Teacher's Guide - Class Planning Guide

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The Contract
Part 1 - [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] | Part 2 - [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] | Part 3 - [12[13] [14] [15]

Important NOTE about chapters 10 and 11

These two chapters together end Part II. They contain much more material than you are likely to want to cover, so you will have to make real choices about what to leave out. Chapter 10 contains two independent sub-sequences of sections: 10.3 to 10.6 on knowledge of other minds, and 10.12 to 10.14 on the philosophy of science. You probably will have to completely skip one of these. And if you cover only the core of this chapter - though I'd recommend stirring in at least 10.3 and one of the sections rehearsing it also - then you can fuse this chapter and chapter 11 into a last part of your course.

Chapter 10 - Comments on Sections

10.1 The distinction here is important, easily grasped, and enlightening. Another way it is expressed in the literature is as a contrast between fear of error - having false beliefs - and fear of ignorance - lacking true beliefs (particularly of some desirable kinds). You could get a quite abstract discussion going with fairly sophisticated students by asking under what conditions the search for accuracy - fear of error - will satisfy the need for informativeness - fear of ignorance - as a by-product. Once those conditions are stated they are seen to be unrealistic, and a hidden premise of traditional epistemology begins to wobble.

10.2 The question behind the activity is: when trying to find out interesting things about other people, must you inevitably take a risk that some of what you learn will be wrong? If you play it completely safe, will there be much of a pay-off? Good answers to the questions at the end of the section could be very varied, but I had the following sorts of things in mind. If you take no risks you are likely to learn only about people's patterns of behavior. You are likely not to learn much about the causes of their behavior or their feelings. A more adventurous and informative method may tell you these things, but at the price of exposing you to deception and psychobabble. If the people around you are dishonest you might be best off being curious about what they do and not why they do it.

10.4 (i)(a), (ii)(b), (iv)(a); (iii) can go either way. It is an (a) case if "you" have had such an experience, a (b) case otherwise. It is interesting that the attribution could be made by someone who had no such personal experience. (The example is based on an incident in which I broke a long non-running interval with a four-mile run ending with a very steep climb up to my house. As I was sitting on my doorstep, panting, my neighbor, a normally undemonstrative man, saw me and put his arm around me, overcome by the impression that I was in some great distress.) (v)(c), (vi)(d), (vii)(d). One point of (vii) is that "you" are unlikely to form the false conclusion that the argument from analogy indicates, suggesting that we have other bases for our beliefs about one another. I think these are easy questions, and the pay-off should come in the discussion they prompt.

10.6 I'd take the answers (a)(ii), (b)(ii) or (iv), (c)(i), (d)(iv), (e)(i), (f)(ii) to be the natural ones, but students may come up with interesting defenses of other answers. From the answers you should be able to see if the class is generally inclined to give a high estimate of our capacity to know about ourselves or is skeptical about self-knowledge. If the first then you should try to undermine it, by stressing all the patterns of self-deception (12.9 and 12.10 may give you some materials). If the second then you should try to argue that if there were not some reliable core in what people say about themselves then we'd never begin to understand one another.

10.8 I'd say: (1)-terrible-(iii)(iv)(v), (2)-weak/terrible-(ii)(iii)(v), (3)-terrible-(i)(iv)(vi), (4)-weak-(iv), (5)-good. (2) and (3) are explanations that might have been more convincing to people in other cultures; so are we being parochial in thinking of them as very weak? (4) is a famous example: the laws of optics and the arrangement of the solar system and the tower entail that the path of the sun will always track the shadow of the tower. So why does the explanation seem to have it backwards?

If doing this activity with a single group the examples may stand on their own - especially if you have worked through your answers to the questions - to provoke a discussion of what explains what. And of what explaining what is grounds for believing: what (1) could support a belief that human life must end, (2) that eclipses are harmless, (3) that there are likely to be five most serious diseases, (4) that the sun will stop rising when the tower is pulled down, (5) that if you heat the pipe the water will flow hot from the beginning? How reasonable are these beliefs? (How strong are the reasons these "explanations" give for them?)

10.9 I'd react to the argument with (a), (b), (e), but my reactions are based on some personal standpoints. All of (i) to (v) can be backed up by the problems with the argument; I think (ii) is the best supported and most worrying; (iii) is clearly true if we take "show" in a strong way, as meaning to establish beyond a doubt. But you should invite the class to defend any of (i) to (v) as all are defensible. I think that, although this is not an essential section in terms of the structure of most courses, it is likely to be a lively and stimulating one to work through. (e) is a point to dwell on particularly: it is part of a sophisticated modern point of view that some things have no explanations, including things which it was the aim of many past beliefs to make sense of. (Why do some people have all the luck?)

10.10 (a), (b), (c), (e), (g). Of course, the interest lies in the reasons why these arise.

10.12 None of the answers is uncontroversial, but mine would be (i) in principle falsifiable, unscientific; (ii) falsifiable, scientific; (iii) falsifiable, scientific; (iv) not falsifiable, not scientific; (v) not falsifiable, not scientific; (vi) not easily falsifiable, scientific; (vii) falsifiable with difficulty, scientific; (viii) falsifiable, unscientific. I've stuck in qualifications in deference to obviously controversial issues. The most controversial are (i) for which I would argue that the claim that actions are caused by beliefs, desires, and emotions is potentially falsifiable, and (vi) for which it is true that one can always postulate a new form of energy to account for some apparent violation of the conservation law, but it may be scientifically not very appropriate. As for (1) to (4) at the end of the section, in a class the best thing would be just to find out which members of the class subscribe to which ones and to note correlations with the intuitions about falsifiability evoked by (i) to (vi), and use this to identify differences of attitude to be argued out.

10.14 In order to work through this in class, it would have to have been read, and digested, in advance. The class should write out brief answers to (1) to (4), (a) to (e), and (i) to (iii), and then in class you could discuss the relevance of these answers to the five features of science listed at the end of the section.

There is no specific test for chapter 10, as different courses are likely to use such different sections. After chapter 11 there is a combined list of questions on chapters 10 and 11, which you can draw from in making your own test.