Abstract

MARIE-FRANCE, Daniel et al. El lugar del relativismo en los intercambios filosóficos de los alumnos. Perfiles educativos [online]. 2002, vol.24, n.96, pp.05-32. ISSN 0185-2698.

This article is about the relation between the philosophical dialogue and the students' critical thinking when the teacher uses in the classroom the approach proposed by the FNPM program (Philosophy for Kids adapted for Mathematics). We start from the epistemological approaches: egocentrism, relativism and intersubjectivity oriented to the meaning. Those approaches make possible to reflect the links between the people's beliefs and the justifications they use to defend them. The research we present here is part of a bigger project subsidized by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) (1998-2002) and was carried out in three different cultural contexts: Australia, Mexico and Quebec. Its general purpose is the global study of the ways in which the students' critical thinking show up and of its development process. In this process we can observe a distinction between the monologic and the dialogic exchange, together with different nuances between a no critical, semi critical and critical dialogue. If we establish a relation between the features of each exchange type and the epistemologic approaches which emerged from the analysis of the transcriptions that we made of the exchanges between students, we will be able to determine to what extent the philosophical dialogue between young people is relativist (this means no critical) or intersubjective (evaluative), but also the influence that the praxis of this kind of dialogue can have on the development of critical thinking.

Keywords : Critical thinking; Philosophical dialogue; Epistemologic approaches; Intersubjectivity; Relativism.

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