Course Description

In this course we take up a particular subject—the character of human knowledge—and move ourselves from the style of inquiry about it characteristic of the humanities to that represented by the social sciences. We begin with the sort of skeptical challenges to our knowledge from thinkers like Rene Descartes and (especially) David Hume that have framed the modern tradition in philosophy, and then move on to consider what empirical research in the social sciences can contribute to our understanding of human knowledge. We will find that a number of classic findings of the social sciences make Hume's own response to skepticism look implausible, but they simultaneously reveal that the faculties we rely on in the acquisition of knowledge are systematically unreliable, misleading, and subject to deception in a myriad of ways we would never have anticipated and indeed find it difficult to believe even when they are experimentally demonstrated. We will then explore Thomas Kuhn's famous suggestion that the theories and methods we use to establish these empirical scientific results are themselves open to an important skeptical challenge. What we will discover in the end is that we cannot acquire any knowledge at all without making some assumptions about the nature of the world and the processes of inquiry, but empirical research into the social sciences has much to teach us about which assumptions are the ones we should and should not be willing to make.