Course Objectives

To introduce students to a variety of theories and arguments about the nature of human knowledge: about what knowledge is and how, if at all, it can be reliably acquired

To provide students with an opportunity to reflect on their own conceptions of knowledge and their own ways of seeking knowledge and evaluating knowledge claims

To learn and practice skills and methods that may be helpful in thinking about various sorts of knowledge claims and in becoming more careful and critical thinkers

To introduce students to some critiques of traditional ‘Western’ theories of knowledge -- critiques that raise questions about the role of class, culture and gender (or, more generally, social context) in human inquiry and that ask us to recognize the legitimacy of a variety of ‘ways of knowing’

Course Texts

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 website: I maintain a simple website where I post course handouts and information. The URL is www.woldww.net/classes

Class Blog: We will have an online discussion forum at: www.woldww.net/philoclass . This will be our approximation to class discussion and participation is required (details below). Students in this class will be able to author their own blog entries and to comment on those authored by others. Contact the instructor by email to receive login instructions and passwords.

Course Description

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’? What about the ideea 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 branch of philosophy known as ‘epistemology’ or the theory of knowledge.) 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 very 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 a blog: an online discussion forum. Participation in online 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.

Electronic discussion forum

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.

Criteria

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:

Ability to read and summarize the main points of analytical, abstract material such as Supreme Court decisions and academic journal articles;
Ability to tolerate and comprehend the longer and more complex sentence structures found in ‘serious’ writing;
Ability to include appropriate citations of quoted and paraphrased sources in your own writing;
Ability to construct short, analytical essays including stating and supporting a thesis, presenting and addressing objections to your thesis, and drawing conclusions.
Ability to edit written work well enough to eliminate most errors in grammar, punctuation and spelling.

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).

Course Policies

Rewriting

Students who are unhappy with the grade they receive on any written assignment for this class may rewrite it. 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.

Plagiarism

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. I will give a grade of ‘F’ to any student who submits plagiarized work for this course.