Was soll bei einer Urteilsbildung eigentlich gebildet werden? Unterrichtliches Urteilen im Spannungsfeld zwischen epistemischer und didaktischer Angemessenheit

The promotion of philosophical judgment skills is often considered as one of the main objectives of philosophy and ethics classes. The underlying idea is that students need to be enabled to make autonomous decisions in their social and personal lives. And in order to develop the necessary skills for that, they must be encouraged to make their own judgments in classroom situations. At the same time, recent didactical research has criticized the epistemic dubiousness of this approach: Isn’t it epistemologically inappropriate to encourage students to take a clear stance on controversial philosophical problems in a very short time and on the basis of fragmentary evidence? In this paper, I would like to propose a solution to the looming tension between the pedagogical and epistemic appropriateness of students’ philosophical problem-solving. This solution consists in a specific interpretation of what is to be understood by a judgment in classroom contexts. More specifically, I will argue that students should not form philosophical beliefs in the context of instructional problem-solving processes, but only so-called acceptances.