1.
An all-purpose suggestion: Critically evaluate
something we read (or one important claim or argument from one of the works we
read).
2.
Whether Descartes is right to think that he has
provided ‘valid and considered reasons’ to doubt all his former beliefs.
3.
Whether the possibility that we are living in the
Matrix is helpful to Descartes’ project of doubt.
4. Whether any of the ‘media watchdog’ groups we looked at have a legitimate conception of what ‘fair and balanced’ news coverage is.
5. Whether or not it is fair to characterize the mainstream media in the US as having a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ (or whatever) bias. (If you write about this, be sure to clarify what you mean by ‘bias’ and what sort of evidence you think is relevant to showing that it does or doesn’t exist.)
6. Whether Schick and Vaughan are right to discount personal experience as a source of knowledge.
7. Whether they are right to discount faith or mystical experience as a source of knowledge.
8. Whether they are right to reject coherence as a criterion of knowledge.
9. Whether they are fair in their discussion of one or more ‘weird things’.
10. Whether Brian Fay is right in arguing that you don’t have to ‘be one to know one’.
11. Whether Hume is right to say that there is no rational justification for our belief that the future will be like the past.
12. Explain and assess Kuhn’s concept of a ‘paradigm’ or his view of how scientific revolutions are resolved or his view about how science makes progress.
13. Discuss the extent to which science is the best or the only ‘way of knowing’.
14. Explain and assess the claim that there is a distinctively African (or Asian or Native American or …) way of knowing.
15.
Explain and assess the claim that there are ‘women’s ways
of knowing’.
16.
Whether Schick and Vaughan have succeeded in providing us
with a good set of ‘principles of inquiry’.
17.
Whether they are fair in their discussion of one or more
‘weird things’.
18.
Whether Brian Fay has succeeded in showing us how to face
up to the importance of cultural differences without falling into relativism.
19.
Whether he is right that social science needs to go beyond
people’s own ways of understanding what they do and why they do it.
20.
Whether relativism can be successfully defended against
the criticisms we have studied.
21.
What would be good principles of inquiry for ‘citizen’s
epistemology’?
22.
A case study: examining the evidence for a belief in a
‘weird thing’ or a belief about some matter relevant to one’s role as a
citizen.