Counterfactual Objectives of University Education

Abstract

Subject of counterfactuality is essential for ethics and philosophy of education, but despite this fact, still has not found a proper philosophical reflection in domestic science - rather philosophical texts meet philologists, in linguistics counterfactuality associated primarily with Plusquamperfekt, long-past time that also  used increasingly to describe unreality of the situation and actions in the present and future time. Unreality of moral standards is relative – they are unreal only to the extent that they can not be implemented without any special effort – very this effort gives them the power and reality even more than ones having “realistic”, positivist standards. This temporal aspect recedes into the background, and to the foreground opposition steps – of traditionalism and modernity desire to change, to improve the world, ourselves, the others. With Plusquamperfekt one can identify different models as models of counterfactual subjective distancing from the flow of events through distancing from: inadequate (partially adequate) senses; inadequate (excessive, reduced or even false) emotional perception; inadequate action results intentions; values discrepancy of the object of perception. Values are always opposed to the counter-value or irrelevant value. Then and there appears actually a philosophical interest to the concept of counterfactuality that can be called a priori selected context. Thus, taking a counterfactual position, we choose a semantic context of our behavior – sensual, emotional, instrumentally rational, value, etc – and give it absolute value relatively to all other possible contexts – within our strategy of certain behavior. Not omly academic values should be considered after the model of counterfactuality –also other values of university education should be. And the same academic values should be deprived of a significant part of their idealization – a value that acquire a real education is regulatory, not absolute. Academic values become variability in the structure of value orientations of different university communities. If the version of each academic values considered as self-sufficient in its counterfactuality subsystem of values, then one gets pluralistic academic values picture in which different versions of their interpretation partially complementary, but may partially be contradict one another. And counterfactual academic values may be supplemented by other counterfactual university values, such as institutional. Counterfactuality may have different directions and different levels of modalities – both for different communities within the university and for different universities.