Possible paper topics
Principles of Inquiry: Ways of Knowing
The general requirement is that your topic should fall
within the scope of this course, i.e., it should address some philosophical
question about knowledge or inquiry.
Some suggestions:
- An all-purpose
suggestion: Critically evaluate something we read (or one important claim
or argument from one of the works we read).
- Criticize
or defend some version of foundationalism or coherentism.
- Criticize
or defend some version of relativism.
- Criticize
or defend some version of pragmatism.
- Try to
provide a successful analysis of “S knows that P” or of “S is justified in
believing that P.”
- Explain
and assess some reason for thinking that it is pointless or futile to do
what #5 above suggests.
- Try to
provide a list of useful ‘rules for the direction of the mind’.
- Explain
and assess some reasons for thinking that it is impossible to do what #7
above suggests.
- 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.
- Explain
and assess Haack’s ‘crossword puzzle model’ of inquiry.
- Explain
and assess the claim that there is a distinctively African (or Asian or …)
way of knowing.
- Explain
and assess the claim that there are ‘women’s ways of knowing’.
- Explain
and assess some version of the claim that science is social.
- Explain
and assess some reason (or reasons) for thinking that modern Western
epistemology is bankrupt.
- Explain
and assess some version of the idea that reality is socially constructed.
- Explain
and assess some version of the claim that epistemology is political or
social.