Stony Brook University - SUNY Digital Repository

After the study was finished, Perry wrote that he had
observed that it was a confrontation with new and problematic
experiences, which were “anomalous and contradictory” (149) and
which pushed students to “’face up’ to limits, uncertainties,
and the dissolution of established beliefs” (73), was the
impetus, the cause and catalyst, for this “evolution,” or
“revolutionary restructuring” (149), “critical thinking” thus
becoming habitual, the rule for perceiving reality and
experience rather than the exception, reserved for particular
classes and the assignments therein. Furthermore, he elaborated
that the influence and potential of such epistemological
conflicts had manifested itself in the development of a
student’s capacity to “conceptualize about concepts, to think
about his thoughts” (45): “The characteristic of the liberal
arts education of today […] is its demand for a sophistication
about one’s own line of reasoning as contrasted with other
possible lines of reasoning. In short, it demands metathinking”
(45).
While Perry had concluded that this “evolution” within
students’ thinking through thinking about their thinking was an
almost natural byproduct of a “liberal arts education” and the
“diversity” offered therein, I still had questions. Does that
conflict with the “anomalous and contradictory” that instigates
the engendering of Perry’s “relativistic pragmatism” simply
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