In this course we are dealing with a small number of topics on the system, but my hope is that you will be enabled to deal sensibly with a lot more, that you will have picked up some of the "rules of the game" from the few examples we look at explicitly.

One of my complaints about regular teaching is that this kind of hope is usually pious, since no one does anything to draw the learner's attention to the features he is meant to learn. Our first order, substantive discussions have so far been about education, teaching, and indoctrination; but what I've just called the "rules of the game" are second order features of those discussions. What I want to do now is draw your attention directly to some of the important second order features. This may give you an idea of what strategies to adopt when you are assailed by conceptual difficulties in some other area. But there are no sure-fire guarantees or recipes in this area. And I'm certainly not saying that other strategies I don't mention should not be used.

Get a picture of the area. I have earlier compared conceptual analysis to map-making; in both, it is a good idea to familiarize yourself with the area. If you are focussing on a particular term, "discipline" say, think of or find a variety of ways of using the term; different contexts in which it is appropriate.

Think too of some obvious cases where the term is not appropriate.

You may begin to see early on that these uses fall into fairly distinct groups. A word may be ambiguous like the word, "bank" — a place you put your money or the earth alongside a river. In the case we took, "discipline," it looks like there are three areas, though they also seem to have some deeper connections as well: control, especially self-control; punishment; a body of knowledge or skills.

As an important part of gathering data, look at the contrasts we make in the area. We did this when we looked at education — we classify people as educated or uneducated; we contrast education with training, or again with indoctrination. As we saw then, different contrasts may be highlighting different aspects of our quarry; they may even reflect ambiguities. In the case of discipline, some people contrast discipline with punishment: what are they getting at?

When you review the cases and the contrasts, you should find yourself coming to hypotheses about what is crucial to the meaning of your chosen term. You then need to test these hypotheses. If you say that X is always at least a part of what "A" conveys, can you find any cases of A that lack X? If you say that X is sufficient for being an A, can we find any Xs that aren't As?

When you gather data, you may come across things like slogans. It is worth noting that social importance is often marked by logical irregularity. A slogan may reveal the logic of a concept by deliberately refusing to obey it � I made this suggestion about the slogan, "Don't teach subjects, teach children."

When you begin to probe a concept, you may well find that you need to look around at what else is needed to use the terms appropriately, or how do we know whether or not something is a case of what you are investigating. In some cases you may want to say that usage is often elliptical, to use the term I offered in Argument Analysis. In other cases, you may see that using a particular concept requires people to use standards that they may not be aware of — I made this suggestion about the way Kleinig's sense of "indoctrination" invokes a standard of rational assessment. How do I tell whether you have been indoctrinated regarding X? I ask whether you are able to assess X appropriately. But that means I must use some standard for appropriateness here. You may see how to discover this sort of thing if you ask "would any old assessment do here?" (replacing "assessment" with whatever is at issue in your new case).

What we are revealing in such cases is often the way our concepts are embedded in a much wider set of concepts; things are not as simple as we might wish. In particular we often find various kinds of evaluation getting tied up in our thinking. A nice "feel" for evaluative as opposed to simply descriptive matters helps a lot in revealing philosophically significant issues. Accuracy requires you to be able pinpoint where the evaluations are entering the picture; many writers say that "A needs X" is itself evaluative, but a look at various examples should convince you that that sentence is not itself evaluative, rather it is often used in a context where X is necessary for Y and there is an evaluation in the background concerning Y (see Argument Analysis, section 11, for pertinent discussion).

When you are philosophizing about evaluative issues directly, one important task is often to give an account of why we have the values we find. I left it aside, but you will find Kleinig, for instance, trying to say precisely why we should regard indoctrination as a bad thing. These are often very difficult questions; if you embark on them it is clearly no good just to repeat what we think � that is what we want explained. Part of the difficulty may be that our thinking is not really coherent, at least not if we are using the principles we think we are using. One example that you might wish to reflect on in this context is one position that many people adopt on abortion: it is wrong because it involves killing an innocent human being, but it is permissible when the woman was raped. Another fascinating and somewhat less controversial case is why we punish unsuccessful attempts to do wrong less vigorously than the successful ones.

Another way into many philosophically interesting issues is to ask how something is possible. Thus one might ask whether it is possible to learn about acceleration without first having learnt about velocity � Hirst uses this as an example of an obvious conceptual dependency that must be reflected in the sequencing of the curriculum, but I'm not so sure. Again, R.S. Peters tried to get interesting conclusions out of asking what anyone must be taken to be accepting who seriously asks whether education is a good thing. How is it possible to be asking that question in good faith? As with Hirst's example, I'm not convinced by what Peters did with this approach, but it does give us a way into some interesting issues.

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