The Table in Our Heads: Rethinking Educational Aims in a Post-Truth Era

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

In the post-truth era, we are overwhelmed not only by a deluge of information but by competing pictures of reality. Education, the very institution meant to prepare us for such complexity, has itself become a battleground of clashing visions. What should its aims be, and why do some values feel so “natural” while others seem ideological or even threatening? In a time of deep ideological divides and eroding public trust, policy reform alone cannot restore coherence or purpose to education. What we need is conceptual clarity—a deeper understanding of why certain educational values resonate with us in the first place. Surprisingly, that clarity can come not only from philosophy but also from science, understood not merely as a static body of facts but as a powerful explanatory framework. Scientific realism, in particular, offers a promising way forward: it seeks not only to describe the world as it truly is but to explain why we hold the beliefs we do, including those that shape our educational aims.

What is the Aim of Education?

At the heart of modern educational discourse lies a question that sounds simple but resists resolution: What is the aim of education? Should it cultivate knowledge? Morality? Practical skills? Social skills? Personal fulfilment?

The postmodern turn, for all its critical insights, has made us suspicious of "essences." It has told us that to speak of the “essence” of education is not only outdated but politically suspect. But this has left us with a void—one in which education becomes a marketplace of competing aims, each as valid (or invalid) as the next. As the philosopher of education Yoram Harpaz notes, “Education has become ready to absorb multiple essences.”

Ask a dozen educators and you will hear familiar answers: critical thinking,  employability, citizenship, moral development. But why these aims and not others? Contemporary educational theory often grounds its answer in epistemology—the study of how we come to know things and what counts as knowledge. Emily Robertson, for example, argues that education should cultivate justified true beliefs—helping students think responsibly within their social and political contexts. Yet this approach, while sophisticated, assumes that what seems epistemically justified is enough to guide aims. It overlooks a deeper ontological question: What is education, really, if we set aside sociological narratives and consider knowledge in relation to the world as it is? Without such grounding, disagreements over aims risk becoming circular and unresolvable. In pluralistic societies, appeals to justification often fail to convince those who do not share the same starting assumptions.

From Belief to Explanation

Arthur Eddington’s famous distinction between the “common-sense table”—solid and familiar—and the “scientific table”—a structure of mostly empty space, composed of fundamental particles governed by quantum uncertainty and electromagnetic forces—highlights a crucial challenge. The key question is not which table is truly real, but why the solid, common-sense table feels real to us, despite the radically different picture revealed by science. Education mirrors this tension: it does not merely transfer knowledge but shapes the very frameworks through which we interpret reality. In this sense, education is deeply epistemic: it constructs the “tables in our heads”—the mental models we rely on to navigate the world. Unlike socialisation, which occurs implicitly through cultural immersion, education is a deliberate, institutionalised effort to build, revise, and sometimes challenge these models. Understanding how common-sense beliefs emerge—and how they relate to scientific explanations—therefore reveals a deeper function of education in a post-truth era.

Why, then, do certain beliefs feel so compelling? Why do autonomy, citizenship, or critical thinking seem self-evident, while other possible aims feel alien or implausible? Scientific realism—the view that science aims to describe the world as it truly is, beyond how it merely appears to us—does not attempt to validate such intuitions but to explain them. Values resonate because they fit with evolved scientific frameworks: critical thinking engages our pattern-recognition and metacognitive abilities; employability appeals to our evolved sensitivity to social utility and cooperation. These values feel “natural” not because they are universal moral truths, but because they activate neural and psychological patterns that have historically been advantageous.

Scientific Realism and Common Sense

Scientific realism, in its general form, holds that successful scientific theories aim to describe the world as it truly is and are approximately true because they best explain the phenomena we observe. Its task is not merely to catalogue observations but to explain why the world appears to us as it does—even when appearances are misleading.

Orly Shenker offers a distinctive application of this view to common-sense realism. She analyses common-sense beliefs in three senses: (1) as a psychological fact—what we intuitively believe; (2) as a metaphysical claim—that the world is just as it appears; and (3) as a normative standard—what we ought to accept as a basic guide to reality. The problem, Shenker argues, arises when we conflate these senses—treating what is psychologically natural as if it were metaphysically (necessarily) true. Her scientific-realist proposal treats common-sense beliefs not as self-justifying truths but as data: structured psychological, social, and economic facts that demand explanation. In her terms, data precedes doctrine: what matters is not whether a belief fits a preferred theory, but whether the theory can explain why the belief arises and persists.

Shenker’s perspective also clarifies why holding common-sense beliefs can be rational and even necessary for everyday life. For instance, we are not constantly aware that the Earth moves at tremendous speed through space, yet our naïve geocentric view is perfectly adequate for ordinary functioning. The heliocentric model, by contrast, is accepted not because it aligns with intuitive common sense—it clearly does not—but because it provides the best scientific explanation. It is supported by extensive evidence, mathematical models such as Kepler’s laws, and physical principles like Newton’s law of gravitation, which together explain the very observations that generate our geocentric intuitions. Crucially, it also explains why we are compelled to hold those intuitions: given Earth’s rotation, we perceive the sun as moving across the sky. Thus, science does not dismiss these intuitions but incorporates them as phenomena to be explained.

Similarly, intuitions about educational values—such as the belief that a particular aim is self-evidently valuable—are, on Shenker’s view, psychological and neuro-physical facts shaped by the structure of both the world and the brain. They are not anomalies to be ignored but data that a scientific-realist account of education must explain. Just as the sensation of heat is now explained in terms of molecular motion rather than by its felt warmth, educational intuitions should be treated as outcomes of evolved, embodied, and socially situated cognitive systems.

In this way, Shenker’s account contributes to a naturalistic philosophy of education grounded in scientific realism. Scientific realism in general does not reduce educational aims to biology or physics, but, following Shenker, it insists that they be intelligible within our best scientific understanding of human cognition and development. Educational frameworks thus retain their normative and cultural richness, yet they are legitimate subjects of the same explanatory standards we apply elsewhere in science.

This demand for naturalistic coherence is not a radical departure—it is already implicit in education itself. We expect students not merely to memorize scientific models of the world—whether in physics, biology, or medicine—but to understand how these models work and why they explain reality. Why, then, should the very frameworks that determine what and how we teach escape similar scrutiny? If we demand conceptual clarity and explanatory rigor in the subjects we teach, it follows that our theories of education themselves should meet the same standards.

Can Educational Aims Be Reduced to Scientific Phenomena?

From a scientific-realist standpoint, we accept successful theories because they provide the best explanations of reality as it truly is—not because they align with our intuitive experience. Crucially, such theories also explain that very experience. As already discussed with the heliocentric example, successful theories must not only fit observations but also explain why our intuitions arise in the first place. Science does not dismiss such common-sense perceptions; it incorporates them into the explanandum—phenomena to be explained within a coherent framework.

The same logic applies to education. The real challenge is not to decide which educational aims are “justified” in the abstract, but to explain why certain familiar educational aims feel self-evident and persist across cultures, while others remain marginal or are rejected. A scientific-realist approach treats these preferences not as self-justifying truths but as data: psychological and social facts shaped by evolved cognitive mechanisms, embodied experience, and cultural structures.

For example, the emphasis on autonomy in many educational systems may stem from evolved preferences for agency and self-direction—traits that proved adaptive in navigating complex social environments. Similarly, valuing moral character may reflect innate social instincts for fairness, trust, and cooperation, which enhance group cohesion and survival. These values feel “natural” not because they are universal moral truths, but because they activate deeply ingrained neural and psychological patterns.

As in science, explanation must precede justification. The task is not to validate the content of these aims as true or falls, but to account for their prevalence and persistence: why they resonate so strongly, how they evolved, and what social and institutional mechanisms sustain them. Only by explaining why we hold certain educational beliefs can we critically evaluate whether they genuinely promote flourishing today or merely persist due to outdated biases or unexamined traditions.

Thus, just as the heliocentric model reconciles scientific theory with our geocentric intuitions, a scientific-realist framework for education must explain both how specific aims cohere with a broader scientific understanding of human cognition and why we experience them as natural or self-evident in the first place. This explanatory grounding provides a more reliable basis for educational policy: decisions about which values to reinforce, revise, or reject should rest not on intuition alone but on a clear, empirically informed account of how those intuitions arise.

Conclusion

Scientific realism invites a fundamental reorientation in how we think about educational values. Instead of asking which aims are most justified, we begin by asking why certain aims—such as autonomy, moral character, or critical thinking—feel so intuitively compelling. Instead of debating values in the abstract, we examine how they emerge, persist, and shape our intuitions. And instead of treating ideological conflict as a struggle to win, we treat it as an opportunity to understand the cognitive and social mechanisms that generate ideological attachment.

This does not mean abandoning normative judgment or accepting every value simply because it exists. On the contrary, it shifts the very basis on which we evaluate educational aims. Scientific realism treats educational values as data: products of evolved cognitive mechanisms, social structures, and cultural histories. By explaining why particular values resonate with us, we gain the tools to distinguish which aims genuinely serve educational and social flourishing today, and which persist largely due to outdated biases or unexamined traditions.

In this sense, understanding precedes justification. Only by explaining how and why values arise can we critically assess them and make informed normative choices. This shift has direct implications for educational policy: the goal is not merely to catalogue where values come from, but to decide—on the basis of a naturalistically grounded understanding—which values to reinforce, which to revise, and which to reject.

A scientific-realist framework thus transforms disagreement from a clash of competing ideologies into a shared inquiry into the mechanisms that shape our commitments. Educational policy, guided by this perspective, can remain normative while being anchored in empirically informed and theoretically coherent explanations—replacing unexamined intuitions with a deeper, scientifically grounded understanding of how we are constituted as knowing and valuing beings.

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About the Author

Guy Kagan, Ph.D. is a philosopher specializing in the Philosophy of Science, focusing on the conceptual foundations of Quantum and Statistical Mechanics, the Philosophy of Probability and Information, and the Philosophy of Mind—particularly the science of consciousness within a physicalist framework. His research also extends to Metaphysics and, in recent years, has significantly expanded into Political Philosophy, emphasizing justice, equality, and property rights.