Syllabus Instructor: Tom Atchison
Philosophy
303-01 3734 17th Ave. So.
Principles of
Inquiry: Ways of Knowing Minneapolis, MN 55407
Summer
Semester 2004 612-728-9421
tomatchison@bigfoot.com
The following books are available at
the Metro State Bookstore:
How to Think About Weird Things
by Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn
Contemporary
Philosophy of Social Science: A Multicultural Approach by Brian Fay
The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn
Further
materials (lots of them) will be available on the Web.
Class email list: Subscribe to the class email list by sending an email to: Philoclass-request@woldww.net. Put “subscribe” in the subject line. Send your request from the email account you want your class emails to go to. Or you can subscribe by going to the website: http://woldww.net/mailman/listinfo/philoclass_woldww.net
(Since I want this list to be restricted to class members, your subscription will not begin until I have a chance to approve your request.)
This course will raise and consider a number of questions about
knowledge: First, what is knowledge?
What is the difference between knowing that something is true and just
believing (or being of the opinion) that it is true?
Second,
What sorts of methods or modes of inquiry can reliably produce knowledge? This is closely related to another question:
how can knowledge claims be substantiated or justified? (If I claim to know something, and you
challenge my claim, what sort of evidence or argument must I produce in order
to show that I really do know what I claim to know?) Here we will need to consider whether there are various
methods for acquiring knowledge or whether instead there is really only one
method (perhaps something called “the scientific method”). Is science the only reliable ‘way of
knowing’, or are their others (faith or intuition or personal experience or
…?)? Should we accept claims that
non-Western cultures have distinctive ‘ways of knowing’? Or that there are (as a recent book title
suggests) ‘women’s ways of knowing’?
A
third question: How should we think
about the structure of human knowledge? How, that is, are the various
things we know related to one another?
One historically prominent idea is that we should think of knowledge as
being like a building – as having foundations.
The foundations would be basic in the sense that they would not
need any further justification, and all the rest of our knowledge would be
built up on these foundations. Is this
a good metaphor? If so, what sort of
knowledge claims could count as basic in the required sense? Lately, many philosophers have criticized
this metaphor and argued that no knowledge claims can be basic in the required
sense. These philosophers have
preferred to use the metaphor of a web wherein the strands offer each other
mutual support, but no one strand is basic.
If no beliefs are basic, though, does this mean that our knowledge as a
whole is unjustified?
These
questions are potentially quite abstract and theoretical (they are central to
the theory of knowledge or ‘epistemology’.)
But I want to treat them as practical questions, too. The world we live in is, in some ways, a
fairly confusing place. In the public
sphere of politics and the marketplace, as well as in our personal lives,
claims and counter-claims abound. Many
people claim to know one thing or another, and many others claim to know that
those claims are false or ill founded.
How can we sort through the spin and the propaganda and figure out
what’s really going on?
I
cannot promise we will answer any of these questions to your satisfaction. They are, for the most part, very difficult
questions. What we can hope to do is to
learn something about how various historical and contemporary thinkers have
answered them, and to become somewhat more careful and critical in our own
efforts to answer them.
A note on the
status of the textbooks:
In philosophy, unlike some subjects,
textbooks are to be argued with, criticized and challenged, not simply learned
or remembered. I would not have ordered
these books if I did not think that they had some merit, but the merit that I
think they have is that they are reasonably readable and provocative. I do not think that they are entirely
correct, right, true, or illuminating.
(And, even if I did think so, I would not expect students to agree or to
pretend that they did.)
Conduct of the Course
Although this course is listed as an independent study,
this is really a misnomer. It is a
web-based course. I will be trying to
provide more than just a series of assignments for you to complete entirely on
your own. I will be trying to create a
virtual classroom. The independent
study format threatens to deprive students of two things that are, in my view,
essential components of good philosophy instruction: dialogue with an instructor and dialogue with fellow
learners. I hope we can provide a
reasonable facsimile of these things by using an email list-serve. Participation in the class email discussion
is required. You will still have the
advantage of being able to read the contributions of others and compose your
own contributions at times of your own choosing, but I will require regular and
substantial participation in order to pass the course. (See below for details.)
In an ideal world (and if I were a different kind of
teacher), I would provide a substitute for lectures by writing extensive
explanations and posting them for you to read.
But I have never made a practice of lecturing, and my classroom
presentations are almost always improvised, not composed in advance. So I will try to replicate my classroom
tactics here in cyberspace -- that is, I will try to provoke a conversation,
and then intervene as seems appropriate.
I will also gladly answer emailed questions. I will normally want to send all the students a copy of the
question and my answer (just as if you had asked the question in the
classroom). So let me know if you want
me to keep your question and its answer private. Sometimes I may not answer your questions and instead try to steer
you to a way to answer them yourself. I
will also be steering you to some of the many excellent web pages that provide
explanations and background information relevant to the course topics. (There are links to some of these on my
website, and I add more frequently. I
also hope you will pass along any good web sites you find.)
Much of our discussion will focus on understanding and
evaluating the texts. This will work
well only if you have done the assigned reading carefully -- often twice or
three times -- and given it some thought.
In philosophy we are interested not in the information that can be
extracted from a text, nor simply in the conclusions or opinions that an author
expresses; we are primarily interested in understanding and assessing the reasoning
that an author uses to try to establish or support those conclusions. This requires a very careful sort of
reading. As an example of the kind of
reading I’m talking about, look at the guide to Descartes’ Meditations prepared
by Rae Langton: www.arts.ed.ac.uk/philosophy/study_html/vade_mecum/sections/section5/descart1.htm
(This is part of your first
reading/writing assignment.) Notice
that her guide to the first meditation is longer than the original, and that it
probes and challenges what Descartes is saying in a very detailed way. This may strike you as overkill, but it is
not! It is only through such careful
interpretation and testing that we can hope to make any progress in
philosophy. Otherwise we may be missing
important assumptions, sowing the seeds of later confusion by accepting
propositions we only half understand, and failing to perceive either the real
merits or the real weaknesses of an author’s work.
The point of reading these texts is
not only to understand what some great minds have produced. A guided tour through the Museum of Great
Ideas is a very good thing, but not the best thing that philosophy has to
offer. Better is the opportunity to
learn to think for yourself. The
readings provide models of careful and/or creative thinking, challenges to our
prejudices and assumptions, and starting points for our own reflections. But the only way to learn to philosophize is
to enter the conversation yourself. In
this way a course in philosophy is more like a course in drawing or sculpture
-- a studio art course -- than like a course in art history or art
appreciation. You can’t learn to draw
by just watching other people draw, and you can’t learn to do philosophy by
just listening and reading. You have to
express your views and expose them to other people’s critical reactions.
Assignments and Grading
Reading/writing assignments
The course will
be divided into 7 units, each corresponding to two week’s work for a
class. Each unit will consist of a
reading assignment, study questions and explanatory materials to help with
understanding and assessing the reading, and a brief writing assignment. All of these writing assignments must be
completed to pass the course. As you complete
each one, email it to me, and I will send you the next one along with a grade
and some comments on the one you sent me.
I will not have time to make these comments very extensive, but I want
you to have some feedback on each assignment before you write the next. I will be looking for evidence that you
have read carefully and given the material some thought. These assignments do not require the formal
apparatus of an academic paper (footnotes, cover page, bibliography,
etc.). I recommend that you compose
your writing in a word processor, check for spelling and grammar, and then, if
it is in a format I can read (like Microsoft Word, or RTF) attach it to an
email, otherwise, paste it into the email.
These assignments will count for 50% of your grade for the course.
25% of your grade will be determined by my evaluation of
the quality of your participation in on-line class discussion. The minimum requirement here is to post one
substantive comment or well-developed question per week (two per unit). Just
showing up and saying something earns a C for this component; occasionally
making helpful contributions earns a B; regularly making helpful contributions
earns an A. Helpful contributions
include: asking pertinent questions, answering questions asked by the
instructor or by other students, expressing your views about the texts or
topics we are discussing, responding (relevantly and respectfully) to the views
expressed by others. “Substantive” here
means that you are saying something reasonably specific and well thought out –
something on the order of a meaty paragraph (as opposed to a quick
one-liner.) Shorter comments and
questions are also encouraged, but will not satisfy the ‘substantive comment’
requirement. I will let you know
several times during the semester how I think you are doing on this assignment.
Position Paper
A 6-10 page (typed, double-spaced, standard font size)
paper will be due at the end of the semester.
A position paper is a paper in which you articulate and support a
position or thesis. Your paper may be
on any topic reasonably connected to the course subject matter. Detailed instructions will be provided. You will need to submit and get feedback on
at least one draft of your paper before you submit the final version. The paper
will count for 25% of your grade.
I try hard to base my evaluation of your work on your
understanding of the reading, the quality of your reasoning and questioning,
and the clarity and effectiveness of your expression of your thoughts, not
on whether I agree with your philosophical theories, ideas, or opinions.
Time
commitment
According Metropolitan State
University guidelines, students in a four credit semester course should spend 3
hours and 20 minutes in class each week for 15 weeks and should do 2-3 hours of
work outside of class for each hour in class. That adds up to 50 hours of class
time and 100-150 hours of homework time.
So I’m a figuring that a student in this independent study can expect to
put in 150-200 hours of work on the assignments over the course of the
summer.
Needed
reading and writing skills
Although there are no prerequisites
for this course, it is an upper-division course, designed for students who can
read and write English at the college level.
This means I assume you have the following reading and writing skills,
and assignments are made with this expectation in mind:
These abilities are part of what I understand by “able to read and write at the college level.” There is (or should be) no shame in lacking this set of skills. But this course is not the right place to acquire them (though it certainly is a good place to polish and improve them).
Rewriting
Students who are unhappy with the
grade they receive on any written assignment for this class may rewrite
it. (This policy does not apply to the
final exam.) If you choose to rewrite
an assignment, turn in the original version along with your revised version and
mark or otherwise indicate which sections have been altered. I am very unlikely to raise a grade by more
than one letter grade.
All work submitted for this course must be your own. Plagiarism is the academic ‘sin’ of presenting someone else’s work as your own. It is plagiarism if you copy something verbatim (word for word) from a published source, from the Internet, or from another student. It is still plagiarism if you rearrange, paraphrase, condense, or summarize someone else’s work without making clear to your reader what is your contribution and what is taken from your source. If the exact wording comes from your source, then use quotation marks. If the idea comes from someone else, give him or her credit for it. The way to do this is to cite your sources. There is a clear and detailed explanation of various forms of plagiarism and of proper citation practices at http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/02-1/plagiarism.html. There is a brief discussion of plagiarism in the conduct code section of the University’s Student Handbook at http://www.metrostate.edu/studaff/context.htm#conduct. Scroll down to the end of the document for the section on plagiarism. I will give a grade of ‘F’ to any student who submits plagiarized work for this course.