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.