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:
- 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.)
- Criticize
or defend some version of positivism or realism.
- Criticize
or defend some version of empiricism or rationalism.
- Criticize
or defend some version of relativism.
- Criticize
or defend some version of perspectivism.
- 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.
- Discuss
the extent to which science is the best or the only ‘way of knowing’.
- Explain
and assess the claim that there is a distinctively African (or Asian or Native
American 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 version of the claim that science is objective.
- Explain
and assess some version of the claim that science is male.
- 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.