You can find the final exam study guide here

You can find Smith's grading scale here

You can find the paper assignment here

You can find the full syllabus here

You can find the midterm exam study guide here

You can find quiz section materials for Section AD/AF : here

Schedule of Topics and Readings:

Note:  Particular authors appear on the syllabus not because the instructor necessarily endorses them but because they are relevant to the course. Some of the readings, videos, and podcasts may change as the quarter moves forward. You will always receive notice of any changes at least one class session in advance.

 

Tuesday, March 31  Introduction to the class (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Van Jones is an author, political commentator, and criminal-justice reform advocate. In the clip we are watching, he makes the case that students should not be protected in college from ideas they find ideologically objectionable.

Van Jones, Safe Spaces on College Campuses, 2017, watch  (transcript here)

2. The Economist is perhaps best described as a weekly newsmagazine with a classically liberal orientation. The article here surveys the prominence of conspiracy theories around the world.

The Economist, It's All Connected, Man; Conspiracy Theories, 2021, read

3. danah boyd, who prefers lower-case letters for her name, is a scholar of communication. Her piece here reflects on what happens, in an individualistic culture with high levels of cynicism, when students are taught to carefully scrutinize media sources.

danah boyd, Did Media Literacy Backfire?, 2017, read

4. Ryan Long is a comedian, and his video clip is obviously a parody. Underlying it are substantive points about the difficulty of finding truth and the recent failures of our truth-seeking institutions.

Ryan Long, I Joined the Disinformation Governance Board, 2022, watch (transcript here)

5. Kendra Cherry is an author and educator. She makes the case here for cultivating a dispositional quality that can improve a person's ability to discern what's true.

Kendra Cherry, How To Be Open-Minded and Why It Matters, 2026, read

 

Part I:  Premodern, Modern, and Postmodern Approaches to Truth

 

Thursday, April 2  Premodern approaches to truth (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Thomas Aquinas was arguably the most influential medieval Christian theologian. We will read an excerpt from his explanation of blasphemy--a concept that makes sense within a premodern approach to truth, but not a modern or postmodern approach.

Thomas Aquinas, The Sin of Blasphemy, 1269 (approximately), read

2. Pope Pius IX served during a time of great transition, when the Catholic Church was grappling with the spread of ideas such as secularism, rationalism, religious pluralism, and the separation of church and state. As you'll see, he rejected them from within what could broadly be considered a premodern approach to truth. 

Pope Pius IX, Syllabus of Errors, 1864.  Focus on #s 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 18, 21, 55, 77, 78, and 80, and remember that these are propositions Pope Pius IX is condemning, read

3. Answers in Genesis is a Christian apologetics organization. Based on a literal reading of the opening chapters of Genesis. the organization promotes young-earth Creationism (i.e., evolution is false, and God created human beings in their current form less than 10,000 years ago). The article we are reading gives their explanation for how we can know that the Bible is reliable and authoritative.

Answers in Genesis, Can We Prove the Bible is True?, 2011, read

4. Whereas conservative Protestants uphold the authority of the Bible alone, Catholics rely on both the Bible and Church tradition. Catholicism eventually came to include the doctrine of papal infallibility. The entry here from a Catholic apologetics website describes the doctrine and its limits.

Catholic Answers, Papal Infallibility, 2004, read

5. Tom Pennington is the lead pastor of a conservative evangelical church. In this sermon, he articulates a version of the premodern approach to truth while attacking the modern and especially the postmodern approaches. 

Tom Pennington, The Legacy of Absolute Truth, 2022, read or watch (take your pick)

 

Friday, April 3  Introduction to your Friday sections

 

Tuesday, April 7  Modern approaches to truth (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Steven Pinker is a cognitive scientist and public intellectual. He treats reason, conceived broadly, as the foundational method for finding truth and grounds it in the Enlightenment.

Steven Pinker, Reason Is Non-Negotiable, 2018, read

2. The Skeptics Society is a nonprofit organization devoted to promoting skepticism, defined in their video as "a provisional approach to claims. It's the application of the methods of science, and of reason, to any and all ideas--no sacred cows allowed."

Skeptics Society, What Is A Skeptic?, 2013, watch (transcript here)

3. Lee McIntyre is a philosopher. Drawing from his book, McIntyre in this interview contends that what distinguishes science is not a single “scientific method” but a particular attitude: the community-wide commitment to evidence, openness to new data, and the willingness to revise beliefs when evidence changes.

Lee McIntyre, The Case for Science, 2019, watch (transcript here)

4. Jonathan Zimmerman is a historian of education. He offers here a vigorous defense of free speech, a necessary precondition for the modern approach to truth to succeed.

Jonathan Zimmerman, Why Free Speech?, 2021, read

5. Julia Galef is a writer and speaker on subjects relating to rationality. She distinguishes here between what she calls "scout mindset," which is conducive to the search for truth, and the "soldier mindset," which is not.

Julia Galef, Why ‘Scout Mindset’ Is Crucial to Good Judgment, 2016, watch (transcript here)

6. Melanie Trecek-King is a biologist. She has written broadly on topics related to this course. Here, we will read her primer on identifying misinformation.

Melanie Trecek-King, A Life Preserver for Staying Afloat in a Sea of Misinformation, 2022, read

 

Wednesday, April 8

Acknowledgment of course policies due

 

Thursday, April 9  Postmodern approaches to truth (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Roland Barthes was a philosopher and literary theorist. He argues that the meaning of a text emerges not from the author's intentions but is constructed anew through each reader's interpretation.

Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, 1967, read

2. Reza Aslan is a scholar of religions. In this interview, he makes the postmodern move of saying that religious scriptures are just "words on a page" and mean whatever a receiving community thinks they mean.

Reza Aslan, interview on The Daily Show, 2015, watch (transcript here)

3. Jesse Singal is a journalist. In this interview, we hear more of Aslan's views, the most important of which (for our class) is his approach to religious scriptures.

Jesse Singal, Reza Aslan on What the New Atheists Get Wrong about Islam, 2014, read

4. Ross Douthat is a columnist for the New York Times. Postmodernism has traditionally been understood as a mainly left-wing phenomenon. Douthat explains how the challenges to experts and authorities in the writings of Michel Foucault, one of the most influential postmodernists, have recently come to be more appealing on the right.

Ross Douthat, How Michel Foucault Lost the Left and Won the Right, 2021, read

5. Nick Gillespie is the editor-at-large of Reason magazine. He argues that libertarianism has a natural affinity with postmodernism. 

Nick Gillespie, Postmodern Libertarianism, 2019, watch (transcript here)

 

Friday, April 10  Premodern and modern approaches to truth

 

Part II:  How Individuals Pursue Truth and the Ways They Can Fail

 

Tuesday, April 14  Fallacies and biases that undermine reasoning (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Melanie Tracek-King is a biologist. Here, she gives a quick overview of how thinking goes awry through fallacies in reasoning.

Melanie Trecek-King, Guide to the Most Common Logical Fallacies, 2023, read

2. Melanie Tracek-King's companion article describes some of the cognitive biases in how people process information and make decisions.

Melanie Trecek-King, Guide to the Most Common Cognitive Biases and Heuristics, 2023, read

3. Carol Tavris is a psychologist. She focuses much of her talk on cognitive dissonance, the discomfort people feel when their beliefs, attitudes, or actions conflict. They then become motivated to change their beliefs, reinterpret the situation, or justify their behavior in order to restore consistency.

Carol Tavris, Why We Believe—Long After We Shouldn’t, 2017, watch (transcript here)

4. Organizations now have unprecedented quantities of data and analytical tools. This article from The Economist observes that numbers can nevertheless create a false sense of objectivity that hides their limitations and biases. 

The Economist, Beware The Dangers of Data, 2025, read

5. David Robson is a journalist. In this interview based on his book, he argues that rather than protecting people from poor reasoning, high intelligence and education can actually make individuals better at rationalizing mistakes or defending flawed beliefs. He concludes that intellectual humility, critical-thinking habits, and awareness of bias are more reliable safeguards against poor judgment.

David Robson, The Intelligence Trap, interviewed on The Middle Way Society, 2019, watch or listen (transcript here)

 

Thursday, April 16  Flaws in intuition (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Melanie Tracek-King is the biologist who we have met several times before on the syllabus. She argues that while intuition can be useful for quick judgments, it is often unreliable and must be checked against evidence-based reasoning and scientific thinking.

Melanie Trecek-King, Should You Trust Your Intuition?, 2023, read

2. Laurie Santos is a psychologist. In the video we are watching, she argues that the same systematic biases that shape human decision-making also appear in primates, suggesting that our irrational tendencies are deeply rooted in evolutionary cognition rather than being uniquely human cultural flaws.

Laurie Santos, How Monkeys Mirror Human Irrationality, 2010, watch

3. Charles Wheelan is a journalist and author. Here and in his books, he explains explains how people routinely misjudge risk and uncertainty by misunderstanding randomness, independence, and conditional probability.

Charles Wheelan, Common Probability Errors to Avoid, 2012, read

4. Dan Williams is a philosopher. In the piece we are reading, he argues that misinformation sometimes emerges from prestigious institutions with a generally progressive orientation, such as universities, nonprofits, and legacy media.

Dan Williams, On Highbrow Misinformation, 2025, read

 

Friday, April 17  Fallacies and biases; flaws in intuition

 

Tuesday, April 21  Flaws in perception and memory (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Daniel Simons is a psychologist. In his talk, he explains that our visual perception feels complete and accurate, but is in fact highly selective and often leads us to confidently miss important details in our environment.

Daniel Simons, Seeing the World As It Isn’t, 2011, watch

2. Melanie Tracek-King, the biologist, explains that the anecdotal quality of personal experience can mislead us about phenomena in the world.

Melanie Trecek-King, Four Ways Your Personal Experiences Can Lead You Astray, 2023, read

3. Elizabeth Loftus is a psychologist. She is one of the most highly cited researchers on the ways in which memory can be distorted and mistaken.

Elizabeth Loftus, How Reliable Is Your Memory, 2013, watch

4. Jennifer Say, a former Olympic gymnast, is now a writer and documentary filmmaker. She argues here for a position that we will grapple with all quarter: namely, that you should decide for yourself on important questions and do your own research.

Jennifer Sey, Doctor’s Orders, 2022, read

5. Melanie Tracek-King, the biologist who we have been regularly reading, argues a position directly opposite to Jennifer Sey.

Melanie Trecek-King, The Problem with Doing Your Own Research, 2021, read

 

Thursday, April 23 Origins and effects of political polarization (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Thomas Edsall is a longtime columnist for the New York Times who is conversant with research in political science and related disciplines. Here, he articulates the case for why we should be concerned with what he calls political sectarianism. Note his date of publication: after the 2020 election, but before the riot and attempted coup of January 6, 2021. Thus, his essay is eerily prescient.

Thomas Edsall, America, We Have a Problem: The Rise of ‘Political Sectarianism’ Is Putting Us All in Danger, 2020, read

2. Kat Rosenfield is a writer and novelist. Here, she describes her experience in navigating an increasingly polarized landscape for writers and intellectuals.

Kat Rosenfield, Why I Keep Getting Mistaken for a Conservative, 2022, read

3. Soumya Ram is a writer and educator. The short essay we are reading articulates her way of how to discover truth in an era of polarization.

Soumya Ram, Before We Can Address Polarization, We Need to Establish Basic Facts, 2023, read

4. John Hapin is a journalist. He makes the case here that widespread political dysfunction and misinformation stem less from voter ignorance than from distortions created by media ecosystems and institutional incentives that shape what citizens see and how politics operates.

John Halpin, Voters Aren’t the Problem: It’s the Media and Political Institutions, 2023, read

5. Liliana Mason is a political scientist. The interview here, based on her book, argues that political polarization arises from what she calls the "stacking" of different identities. As a result, when one aspect of a person loses politically, other aspects of the person also lose.

Lilliana Mason, Uncivil Agreement, interviewed by Russ Roberts on Econtalk, 2018, listen (transcript here)

6. In the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk in 2025, over 200 American mayors signed the following bipartisan statement. It condemns political violence and dehumanizing rhetoric while affirming pluralism, compromise, civility, and democratic persuasion as core civic values.

The Oklahoma City Declaration, 2025, read

 

Friday, April 24  Flaws in perception and memory; political polarization

 

Tuesday, April 28  Thinking in Groups: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly (lectures slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Tom Jacobs is a journalist. Here he interviews the primatologist and neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky, who talks about the biological mechanisms, which humans share with our primate relatives, that lead us to divide the world into in-groups and out-groups. 

Tom Jacobs, Why We Engage in Tribalism, Nationalism, and Scapegoating, 2018, read

2. Ezra Klein is a columnist for the New York Times who often incorporates ideas from political science into his writings. In this article, he writes about a study showing a particular form of motivated reasoning on political issues.

Ezra Klein, How Politics Makes Us Stupid, 2014, read

3. Yascha Mounk is a political scientist and the founder of Persuasion, a publication that aims to promote rigorous, good-faith debate across ideological lines in defense of liberal democratic values. He writes here about what happens when people define themselves as standing against whatever their opponents say and propose. As you are reading the piece, keep in mind that he wrote it in 2021, after Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

Yascha Mounk, The Perils of 180ism, 2021, read

4. Jerry Taylor is an environmentalist and policy analyst. In the piece we are reading, he writes about the limitations of ideologies, including the one he used to hold (libertarianism).

Jerry Taylor, The Alternative to Ideology, 2018, read

5. Hyrum Lewis is a historian. Based on the book he cowrote with his brother (political scientist Verlan Lewis), he argues in this article that the left-right ideological spectrum is incoherent.

Hyrum Lewis, Our Big Fight Over Nothing:  The Political Spectrum Does Not Exist, 2020, read

6. In the following article, the Lewis brothers give a short version of their book's main claims. They argue that the cluster of ideas called "left" and "right" have a social origin rather than representing an underlying unidimensional reality. 

Verlan Lewis and Hyrum Lewis, The Myth of Ideological Polarization, 2022, read

 

Thursday, April 30  The limits of individual rationality (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Robert Kurzban is a writer and psychologist. In this talk, he argues that hypocrisy is a natural byproduct of the mind’s evolved, modular structure. For Kurzban and other researchers working in his general area, we all contain competing mental systems that generate inconsistent beliefs and behaviors while presenting socially advantageous justifications.

Robert Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite, talk at The Amazing Meeting, 2014, watch

2. Hugo Mercier is a cognitive scientist. He argues that human reasoning evolved primarily not to discover truth but to produce and evaluate arguments that persuade others, which explains both our skill in debate and our biases when thinking alone.

Edge, The Argumentative Theory, A Conversation with Hugo Mercier, 2011, read

3. Scott Lilienfeld was a psychologist. He and his coauthors argued in this article that the skeptical movement should adopt intellectual humility—an awareness of one’s cognitive limits and biases—as a central guiding principle for evaluating evidence and reducing error in belief formation.

Scott Lilienfeld, et al., Intellectual Humility: A Guiding Principle for the Skeptical Movement?, 2020, read

4. William Deresiewicz is a writer and former English professor. He argues that healthy civic discourse requires moving beyond binary partisan "sides" toward more nuanced, independently reasoned "positions" that reflect careful thought and engagement with complexity.

William Deresiewicz, Take a Position, Not a Side, 2023, read

 

Friday, May 1  Tribalism and truth; individual rationality; course review for midterm exam

 

Tuesday, May 5  Midterm exam

 

Part III:  Truth-Seeking Institutions and their Limitations

 

Thursday, May 7  Experts and science (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. The UK's National Health Service is widely respected as an authority on medical questions. Here, we see its explanation of homeopathy, a system of alternative medicine based on the principle that a substance that would cause an ailment can also cure it, so long as it is highly diluted. Through these dilutions, it is common that no molecules of the original substance remain.

UK National Health Service, Homeopathy, 2024, read

2. Nikita Lalwani and Sam Winter-Levy are public policy analysts. They review here the book by political scientist Tom Nichols on why expertise has become less valued in American society, and with what effects.

Nikita Lalwani and Sam Winter-Levy, When Every Opinion Is as Good as Any Other: On “The Death of Expertise”, 2017, read

3. Naomi Oreskes is a geologist and historian of science. In this talk based on her book with the same title, she argues that science is trustworthy not because individual scientists are unbiased, but because the social processes of scientific communities—especially diverse, critical scrutiny—reliably produce more objective knowledge over time.

Naomi Oreskes, Why Trust Science?, talk at The Royal Institution, 2021, watch

4. Dan Williams is a philosopher. He argues here that AI has the potential to improve public opinion by helping identify, correct, and counteract misinformation at scale, thereby supporting more effective truth-seeking.

Dan Williams, How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion, 2026, read.

5. Martha McKinney is an academic physician and writer. Here, she reviews a book by the psychologists Barbara Hofer and Gale Sinatra. They argue that science denial arises from a mix of cognitive, motivational, and social influences—such as prior beliefs, identity, and misinformation—and can be mitigated through targeted educational and communication strategies that build understanding and trust in science.

Martha McKinney, review of Barbara Hofer and Gale Sinatra, Science Denial: Why It Happens and What to Do about It, 2022, read

 

Friday, May 8  Experts and science

 

Tuesday, May 12  Limitations of scientific institutions and practices (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Stuart Ritchie is a psychologist. In this talk based on his book, he argues that science often goes wrong due to systemic issues like bias, perverse incentives, and weak methods, but can be improved through reforms that increase transparency, rigor, and accountability.

Stuart Ritchie, When Science Goes Wrong, 2022, watch

2. Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist and health researcher. In some of his early research, which he summarizes here, his research team found that an alarmingly large number of commonly accepted medical practices have been overturned when they were systematically studied through the best available methods.

Vinay Prasad, A Decade of Reversal: An Analysis of 146 Contradicted Medical Practices, 2013, watch

3. The Babylon Bee is a conservative Christian satire site. In this parody, they depict the decision-making behind the U.S. government's original food pyramid in 1992. The 1992 food pyramid is now understood by a wide range of health researchers to have emerged through undue influence from industry, and to convey an unhealthy approach of highly processed carbohydrates as the base of the pyramid.

The Babylon Bee, How the Food Pyramid Was Created, 2025, watch

4. If you don't know who Mark Alan Smith is by now, you have probably been attending the wrong class. In this piece, Smith criticizes on scientific grounds the guidance on masking that public health authorities offered during the Covid pandemic.

Mark Alan Smith, Masking Uncertainty in Public Health, 2023, read

5. Paul Bloom is a psychologist. He considers himself to be part of the left but argues that progressives should apply the same skepticism to scientific findings that align with their values as they do to those that don’t, since bias, weak methods, and ideological incentives can distort research across the political spectrum.

Paul Bloom, Why Progressives Should Question Their Favorite Scientific Findings, 2024, read

6. Thomas Huddle is an academic physician. He reviews here a book by the legal scholars Jacob Russell and Dennis Patterson. They argue that when elites deploy expertise in ways perceived as partisan, self-serving, or dismissive of public concerns, they undermine trust in institutions and inadvertently fuel populist backlash.

Thomas Huddle, Just the Facts, 2026, read

 

Wednesday, May 13  Topic of paper due

 

Thursday, May 14  Universities and truth (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. The University of Chicago Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression argues "concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community." However, universities should "restrict expression that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the University."

University of Chicago, Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression, 2014, read

2. Since its founding in 1915, the American Association of University Professors has advocated for (a) academic freedom, and (b) the faculty role in the shared governance of universities. Its statement on professional ethics maintains that faculty must uphold intellectual honesty and academic integrity, respect students and colleagues, and exercise their academic freedom responsibly in teaching, research, and public engagement.

American Association of University Professors, Statement on Professional Ethics, 2009, read

3. Heterodox Academy is an organization, primarily comprised of university faculty, with a mission "to advance open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement across higher education." This report (just read the executive summary, not the full report) surveys the evidence on the political orientations of university faculty in the U.S.

Erin Shaw and Shiri Spitz Siddiqi, How Politically Diverse are University Faculty, 2026, read

4. Jon Shields, Yuval Aunus, and Stephanie Muravchik are, respectively, a political scientist, a philosopher, and a political scientist. Their analysis of a large collection of university syllabi college finds that professors typically assign a narrow, ideologically aligned set of readings on controversial topics, rarely pairing them with serious scholarly critics. Such moves, these authors argue, limits students’ exposure to genuine intellectual disagreement and produces a form of academic “monoculture.”

Jon Shields, Yuval Aunus, and Stephanie Muravchik, Professors Need To Diversify What They Teach, 2025, read

5. Lara Schwartz is a political scientist. She argues that “false equivalence” arises when universities treat all positions as if they deserve equal weight. She contends instead that responsible discourse in a classroom setting requires allocating time based on the extent to which a position has support within the relevant academic field.

Lara Schwartz, False Equivalence, interviewed by Chris Martin on Half Hour of Heterodoxy, 2019, listen

6. Musa al-Gharbi is a sociologist and communication scholar. He argues that many failures in truth-seeking and public discourse stem from deeply rooted human tendencies that lead individuals, especially educated elites such as university professors, to defend their beliefs rather than revise them in light of evidence.

Musa al-Gharbi, Human Nature is Our Problem, 2024, read

 

Friday, May 15  Limitations of scientific institutions and practices; universities and truth

 

Tuesday, May 19  Does (or can) the news media uncover truth, part 1 (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. The Society of Professional Journalists is the oldest organization in the U.S. representing journalists. Its 1926 Code of Ethics argues that journalists have a duty to pursue accuracy, fairness, independence, and public service while avoiding conflicts of interest, sensationalism, and deliberate distortion of the news.

Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics, 1926 version, read

2. In the 2014 version of its Code of Ethics, the Society of Professional Journalists states that journalists should seek truth and report it accurately while minimizing harm, acting independently, and remaining transparent and accountable to the public.

Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics, 2014 version, read

3. Wesley Lowery is a journalist who has written for many prestigious outlets. Lowery argues here that traditional journalistic notions of objectivity have often obscured structural biases and constrained honest reporting about race and power. He offers "moral clarity" as an alternative goal for journalists..

Wesley Lowery, A Reckoning over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists, 2020, read

4. Tara Henley is a journalist who spent the largest part of her career at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. She argues that journalism should preserve ideals of objectivity, open inquiry, and viewpoint diversity rather than allowing ideological conformity or activist pressures to narrow the range of acceptable debate.

Tara Henley, On Objectivity, 2022, read

 

Wednesday, May 20  One-paragraph abstract of paper due

 

Thursday, May 21 Does (or can) the news media uncover truth, part 2 (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Scott Alexander is a psychiatrist and writer. He argues that mainstream media outlets usually avoid outright falsehoods but sometimes mislead audiences through selective framing, omission, emphasis, and narrative construction. (There's no need to read the massive number of comments to his essay; just read the essay itself.)

Scott Alexander, The Media Very Rarely Lies, 2022, read

2. Craig Robertson is a communication scholar. He offers data across many countries showing that growing numbers of people are disengaging from news consumption. Robertson pins the causes on people finding the modern news media emotionally exhausting, overly negative, politically polarized, and increasingly untrustworthy.

Craig Robertson, People are Turning away from the News, 2025, read

3. The Onion is a satirical site. Here, they offer a fake article about a CNN meeting on the best way to stoke fear that day.

The Onion, CNN Holds Morning Meeting to Decide What Viewers Should Panic about for Rest of Day, 2014, read

4. Maureen Salamon is a journalist. She argues that excessive consumption of negative online news can worsen anxiety, stress, and feelings of helplessness, especially because digital platforms are designed to keep users continuously engaged with emotionally charged content.

Maureen Salamon, Doomscrolling Dangers, 2024, read

 

Friday, May 22  The news media

 

Tuesday, May 26  No class

 

Wednesday, May 27  Paper due, 11:59 PM

 

Thursday, May 28 Courts as venues for truth-seeking (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. The American Bar Association, the largest voluntary association of lawyers in the United States, sets professional standards, accredits law schools, promotes legal education and ethics, and advocates on issues related to the law and justice system. In its role for public outreach, the the American Bar Association here explains key features of how courts work in the U.S.

American Bar Association, How Courts Work, 2021. Read each of the short entries from “Diagram of How a Case Moves through the Courts” to “Appeals.”

 

Friday, May 29  Courts

 

Tuesday, June 2  Moral truths (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. EBSCO Information Services is a major provider of academic databases, journals, ebooks, and library research tools. We are reading several of its entries on whether there is such a thing as moral truths and, if so, how we can discover them.

EBSCO, entries on Morality, Normative Ethics, Metaethics, Moral Relativism, Deontological Ethics, Consequentialism (ethics), and A Theory of Justice by John Rawls.

                                                                                   

 

Thursday, June 4  Individual and institutional means of seeking truth (lecture slides)

Read/listen/watch:

1. Dan Williams is a philosopher. He contends that much misinformation research wrongly assumes that experts can neutrally determine what counts as misleading content, when such judgments frequently depend on political, moral, and contextual interpretation. He concludes that concerns about misinformation often exaggerate human gullibility and distract from deeper problems such as polarization, institutional distrust, and social conflict.

Dan Williams, Should We Trust Misinformation Experts to Decide What Counts as Misinformation?, 2024, read

 

Friday, June 5  Moral truths; course review

 

Monday, June 8  Final exam (covering material from the entire quarter) from 10:30-12:20