Elsevier

New Ideas in Psychology

Volume 20, Issues 2–3, August–December 2002, Pages 285-307
New Ideas in Psychology

Disentangling the course of epistemic development: parsing knowledge by epistemic content

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0732-118X(02)00011-9Get rights and content

Abstract

Over the past three decades, research into the developmental course by means of which persons come to an increasingly mature conception of the knowing process has yielded an highly defracted picture. Despite some concert of opinion about the general bill of particulars, what remains deeply problematic is the increasingly radical disagreement that has arisen regarding the ages at which major milestones in the course of epistemic development are said to be reached. As a way of making some sense of these competing claims, it is argued that the emerging insight that knowledge is ineluctably shaped by those doing the knowing (i.e., that there is an unavoidable “world-to-mind direction of fit” (J.R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1983) between things in the world and the manner of their understanding) does not arrive in a single piece. Instead, as the data presented here help to illustrate, an appreciation of the constructed character of knowledge more commonly arrives piecemeal and at different ontogenetic moments, the times of which are governed by the place that different objects of knowledge occupy along an envisioned continuum of diverse epistemic contents. On this account, not all “facts of the matter” are ordinarily seen to occupy the same epistemic footing. Rather, some so-called facts are commonly understood to be of an “institutional” sort, where “representational” diversity is early expected and widely tolerated. By contrast, other objects of knowledge are imagined to be more like “brute” facts that, on some less mature readings, fully escape the clutches of subjective opinion. Viewed against the backcloth of this proposed continuum, a developmental sequence hypothesized according to which growing persons first come to view “institutional” facts as humanly constructed before subsequently coming to a similar view about presumptively “brute” facts. To test this hypothesis, 242 young persons were administered a paper and pencil measure of epistemic reasoning (the EDQ). Results strongly support the hypothesis that respondents understood the interpretive nature of beliefs about “institutional” facts at an earlier age than so-called “brute” facts.

Introduction

Although often slow to say so, few adults seriously doubt that all knowledge is in some measure person relative, that interpretation is ubiquitous, and that everything shot through with human understanding necessarily bears the signature rifling-marks of those who triggered it. We know only too well about optimists and pessimists and their annoying biases. In short, we grownups largely live by the rule that any knowledge we and others actually handle necessarily ends up with our fingerprints all over it. Just as certainly, most of us are equally convinced that we were not born into the world with a native understanding of these complicated matters. This much, at least, seems clear enough.

What such intuitions fail to tell us, however, is at what particular tender age such necessary insights about knowledge construction actually begin getting off of the ground. Because the answer to this question is not at all self-evident, and because it obviously matters in deciding how best to interact with young people who may or may not share our hard-won insights about such epistemological matters, people have been interested to know, and developmentalists have been eager to explain, how and when such beliefs about belief originally come about. Here are some of the candidate answers that have been provided. Children as young as 3 or 4 already possess “an interpretive or constructive understanding of the knowing process” (Perner, 1991). No, that is not right. Simple false belief understanding requires nothing more than an appreciation of the fact that ignorance can led one astray, and so falls importantly short of the insight that two people can differently interpret one and the same thing––an insight that, according to some (Carpendale & Chandler, 1996; Chandler & Carpendale, 1998; Chandler & Lalonde, 1996; Chandler & Sokol, 1999; Lalonde, 1996; Broughton (1991), Pillow (1995)), does not typically emerge until well into middle childhood. But why, if this is true, have so many others also insisted (on what appears to be good evidence) that only teenagers (Broughton, 1978; Chandler, Boyes, & Ball, 1990; Boyes & Chandler, 1992; Reich, Oser, & Valentin, 1994), or college sophomores (Baxter Magolda, 1992; Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Perry, 1970), or a special breed of doctoral candidates (Kitchener & King, 1981; King & Kitchener, 1994) are capable of appreciating that all knowledge is, to some degree, humanly constructed? Clearly something is badly amiss here. Small caliber disagreements over whether, for example, object permanence is accomplished at the beginning or end of the first year, or whether false belief first arrives on the ontogenetic scene at 3 or 4 (while increasingly viewed as “chumps games”) at least avoid the spectacle of various researchers contradicting one another by decades. By obvious contrast, the wildly divergent claims that we first round the interpretive turn at 4 or 8 or 16 or 32 does not. As it is, you could easily digest large patches of the relevant literature and still come away justifiably convinced that people experience their first pangs of serious epistemic doubt at just about any age you might happen to choose (Chandler, Hallett, & Sokol, 2002).

The research to be reported here aims to help sort out a small part of this muddle. It does so by arguing that not all of the so-called “facts” in the world are commonly judged to be facts of the same caliber, and by demonstrating that at least some of the confusion about when young people first round the interpretive turn is an artifact of the fact that ideas about the subjective nature of the knowing process vary as a predictable function of just what sorts of facts one has in mind. Before coming to this, however, our rude claims about the disordered state of the existing literature concerning the course of epistemic development requires some careful backing.

The roots of much of the recent research concerned with the course of epistemic development can be traced back to the seminal work of William Perry (1970), who identified predictable developmental changes in the variable ways that increasingly older Harvard undergraduate males thought about the process of belief entitlement. On this account, such students followed what, at the limit, is a nine-level process that begins with an strictly objectivistic, “copy theory” (Chandler & Boyes, 1982) view of the knowing process—a view according to which the truth of any matter is thought to be at least potentially available to anyone with the eyes to see reality for what it actually is. Through the next two levels, this extreme objectivistic position is qualified by the growing suspicion that some so-called “experts” may actually distort the truth, due to their own potentially correctable biases. At Level 4, Perry described a more qualitative shift, according to which certain putative knowledge claims are unmasked as mere matters of taste or opinion about which everyone is imagined to be equally entitled to their own views. At Level 5—a stage of unbridled skepticism—resolvable issues of right and wrong come to be seen as exceptions to the rule, with everything else understood to be unassuageably personally relative. Levels 6 through 9 are described as sequential steps toward reasoned “commitment” in an uncertain world. As it was, not all of Perry's students began at Level 1 or ended at Level 9. In fact, he found that the modal starting point of college freshmen was Level 4. Still, regardless of their starting point, Perry's own line of evidence was taken to show that most students ordinarily experience some measured degree of epistemic development during the 4 years of their undergraduate training.

Following Perry, a long list of investigators have reported findings that, for the most part, qualify rather than broadly challenge the general outline of his original claims. Some (e.g., Benack & Basseches, 1989; Sinnot, 1989) have suggested that Perry's description of the shift from realism to relativism counts as the next logical step in Piaget's developmental framework—a period of so-called “post-formal” operations (Benack & Basseches, 1989; Commons et al., 1989; Sinnot, 1989). Using a modest variation upon Perry's scheme, others such as Kitchener, King and colleagues (e.g., King, 1977; King & Kitchener (1994), King & Kitchener, 1994 (2002); King, Kitchener, Davison, Parker, & Wood, 1983; Kitchener & King, 1981; Kitchener, King, Wood, & Davison, 1989; Kitchener, Lynch, Fischer, & Wood, 1993; Kitchener & Wood, 1987) have examined a broad range of age groups from high school students to those in late adulthood. Though conceding that epistemic development begins before the college years, these authors generally agree with Basseches and others that the most highly developed levels are reached by only a very few people—more often than not by people who hold a Ph.D. in philosophy. Similarly, Kuhn (1991a), along with and her colleagues (Kuhn, Amsel, & O’Laughlin, 1988), examined the epistemic stance of sixth-, ninth- and twelfth-graders, as well as 20-, 40-, and 60-year-olds. In general, the youngest of these subjects scored at the lowest levels (0, 1 or 2) of their six stage scheme, with only the oldest and best educated of their sample scoring at the highest, or “evaluative”, level. Here, as with the large bulk of research carried out in the Perry tradition, the take-home message is that while some epistemic development may happen in the teenage years, real insight into the relativised character of knowledge is reserved for adulthood, especially among those who are well educated.

In contrast to the often-repeated claim that serious epistemic development is an exclusive feature of early adulthood, other researchers have worked to explore the possibility of serious epistemic growth during the teenage years. For example, Chandler and his colleagues (Boyes, 1987; Boyes & Chandler, 1992; Chandler (1975), Chandler (1987), Chandler (1988); Chandler & Boyes, 1982; Chandler et al., 1990) have argued that the lack of evidence of early epistemic development reported by Perry and others is an artifact of assessment strategies that dwell on matters about which young people often feel poorly informed. By asking them questions about familiar situations (e.g. a debate over whether 16-year-olds are responsible enough to drive), Boyes and Chandler (1992) found that even some eighth-graders showed unmistakable signs of relativistic understanding, and that by the 12th grade, many evidenced epistemic stances consistent with Perry's later stages of commitment. In a closely related program of research involving Swiss youth aged 9–22, Oser and Reich (1987) (Reich, 1998; Reich et al., 1994) noted that the conclusion that each person plays an active role in construing their own knowledge begins to appear in, and perhaps even before, adolescence. Similarly, Broughton (1978) reports the existence of “nascent skepticism” even among his 12-year-old respondents. Still other researchers have found evidence of relativistic thinking in the pre-adolescent years (Mansfield & Clinchy (1987), Mansfield & Clinchy (1997); Walton, 2000) and some recent research has suggested that even grade-six students can begin to appreciate the constructive nature of scientific thinking if they receive the right kind of prior instruction (Smith, Maclin, Houghton, & Hennessey, 2000).

Even these “early onset” claims are made to appear too little too late by certain findings emerging from the so-called “theory-of-mind” literature—findings that purport to show that even 4-years-olds already possess certain insights about the subjective nature of the knowing process (e.g. Gopnik & Wellman, 1992; Perner & Davies, 1991; Wellman, 1990). On this account, the success of such young preschoolers on standard measures of false belief is said to demonstrate that children achieve an understanding of false belief by first developing a “representational theory of mind” (Perner, 1991)—a “theory” that is, by its very nature, argued to be “interpretive” in character (Wellman, 1990). On this view, 4- or 5-year-olds who pass standard-issue false belief tests automatically “understand the mind's active role in evaluating the truth of verbal information” (Perner & Davies, 1991, p. 51). If this is so, such 4-year-olds hardly need wait until their high school, or college, or post-graduate years before coming to a first appreciation of the fact that knowledge is an active human construction, relative to the viewing stances of the observer.

Others, only slightly more withholding (e.g. Carpendale & Chandler, 1996; Chandler & Carpendale, 1998; Chandler & Lalonde, 1996; Chandler & Sokol, 1999; Lalonde, 1996; Broughton (1991), Pillow (1995)), have argued that, while standard false belief measures demand little more than an appreciation of the role of ignorance in the shaping of counter-factual beliefs, children as young as 7 or 8 do actually show a fledgling appreciation of the person-relative nature of beliefs. They do so, it is argued, by recognizing that two people with the same information can, and often do, legitimately come up with different interpretations of one and the same thing, and so qualify as having some nascent appreciation of the active contribution people make to their own store of knowledge. The merits of this acrimonious debate aside, the important point here is that the difference between a simple false-belief understanding and what Chandler and his colleagues have called an “interpretive theory-of-mind” sounds distressingly similar to the critical objectivism–relativism transition that Perry and many others have argued does not come on-line in the course of epistemic development until the college years. In short, then, one could read selectively from the available literature concerned with the early course of epistemic development and, with good reason, conclude that such abilities put in their first appearance at either 4 or 8 or 12 or 16 or 20, or in receipt of a Ph.D.

Stipulating to the likelihood that all the data from all the different research enterprises summarized above is precisely as reported, and given the number of times the same pattern of evidence concerning the retreat of realism and the emergence of skeptical doubt has been found in just about any age group one might choose, some explanation is clearly called for. Two such possibilities especially suggest themselves. The first is that epistemic development is not a monolith, but is instead a multi-dimensional phenomenon, with different and independent components of epistemic understanding coming “on line” at different ontogenetic moments. In other words, broad talk of epistemic development might well be a cover story for a variety of distinctive conceptual pieces (e.g. the relativity of knowledge; what is considered to be a valid source of authority, etc.) each of which develop independently and at progressively later moments in the course of development. On this account epistemic development is best viewed, not as a coherent process, but rather as a summary term that serves to loosely collect several different abilities under a common conceptual umbrella.

The work of Pillow (1990), Schommer (1993) and others (e.g., Pillow, 1999) exemplifies this dimensional approach. Schommer, for example, postulates four main dimensions of epistemic growth that are said to be relatively independent: (1) the extent to which intellectual ability is thought to be innate; (2) the degree to which knowledge is considered simple; (3) assumptions about whether learning occurs quickly or more slowly; and, (4) beliefs about the relative certainty of knowledge. Schommer found limited evidence for the hypothesized independence of these dimensions in both a university sample (1990) and a sample of high school students (1993). Interestingly, although she reports development across these dimensions within each sample, no comparison across these samples was attempted. Consequently, it is difficult to tell if these factors could help to explain how epistemic growth could happen and then apparently re-happen at different junctures in development.

Pillow (1999), responding to the same evident confusion over when epistemic development first occurs, has also proposed a similar dimensional explanation. He identified nine dimensions: (a) the nature of the knowledge acquisition process; (b) the degree of correspondence between knowledge and reality; (c) the certainty of knowledge; (d) the commensurability of knowledge across individuals; (e) the degree to which knowledge forms or inheres in a coherent system of thought; (f) the nature of meaning; (g) the appropriate procedures for evaluating competing beliefs; (h) the nature and role of authorities as sources of knowledge and justification; and (i) the nature of reality. However, to date, there are no empirical data to support his claim that these dimensions could be developing at different ages or to otherwise explain the problem in question.

An alternative to such multi-dimensional explanations (an alternative that gains support from the research presented below) is that it is not the existence of different dimensions of epistemological development which best explains the seemingly recursive pattern of developmental changes summarized above. Rather, on this second account, insights regarding the interpretive or constructive character of knowing are held out to be a coherent accomplishment, but one that occurs in certain “domains of understanding” before others. On this account, people do not come to a more or less mature understanding of all “facts of the matter” simultaneously. Instead, some types of knowledge are held to be relatively immune to the uncertainty and relativism that plagues others. By way of an example, it seems possible that someone might simultaneously think relativistically about journalistic reports without also questioning the objectivity and certainty of some application of Newton's laws. As intuitive as this distinction may seem, it is nevertheless far from self-evident how people might normally go about carving up the epistemic world into knowledge of different types.

What does and does not qualify as a bona fide epistemic issue is a confusing and contentious matter that is hardly clarified by what is often said about it. Still, at the level of common parlance, this much, at least, is ordinarily agreed to. Epistemologies, even those everyday tacit epistemologies of developing persons, are standardly understood to be about appropriate methods and grounds for securing positive knowledge. Your or my body of warranted knowledge is generally taken to be that sub-set of our individual beliefs that are effectively argued to be true. The importance of carefully specifying our methods and grounds for arriving at such true beliefs derives from the recognition that not all of our convictions about what is truth are always well justified. Rather, of all of our sundry convictions, only some are actually meant to pass usual tests for what is true as opposed to mistaken. Over and above the full compliment of our true and mistaken beliefs there exists a great variety of other convictions than have more to do with our reactions to and appraisals of our experience than any supposedly independent “fact of the matter”. For example, clear matters of personal preference or taste are generally thought of as being neither true nor false, and so are broadly imagined to be empty of epistemic significance. Sandwiched between beliefs that seem clearly true or false, on the one hand, and matter of arbitrary personal taste, on the other, is a confusing variety of other things variously labeled “opinions”, “sentiments”, “convictions”, etc., which are generally thought to involve some qualified measure of warranted belief that is (as Webster put it) greater than a mere “impression” and less than an instance of “positive knowledge”. About matters of this intermediary sort common sense becomes easily confused. Sometimes we worry about the place of truth in the world of taste and opinion. What, for example, is the meaning of claims about connaisseurship and instances of good and bad taste (e.g., Gadamer, 1982)? Can moral or cultural values really be isolated from the beliefs that sustain them (Chandler, Sokol, & Wainryb, 2000; Wainryb, 1993)? Can we ever commit the “is to ought fallacy” and get away with it (Kohlberg, 1981)? At other times our concerns flow in the opposite direction and we wrestle with the degree to which all so-called truth claims are actually value impregnated (Elgin, 1989).

Without needing to suppose that authoritative answers to such questions are forthcoming, it is already clear enough that between the extremes of idiosyncratic taste, on the one hand, and so-called “brute” facts, on the other, there exists an ill-defined space that is better understood by the old than the young. Not surprisingly, developmentalists of various stripes have been quick to move into and begin to chart this little explored territory, demarcating it with typologies of one sort or another. For example, Flavell and his colleagues (Flavell, Flavell, Green, & Moses, 1990) have shown convincingly that even 3-year-olds are quick to appreciate that cats have one aesthetic about cat food and preschoolers another. At the same time, Flavell and his colleagues (Flavell, Mumme, Green, & Flavell, 1992) have also made the point that one needs to do further research to distinguish between children's appreciation of the empirical fact that diverse beliefs often arise and their understanding that such diversity is somehow legitimate. In keeping with this distinction, Carpendale (1995) and Chandler and Carpendale (1998), as well as Broughton (1991), Pillow (1995) have demonstrated that by early school age young persons already have clear and actionable ideas about personal bias. In much the same way Kalish and his colleagues (Kalish, Weissman, & Bernstein, 2000) have documented that even preschoolers appreciate the arbitrariness of various social conventions––a point already well established in the moral domain by Turiel and his co-workers (e.g., Turiel & Wainryb, 1994)

Much of the research already in hand goes to make the point that children of a tender age already understand something of the person-relative character of beliefs. However, as it turns out, the large bulk of these studies involve children's thoughts about matters that are effectively empty of any real epistemic content. That is, while children, by their recognition that different people can legitimately have different tastes (or that those who lack crucial information can have mistaken beliefs, or that ambiguous situations can lead to multiple interpretations, or that the arbitrary rules of certain arbitrary games can be arbitrarily changed) may well signal an acceptance of the principle that beliefs can be somewhat subjective, there is no reason to suppose that they have made the same concessions about matters of true beliefs or knowledge. As such, while it is true that this research has given us important insights into children's understanding of the person-relative nature of certain of their beliefs, it remains the case that there still is much to be understood about the remainder of epistemological development—especially as it concerns their appreciation of the person-relative nature of positive knowledge.

Having taken note that research regarding children's earliest insights about representational diversity has been confined to matters of aesthetics, values and conventions, the importance of working out how and when young people come to appreciate the interpretive nature of fact beliefs seems especially compelling. This same assessment is reflected in the recent work of Kuhn and her colleagues (Kuhn & Weinstock, 2002), who investigated children's and adult's epistemic judgements in four different knowledge domains: personal taste; aesthetics; values/morals; and, truth. Of all of these, it is what Kuhn and her colleagues call the “truth domain” that most accurately reflects what we normally take to be factual matters with some real epistemic up-shot. In a fashion that parallels related distinctions made in our own work, Kuhn and her co-workers (Kuhn & Weinstock, 2002) loosely subdivided this domain in the realms of “social truth” and “physical truth”.

In the research to be reported here, we have elaborated on this rough distinction by drawing on the work of John Searle, in which he parses the world of potential knowledge claims into what he calls “institutional” and “brute” facts. According to Searle (1969), an “institutional” fact is something that, while held to be true, turns upon a type of human meaning which is entirely structured by social context and social rules. A classic example is something like the “fact” that John and Jane were married—a “fact” that, while either true or false, only takes on meaning within the context of some social institution of marriage. Stripped of its proper “institutional” context—that is, of all the conventions surrounding what it means to be married—the “fact” that John and Jane are married would be largely empty of meaning. Searle also illustrates his argument by pointing to, for example, the “fact” that the Dodgers beat the Giants 3 to 2 in 11 innings. Without knowledge of what constitutes a “run” or an “inning” and other such conventions, all we would have is some men running around the field to no apparent end.

Questions of “brute” fact, on Searle's account, concern those parts of our knowledge claims that have a basis in a world largely set apart from human convention. The physical sciences probably provide the best examples of such matters of brute fact. However, certain aspects of the social sciences and history would also qualify as matters of brute fact. That is, even though they involve human action and behaviour, such matters often focus on phenomenon beyond those based on human convention. Though it could be argued, and regularly is (e.g. Rorty, 1991), that all human actions and conceptions are coloured by context dependent and culturally conditioned cognitive pre-conceptions (i.e., are in some sense socially saturated), such influences are not always the sole, or even major, provider of meaning. As Searle (1969) notes:

the fact that I weigh 160 pounds, of course requires certain conventions of measuring weight and also require certain linguistic institutions in order to be stated in a language, but the fact stated is nonetheless a brute fact, as opposed to the fact that it was stated, which is an institutional fact (p. 51).

On this account, certain attempts at meaning making (and perhaps whole disciplines) can be said to focus attention more frequently on questions of brute fact, even if they require institutional facts in order to explain them.

Our point is not necessarily to endorse Searle's brute-institutional fact distinction as the only or most philosophically defensible scheme for parsing distinctive knowledge types (see, for example, Putnam, 1981; Rorty, 1991). Rather, we mean only to suggest that it would seem to count as a reasonable reflection of how ordinary persons commonly talk about knowledge. Turiel and Wainryb (1994), in a research enterprise that parallels our efforts here, make the same point. Their work suggests that, in judging issues of right and wrong, people respond differently to violations of “convention” and to violations of supposed “moral” truths. While acknowledging that it is philosophically difficult, if not impossible, to draw a hard and fast distinction between matters of convention and matters of morality, the point made by Turiel and Wainryb is that laypersons do seem to actually operate in terms of this distinction. In a similar sense, it is not important for our present purposes whether there truly are such things as institutional and brute facts. What does matter is whether or not people, in general, routinely divide up knowledge in this way.

To this end, we trade upon Searle's institutional and brute fact distinction as a means for marking out possible points along a proposed continuum of distinctive folk conceptions regarding different types of factual claims. While we have chosen to use Searle's distinction as a guideline to how people ordinarily carve up the knowledge domain, others have similarly attempted to differentiate knowledge in closely related ways. As noted above, Kuhn and her colleagues (Kuhn & Weinstock, 2002) make a distinction between “social truth” and “physical truth” that makes similar points about lay conceptions of knowledge. The long-standing, if somewhat controversial, distinction between the social and natural sciences (Kuhn, 1991b) is, we think, another instantiation of the difference between institutional and brute fact. See, for example, Hofer's (2000) recent research demonstrating that university students see psychology and the natural sciences belonging to different epistemic categories.

On such authority, we have taken up Searle's institutional/brute fact distinction in order to bracket the extremes of a knowledge continuum that he and others have intuited. On this account, the further one moves along this proposed continuum in the direction of so-called brute fact, the more knowledge is seen to refer to some free-standing “fact of the matter” that lies outside the orbit of human affairs. Conversely, as you move away from such outlier instances, and toward matters more explicitly framed by human convention, there continue to be real “facts of the matter” (e.g., whether John and Jane are or are not married) that, while taken as true, are empty of meaning outside of usual social contexts.

With this distinction in mind, we hypothesize that while adolescents do ordinarily begin to demonstrate increasingly more mature insights about the subjective and person-relative nature of certain truth claims, they do so, in the first instance, with reference to matters of institutional fact. Accordingly, questions about whether 16 should be the legal driving age—one of the scenarios used by Boyes and Chandler (1992) to measure epistemological development in high school students—clearly involve questions of institutional fact. Arguments about politics, and other societal structures, would also be commonly considered matters of institutional fact and thus, it may be no accident that political consciousness seems to be an emerging characteristic of adolescence (Erikson, 1968; Marcia, 1980). It would seem, then, at least possible that the epistemic development that is ordinarily witnessed during the teenage years commonly involves wrestling with issues of institutional fact, but not with those of brute fact.

By contrast, the epistemic interview procedure devised by Perry's and others would appear to focus attention on matters that occupy the shifting no-man's-land between brute and institutional fact. That is, although his interview was free form, the initial question—“Would you like to say what has stood out for you during the year”—conspires to prejudice the discussions that follow by focusing them on the overlap between certain types of brute and institutional facts. While college courses can, of course, concern just about anything, they rarely dwell on the very much taken-for-granted fact that people vary in their personal tastes and aesthetic preferences. Nor are there many lively discussions concerning the admittedly hard-to-remember “brute” facts about the atomic weight of this and that. Rather, what is often potentially transformative, and the subject of much dormitory debate, is all the ways that putatively “brute” facts are revealed, on closer inspection, to be more in the running for “institutional” fact status. That is, while adolescents carve the world up according to their folk conceptions of institutional versus brute fact, epistemic development for college students involves coming to see that many things they had once thought of as brute facts are actually subject to the same doubts and uncertainties that plague institutional facts. Given the “lowest common denominator” scoring scheme employed by Perry and many of those that followed in his footsteps, much of their effort to code such data appears to be have focused on those elicited statements having to do with disputes regarding this fuzzy boundary dividing institutional and brute fact. On this account, we suggest that the late-arriving epistemic achievements that have been attributed to university students and young adults are, more specifically, symptoms of epistemic development as it emerges with regard to matters of brute fact.

The research presented here is meant to test the hypothesis that developing persons, in the course of their epistemological development, come to treat matters of institutional fact and matters of brute fact differently. More specifically, adolescents will demonstrate epistemic development with regard to institutional facts before doing so with respect to brute facts. This difference is expected to narrow somewhat through the university years as these students begin to see brute facts as subject to the same doubts that lead them to question institutional facts in their adolescent years.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants in this research were 195 university undergraduates and 47 generally college-bound high school students from a private suburban parochial school. All groups were of a similar socio-economic class. For the purpose of analyses, these respondents were split into three groups: High School Students (N=47, Mean Age=16.60 years, 23 males, 24 females); Junior Undergraduates (first and second year students, N=79, Mean Age=18.74 years, 29 males, 50 females); and Senior Undergraduates (third

Gender differences

The data were first tested for gender effects by running a MANCOVA with each of the subscale scores as a dependent variable, gender as the between factor, and controlling for educational level (i.e., High School Student, Junior Undergrad, and Senior Undergrad). The educational level was controlled for because the sample has an unequal distribution of gender across the groups, with a higher proportion of women among the undergraduates than among the high school students. Results indicate no

Discussion

The gender differences found on the Objectivism subscale are perhaps best understood in relation to the research findings of Belenky and colleagues (Belenky et al., 1986) and Baxter Magolda (1992). The evidence gathered by these researchers suggests that while men and women have parallel epistemological styles, women tend to rely less on themselves as sources of authority than do men, especially in the earlier stages of epistemic development. On an examination of many of the EDQ Objectivist

Conclusions

Finally, it is worthy of note that progress in the course of conceptual development is customarily understood to be reflected in the young person's greater success at making vital cognitive distinctions that help to more efficiently carve up the world around them. By contrast, the course of epistemic development proposed and observed here is more “U”-shaped and ends more nearly where it began. On this account, children first approach the spectre of epistemic doubt by carving off matters of

Acknowledgements

The preparation of this article was supported by a University Graduate Fellowship to the first author and by a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada operating grant to the second author.

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      Classic longitudinal studies show increases in epistemic thinking levels (King & Kitchener, 2004) or in beliefs in complex and tentative knowledge (Schommer, Calvert, Gariglietti, & Bajaj, 1997). Similar results have been found in classic cross-sectional studies (Boyes & Chandler, 1992; Gottlieb, 2007; Hallett, Chandler, & Krettenauer, 2002; King & Kitchener, 2004; Krettenauer, 2005). For example, Kuhn et al. (2000) surveyed American 5th, 8th and 12th graders as well as adults and observed declining absolutism and increasing evaluativism.

    • Adolescents’ epistemic profiles in the service of knowledge revision

      2017, Contemporary Educational Psychology
      Citation Excerpt :

      Another consideration of the current study was the relative paucity in research on children’s epistemic cognition as it predicts academic achievement. Although there is a long tradition of research in developmental psychology on children’s epistemic cognition, which often examines how educational and life experiences relate to epistemic development (Benedixen, 2016; Burr & Hofer, 2002; Hallett, Chandler, & Krettenauer, 2002; Krettenauer, 2005; Kuhn et al., 2000; Moshman, 2015), relatively fewer investigations have been conducted on children’s epistemic cognition using an educational psychology research paradigm, in which epistemic cognition is examined as it relates and predicts relevant learning outcomes (Hofer, 2004). Related to beliefs about how knowledge is justified, the period of adolescence in particular marks a shift away from realism as the singular form of justification (i.e., knowledge is objective and a direct copy of reality) towards differentiation of other forms of justification, including subjective skepticism, dogmatic reliance on authority, or appeals to rationality (Greene et al., 2008).

    • Epistemic Doubt During Adolescence

      2015, International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences: Second Edition
    • How epistemological beliefs relate to values and gender orientation

      2013, Learning and Individual Differences
      Citation Excerpt :

      A questionnaire constructed by Krettenauer (2005) for assessing evaluativist epistemological beliefs was used (Fragebogen zur Erfassung des Entwicklungsniveaus epistemologischer Ueberzeugungen — FREE). It is a German translation and adaptation of a questionnaire by Hallett et al. (2002). In both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, Krettenauer (2005) showed that the FREE reflects effects of age and education on epistemological beliefs as expected from a developmental psychological perspective and can thus be regarded as a reliable and valid instrument when focusing on individual differences and group comparisons.

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