Philosophy 303 - Principles of Inquiry: Ways of Knowing

Assignment #2

Beginning to Develop Some Principles of Inquiry
(largely by reflecting on some common sources of confusion and error)

Reading for this assignment:

  1. Chapters 1, 2, and 5 of How to Think About Weird Things (pp.1-34 and 101-162) (It would not be a terrible thing, from my point of view, if you skipped some of the examples of “weird things” described on pages 6-13 and in the ‘breakout boxes’ in Chapter 2 – for example, the box on p.25 discussing quantum mechanics and ESP.  The authors offer a lot of examples and illustrations in this book, and you may not be that interested in all of them.  The important thing, from my point of view is to make sure that you understand the principles of inquiry that they are articulating.)
  2. “Relativism and the Constructive Aspects of Perception” by Chris Swoyer, online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement1.html (Note: for now, we are primarily interested in the constructive aspects of perception and the consequences they have for inquiry.  We’ll come back later to the issue of relativism. I include this brief piece in this assignment because it offers some further illustrations and elaborations of the claim made in Chapter 5 of Weird Things, that what we perceive is actively constructed, not passively received, by our minds.)
  3. Chapter 1 in Contemporary Philosophy of Social Science (pp.9-29).
  4. Optional extras (not required reading): 
    1. Part of the work by Segal, Campbell, and Herscovitz on cultural differences in visual perception (mentioned by Swoyer) is online at:  http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/socialperception14.pdf
    2. There’s a great collection of visual illusions online at http://www.wyrmcorp.com/galleries/illusions/index.shtml  It includes clearer examples of some of the illusions discussed by Swoyer, but many others as well.  Highly recommended.
Writing Assignment:
  1. Write out brief answers to the study questions at the end of Chapter 2 (on p.31) of How to Think About Weird Things. (There are five of them – I do not mean to include the “discussion questions” or the exercises headed “Evaluate these claims…”)
  2. According to Chapter 5 of How to Think About Weird Things, what are some of the ways that our personal experience can be misleading as a source of knowledge? (Write a page or two.)
  3. Schick and Vaughn focus their attention on people’s beliefs about various occult and ‘paranormal’ phenomena (“weird things”).  But they also say that the principles they are developing in their book should be applicable to thinking about other sorts of things.  So, how might some of the ideas in Chapter 5 (about the limitations of personal experience as a source of knowledge) apply to
    1. a person's beliefs about what sort of car is the most reliable
    2. a person's beliefs about politics and public affairs?
    3. Do you think that your own beliefs about these things (and your decisions about who to vote for) might be at least partly the product of some of the unreliable processes described in Chapter 5?  (Write a page or two; be as specific as you can.)
  4. The title of Brian Fay’s chapter 1 asks, “Do you have to be one to know one?”  The answer seems to be, “No, you don’t.”  Why not?  Your answer should be a page or two long and should include some discussion of the following: 
    1. The different things that might be meant by “knowing;”
    2. The reasons Fay gives for his preferred interpretation of that term;
    3. His reasons for saying that others may know us better than we know ourselves; and, finally,
    4. The sense in which the claim he is rejecting does contain a (limited) kernel of truth.