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 (and, of course, online booksellers):
How to Think About Weird Things (5th or 6th ed.) by Theodore Schick, Jr. and Lewis Vaughn
(Be sure to get the 5th or 6th edition. Earlier editions lack some material we will be using.)
Science, Truth, and Democracy by Phillip Kitcher
The Structure of Scientific
Revolutions (3rd ed.) 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
Discussion: We will have a variety of discussion forums in the class D2L site. Log in here:
https://metrostate.ims.mnscu.edu/shared/login.html
This will be our approximation to class
discussion and participation is required (details below).
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 idea 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? Part of
what we need is to understand better how our minds work and what errors they are
prone to. We will also think about how the mass media inform and misinform
us.
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 the online discussion
forum in D2L. 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.)
Another course-like feature: You will need to complete the seven unit
assignments on a schedule, roughly one every two weeks. This is necessary
for two reasons: First, unless we are all moving through the material at
about the same pace, it's hard to have a productive class discussion.
Second, in the past, when I have allowed students to work at their own
pace, too many have put off most of the work until nearly the end of the
semester. This led to my receiving too many poorly done assignments all at
once, and to too many students failing to finish the course. So plan on
working fairly steadily through the summer. I am willing to be somewhat
flexible about this (to accommodate vacations, travel, and so on), but I am not
willing to allow students to continue in the course who are not making
reasonable progress towards completing the work.
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. (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 writing assignment. All of these writing assignments must be completed to pass the course. As you complete each one, submit it to the D2L dropbox, and I will return it with a grade and some comments as soon as I can. 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, and check for spelling and grammar, before you submit it. These assignments will count for 70% of your grade for the course.
Electronic discussion forum
30% 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). These can be replies to posts by other students, or they can be your own posts, but they need to be substantive. “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. 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. I will let you know several times during the semester how I think you are doing on this assignment.
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
Incompletes
I will give incomplete grades only to students who have satisfactorily completed most of the course work and who are unable to finish on time because of circumstances beyond their control.
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.
Disability Services
Metropolitan State University offers reasonable accommodations to qualified students with documented disabilities. If you have a disability that may require accommodations it is essential that you be registered with the Disability Services Office. You may contact the Disability Services Office, at Founders Hall, Room 221, St. Paul Campus or (651) 793-1549, or email Disability.Services@metrostate.edu For additional information on Disability Services, please visit: http://www.metrostate.edu/msweb/pathway/academic_success/disability/index.html