PHIL 1250: Reasoning and Rational Decision-Making
Revising the Design of PHIL 1250 for Communication (CM) Designation
PHIL 1250's revision is significant for two primary reasons: a) It was one of the first courses to go through the curricular process for the new Communication (CM) Gen Ed Designation, and b) its attention to scientific reasoning came right out of my sabbatical work.
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a) PHIL 1250 as Communication (CM) If I am not mistaken, PHIL 1250 was one of (if not the) first course to go through the Gen Ed curriculum process for the new CM designation. The CM designation was the product of a multi-year gen ed reform project filled with promise and pitfalls of equal measure. As I prepared the PHIL 1250 CCO and materials, I wanted to make sure that there was no possible question in anyone's mind about this course being an exemplar of both the CM designation and of high quality CCO documentation. Particularly because the Gen Ed committee had opted to remove the phrase "and Argumentation" from the original name of the proposed designation (Comm and Argumentation), and because Suzanne (and I, though I was on sabbatical) found
ourselves pushing back against other members of the CM task force who seemed to be defining Argumentation as merely a subset of communication (and foreseeing some issues down the line in that regard), I felt it super important to establish a firm precedent. You can see from this Gen Ed Rationale how carefully I (over)argued for the CM status of PHIL 1250.
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The good news is that this course now is one of seven-ish courses that fills the CM designation on our campus.
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b) PHIL 1250 and Scientific Reasoning
The revision of PHIL 1250 was one of the more concrete "deliverables" from my 20162017 Sabbatical Project. The third area of focus for the sabbatical related to scientific literacy and how to best bring in philosophical analysis and understandings of scientific reasoning (particularly as it appears in the public sphere). To that end, I met with science faculty across the college to determine our institutional needs and opportunities. And settled on PHIL 1250 as the most promising course on which to hone in.
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This redesigned reasoning/argumentation class would offer a thematic focus on topics in philosophy of science, particularly regarding the Development of Scientific Methodology and the epistemological foundation and force of scientific claims:
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Development of Scientific Methodology (Deductivism, Inductivism, Falsificationism, Underdetermination of theory by evidence, Embeddedness of theory in conceptual structures, the fundamentality of mathematics, etc.);
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Epistemological force of scientific claims, and its challenges (epistemic relativism, science and pseudoscience, science in the political sphere)
While don't want to go into too much detail here, since the whole report (all the reflection, research-based proposals, interviews and all) is available on the
Professional Activity Section's subpage, "Scholarly and Pedagogical Work," I would like to note that I met several time with our two adjunct faculty who most often pick up sections of the course, Greg Spendlove and Jeff Wood, as we discussed course structure and content (particularly on scientific reasoning, which they are both well-versed in), and selected our textbook. It is also worth noting, that the textbook isn't working as well as we had hoped (I am not teaching the course this year, so am basing this claim on my conversations with the other profs). I will be meeting them in April to assess and plan next steps.
One last thing, in case you want to see some cool stuff: I also created Spotlight assignment (see Teaching Delivery page for more on those) for PHIL 1250. These spotlights were designed to allow students to explore the types of reasoning they see in their own majors, spheres, or in media/public. There were a few different kinds I designed: one on "field reasoning," one on "fallacies," and more. Here are a couple of great examples of student work:
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(well, actually, this one also functioned as this students' fallacy study guide...each item in the drawing corresponds to a fallacy we had covered in class....some of this pic is pretty clever, and all of it is fun).
