William Perry

Perry studied exactly the readers this site is written for, and found that encountering contested knowledge produces failure modes as often as it produces growth.

Undergraduates arrive believing that knowledge is right answers held by authorities. What happens when that stops being true is not one thing.

The scheme

Perry interviewed Harvard and Radcliffe students across their years of study and mapped a sequence.

They begin in dualism: there are right answers, authorities have them, the job is to receive them. They move into multiplicity: on some questions the authorities disagree, so perhaps everyone has a right to an opinion. Then into relativism: knowledge is contextual, claims are argued for rather than announced, and even the authorities are arguing. Finally, and only some of them, into commitment within relativism: choosing a position and living by it while knowing it is not the only one available.

The part that matters here

Perry did not describe a road everyone walks. He documented what happens to the people who do not.

He named retreat, a return to dualism with fresh certainties and often with hostility toward whatever produced the doubt. He named temporizing, where a student pauses at a stage and stays there. And he named escape, a drift into detachment where relativism gets used as a reason to be responsible for nothing, since if everything is a perspective then nothing requires commitment.

Those are the two failure modes this site already worries about, found in undergraduates in 1970. Retreat is the reader who converts this material into a new hard certainty about who is to blame. Escape is the reader who becomes cynical and does nothing.

Why it changes the design

Commitment within relativism is the target, and Perry's finding is that it is not reached by adding information. It is reached by having to act on a position while knowing it is contestable. That is an argument for giving readers something to do rather than more to know.

Serious objections

• The sample was Harvard and Radcliffe students in the 1950s and 1960s, overwhelmingly male in the original interviews, and it is a considerable leap from there to a general account of intellectual development.
• Later researchers, including Belenky and colleagues in Women's Ways of Knowing, argued the scheme missed routes taken by people outside that population.
• Like all stage schemes it implies later is better, and the endpoint closely resembles the disposition of the liberal academy that produced it.
• The evidence is interview-based and interpreted by the researcher, with the usual risks that brings.