Instructor Manual
Chapter 8: Truth, knowledge and belief
Instructors’ material
The self-assessment exercises in the students’ section can be extended for class room/assessment use as follows.
Exercise A
Discussing the answers to these will help
reinforce relations between concepts of belief, truth, justification and
knowledge.
Exercise B
Discuss the answers, ask students to explain
why they answered as they did and, where there’s implicit speaker relativity, to
make that relativity explicit. Students could be asked to give their own
examples.
Exercise C
Discuss the answers, particularly those for
question 3. In groups, ask students to devise their own narratives and set
questions for the class.
Further ideas
If they have covered all of the eight
chapters in the book, students should now be well placed to apply all the skills
and concepts they have acquired in a final, project-type assignment. You could
set one of the longer passages provided on this site and ask them to identify
and reconstruct the argument(s), write a commentary on their reconstruction and
then answer some questions about their epistemic relationship with the argument.
Alternatively, you may want to provide your own passage or ask students to
select some material themselves. I have also done this successfully as an
ongoing project throughout the course: Students formed groups of four and picked
a topic from a short list of issues that were current. During the early weeks of
the paper, they collected materials on that topic and began to work out which
material contained arguments, rhetoric and so on. Later they attempted
reconstructions of the arguments, identifying and exposing any fallacies and
then writing commentaries. At the end, each student selects two or three pieces
and presents their own reconstructions and commentaries. A variation on this is
to provide all the students in the class with a selection of material you have
collected yourself and have them perform the same tasks. While this involves
less independent work on the part of students, it has the advantage of providing
some consistency and familiarity for the marker.