A NOTE FOR TEACHERS: I’m interested in helping young people think skeptically and philosophically about concepts like knowledge, belief, evidence, fact, and theory. I developed the Vinland Map exercise for this purpose for older students and then wrote Noises in the Night as a way of starting similar conversations with younger age groups. The Lesson: … Noises in the Night
I developed this exercise in a series of Critical Thinking and Philosophy of Science classes. It can raise a huge range of issues about knowledge; testing and confirmation bias; skepticism and how not to be gullible; the relationship between scientific and historical and common sense thinking; the relationship between key concepts like fact, belief, theory, … The Vinland Map Exercise
The full lesson plan is available as a PDF in the Lesson Attachment area above. Our whole education is organized around “buckets” of knowledge: “2+2 = 4” (math bucket); “Hydrogen is an element but water isn’t” (chemistry bucket); “Abraham Lincoln was born in 1809” (history bucket). But philosophy (and especially epistemology, the study of knowledge) … What do you know? An Exercise about What Knowledge Is
This lesson plan is accessible through the Lesson Attachment above.
Materials needed: Epistemic scavenger hunt document (at least 2 per group, one for before the discussion and the other for after) Orienting quotes Visual prompts Description: 1. Before presenting participants with one or more of the prompts outlined above, have them gather into pairs or small groups to think about, discuss, and fill out a … Epistemic Adventure: Are you sure that you know?
For much of modern science, since the Enlightenment, animals were generally thought to be automatons: materialist robots programmed to behave in certain ways. Rene Descartes drew a sharp distinction between thinking beings, humans, and everything else, matter. 20th Century behaviorism continued to think of animals in this way but added humans to the mix. “Mind” … Animal Minds: puzzling over Puppies and Parrots
In this middle school philosophy lesson plan, students express the degree of confidence they have in the truth of various statements.
What is an allegory? Explain to the students that an allegory is a kind of story in which what happens is being compared to something else that is similar and unstated. Activity 1. Read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave together. Here is one adaptation of the allegory: Plato imagines people living as prisoners in an … The Allegory of the Cave (in Plato’s Republic)
One of the practical consequences of the Scientific Revolution was a suggestion that one should only believe things that are both true and justified. Eventually, there was even the proposal by mathematician William Clifford that it is morally wrong to believe things without good justification. While early thinkers suggested we need to justify all of … The Demarcation Problem and Falsifiability
PLATO is part of a global UNESCO network that encourages children to participate in philosophical inquiry. As a partner in the UNESCO Chair on the Practice of Philosophy with Children, based at the Université de Nantes in France, PLATO is connected to other educational leaders around the world.
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