| Course: | Social Science Honors Sequence I |
| Name: | Naturalized Epistemology and the Social Sciences |
| Description: | In this course we will examine the nature, extent, and justification
of human knowledge. We will be particularly interested in what has come
to be called Œnaturalized epistemology¹. This view holds that we can do
no better in trying to justify any of our beliefs than to begin from the
best scientific account we have of ourselves and our place in the natural
world. Such an approach assigns an especially significant role to the social
sciences in understanding human knowledge: it is these fields, after all,
which claim to provide us with scientific knowledge about human behavior,
including our dispositions to form, revise, and assess beliefs. But naturalized
epistemology also faces an obvious challenge, in that it begins the project
of trying to justify what we think we know by taking for granted some of
the very knowledge we ultimately hope to defend, and therefore seems to
run the risk of vicious circularity. We will begin by examining one of the very earliest naturalistic proposals: that of David Hume, who argues in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding that there simply is no satisfying response to the skeptic¹s challenge to us to justify what we think we know and that the most we can do in understanding the nature of justification is to discover how and when human beings actually do form, revise, and accept beliefs of various kinds. But classic and contemporary experimental research in the social sciences poses a challenge for Hume¹s claim, insofar as part of what they have uncovered is the many ways in which human beings seem to be reliably and systematically irrational or unjustified when it comes to forming or accepting beliefs. We will review some of these experimental findings and explore the challenge they pose to Hume¹s approach: if we can come to decide that our actual practices of belief formation are irrational, there must be something more to rational justification than mere conformity to these practices. Perhaps the most natural reply to this challenge is to suggest that we can only judge some of our actual practices of belief formation and revision to be irrational when we find that they conflict with other such practices that, upon reflection, we prefer. If so, it would seem to be the practices of science itself that trump all others when it comes to rational justification: perhaps we reject other ways of forming beliefs when they conflict with the methods or results of scientific inquiry. But this response faces yet a further challenge, once again from the social sciences themselves: recently influential thinkers have argued that the replacement of one scientific theory or set of beliefs by another is itself a process that is not (or not fully) determined by reason and evidence. We will read Thomas Kuhn¹s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and seek to assess his widely influential claims that the history of science consists of a succession of radically different Œparadigms¹, each superior on its own terms to its predecessors and successors and separated from all others by revolutionary changes that doom to failure any possibility of objective comparison, and that the transitions between them must therefore be mediated by human psychological and sociological idiosyncrasies rather than any genuinely rational evaluation of their merits. The course will conclude by examining a particular instance of radical change in theoretical science‹the quantum mechanical revolution‹and by asking whether Kuhn¹s account of scientific revolutions offers a convincing account of this episode or not. Schedule (All readings besides Hume and Kuhn are available in a Coursepacket from Anteater Publishing available at the University Bookstore) Week 1: Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Ch. I-III Week 2: Hume, Enquiry, Ch. IV-V Week 3: Hume, Enquiry, Ch. VI-XII Week 4: I. Hoffman, Visual Intelligence, Ch. 5: The Day the Color Drained Away. II. Loftus, ³Make My Memory: How Advertising Can Change Our Memories of the Past²; Loftus, ³Our Changeable Memories: Legal and Practical Implications² Week 5: I. Maier, ³Reasoning in Humans²¹; Nisbett and Wilson, ³Telling More Than We Can Know². II. Midterm Examination. Week 6: I. Festinger and Carlsmith, ³Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance²; Aronson, ³The Theory of Cognitive Dissonance: The Evolution and Vicissitudes of an Idea². II. Vos Savant, ³Ask Marilyn² columns from 9/9/90, 12/2/90, 2/17/91, and 7/7/91; Stich, ³Could Man Be An Irrational Animal?² Week 7: Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Preface & Chs. I-VI. Week 8: Kuhn, SSR, Chs. VII-X. Week 9: Kuhn, SSR, Chs. XI-XIII and Postscript. Week 10: Albert, Quantum Mechanics and Experience, pp. 1-47. All reading should be completed before lecture. Grades will be determined by one midterm, one final examination (cumulative), and participation in section. Each examination will involve answering ten essay-style questions and will have equal weight in the final grade. The examinations will allow for some flexibility in which questions one answers. A list of study questions will be made available before each of the examinations. There is no direct penalty for not participating in section discussions, but consistent, active, smart participation can improve one¹s course grade (the grade after averaging the two exam grades) by as much as one-half letter grade). |