Beth A Barker

In this course, students will develop the skills they need to recognize and evaluate arguments, wherever they find them: journalistic media, social media, advertising, and even the arts. They¿ll do this by learning how to identify argument patterns, how to draw out implicit arguments, and how to avoid common mistakes in reasoning, both psychological and formal. Students will primarily learn through guided practice, and through the work of philosophers like Vaughn, Nguyen, and Setiya.

This course will cover questions like How do we know what we know? How can we tell what other people know, and how does bias prevent us from evaluating them fairly? Is it possible that we know nothing? Students will learn how to evaluate the views of ancient philosophers like Plato and contemporary philosophers like Gettier, Matheson, and Dotson. Students will also learn how to develop and defend their own answers to the questions about knowledge that matter most to them.