Network Epistemology as a Scientific Status of Educational Practice

A critical reconsideration of the theoretical body of pedagogy and its practical inherence appears to be legitimized, on the epistemological level, by the plurality of linguistic systems that intervene in it. These underlie both the practice of reducing pedagogical discourse to a single language, and the forms of convergence in it of the methodological canons of the operations of science. Pedagogy, in fact, carves out its semantic horizon at the intersection of the fields of investigation of the sciences and philosophical reflection. It is connoted, on the formal ground, as a structured field in continuous metamorphosis with the methodological segments and categorical schemes of the socio-psychological sciences. At the same time, it interacts with the hypotheses and interpretative and explanatory parameters of philosophical thought. The complexity of this theoretical place pushes the terms of the epistemological question on the scientific status of pedagogy and its formal object out of the schemes of an antinomian use of abstract conceptual categories. These would appear, for a broader interpretation of the methodological analogy, extrapolated from their own context and from their own logical plane. They would come to operate, both on the theoretical and on the pragmatic level, within a global project with which pedagogy would tend to want to interpret itself as an applied model of rationality.