3. Metacognition. Kant’s epistemology suggests that we can know about the mind’s consciousness. For Kant there are two kinds of informative knowing: knowledge from experience (synthetic judgments aposteriori) and knowledge of the conditions of possibility of experience (synthetic judgments a prion). The focus on the cognitive aspects of knowledge creation has given us the concept of metacognition and also self-reflection. Metacognition is the ability to become conscious of our own mental faculties and operations and both this and the inherent self-reflection it involves draw on the capacity to abstract from what we experience. This ability to reflect on our mental activity has impacted on our development of reflective practice and metacognitive and subsequent theories of learning and adult development. The possibility of the subjective and the objective also informed eventual theories of cognitive­ development and theories of adult development. Kegan and Lahey (2003) have described in detail how in a range of workplace contexts we can build psychological space between our selves and our assumptions, thus moving them from subject to object. From a practical perspective, developing such metacognitive ability offers us an escape from automatism and prejudice.
4. lnterpretivism. The implications of Kant’s philosophy for coaching and for coaching research are far reaching. It is from Kant that we get the possibility of an interpretivist paradigm. Within the previous positivist paradigm, objectivity is the guiding principle and researchers are required to remain neutral in relation to what is being researched. This paradigm was based on Hume’, proposition that there is a world is ‘out there’ from which w, discover causal relationships and subsequently generalise from the particular results of our research to a larger population. Within the interpretivist paradigm the separation of ‘out there’ facts from the ‘in here’ subjectivity of the researcher is impossible. Knowledge is seen as something that is inherently constructed, rather than being the discovery of an independent, pre-existing reality. Thus the idea of causality is defined differently: in the interpretivist model, a causal relationship is simply one possible constructed explanation for particular aspects of the world. And so from Kant the possibility of constructed knowledge is born, together with an inevitable dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity. The effect of this concept on practice is seen more fully through the ideas of Dewey.

Impact of Dewey

Unlike earlier philosophers, who viewed thought as a something purely subjective within an individual, Dewey sees it as the product of interaction between us and our environments and posits that knowledge has a practical role to play in the guidance of that interaction. He uses the term instrumentalism to describe his approach.

Two key concepts embedded in the approach are continuity and interaction. ‘Continuity’ refers to the idea that each experience is stored and carried into the future, whether we like it or not; ‘interaction’ builds on the notion of continuity and explains how past experience interacts with the present situation to create our current experience. Current experience is understood as a function of our past (stored) experiences which interact with the present to create unique, individual experience. Dewey (1938) asserts that there is continuity in any inquiry (informal or formal) as the conclusions reached in one inquiry become the means and material for carrying on further inquiries. Extrapolating from this theory we can see how a disciplined reflection on our experience can result in increased intuition, a core tool of the experienced coach.