Abstract

This paper introduces some educationally related aspects of the work of G. B. Vico. It describes Vico's discovery that knowledge is the sole product of the human imagination and that our notion of truth must derive from this. Truth is made by the connection of things previously unrelated via a metaphor. We are exactly the sum of these creations, and society is no more than the sum of the things we have passed into the sensus communis. This leads to the conclusion that those things which we can know are made by us. Professions have made their own values, standards and practices and must be judged by these rather than against more abstract and general criteria. The notion of 'action research' is evaluated in relation to this view of truth and it is seen that Vico's notion of fitness for purpose, of things being as they are and being done as they are because that is the way we have been and are, is important. The work concludes that science is not a thing of formal experimentation in the 'hard' world but of imaginative action in our inner world. Teaching therefore cannot be other than a science, a 'new science' of the imagination.

How to Cite:

Moran, A., (2002) “The Science of Teaching: Where We Must Stand and Why We Must Stand There ”, Wales Journal of Education 11(2), 59-71.