Contribution of Professional Pedagogy to Decision-Making

The aim is to offer a contribution to the problem of decision-making in the world of the higher intellectual professions, considering the pedagogy as a paradigmatic profession in the social, caring, and helping field. Pedagogy is an ancient science and profession, like medicine and jurisprudence, as it is known. The professional practice, in the social field as in the health and in other fields, consists in reconnecting the complex phenomenology of each singular particular case to a more limited number of general cases, theories, or disciplinary casuistries. It is a question of making a diagnosis, in a broad sense of the term. For this procedure, both the positive inductivist approach, from many facts to the generalization, and the idealistic and deductive approach, from general a priori ideas to the particular, are obsolete. We then examine the pragmatistic concept of abduction and, more generally, the contributions of the most up-to-date methodology, just as it is applied in the practice of professionals.