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On The Relevance Of Cognitive Neuroscience For Community Of Inquiry, Mark Weinstein, Dan Fisherman

Department of Educational Foundations Scholarship and Creative Works

Community of inquiry is most often seen as a dialogical procedure for the cooperative development of reasonable approaches to knowledge and meaning. This reflects a deep commitment to normatively based reasoning that is pervasive in a wide range of approaches to critical thinking and argument, where the underlying theory of reasoning is logic driven, whether formal or informal. The commitment to normative reasoning is deeply historical reflecting the fundamental distinction between reason and emotion. Despite the deep roots of the distinction and its canonization in current educational thought contemporary cognitive neuroscience presents a fundamental challenge to the viability of the …