- Winter 2021
Additional Details:
The knowledge produced by the sciences ranks among humankind’s greatest achievements. In this course, we will examine these achievements in order to better understand what science is and how it works. We will consider questions such as: What are scientific theories, and how are they discovered and justified? How does scientific knowledge change over time? What distinguishes science from pseudoscience? What are scientific experiments good for? What role, if any, should value judgments play in science? Do we have good reason to believe our best current scientific theories are true? Students who take this course will be exposed to a variety of views on each of these topics, and will be trained to evaluate them and to develop and defend their own views. Students will leave the course prepared to engage with science both as citizens of a science-dominated world and, where relevant, as scientists themselves.