You can find the full syllabus 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 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

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  Tribalism and truth 

Read/listen/watch:

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

Ezra Klein, How Politics Makes Us Stupid, 2014

Yascha Mounk, The Perils of 180ism, 2021

Jerry Taylor, The Alternative to Ideology, 2018

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

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

Thursday, April 30 

The limits of individual rationality

Read/listen/watch:

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

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

Scott Lilienfeld, Intellectual Humility: A Guiding Principle for the Skeptical Movement?, 2020

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

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

Read/listen/watch:

U.K. National Health Service, Homeopathy, 2024

Nikita Lalwani and Sam Winter-Levy, When Every Opinion Is as Good as Any Other: On “The

Death of Expertise”, 2017

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

Dan Williams, How AI Will Reshape Public Opinion, 2026

Martha McKinney, review of Barbara Hofer and Gale Sinatra, Science Denial: Why It Happens

and What to Do about It, 2022

Friday, May 8  Experts and science

Tuesday, May 12  Limitations of scientific institutions and practices

Read/listen/watch:

Stuart Ritchie, When Science Goes Wrong, 2022

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

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

Mark Alan Smith, Masking Uncertainty in Public Health, 2023

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

Thomas Huddle, Just the Facts, 2026

Wednesday, May 13  Topic of paper due

Thursday, May 14  Universities and truth

Read/listen/watch:

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

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

Payton Jones, et al., What Students Fear vs. What Happens When Students Discuss Controversial Topics

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

Jon Shields, Yuval Aunus, and Stephanie Muravchik, We Analyzed University Syllabi: There’s a Monoculture, 2025

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

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

Tuesday, May 19  Does (or can) the news media uncover truth?

Read/listen/watch:

Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics, 1926 version

Society of Professional Journalists, Code of Ethics, 2014 version

Associated Press, Statement of News Values and Principles, 2018

Scott Alexander, The Media Very Rarely Lies, 2022

Maureen Salamon, Doomscrolling Dangers, 2024

Wednesday, May 20  One-paragraph abstract of paper due

Thursday, May 21  Courts as venues for truth-seeking

Read/listen/watch:

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

Friday, May 22  The news media; courts

Tuesday, May 26  The truth-seeking functions of bureaucratic agencies

Read:

TBA

Wednesday, May 27  Paper due, 11:59 PM

Thursday, May 28  Moral truths

Read/listen/watch:

EBSCO, entries on Morality, Normative Ethics, Metaethics, Moral Relativism, Deontological

Ethics, Consequentialism (ethics), and A Theory of Justice by John Rawls.

Friday, May 29  Bureaucratic agencies; moral truths

Tuesday, June 2  Facts, opinions, values, and the will of the people

Read/listen/watch:

Andre Bächtiger, John S. Dryzek, Jane Mansbridge, and Mark D. Warren, Deliberative Democracy: An Introduction

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

Thursday, June 4  Individual and institutional means of seeking truth

Read/listen/watch:

Thomas Harper, On Pleasurable Beliefs, 2021

Isaac Saul, Misinformation Is Here to Stay (And That’s OK), 2022

Friday, June 5  Course review

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