Future Human Image. Volume 7, 2017 27
Counterfactuality of the Ethical Norms of Higher
Education
Natalia Boychenko - Doctor of Philosophy, Associate Professor Shupyk National Medical Academy of Postgraduate Education
(Kyiv, Ukraine)
E-mail: [email protected]
Usage of the counterfactuality as a term for marking the modality to some event becomes a new trend in social sciences. Recently this term was popular almost exclusively in psychology - especially in study of cognitive processes, but now it receive wide spectrum of interpretations: from economic to philosophical one. Most of such interpretations is concentrated near the problem of somebody"s attitude to situation that he or she was involved in. Meanwhile the term "counterfactuality" marks the real influence of the person on the course of events rather than his or her pure mental states. The person could change the future events due to his or her activity about these events: these changes rarely could be exactly the same that were calculated, desirable or even acceptable for this person, but these changes are for sure the consequence of his or her decision - direct or indirect, substantial or accidental, necessary or extraneous, evidently relevant or seemingly unrelated. For the philosophy the situation with ethical optation and its consequences is significant. Typical for analytic philosophy is the reconstruction of positivist logic of counterfactuality as possibility. According to this positivist point of view, we should not accept any human discovery, any creation because of their improbability - the sentences about them were simply the consequences of false sentences. More important is the fact that the consequents of the counterfactual conditional judgments are always true. Nobody can take the antecedent of the counterfactual conditional judgments as false from the point of view of human will, i.e. from the point of view of our intention and results of its implementation in our activity and our creations. These consequences are real because men act according to their definition of situation: their belief motivates them and push them to make real things that were unreal before. Reality of mind becomes real materially due to human activity. This is the way of design of future human nature on the basis of future human image.
Key Words: counterfactuality, counterfactual conditional judgment, ethical norms, higher education, means and goals, future, pluperfect
Usage of the counterfactuality as a term for marking the modality to some event becomes a new trend in social sciences. Recently this term was popular almost exclusively in psychology - especially in study of cognitive processes, but now it receive wide spectrum of interpretations: from economic to philosophical one. Most of such interpretations is concentrated near the problem of somebody"s attitude to situation that he or she was involved in. Meanwhile the term "counterfactuality" marks the real influence of the person on the course of events rather than his or her pure mental states. The person could change the future events due to his or her activity about these events: these changes rarely could be exactly the same that were calculated, desirable or even acceptable for this person, but these changes are for sure the consequence
╘ Boychenko, Natalia, 2017
28 Future Human Image. Volume 7, 2017
Counterfactuality of the Ethical Norms of Higher Education by Natalia Boychenko
of his or her decision - direct or indirect, substantial or accidental, necessary or extraneous, evidently relevant or seemingly unrelated. Sometimes these changes occur opposite to the person"s wish, but nevertheless it is the regular result of this wish too. The classic example of such determination is a game with futures on the stock exchange. However, for the philosophy much more significant is the situation with ethical optation and its consequences. What should be our activity as human beings and therefore what could be future human image?
As Oleg Bazaluk suggested: "The philosophy of education should not just investigate the process of education - it should be a process, action, questioning aimed at full implementation of internal creative potential as individual human psychic, so the potential of certain micro- and macro- group as a whole" [Bazaluk, 2015: 14]. Here we can see the example of counterfactual judgment with imperative mode. Also Galina Beregova underlined the methodological role of the philosophy of education: "The philosophy of education in the modern world is able to perform and performs the methodological function: it defines the principles of values and worldview of a human of the future, giving for him a true understanding of the meaning of life and therefore it is a research branch of pedagogy, proposing new guidelines for the progressive reorganization of the education system" [Beregova, 2016]. Mykhailo Boychenko investigated the interconnection between values and functions in modern university education [Boychenko, 2017], and we researched counterfactual goals of university education [Boychenko, 2016]. All these studies help us to represent the ethical norms of higher education in their counterfactuality.
First of all, we should distinguish philological and philosophical meanings of counterfactuality. In linguistics the counterfactuality is associated primarily with Pluperfect (Plusquamperfekt) [Okhrimenko, 2013; Plungian, 2004], or so-called long-past time [Andriiv, 2015; Popovych, 2012]. According to the researcher Lyudmila Popovych: "In the Ukrainian linguistics Pluperfect is mainly seen as a relative time, i.e., a form which expresses an action that relates not to the moment of speech, but to another action that precedes the moment of speech" [Popovych, 2012: 653]. Could this philological description of the situation of time shift correlate with moral choice - when we are talking about remorse, when we had to do in other way in the past in order to have not a moral dissatisfaction later?
However, the language Pluperfect is also used increasingly to describe unreality of the situation and actions in the present and future time. According to local researcher Olga Andriiv, who summarizing preliminary philological studies: "Julia Panova in her interpreting Ö. Dahl"s provisions says that the beginning of the application of long-past time forms to study this function is associated with forms of Perfect, used for marking of pseudo-real situations that can relate not only to the past but to the present and even future time. Thus, the same linguistic construction can mean unrealized effects as in the past or present, but even in the future, about the implementation of which we know nothing. To avoid ambiguous interpretation of modal constructions designated by such forms, language uses a form of long-past time" [Andriiv, 2015: 31]. So, Andriiv discovers in Lina Kostenko"s novel "Notes of a Ukrainian Lunatic" that "Pluperfect performs functions related to modeling of the situation parallel to the reality" [Andriiv, 2015: 31]. Russian linguist Vladimir Plungian determines the function of unreality as counterfactual, i.e. one that indicates the idea that a particular situation (according to the speaker"s evidence) has no place in the real world, but could occurs in some "alternative" one; so counterfactuality means the probability that contradicts the facts [Plungian, 2004: 274].
