Summative judgments cannot be overridden. A startling conclusion we can draw is that some kinds of learning are not caused in any scientific sense of cause. What we might give up on is accepting traditional defeasible ascriptions of learning as anything more rough approximations of what we are looking for. If we really want to do a summative causal analysis, a new language of learning outcomes may have to be developed. This is a task which remains to be seriously undertaken.
Teaching is truly an enterprise of inquiry.
We should note here that the less explicit the procedures for rendering the judgments of learning, the more defeasible such judgments likely are. Certainly, there will be more consensus on what it means to be five feet tall, than on what it means to be able to do quadratics or to be honest. What defeasibility seems to point out is that while we may not easily agree on what something is, we tend to agree on what it is not. Perhaps this is why criticism is more likely than praise in the political environment of the school. Figure TA 18.1 schematizes a range of learning outcomes as they depend on authority and defeasibility.