The Value of Marketing Theory for Parochial Schools: Some Parting Thoughts

In this response to Thogmartin's Spring 1994 JRCE article on “The Prevalence of Phonics Instruction in Fundamentalist Christian Schools,” the author offers his suggestions about why fundamentalist Christians are so enamored with intensive phonics reading pedagogy. In the first part of his response, he argues that the rationale for intensive phonics teaching lies in a radical behaviorist anthropology and epistemology of which Christian educators ought to be extremely wary. In the second section, the author provides a review of some empirical evidence for the limited utility of phonics in the teaching of reading and suggests, finally, that Christian teachers should show as much concern about what and why Christian children and adolescents should read as about how to teach them to do so.     

ROCK BOTTOM: COHERENTISM'S SOFT SPOT

Often coherentism is taken to be the view that justification is solely a function of the coherence among a person's beliefs. I offer a counterexample to the idea that when so understood coherence is sufficient for justification. I then argue that the counterexample will still work if coherence is understood as coherence among a person's beliefs and experiences. I defend a form of nondoxastic foundationalism that takes sensations and philosophical intuitions as basic and sees nearly all other justification as depending on inference to the best explanation. I take up Wilfrid Sellars's Dilemma, which starts with the idea that the foundations must be either propositional in nature or not. The argument continues: if they are, they stand in need of justification; if they are not, they cannot confer justification. It concludes that there cannot be foundations that confer justification on other beliefs. I deny both horns of this dilemma, arguing that philosophical intuitions are propositional but do not stand in need of justification and that sensations are not propositional but can confer justification on perceptual beliefs.