The Rationality of Practice

Joseph Dunne has written a scholarly and finely-crafted (and beautifully produced: much credit to the University of Notre Dame Press) book on one of the most important philosophical questions of the late twentiethcentury, particularly but not only as it affects education.That question is just how far what he calls 'technical reason' is adequate to guide us in complex areas of human life such as medicine or teaching.In the late 1970s Dunne was encouraged to inflict the behavioural objectives model of planning and conducting lessons on his college of education students: his instinctive and philosophical dissatisfaction with that model was the grit that, more than a decade later, produced this substantial work.Though he makes no reference to the fact, the view of education which emphasises outcomes, effectiveness and accountability has of course become in the decade since then even more virulent in many respects and stands still more in need of the extended criticism to which Dunne subjects it here.Dunne sees the root of the problem in the tendency of some Classical Greek thinkers to elevate techne -roughly, instrumental reason with a 'scientific' (as we would now understand it) flavour -to the status of universal paradigm of rational human action.The carpenter, for instance, does more than stumble instinctively, through a collection of 'knacks' and the intelligence of his hands, towards the finished table or bed.Rather he