there, of occupying and yet also questioning one’s position, is a state of sustained tension. The in-between arises from engagements with difference, and the recognition of difference within one’s self: the frustration of unitary purposes and of unitary identities. It is a fertile state educationally where it tends to keep questions open, to raise new questions, and where it blurs the roles of teacher and learner. Again, this is not the simple point that a teacher can learn from a student’s novel insight or connection, or can learn something about teaching from helping to solve a new educational problem; it is that the teacher can learn something new about teaching itself, about being a teacher — and that what is learned might be disturbing, unsettling, and not always encouraging. On the other side of this relation, it means that learners teach themselves, and teach each other, not merely in ways that supplement the "main" teaching, the primary teaching, of the teacher, but in ways that can conflict with that, undo the teacher’s efforts, or render them irrelevant and moot (from the students’ point of view). Kris Gutierrez and her co-authors describe this process and call for teaching that occupies — that constitutes — a "third space" between teacher intentions and student interests: a space in-between, that needs to be continually renegotiated and that therefore can never rest static. Teaching "in-between," in the sense I am sketching it here, is always incomplete, often troubled and troubling, and frustrates the particular desires for "success" that partly govern our own ideas (and motivations) about teaching. It is, I would say, a profound state of doubt.

Does doubt make us "better" teachers? I think now that a safer way to put this is that it might make us braver teachers, more risk-taking, more modest in our self-conception; that we might admit our own doubt, our own difficulty, uncertainty, and error; that we might take ourselves less seriously, while taking education very seriously indeed. I leave it for you to decide if that is another way of saying "better." Does doubt help students learn? I think, again, that this is the wrong way to frame the question. Students do experience doubt; it is intrinsic to learning of any depth or value. The challenge to teachers (and to students) is to acknowledge doubt, to see it not as a failing or weakness but as an opportunity — to recognize in doubt the conditions of a possibility. It is a condition of learning to think (and act) differently, to move outside a framework of assumptions and conventions and to consider them anew. I do not see any linear, unproblematic way to achieve that sort of educational end; and yet a consequence of that sort of end is that it cannot have a particular, determinative, outcome. If we imagine that we are helping students to question their own way of looking at the world merely in order that they should come to agree with ours, we have not educated them. This is so even when we imagine that our ends are emancipatory; for it is an illusion to think that we are enabling a kind of freedom when we have already decided what that free choice should choose. Here, too, and finally, is a challenge to a pedagogy based on doubt: not only that we hold our own deeply held purposes in abeyance, but that we truly open them up for question, and truly question them ourselves. That is a vision of emancipation that may liberate not only the "oppressed," but the pedagogues themselves.