Instructions

The paper (6–10 pages long) is due, as an attachment, via the “Assignments” tool on eCommons, by 11:55pm Wednesday, March 22 (in PDF or any format easily converted to PDF, e.g. MSWord, LATE X, RTF, plain text).

The topics listed here are suggestions. If you want to write on another topic, feel free to do so. It might be a good idea, however, in that case, to check with me first.

You should use some material from the second part of the course — i.e., Popper and/or Kuhn, and possibly also one or more of Popper’s critics (Neurath, Putnam, Lakatos). Most if not all of the topics will also allow you to bring in material from the first part (e.g. you could write on Carnap vs. Popper, or Quine vs. Popper).

The first three suggested topics below are new; the others are modified versions of topics from the first paper

Note that the topics tend to have many sub-questions. You need not (and probably should not) try to answer all of them. (You certainly should not just answer them one after another in order—that would make a bad paper.) I put them there to suggest various directions for thinking about the topic, and in particular to head off superficial or excessively simple ways of thinking about it.

The main focus of the paper should be, one way or another, on texts we’ve read for this class, though you’re welcome to use other material also if it seems useful/relevant. If you do use outside sources, it should go without saying that you must cite them, and provide enough bibliographical information that I can figure out what they are.[1]If you have any questions about policies on plagiarism and related issues, please see https://www.ue.ucsc.edu/academic_misconduct. (For sources from the recommended or required reading, title and page number should be sufficient.)

I recommend an attempt to interpret (understand/explain/make sense of) the views of the authors we’ve read, rather than, say, an attempt to make an argument of your own against them. (I recommend this particularly if one or more of these authors rubs you the wrong way or seems obviously wrong or uninteresting.) All of the suggested topics below are along those lines. This is only a recommendation, however: I suspect that an effort in this direction is most likely to produce a good paper, but if you think you have a good idea along other lines, go ahead and try it.