Laozi's"Wordless Teaching"from a Philosophical Perspective
Since Plato,knowledge has been defined as justified true belief and therefore regarded as a major educational objective in the cognitive domain.However,this definition of knowledge has been challenged by the Gettier Problem,which,in education,re-fers to the situation where students provide correct answers but do not really understand the logic behind them—they merely arrive at the correct answers by chance.In other words,there are possible cases of true justified belief without knowledge but with"epistemic luck".Therefore,knowledge should be regarded as something rather vague and complicated,just like what is meant by Laozi's idea of"wordless teaching".To be more specific,"wordless teaching"is not against or without linguistic communication;instead,it just opposes dogmatic and outdated ways of learning and teaching.This article is to analyze the concept of"wordless teaching"based on both textual evidence from Laozi's Tao-Te Ching and the epistemic theory of Timothy Williamson(a renowned philoso-pher at Oxford).
wordless teachingLaozi(also known as Lao-Tzu or Lao-Tze)knowledgethe Gettier Problemcognitivismepiste-mic luck
NETL
NSTL
万方数据
