Why Teaching Isn’t Possible By Bernard Davis

Teaching’ takes place when some information (or some skill), is communicated from teacher to pupil. If there is no communication, there is no teaching. If what is to be taught is not what is communicated, the attempt at teaching is unsuccessful. An analysis of communication, then, should provide us with important insights as to what teaching is and under what conditions it is possible.

An analysis of communication should be able to answer three questions. What is communicated by a specific utterance spoken by a specific speaker and heard by a specific hearer in a specific situation? What is the criterion for the occurrence of communication? When is communication to be deemed successful?

What is communicated by a specific utterance spoken by a specific speaker and heard (correctly) by a specific hearer in a specific situation? One answer that comes immediately to mind is that it is the meaning of the utterance. This is the answer, with qualifications, that John Searle gives in Speech Acts. But, this is not generally true.

Consider this case, I am told that John is as ugly as a gnu. I know the meaning of ‘gnu’ and I use this meaning in understanding the sentence spoken. I learn that John is as ugly as an ox-like antelope inhabiting southern Africa. Or, if I am more scien- tifically minded in choosing a meaning, I learn that John is as ugly as a member of the genus Connochaetes. Perhaps I can even proceed to give conditions for membership in this genus in terms of distinctive skeletal features. Has what we would normally expect to be communicated, what we would insist be communicated if we were to judge communication to be successful, been communicated in this case? I think it is clear that it has not.

The expected communication will take place and communication will be judged successful if I know neither meaning of ‘gnu’, but know of the gnu that those used to cows or horses generally consider it ugly by virtue of misproportion. Any simile or metaphor will provide an equally good case.

The information that is intended to be conveyed by a simile or metaphor is that something has some feature which is deemed chara:.eristic of the thing it is said to be like. But that this feature is characteristic of that thing need not be part of the meaning of the term used. ‘Gnu’ is not defined as “an ugly animal.”

But, the problem is not limited to simile or metaphor. If, for example, I tell someone that there is a bull in the next pasture, communication, though not nil, may be woefully and dangerously inadequate if he learns only what my sentence means- that there is a male bovine animal in the next pasture. On the other hand, communica- tion may be adequate if he learns that there is an animal in the next pasture which can be expected to be horned, fast, and irascible, even though he never learns that it is a male of the genus Bos. Often when we tell someone that there is a bull in an adjacent pasture we expect he will know to avoid it rather than to breed it.

A further problem for regarding what is communicated by a sentence to be its meaning is discovered when we consider what is communicated by a sentence which includes the name of some entity with which the speaker or the hearer is unac- quainted. Whatever information is communicated by this sort of a sentence must be what is conveyed by some sentence in which that name is replaced by a description. Bernard Davis is an Associate Professor of Education at Saint Mary’s University, Walifax, ‘Nova Scotia.

1. By ”teaching” in this essay I mean teacher directed or designed interactions having learning by the student as the intended outcome. It is teaching in this sense which sets the context for most present problems in educational theory-curriculum planning, classroom control, evaluation of student learning, etc. There is a broader sense of “teaching” in which it is simply a synonym for occurrences resulting in learning however they occur-”Being almost trapped in that burning house taught me. . . .” I am using “teaching” in the stricter sense.

I am thankful to P. David Mitchell of Sir George William’s Univetsityfor pointing out that this footnote was necessary.

I want to thank Henry Lackner of Saint Mary’s University and the Review Board of this journal for comments leading to extensive revision. I also wish to thank Faye Hartlen for typing more drafts and revisions than I care to remember.

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But, if what is communicated by “Aristotle died an old man,” is that the teacher of Alexander died an old man, that the founder of the Lyceum died an old man, or that the ancient Greek philosopher born in Stagira died an old man; and, if what is communicated by a sentence is its meaning, then it must be analytic that Aristotle taught Alexander, founded the Lyceum, or was born in Stagira. But, it seems a synthetic truth that Aristotle taught Alexander, founded the Lyceum, or was born in Stagira. And it is clearly a synthetic truth that a man who taught Alexander founded the Lyceum or that the man who founded the Lyceum was born in Stagira. So, how can the sentence “Aristotle died an old man,” be equivalent in meaning to any sentence in which “Aristotle” is replaced by such a description? It seems that it cannot. But, in this case, whatever is communicated by a sentence containing the name of an entity u;,known to either speaker or hearer must be something other than the sentence’s meaning.

The meaning of the spoken sentence will not do as an analysis of what is communicated. Can we provide an account of what is communicated based on the reference of the parts of the utterance spoken? This seems initially hopeful. For, as Strawson puts it in Individuals:

When we say “John smokes,” the first expression indicates what particular it is that is referred to, the second expression indicates what characteristic it is that is ascribed to him?

Metaphor and simile seem to depend on the subject having some feature or charac- teristic which is possessed by the being or class of beings to which reference is made in the predicate. Can we, then, avoid the problem we found with the utterance’s meaning as an account of what is communicated, by constructing an account in terms of sameness of reference?

Upon hearing “Aristotle died an old man,” the hearer can substitute “The teacher of Alexander died an old man,” because Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander, so “Aristotle” and ”the teacher of Alexander” refer to the same person. This position does not require that “Aristotle” be analytically equivalent to any description. It also has the advantage that in cases where descriptions ascribed to an entity differ, communication about that entity is still possible. Thus, it avoids the problem that Searle (“Proper Names”3) and more recently Donnellan (“Proper Names and Identify- ing description^"^) find with the Russell-Frege view that references to entities with which speaker and hearer are unacquainted are disguised descriptions.

To allow communication to rest on reference, however, fails to account for the possibility of communicating false information by the use of mutually accepted mis- taken descriptions. Consider this case: Ann believes, falsely, that Aristotle did not teach Alexander, but, truly, that Aristotle founded the Lyceum. She says to Charles: “Aristotle died an old man.” Charles believes, with Ann, that Aristotle did not teach Alexander, so, for “Aristotle,” he substitutes, “the ancient Greek philosopher who founded the Lyceum, but did not teach Alexander,” and so arrives at, “The ancient Greek philosopher who founded the Lyceum but did not teach Alexander died an old man.” Can we say Ann communicated this false information to Charles?

Not on an account based on reference. On this account communication is only possible if there is a referent. There was no one who founded the Lyceum but did not teach Alexander. The reference is to a nonexistent and nonexistents do not have features (or have all features, depending on which version of extensional logic is accepted). But, at least a nonexistent cannot possess -. specific set of features of the sort necessary for the communication of definite information.

We could say that the reference was not to the nonexistent founder of the Lyceum who did not teach Alexander but rather to Aristotle, the actual ancient Greek philoso- pher who, it happens, both founded the Lyceum and taught Alexander. But, in this

2. P. F. Strawson, lndividuals (London, 1959). 3. John Searle, “Proper Names,” Mind 67 (1958). 4. Keith S. Donnellan, “Proper Names and Identifying Descriptions,” in Semantics of

Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harmcn (Dordrecht, Holland, 1972).

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case, we would have to say that “the ancient Greek philosopher who founded the Lyceum but did not teach Alexander died an old man,” was not communicated by Ann to Charles when she said, “Aristotle died an old man.” This is clearly false, as Ann and Charles can testify.

The case is not materially altered if we presume that Ann and Charles share a totally false description for “Aristotle.” “The Greek philosopher who thought the world was a great toad,” perhaps. Ann and Charles can still communicate despite the fact that the subject of their sentence has no referent.

The same problem is apparent in the case of simile and metaphor. An account in terms of sameness of reference will give the right interpretation of a simile or metaphor if the beliefs of speaker and hearer on which the understanding of the simile or metaphor rests are accurate ones. But, for similes or metaphors based on mutually shared false beliefs, what is communicated will be systematically misidentified. Many common beliefs are false. I am told that one of them is that about the memory of elephants-it is really quite short. Consequently, what is communicated by “He has the memory of an elephant,” if what is communicated is what is true of the referent, includes “He has a short memory.” But this is false for most North American speakers of English. To fail to refer or to speak falsely is not to fail to communicate.

What is it that does determine what is communicated? It would seem that it must be whatever information is shared by speaker and hearer, whether this information is analytic or synthetic, true or false. A thesis is communicated by an utterance if that thesis is a consequence of the utterance by the system of beliefs of the speaker, and it is a consequence of the utterance by the system of beliefs of the hearer5 If either condition fails, that thesis is not communicated by the utterance.

This position avoids the problems which we found with the analysis of communi- cation based on meaning and that based on reference. A simile or metaphor need not depend on information which is analytic or on information which is true. We can decide that “John has the memory of an elephant,” conveys to most speakers of English that John is slow to forget, despite the fact that neither is “having a long memory” part of the definition of ‘elephant’ nor do elephants have the long memories popularly attributed to them. Communication by talk of named entities with which the interlocutors are not directly acquainted does not depend on proper names having a meaning in the sense that it is analytic that certain features are attributable to them. Communication does not depend on the interlocutors’ beliefs concerning these entities being correct. Nor does it depend on these names having referents.

Whether communication takes place depends on whether there are suitable shared beliefs. Whether to say that communication takes place where these shared beliefs are minimal we can leave in the vague state in which it is found in ordinary speech. When we say that communication did not occur we usually mean that what was communicated was not up to whatever are our expectations for communication in that circumstance-that what was communicated did not include the information we consider significant. When what is communicated is manifestly inadequate, whether to say that communication did not occur or that something was communi- cated but it was not what was needed seems a matter of individual (verbal) decision. In most arguments as to whether communication has taken place, what communication is expected is tacitly agreed by the disputants, and it is of the expected communica- tion they are debating whether it occurred. Communication which is intentional will be deemed successful if what is communicated is what the speaker intended to com m u ni cate.

What consequences does this account of communication have for teaching? To

5. For any two thesesA and 8, 6 is a consequence ofA by a person’s system of beliefs if and only if from A, together with theses believed by that person, B is derivable by rules of inference which he accepts. Taking S as the set of believed propositions and R as the set of accepted rules of inference we can express this formally as follows. 6 is a consequence of A with respect to S and R if and only if there is some sequence of theses T, , Tz, . . . , T, such that T, = 6, and each of T I , T2, . . . , T, is either A, or a member of S, or can be directly inferred from some earlier members of the sequence by some rule in R.

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teach, a teacher must communicate something to his pupil. If his teaching is to be successful, what is communicated must be what was intended to be taught. What is communicated does not rest on meaning or on reference. Neither, then, can teaching. Our investigations have deprived the teacher of what he thought were his two best teaching aids-the meaning of what he says and the world to which he refers. This is not a minor loss. These “aids” both have two very helpful features not shared by systems of beliefs.

First, they are objective-there is a single standard for everyone Which is inde- pendent of personal differences. An expression has the same meaning as another or it does not. Whether it does is independent of whether or not I happen to know it. The world is also objective in this sense. Something is the case or it is not. Whether I, or anyone, knows this is irrelevant. Second, meanings and the world are publicly accessible, meanings by knowing the language, the world through perception.

That systems of belief are not objective in the sense of being independent of persons insures that what is Communicated by a particular utterance spoken by a specific speaker and heard by a specific hearer cannot be a function of the utterance alone. What is communicated is always a function of the systems of beliefs of both interlocutors. When, in ordinary circumstances, we tell someone something, we as- sume that, except for the belief corresponding to the utterance itself, our interlocutor shares the relevant portions of our own system of beliefs. If I say to you, “There is a bull in the next pasture,” I assume that our beliefs about bulls, pastures and our present location coincide. Insofar as our beliefs do coincide, communication takes place. Insofar as they do not, communication fails-the conditions for communication were not present.

If this coincidence of systems of beliefs could be assumed for communication between teacher and pupil, teaching would be simple-just tell the pupil the informa- tion. Further, what was communicated by any utterance would always be known to the teacher-the consequences of the utterance by his own system of beliefs. But if teaching is necessary it is because the pupil’s system of beliefs is significantly different from the teacher’s.

If it is necessary that the pupil be taught, it is because his system of beliefs is significantly different from that we expect it to be when he finishes being taught. And it is the latter, not the former, system of beliefs that we expect to have such coinci- dence with the teacher’s that simple telling be possible. I can tell you there is a bull in the next pasture. I don’t have to teach you this. I may have to teach a child what a bull is. If I have to teach him it is because I cannot just tell him. I could just tell the child what a bull is i f his system of beliefs coincided with mine except for not including what a bull is-if, for example, while believing the same things about bulls, he had always called them “male bovine animals.”

If teaching is to be of use in the cases for which it is needed, it must be possible in cases in which the assumption of shared systems of beliefs fails. But is this possible? For something to be taught it must be Communicated. For it to be communicated it must be a consequence of the material presented by both the teacher’s system of beliefs and the pupil’s system of beliefs. Insofar as the pupil’s and the teacher’s beliefs do not coincide, communication does not take place. But, insofar as the pupil’s and the teacher’s beliefs do coincide, teaching is unnecessary. So, insofar as teaching can occur it is unnecessary. And, insofar as teaching is necessary, it is impossible.

I could stop here, leaving this fresh tied Gordian knot for some future Alexander. But, it makes me too uncomfortabl?. In an attempt to provide some small comfort I will explore the phenomenon which I call non-normal communication, which seems to provide whatever hope there can be for a solution to the problem.

There are some cases in which we successfully communicate even though we do not share the beliefs that should be necessary for communication. If someone whom I know to believe that bulls are gentle tells me that John is as gentle as a bull, then I can take him as saying that John is gentle and he will have communicated this to me, despite the fact that I don’t believe that bulls are gentle. Similarly, I can communicate to my friend that someone is gentle by saying he is gentle as a bull. Grice’s example wherein he learns that the small daughter of a friend wrongly believes a certain

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French sentence means “Help yourself to a piece of cake,” is apropos here.6 Knowing this, he can both interpret her utterances of this sentence and use utterances of that sentence in appropriate circumstances to communicate that she should help herself to a piece of cake. How can we analyze communication in such cases?

We should note that to account for communication in these cases we had to provide a special scenario. Without the special knowledge that we wrote into our scenario, communication would not take place. If I believe bulls are gentle (charac- teristically bovine) animals, and you believe that they are irascible, and if I say to you “John is as gentle as a bull,” communication can be expected to fail utterly. The information I expect to be communicated by my sentence, that John is gentle, will not be com m u ni cated.

We might distinguish between ”normal” and “non-normal” communication. A thesis is normally communicated by a speaker to a hearer by a sentence if that thesis is a consequence of that sentence by beliefs accepted by both speaker and hearer. A thesis is non-normally communicated by a speaker to a hearer by a sentence if that thesis is not normally communicated by the sentence, but either 1) the hearer realizes that the thesis is a consequence of the sentence by the speaker’s system of beliefs and he takes this into account in interpreting the utterance, or 2) the speaker realizes that the thesis is a consequence of the sentence by the hearer’s system of beliefs, and he intentionally utters the sentence so that he will communicate the thesis to the hearer. In the case of a scenario of mutual pretense, these could be combined.

The occurrence of non-normal communication depends on special knowledge. It requires one interlocutor to know what the relevant beliefs of the other are. It requires special effort-either an effort of interpretation on the part of the hearer or an effort of intentional phrasing on the part of the speaker. Such efforts can fail. As shared beliefs become fewer, communication, if it is to occur at all, must become more thoroughly non-normal and hence more difficult and risky.

Because there can be non-normal communication, teaching is possible in the general case. But what is the likelihood that teaching will take place?

Teachers of teachers try to make teaching more likely by reminding teachers that they must begin instruction where the pupil is-a remark heard with many variations around faculties of education. But even if the teacher takes this advice to heart, there is no reason to believe it is within his power to do what he is advised to do. Here we run directly into the second problem we noted with beliefs-they are not publicly accessible.

A person’s system of beliefs constitutes an infinite set of sentences. The rules of inference which he accepts are always sufficient to generate such a set.

The content of each belief, if we can even talk of distinguishing a single belief, depends on other beliefs. If Johnny believes that ruminants have more than one stomach, then his belief that cows are ruminants includes as part of its content that cows have more than one stomach. If we discover that Johnny believes that cows are ruminants we still don’t know the content of this belief until we know whether he does or does not believe that ruminants have more than one stomach. But, if we go to determine whether Johnny believes ruminants have more than one stomach, the content of this belief will depend on what Johnny believes a stomach to be. And so on ad infinitum.

The pupil’s system of beliefs is infinite, interdependent and private. Denied privi- leged access the teacher can only make and test hypotheses as to what the pupil’s system of beliefs does or does not contain. The hypothetico-deductive method is the only reliable device we have for attaining knowledge about what is beyond the limits of our observation. But its likelihood of success over a short period of time is very low unless the range of possible hypotheses is severely limited. But in the case of an infinite interdependent system of beliefs there is no such limitation.

The teacher’s aim is not the long term one of explaining how learning takes place, but the short term one of ensuring learning in a particular case. But the hypothetico- deductive method, so well-suited to the first aim, is not well-suited to the second. This

6. H. P. Grice, “Utterer’s Meaning and Intention.” Philosophical Review 78 (1969): 162-63.

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inherent limitation of the hypothetico-deductive method when used over a short period of time is sufficient to make the likelihood of correct hypotheses quite low. In addition, those special factors which in social inquiry further reduce the likelihood of correct hypotheses are present. Within the usual teacher-pupil relationship, which involves teacher and pupil in a complex social situation, acceptable levels of objectiv- ity and validity are hardly to be expected.

The teacher can make and test hypotheses about the pupil’s beliefs and his hypotheses will be correct in some cases. In these cases this attempt to teach may succeed. But if his hypothesis is wrong, communication, and hence teaching, does not take place. Rather, what he says and what the pupil learns are different things. What the student is learning is outside the teacher’s control. It is not what is being taught, nor does the teacher know it is being learned.

We seem no better off than we were. Yet, teaching has seemed possible-else it would not have been attempted. Is there some alternative or solution we have over- looked? In fact, there is a special case of non-normal communication for which the determination is a much simpler task and failure to make such a determination has minimal consequence. It is the assumption that this special case is the general case which, I believe, is responsible for the widespread betief in the possibility of teaching.

The special case is that wherein the pupil’s system of beliefs is a subsystem of the teacher’s system of beliefs. In this case what is communicated by an utterance is always part of the content which the teacher gives the utterance. What the pupil understands is part of what the teacher means. While the teacher may take the pupil’s replies as meaning more than they do, nonetheless what they mean is part of what they are understood by the teacher to mean. Insofar as non-normal communication is necessary, the required modeling of the pupil’s system of beliefs is of minimal difficulty-just find out how much the pupil knows.

This special case, wherein communication of part of what the teacher intends to communicate is ensured, and wherein the pupil interpreting the teacher’s utterances as meaning something the teacher does not mean is ruled out, is a case especially congenial to teaching. And our traditional model of teacher-pupil communication assumes this special case. Teaching techniques are directed toward this uniquely congenial situation-providing redundancy, structuring or spiraling the curriculum, testing to determine how much has been learned. The teacher is told to express a concept in a number of different ways, a technique which assumes that the pupil’s system of beliefs contains information which allows him to understand some but not all of these ways, all of which are understood by the teacher. The teacher is told to obtain feedback in order to determine how much the pupil knows. But the very concept of knowing an amount of something presupposes a model wherein the pupil’s system of beliefs is a subset of the system it is being tested against. Should this assumption fail, the adequacy of this sort of feedback fails with it.

But we haven’t sufficient grounds for assuming the pupil’s system of beliefs is a subset of the teacher’s system of beliefs. If teachers were to teach pupils of basically their own social status in a monolithic and conservative society, we could reasonably hope this assumption to hold. We know, however, that present North American societies are not societies of this sort.

We seem to have arrived at another, and a final, dead end. We are left with a problem that is essential to teaching-it arises from the concept itself. We cannot solve the problem, and its existence ensures that teaching is not possible except in a quite restricted special case. This is an uncomfortable conclusion, but I see no way to avoid it. I see only one way in which its discomforting effects can be evaded-give up teaching. This alternative is drastic, but is not impossible. Teaching isn’t the only device available for human education, it is just one we happen to have been using rather extensively recently. Can we, then, stop attempting the impossible, and instead look seriously at some of these other alternatives?

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