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.  If you have an idea for a topic, and you’re not sure it fits, ask me about it.

 

Some suggestions:

 

  1. An all-purpose suggestion: Critically evaluate something we read (or one important claim or argument from one of the works we read).  (This should probably be a chapter or an essay, not a whole book.)
  2. Criticize or defend some version of positivism or realism.
  3. Criticize or defend some version of empiricism or rationalism.
  4. Criticize or defend some version of relativism.
  5. Criticize or defend some version of perspectivism.
  6. Try to provide a successful analysis of “S knows that P” or of “S is justified in believing that P.”
  7. Explain and assess some reason for thinking that it is pointless or futile to do what #5 above suggests.
  8. Try to provide a list of useful ‘rules for the direction of the mind’.
  9. Explain and assess some reasons for thinking that it is impossible to do what #7 above suggests.
  10. 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.
  11. Discuss the extent to which science is the best or the only ‘way of knowing’.
  12. Explain and assess the claim that there is a distinctively African (or Asian or Native American or …) way of knowing.
  13. Explain and assess the claim that there are ‘women’s ways of knowing’.
  14. Explain and assess some version of the claim that science is social.
  15. Explain and assess some version of the claim that science is objective.
  16. Explain and assess some version of the claim that science is male.
  17. Explain and assess some reason (or reasons) for thinking that modern Western epistemology is bankrupt.
  18. Explain and assess some version of the idea that reality is socially constructed.
  19. Explain and assess some version of the claim that epistemology is political or social.