Goal
Students will confront the problems with verifying any statement. Ideally, they will also come up with frameworks for evaluating statements’ comparative strength and for navigating epistemological uncertainty.
Learning Tools
index cards
(if bored: selective attention test)
Lesson Plan
in two groups, each assisted by Olivia or Ryan if needed, four things on index cards:
- a true statement
- why we know it’s true
- a false statement
- why we know it’s false
- (for assistance here, will have O or R do something in the moment, e.g. drop a pen, show that we have a red pen, say that the sky is blue)
have an exchange in which each group demonstrates possible exceptions to the other group’s justification.
- how do you know the sky is blue if we can’t see the sky from inside Medford High?
- why do you believe the evidence of your eyes and ears?
- if _____ fact was told to you / seemed to happen in front of you, would you still assume it to be true? why might you not assume it to be true?
establish: there are some things that def seem to have truth value, but our access to truth value is limited.
- establish types of ways that we attempt to get at the truth
ask their ideas about what we should do about epistemology; esp. as this was helpful for generating new thought experiments / proposals last time
Additional Questions
direct observation
- how do you know that what you observe is actually what is happening?
- how do you know that the conclusion you’re drawing from the observation is appropriate?
hearsay
- how do you know that what has been told to you is true?
- are there better and worse hearsays?
authority
- on what does authority rest?
- should you assume that authorities are telling you the truth? (e.g. CIA)
givens
- relativism / truth of the time / Plato’s Cave: why do you assume that our baseline givens are in any way related to capital-T Truth?
Internal Resources
Stephen Miller (Marist), “Truth, Lies, and Bullshit.” PLATO Toolkit. Web.
Peter Warrington and Baker Renneckar (UNC), “Lesson Plan XI.” P4C Lesson Plans. Web.
External Bibliography
Plato, start with the cave
Kant, 1st critique antinomies
In the group discussion we had two students who did most of the discussion. In the future I would set a maximum each student can speak–everyone has to speak once before someone can speak twice.