Cultural Context: Eli Gottlieb

Learning How to Believe: Epistemic
Development in Cultural Context
Eli Gottlieb

Mandel Leadership Institute
Jerusalem, Israel

Over the last decade, researchers have become increasingly interested in students’
beliefs about the nature of knowledge and how these beliefs develop. Although initial
psychological accounts portrayed epistemic development as a domain-independent
process of cognitive maturation, recent studies have found trajectories of epistemic
development to vary considerably across contexts. However, few studies have focused
on cultural context. This article examines the role community values and practices
play in fostering particular epistemological orientations by comparing the
epistemological beliefs of 5th, 8th, and 12th graders (N = 200) from General and Religious
schools in Israel regarding 2 controversies: belief in God and punishment of
children. In both controversies, older participants were less likely than younger participants
to consider the controversy rationally decidable. However, this shift
emerged earlier in the God controversy than in the punishment controversy. In the
God controversy, General pupils were less likely than Religious pupils to consider
the question rationally decidable or their own beliefs infallible. But no such school
differences were observed in the punishment controversy. Qualitative and quantitative
analyses linked these differences to divergent discourse practices at General and
Religious schools, suggesting that the relations between learning and epistemic development
are more intricate than has been assumed hitherto.
Epistemology is an area of philosophy concerned with questions of what knowledge
is and how it is justified. Although few people give these questions such detailed
and sustained attention as professional philosophers, anyone attempting to
acquire, produce, or evaluate knowledge relies, at least implicitly, on some set of
epistemological beliefs. Such beliefs are of obvious interest to educators. To understand
how students acquire, evaluate, and justify knowledge, we need to